Discursive othering: Processes of constructing (the opposite of) identity in professional self-presentation

Anna Marie TresterGeorgetown University Department of Linguisticsamt23@goegetown.edu

Introduction As part of a larger ethnographic project investigating linguistic aspects of professional self-presentation, this investigation focuses on the process of discursive othering. While there are many ways of linguistically constructing the self and other, discursive othering traffics in juxtaposition. It involves evaluative stancetaking (DuBois 2007, Jaffe 2102) towards representations of the other (i.e. the use of the voices of others through quotation or constructed dialogue) to reflect an identity for the self. And while processes of othering reflect agentive stances of acceptance or resistance which transform and define experience, and which have real life implications in the mechanics of meaning-making, this process is “terra incognita” in that it is seldom explicitly recognized. This is true generally and perhaps especially so in organizational life, where the professional identities which emerge through interaction in organizational contexts inform who gets heard and what gets done and how it is that “we” do things.

By use of the term “discursive othering” I call attention not only to practices of linguistic differentiation, but instances in which illuminating this difference involves evaluation. As researchers of discourse, we know that identity is a construction and we pay attention to the mechanisms through which identity is constructed including language, but we know less about instances in which focused attention elsewhere ultimately points to the self.

By choosing to focus on organizational contexts, where “the other” is the organization or where the organization is doing the othering, I seek to call into focus the particular challenge for the speaker’s professional self-presentation. That is to say, that the person (or entity) doing the othering must still be cognizant of the maintenance of his or her (or their) professional identity, and might in fact be othering precisely to bolster professional identity claims, as will be the case in this analysis. For the bulk of this analysis I will be focusing on a very particular kind of text, a resignation letter, specifically Greg Smith’s resignation letter from Goldman Sachs published in the New York Times as an Op-Ed entititled “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” Because I am an interactional sociolinguist, I view such a text itself as an interaction, but I also include in this analysis the response issued to this letter by Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer Gary D. Cohn.

But first by way of introducing the problem of discursive othering, I would like to share an interactional example from the ethnography.

An exampleThe larger project is a three-year ethnography with a business school in the Mid-Atlantic region of the Eastern United States, referred to for the purposes of this analysis as

Quadrangle University. Data are drawn from video recordings of classroom interactions collected over the course of these three years with focus on an Executive Master’s program in leadership. A recent cohort used the data that will be the focus of this investigation (the resignation letter and the response) as a case in their leadership communication class (this is as an example of crisis communication), however, this case only made salient for me as ethnographer the prevalence of discursive othering in organizational life. Throughout the day to day of classroom interaction, there are literally hundreds of examples of discursive othering, such as this one for example, where the professor is asking the class for an example from their workplace where there were issues of cohesion with a team.

Example 11. Prof: Have any of you been on a team, or seen where there’s been a clear fault line? 2. has anyone been a part of that?3. (students raise hands). 4. Darla? You want to, would you be willing to share your experiences? 5. Darla: Well, I I just remember a team where we were midway through, um, 6. like a half a million dollar implementation, and um, leadership change. 7. So, the leadership of the company. 8. Prof: OK [ah]9. So they brought in new people to add [to the team] and it was us and them. 10. The new versus the old. 11. Prof: And what kind of outcome did that lead to?12. Darla: It was terrible.13. Prof: Yeah,14. Darla: First of all, they didn’t have context, for everything else we had already done, 15. so they had to spend a long time getting context. 16. And then they wanted to do it their way to put their stamp on it, for it to be

them, 17. so it ended up, the project had cost overruns and deadline delays.18. Prof: Yeah, so this is a common thing, right? We have these fault lines […]

We see the othering straightforwardly in line 7 “it was us and them” and then a variation in line 8 “the new versus the old,” where if we did not know already that we were trafficking in distinction, we now have the explicit framing of “versus.” But there are many other ways that distinction is constructed and reinforced here. For one thing, we can observe that there is much more discursive work in constructing the other than there is in the “we.” Darla uses “they” “them” or “their” eight times as compared to only two instances of “we” or “us” although clearly this example is about the “us,” and is designed to show through contrast why it is that our way of doing things is clearly better.

However, there are other aspects of this juxtaposition that are perhaps slightly less salient. For example we can observe a repetition of a "they ______" structure (they had, they didn't have, they wanted). Time and tense are being exploited as a mechanism for othering by calling attention to who knew and did what when, and crucially before whom, and then who spent a long time doing something unnecessary because of their ignorance. In telling this story, as Bauman observed in the oral telling of practical we see that the narrator

exploits “complex structures of information management, involving dimensions of backstage activity, frame manipulation, fabrication, concealment and varying degrees of access to information about what is going on” (p. 35). Although certainly no joking matter, the rhetorical structures of jokes are useful in understanding what is being accomplished here, where similar strategies of audience alignment are being recruited to show “us” in a more favorable light than “them.”

While Darla stops short of straightforwardly blaming “them” for the cost overruns and deadline delays, causality is clearly implicated if not entailed, but it is precisely such processes of erasure that I wish to call attention to in this investigation. Notice that while her example begins with a corporate “we” in line 6, “we were midway through, um, like a half a million dollar implementation, and um, leadership change” there is no "we" at the end. Instead although clearly the consequences were felt by the individuals and the organization, the locus of responsibility here in the coda is “the project.” As in "the project had. Cost overruns and deadline delays." Such erasure is part and parcel of othering, but partly why it can be so very insidious.

And this might be just an interactional throw-away example, over in a moment and fleeting, and not very likely to have been noticed by anyone much less remembered except by an ethnographer, who at that time happened to be reading Urban’s (2001) observed pattern in the Declaration of Independence. The primary rhetorical strategy employed in this document that made one very “we” quite famous is a “litany of complaint,” with an observable “he” vs. “we” parallel structure. An example:

He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He had plundered our seas,ravaged our Coasts,burnt our towns,and destroyed the lives of our people

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their country (119, italics by Urban)

In this analysis, Urban traces the “litany of complaint” pattern back to previous declarations of complaint, including a Declaration of Arms issued in July of 1775, nearly a year before the Declaration of independence. But in this earlier document, the observable grammatical parallelism here is not maintained. “He” as a grammatical subject comes and goes. It is elided for part of the litany and then General Cage is referenced through an anaphoric “he” and then there is passive voice before “he” reemerges as grammatical subject. Tracing this litany back even further, Urban traces the litany of complaint back to a similar unfolding of clauses in the English Bill of Rights authored in 1689, where neither is there a strong (and repeatedly reinforced) construction of a “he” nor is there a clear construction of the “we” as may be seen in the excerpt below:

Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges, and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert

and extirpate the protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.

By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of parliament.

By committing and prosecuting divers worthy prelates, for humbly petitioning to be excused concurring to the said assumed power. (Urban 2001, page 120, bulleted formatting in original)

Unlike the Declaration of Arms or the Declaration of Independence, once the “he” is established in this document, there is no repetition of the grammatical subject “he” that we saw consistently in the Declaration of Independence and inconsistently in the Declaration of Arms. In this respect, our Example 1 is more like the Declaration of Independence with it’s establishment and repetition of the other “they.” However, in Example 1, there was nothing like the Declaration of Independence’s use of the “we” in “kindling strong feelings, a sense of outrage, capable of marking a sharp boundary for a social entity” (133), creating an us in this case a country.

While I am not attempting to claim that Darla’s fleeting litany of complaint should be understood as a declaration of independence, I do wish to call attention to the possibilities for use of “us”ing and “them”ing in the production of us-es and them-s (especially when the one is being called into focus to accomplish the other). We now have some idea of the range and types of variation possible, and the importance of a feature like repetition as we turn to the document that I will focus on for the bulk of this analysis. A resignation letter is a declaration of independence of sorts, one that exists in the professional world. Exploring the relationships among the institutional other in these texts of institutional othering serves as a productive means for identification, categorization, and sense making.

Research designIn this paper, my two sources of data: Greg Smith’s resignation letter from Goldman Sachs titled “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs” and the response letter written by Lloyd Blankfein, the then CEO and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn titled “Our response to Today’s New York Times Op-Ed”, both traffic in discursive othering. These texts constitute boundary crossing both literal and metaphorical. The boundary of ‘us” vs. ‘them” conscribed by Goldman employees and non-employees, but other surrounding identities as well, including that of firm and client, employer and employee.

Myriad features of language work together in Smith’s very public performance of resignation to construct an identity for the author as now separate from that of his organization, but I will focus specifically on referring expressions such as personal pronouns, references to the organization and crucially erasures of one or the other. Notably, while processes of discursive erasure proliferate in the response, they serve to invisibilize even as they “other” Smith (going on-record to address the act of communication itself and not the actor), while Smith’s letter focuses discursively on establishing and constructing the “other,” famously giving the world access to use of the expression “muppets” as a referring term used by Goldman to discursively other their clients, which ironically establishes him as company insider.

Typically, in exploring identity construction, we focus on what speakers do, for example in a study focusing on the narrative construction of leadership (Trester, forthcoming), I focus on aspects of language within the narratives of leaders that help to establish their authority which distinguish themselves (as being more systems and forward thinking) from managers. Such linguistic strategies include the use of constructed dialogue, speech acts like commands (as opposed to questions), the construction of causality of events, and entextualitzation of unfolding discourse. In this paper, I wish to identify and explore identity that is accomplished by something that the speaker does by not doing, that is to say creating an identity for yourself as speaker by calling attention to the differences between yourself and a specific other, but for the primary purpose of showing that “other” to be undesirable. In this, you are ultimately saying something about yourself, but with explicit discursive attention and focus on another (in many cases, but not all as we will see).

The analytical starting point of this project is Hall’s observation that “it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term – and thus its ‘identity’ – can be constructed” (1996:4–5). Identity construction is then an act of drawing boundaries and creating inside and outside. This “othering” is itself interesting as are the particular discursive strategies that achieve it. Although part of a broader set of practices of presenting the self discursively in relationship with an organization, discursive representations of the other emerge in analytically meaningful ways that are suggestive of broader practices of meaning-making through language. Illuminating these often invisibilized practices will be the focus here, considering how discursive othering is related to (and distinct from) processes like the overt introduction of referential identity categories, silences, implicature, presupposition, and indexicality.

Wodak’s (2014) current work investigates the discursive construction of the stranger and constructions of “otherness” for the purposes of racism and right-wing nationalistic discrimination discourse in political campaigns and other such very public communications. In her work, the point of othering is to unify the audience: rallying and inspiring voters to action in aligning their voices with those who would seek to build a “stronger homeland.” Coupland and Jaworski (2005) investigate the more private gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities through the sharing of judgments not only about others’ behavior but also about their own behavior. Specifically, they look at how the “protagonists featured in gossip stories (we might call them the ‘gossipees’) become subject to processes of othering by the gossip participants, or ‘gossipers.’ (667). In both cases, such linguistic practices constitute “boundary work” as they configure categories of belonging something along the lines of “who we are by who we are not and what we do not do (say, believe).” Additionally, such difference is highlighted not just for the sake of illuminating difference but for illuminating “otherness.”

Crucially, these researchers observe problematic conflations of “difference” and “otherness” that go unrecognized. There is a crucial difference between identity-building “based on the difference between self and non-self (of the day/night variety), and

othering.” (672). That is to say that language need not other when it calls actions or characteristics into focus through language, but it can. For Coupland and Jaworski, our attention as analysts should be called particularly to instances where identity is “rendered uncertain or ambiguous in relation to social categories” (671). In their work, these included things such as gender: unmanly men (“gays”) or unfeminine women (‘badly behaved’),” in this project, we are talking about bad employees and organizations and good ones, what these categories mean and what they do.

For Coupland (1995) “othering is the process of representing an individual or a social group to render them distant, alien or deviant” (emphasis in original) it “raises issues about group boundaries” (5), and as we have seen in the work of Jaworski and Coupland, this is accomplished “not so much by making these boundaries clear as by blurring them to provoke anxiety or excitement” (675). In this analysis, we will focus on boundaries and boundary crossing. I suggest that these are worth exploring and seeking to clarify both that which is left ambiguous in addition to that which is fleshed out and explicitly evaluated at length, for processes of othering are so seldom recognized that they can exist in plain sight and go unnoticed. Othering is invisibilizing, but it can itself be invisibilized and naturalized. In shedding light, I suggest that we may better understand how these practices make meaning, and do things in the world.

DataIn March of 2012, Greg Smith wrote a battle-cry of an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times entitled: “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs” by way of a resignation letter. In this piece he speaks to a toxic and destructive working environment and culture, painting a picture of factors that contributed to this very public expression of his disenchantment. Through the piece, Smith invites the reader into a day-by-day through use of insider referring expressions for products and practices ”any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.” He cites examples of Goldman-speak including “axes,” (stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit) and “hunting elephants” (get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman). Famously, twice in the piece, he cites shocking examples of clients being referred to by his colleagues as “muppets.” This instance of discursive othering by illustrating some observed discursive othering was what made me know that I wanted to analyze this piece linguistically.

What also struck me in this piece was Mr. Smith’s awareness of the questions which he does NOT hear being asked: “I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients” for him this noisy not illuminates exactly how “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.” He also portrays instances of listening during which he increasingly did not like what he was hearing. In his words: “if you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.” For Smith, these “noisy nots” speak volumes about the current cultural climate.

While I had been aware of this text, it suggested itself to me for analysis when it came up in the context of a lecture that I was observing as ethnographer at Quadrangle University’s business school. In tracking and interpreting these “nots” and “otherings,” I draw from this ongoing ethnography with business executives and also, my own previous work experience as a former employee of this organization myself. Although my tenure at Goldman was relatively short (4 years), and from doing the math that Smith lays out in his letter, my times seems to have predated his, my perspective as a discourse analyst is layered with insider insight.

To capture something of what Smith is doing with this piece in navigating his own relationship with this culture, I explore the rhetorical shifts throughout this essay, reflected in the deictic choices embedded in his use of pronouns. I track how their alternation serve to reinforce his dissatisfaction and sense of distance from the organization, at other times to invite you into his recollection of a better time, or finally to share his experience of pain at the changes he has observed, as I will now explore. Note that both letters in their entirety are reproduced in the appendix.

AnalysisFirst, I present here an overall count of pronouns, which I will then explore in context, moving sequentially through the piece.

Upon first reading it, my first impression of the piece had been that Smith devoted a majority of the rhetorical focus of the piece on the discursive “others,” and I was a bit surprised to notice in this overall count of referring expressions to notice that he spent as much time referring to himself as he did, however, do note that 88 of the overall referents are either the firm or other (a category comprised mainly of references to clients).

Overall use of referring expressions in “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs”Referent N % of overall

referring strategyI 42 27

We 13 8You 13 8

The Firm 35 22Other 53 34

TOTAL 156

Additionally, observed uses of “I” tended to cluster, such as for example in the first paragraph, shown below.

The piece begins with Smith’s declaration that today is his last day at the company. Throughout this first section, he establishes an “I,” set up in clear juxtaposition to an “it,” “the firm.” In Excerpt 1, Goldman Sachs is mentioned in line 1, which establishes the referent in the discourse, followed by “the firm” “here” and then a series of “its.” Upon first

reading, I knew that there was something striking being set up here, not only the distinction between himself and the firm, but that repetition of “it” in lines 4 and 5 was establishing at least distance if not otherness. I present the text here, roughly broken up into intonation units and numbered for ease of analysis and discussion.

Smith letter: Excerpt 11. TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. 2. After almost 12 years at the firm 3. — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and

now in London — 4. I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture,

its people and its identity. 5. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive

as I have ever seen it.

Although Smith and the firm are set into parallel construction, what we see here is slightly more discursive attention paid to the “it.” While each of these clauses is constructed to present the I’s perception and understanding and evaluation of the “other,” there are 5 first person pronouns and 8 referring expressions and pronouns for the organization. Thus “it” receives more attention and by repetition, nuances of meaning get established and reinforced.

The pattern of more discursive attention focused on the “other” bears up in the second paragraph. This second paragraph is quite similar in structure and tone to the first, using 3 first person pronouns to 5. In the third paragraph however, a marked difference is apparent. When he shifts to speaking of the past, describing when he first joined the firm, he rhetorically shifts as well, referring to the organization as “this firm,” “this place” instead of “the firm” and “it” also using the inclusive pronouns “us” and “our,” for the first time in the text, and repetitively.

Smith letter: Excerpt 21. It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, 2. but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. 3. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right

by our clients. 4. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great5. and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. 6. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. 7. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. 8. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the

culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. 9. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

While the first half of the above segment could be considered as having parallel structure to what came before n the sense of more attention paid to constructing the “other:” 4 referring expressions about the firm to the 3 “we”s, in the last two lines of the paragraph,

we have a clustering and repetition of “I”s. When in lines 8 and 9, we move from the past back to the present, there is an accompanying shift back into his moral outrage, couched in parallel structure of “I” and “the firm,” but this time with proportion of discursive attention paid to the “I.”

As noted above, observed uses of “I” tend to cluster in segments, calling attention only in specific moments to the voice of the author. What Smith appears to be doing here is establishing his credibility as an author. In order for us to understand as readers whether we can fully buy into his moral outrage, we need to understand that he is a reliable and credible narrator. The next few paragraphs jump back and forth from a paragraph focused on him, to a paragraph focused on the firm and some of the key leaders who he identifies for being to blame, and then back to him. In these two “I” paragraphs (sandwiched around the big “they” paragraph), we have 9, or 20% of the 42 total uses of “I” from this piece.

Paragraph 8 marks a rhetorical shift in the essay, into a “we” with beginning with “how did we get here?” What is for me most telling, when he comes to a description (dripping with irony) of “how to be a leader” within the organization, we have his first use of the referring expression that I was most familiar with when I was an employee of the firm “Goldman.” Here in paragraphs 8 through 10, owing to his use of that term, I would argue that we are the closest rhetorically to him being inside the firm. The reader is invited to share in his horror, and own in his pain, and perhaps feel his sense of complicity.

Interestingly he employs a strategy of a rhetorical “you” as in “if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.” This deictic shift sets the stage for interaction, which gets plays out paragraph 11,which feels like a conversation. This paragraph carries the most damming of his critique.

Smith letter: Excerpt 31. It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. 2. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own

clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. 3. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire

Squids?4. No humility? I mean, come on. 5. Integrity? It is eroding. 6. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch

lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals?

7. Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

As Smith explains here, to refer to clients as muppets shows just how far the firm has veered from being organized “around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients.” It depresses him for what it demonstrates to be an utter lack of humility and integrity for what ought to be the center of the enterprise. The client ought to be treated with respect instead of having their “eyeballs torn out.” But specifically,

attending to the discursive strategies employed here, to communicate that meaning, Smith ”others” those at Goldman who would “other” in this way.

Jaworski and Coupland’s (2005), work identifies some of the major discursive features by which othering is accomplished, including “ marked register (e.g., humor, parody, caricature), naming/labeling which symbolically dehumanizes the referent (“monkeys,” “insects,” “beasts,” “serpent”), and accusations of stupid, irrational behavior (e.g., giving land and women away).“ Through use of the strategies, the “Other is impure, sinful, and dirty and threatens to pollute “us.” Just as “dirt” is “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966:48), the Other is a person out of place.” (675, citation in original). Here, I would suggest that we see all of these strategies employed. There is a marked shift in register. He “others” the ”otherers” by quoting them using naming and labeling that symbolically dehumanize the referent “muppets,” and then gives a litany of accusations of stupid and or irrational behavior with the list of sins that Goldman has committed: “the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids” Note that in the original letter, “Fabulous Fab,” “God’s work” and “Vampire squids” has hyperlinks, should the reader wish to educate herself about Goldman’s sins.

Another striking aspect of this paragraph is that it is the only one not containing a single reference to Goldman. Thus, in the paragraph that is maximally othering, the “other” is discursively elided, a strategy which as we will see, is strikingly resonant with how those being “othered” in this text “other” Smith in their response to him. This finding is striking for here at the climax of his essay to employ the strategy that seems to be the preferred strategy of those he would seek to other belies a deeper way in which he is (or has become) one of them. And the identity he must strike here in this letter is a tricky piece of business, because he must establish to readers that he is (or at least was at some time) an insider to know enough of what he speaks to be able to comment on it with authority. Ironically, to be an outsider, Smith needs to have a great deal of insider perspective.

Smith’s last paragraph folds back on itself and entextualizes his resignation letter as a wake-up call (a call to action) to specific addressees. Here, the “you” are the board of directors.

Smith letter: Excerpt 41. I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. 2. Make the client the focal point of your business again. 3. Without clients you will not make money. 4. In fact, you will not exist.5. Weed out the morally bankrupt people,6. no matter how much money they make for the firm.7. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. 8. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm 9. — or the trust of its clients —10. for very much longer.

It is here in this paragraph that Smith separates discursively from the firm referring to Goldman now as “your business.” This is very different from the “here” in the first paragraph. As a performative speech act, this letter, in ending has had the perlocutionary effect of now severing his relationship with the firm, now reflected in deixis.

The ResponseIn looking at the response, I begin as I did with Smith’s letter, presenting the observed overall patterning of referents. This letter is much shorter – 579 words as compared to 1227 in Smith’s letter, but even by looking at the use of referring expressions, the fact that this letter employs a much different rhetorical strategy is immediately apparent. This is partially owing to the fact that the authors are speaking on behalf of an organization, which would account for much of the “we” however, what is most striking to me here is the absence of the “other.”

Overall use of referring expressions in “Response to Op-Ed”Referent N % of overall

referring strategyI 1 1

We 26 32You 10 13

The Firm 22 28Other 21 26

TOTAL 80

At first glance, this would not appear to be a candidate text for observing processes of discursive othering, as Smith is entirely absent from this text. Smith’s name is never given at any point in the document, his existence as a referent is established by use of the term “a former employee of the firm” in the very first sentence of this response letter: “By now, many of you have read the submission in today’s New York Times by a former employee of the firm”, and he is referred back to as “this individual” and later as “the author of today’s commentary,” and finally “the writer of the opinion piece,” overall the progression of the referring strategy seems to sequentially distance him from the firm.

Paragraph two initiates a dehumanizing referring strategy for Smith, where it is his ideas and not him as an individual that is being called out in the discourse. While “an individual opinion” is contextualized as something that everyone is entitled to have, this referring strategy is both becoming more embedded textually and put now into passive voice.

Response letter: Excerpt 11. In a company of our size, it is not shocking that some people could feel disgruntled. 2. But that does not and should not represent our firm of more than 30,000 people. 3. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. 4. But, it is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is amplified in a

newspaper

5. and speaks louder than the regular, detailed and intensive feedback you have provided the firm and independent, public surveys of workplace environments

Paragraph three moves the locus of the referent even further away from its human origin as “the words you read today.” Not only does this response now label them as something it expects the reader (you) will find foreign from your own day-to-day experiences as a Goldman employee, but now that “words” have been established as the referent, they can be labeled “out of place” by pointing to the unsuitability of the venue chosen for their expression.

Response letter: Excerpt 21. While I expect you find the words you read today foreign from your own day-to-day

experiences, 2. We wanted to remind you what we, as a firm - individually and collectively - think about

Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture.

Finally, in the last paragraph, Smith is reduced simply to an anaphoric “this.” “It is unfortunate that all of you who worked so hard through a difficult environment over the last few years now have to respond to this.”

In none of these clauses is Smith as referent topicalized. Neither does this letter address his resignation, much less express any loss to the organization. It is entirely silent about all of the critiques that he lodged against the firm, in fact, the only aspect of the Op-Ed which is addressed is the fact that he has “misgivings,” but these are only invoked in the context of stating that they were never expressed (at least to their knowledge) through the proper channels.

Response letter: Excerpt 31. And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? 2. Across the firm at all levels, 89 percent of you said that that the firm provides

exceptional service to them. 3. For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s

commentary was, that number was similarly high.4. Anyone who feels otherwise has available to him or her a mechanism for

anonymously expressing their concerns. 5. We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressed misgivings

through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case.

Such silence is deafening.

Some of the more salient mechanisms for othering in discourse that Wodak (2014) identifies, include

1. Positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation2. Denial (of racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism; etc.)

3. Justification and legitimation strategies4. ‘Homeland’ rhetoric (salience of deixis)5. Dialectic relationship between formality of context and degree of explicitness of prejudicial expressions6. Syncretic racism/anti-Semitism

The real work of this letter is in its lack of explicitness. It does not explicitly deny, it does not justify, it does not need to. It does not even deign to engage in negative other presentation because syncretism here conflates and reduces what was a person to his words, which can then be silenced for being expressed by the wrong mechanism and therefore “out of place.” It appears to be no accident then that Smith’s letter begins with the things that he does not see and hear because such “noisy nots” appear to be among the most cacophonous of discursive tools employed at this organization.

And the real silence here is very purpose of discursive othering, which is to focus on some other to reflect information about the self. So the question which must be asked is to what ends is discursive othering ultimately put? What do these individuals say about themselves in the process of “othering” another?

Discussion: Throughout Smith’s letter, he exploits perspective, taking up the vantage point of a series of “others”, observers external to himself real or imagined. First, inviting us to see him through the lens of a camera, he:

“was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world”

Appearing in a recruiting video as evidence of institutional support and endorsement is a professional identity claim that is liminal at best. For to appear in a film, one need not necessarily be an expert, one must simply be able to act that way.

Then, he invites us to look through the eyes of another other, an alien from Mars:

“if you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.”

Finally, his strongest statement of the need to leave was the moment of realization of something that he could not say:

“I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

But again, his strongest instance of othering in this letter is the moment where Smith gives us referring expressions which actually reflect an other doing the othering in the form of colleagues referring to clients as “muppets.” But sharing this “Goldman insider speak”

ironically, placing him more on the inside, and serves as one of the most effective pieces of evidence that he is credible as a company insider. The “noisy not” here which he does not call attention to is his response in the moments of hearing and witnessing this talk. And ultimately, the rhetorical strategy of discursive invisibiliazation, unmistakable in the response letter, is also the strategy employed in Smith’s letter when he works up to the paragraph which is his rhetorical “so what” the main idea as was seen in Excerpt 3 above. Here in this strongest expression of his dissatisfaction, Goldman is discursively absent. When he is working hardest to show that he is separate from this firm is when he most closely replicates the linguistic style of the leadership of his organization. He reproduces a “we” in reproducing a Goldman style of writing.

And while by contrast, the goal of Blankfein and Cohn’s letter would appear to be that of re-establishing an institutional “we,” the use to which “we” is put in their letter seems to in fact have a distancing effect, as for example the third paragraph, presented as Excerpt 2 of the response letter above, reproduced here for ease of reference:

Response letter: Excerpt 21. While I expect you find the words you read today foreign from your own day-to-day

experiences, 2. We wanted to remind you what we, as a firm - individually and collectively - think about

Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture. This “I,” the only “I” in the entire piece serves to introduce an institutional voice in this paragraph that will establish the point of view of “the firm.” While a bit confusing rhetorically to hear an “I” when the piece is entitled “Our Response to Today’s New York Times Op-Ed” the intended audience knows that the letter is from Blankfein as CEO, the addressee of the Op-Ed and the person who is in the position to be able to “remind” the listener what we think. The sentence “We wanted to remind you what we, as a firm - individually and collectively - - think about Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture” would seem to be intended to serve the function of inclusivity, but in the attention that it calls to the various “we”s and the attention to the speech act of one of these “we”s reminding the other set, it instead calls attention to difference at many levels.

Response letter: Excerpt 31. And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? 2. Across the firm at all levels, 89 percent of you said that that the firm provides

exceptional service to them. 3. For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s

commentary was, that number was similarly high.4. Anyone who feels otherwise has available to him or her a mechanism for

anonymously expressing their concerns. 5. We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressed misgivings

through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case.

Line three here is the moment in this letter where the “othering” effect of the referring strategy becomes most apparent. “For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s commentary was” this way of referring comes to serve almost as metalinguistic commentary on processes of referring in calling so much attention to itself. It also serves to call attention to this authors of this document, inviting reflection on this choice of referring strategy as it relates to their motivations and goals in presenting information thus, as opposed to conveying content, which the authors state it is their goal in communicating.

Systematic avoidance of use of the name of the individual who has occaisioned this letter creates a bit of a linguistic obstacle course in this paragraph, as does jumping from inclusive to exclusive “we” (which serves to repeat “we” throughout), with the added introduction of “you” and now a 3rd person category of “they” in the form of “Anyone who feels otherwise.” This anyone is obviously excluded from the “we” which also serves to call attention to categories of belonging.

Thus, ultimately, the three strategies which I have focused on in this analysis which serve to discursively construct the other:

1) the use of referring expressions (and metalinguistic commentary about them) 2) pointing to “noisy nots” i.e. questions that are not asked, and 3) deictic shifts which in constructing perspectives of belonging also convey its subsequent loss.

become most interesting in how they interrelate to illuminate the speaker, who would seem to be pointing in another direction.

In Smith’s performance of resignation, ultimately, he is constructing a new identity as now separate from that of his organization, and in the response to that piece, the firm would wishes to reassert their position and value, but in calling attention to this “we,” seem to call more attention to what is not being said than what is.

Although part of a broader set of practices of presenting the self discursively in relationship with an organization, discursive representations of the other has shown that it merits particular attention as a productive means for identification, categorization, and sense making. This is but one small attempt to begin to illuminate the various ways these strategies are employed and interrelate. Much more work is needed.

For the purposes of the larger research project, I also consider the strategy of discursive othering as it occurs in other conversational and spontaneous professional interactions, such as workplace narratives or in responses to “tell me about yourself” in job interviews. Awareness of these strategies of self-presentation are critical for more effectively engaging in activities like securing a job, but discursive othering occurs everywhere in professional and organizational life. It is not something to be mindful of only at the boundary events (getting a job, leaving a job), because it saturates organizational experience, as was seen in this analysis, ways of structuring othering may be learned as part of participation and

involvement with an organization. I view such heightened awareness as contributing to the understanding of organizational life.

References:

Angouri, Jo and Meredith Marra. 2011. Constructing Identities at Work. New York: Palgrave.

Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coupland, Nikolas. 1999. ‘Other’ representation. In Jef Verschueren et al. (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics 1999, 1–24. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Delanty, Gerard, Ruth Wodak and Paul Jones (eds.) 2011. Migration, Identity, and Belonging. Liverpool: LUP.

Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. 137–182.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. Introduction: Who needs ‘identity’? In Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity. 1–17. London: Sage.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 2012. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics

Jaworski, Adam and Justine Coupland. 2005. Othering in gossip: ‘you go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like...”: Language in Society 34 667-694.

Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak 2001, Discourse and Discrimination. London: Routledge.

Thurlow, Crispin. 2001. Naming the ‘outsider within’: Homophobic pejoratives and the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual high-school pupils. Journal of Adolescence 24:25–38.

Trester, Anna Marie. Forthcoming. Narrative Leadership: Narrating leadership in the executive business school classroom. Semiotic Aspects of Modern Business Corporations, a February 2015 Supplement of Signs and Society.

Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Public Worlds, Volume 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wodak, Ruth. 2014. FORTRESS EUROPE? ‘Unity in Diversity’: The Discursive Construction of ‘The Stranger.’ Given as the Davis Lecture, Georgetown University; 3/27/2014

________. 2012. Language, Power and Identity, Language Teaching 44(3), 215‐233.

Appendix

March 14, 2012

Why I Am Leaving Goldman SachsBy GREG SMITH

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about

“muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

GOLDMAN SACHS MEMO: RESPONSE TO TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED(The following is an internal memo to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) employees from Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein and Chief Operating Officer Gary D. Cohn. A copy of the memo was obtained by Bloomberg News. Its contents were confirmed by David Wells, a company spokesman in New York.)

March 14, 2012Our Response to Today’s New York Times Op-Ed

By now, many of you have read the submission in today’s New York Times by a former employee of the firm. Needless to say, we were disappointed to read the assertions made by this individual that do not reflect our values, our culture and how the vast majority of people at Goldman Sachs think about the firm and the work it does on behalf of our clients.

In a company of our size, it is not shocking that some people could feel disgruntled. But that does not and should not represent our firm of more than 30,000 people. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. But, it is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is amplified in a newspaper and speaks louder than the regular, detailed and intensive feedback

you have provided the firm and independent, public surveys of workplace environments.

While I expect you find the words you read today foreign from your own day-to-day experiences, we wanted to remind you what we, as a firm - individually and collectively - think about Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture.

First, 85 percent of the firm responded to our recent People Survey, which provides the most detailed and comprehensive review to determine how our people feel about Goldman Sachs and the work they do.

And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? Across the firm at all levels, 89 percent of you said that that the firm provides exceptional service to them. For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s commentary was, that number was similarly high.

Anyone who feels otherwise has available to him or her a mechanism for anonymously expressing their concerns. We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressedmisgivings through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case.

Our firm has had its share of challenges during and after the financial crisis, but your pride in Goldman Sachs is clear. You’ve not only told us, you have told external surveys.

Just two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs was named one of the best places to work in the United Kingdom, where this employee resides. The firm was the highest placed financial services company for the third consecutive year and was the only one in its peer group to make the top 25.

We are far from perfect, but where the firm has seen a problem, we’ve responded to it seriously and substantively. And we have demonstrated that fact.

It is unfortunate that all of you who worked so hard through a difficult environment over the last few years now have to respond to this. But, our response is best demonstrated in how we really work with and help our clients through our commitment to their long-term interests. That priority has distinguished us in the past, through the financial crisis and today.

Thank you.Lloyd C. Blankfein Gary D. Cohn(bjh) NY