Communication in institutionalized settings in Oman: Gender, discourse and the politics of interaction

This thesis is concerned with exploring to what extent gendered behaviors in interaction are situated and constrained by the situation and the context in the Omani workplace. One of the most important aims of this research was to study the influence of the context on the communication process, and why some rules of interaction are reproduced and others resisted. Therefore, I used social constructionist epistemology that assumes that social categories such as gender and power are constructed through the talk and not taken for granted or independent variables as was previously assumed by the essentialist approaches ( Burr, 1995 ). Within the social constructionist epistemology I used two different frameworks to analyze the data: critical discourse analysis of Fairclough ( 1992 ) and the discursive psychology approach. The two frameworks both served to answer my research question as the ( CDA ) framework provided me with a research tool that combined linguistically oriented discourse analysis with relevant social and political aspects ( Fairclough, 1992) while the ( DP ) is a discourse analysis approach that is concerned with analyzing the talk in interactions (Fitch and Sanders, 2005). The analysis of a meeting between male and female librarians revealed that the participants did not enact gender and they did not interact according to their gender category but according to their group membership as they talked as one group: “the librarians group”. The second conclusion drawn is that in every interaction participants try to achieve particular goals and to achieve their goals they may use more interactional control features, identify themselves with specific identities and reject others, they may take up a specific social position in the discourse and they may reject others, and they may join a specific group or distance themselves from the group.