Identity negotiations at work of women with a migration background: Combining interactional sociolinguistic and social psychological analyses to advance our understanding of group affiliation and distancing

In the last few decades, the notion of identity negotiations has become very popular as a research topic in numerous disciplines as diverse as anthropology, literature, history, psychology and linguistics. While there are some common threads in these different approaches to identity, there is actually little cross-fertilization. This lack of interplay is particularly a pity for the fields of interactional sociolinguistics and social psychology. These two fields not only focus on similar research themes, namely affiliating with and distancing from social groups, but also on similar contexts, namely investigating the identity negotiations of minority groups at the workplace. In this interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation, I address this lack of cross-fertilization by incorporating both interactional sociolinguistics and social psychology in the study of identity. More precisely, I investigate how Belgian and Dutch women with a Turkish and Moroccan migration background working in professional contexts construct and negotiate their identities in the workplace, and how they negotiate affiliating with social groups and distancing from social groups at work. The key aim of this dissertation is thus to integrate the research of both fields in order to advance our understanding of affiliation and distancing.

In this interdisciplinary doctoral research, I used two research designs. The first research design integrated social psychological findings as a theoretical base to carry out qualitative linguistic analyses of day-to-day recorded conversations at the workplace, plus semi-structured interviews probing for individuals’ career stories. With this set-up, I have been able to explore how social psychological concepts and theories that are related to the negotiations of identities of women with a migration background at work play out in real-life conversations. This research design was used for three case studies, which are described in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. In the second research design, described in Chapter 5, these qualitative sociolinguistic analyses are integrated in a research design that is typical of social psychology, namely experience sampling methodology. More precisely, in this study, I explored the possibility of integrating linguistic methodology in a typical social psychological study. This was done by using both psychological measures and linguistic measures to examine affiliation and distancing, and examining how they relate to identity motives at work for women with a migration background.

This dissertation shows that it is worthwhile, fruitful and crucial to bridge the gap between the fields of psychology and linguistics, as we found our interdisciplinary approach advanced both fields in a theoretical and methodological way. Theoretically, this dissertation adds to the literature in three ways. First, the conducted research innovatively broadens the expertise on social categories and intersectionality by focusing on the group of women with a Turkish or Moroccan migration background, and by highlighting the fluidity, complexity and dynamic nature of intersectional identity work. Second, the analyses and results revealed how individuals discursively negotiate affiliation with and distancing from groups, which provides other researchers with the foundations to further examine the relationship between the discursive and psychological processes. Lastly, our findings provide further insight into the consequences of individuals’ social group memberships as well as the consequences of affiliating with and distancing from groups, showing that moving towards groups was associated with positive consequences for identity motives and work-related outcomes, whereas moving away from groups was found to be associated with negative consequences. With regard to the methodological contributions of this dissertation, our two innovative research designs have allowed us to not only generate new research questions but also formulate several avenues for further research. Our work has also furthered our understanding on how we can methodologically combine both perspectives by highlighting the added value of discourse analytical research for social psychologists as well as mixed-methods approaches.