How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team

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Description

While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. This book addresses this gap by examining how every day, authentic language patterns used by coaches, captains and players shape relationships in a professional New Zealand rugby team. More specifically, through a discourse analysis of taken-for-granted ritual language practices in training sessions, team meetings and match-day interactions, the chapters of this book illustrate how coaches, captains and players shape particular interpersonal dynamics of power and solidarity between themselves in and through language and, in the process, reflect and reconstruct shared and underlying ideologies about how relationships of power and solidarity work in their team. Offering an evidence-based discussion of the silent and pervasive ideologies that underpin how relationships work in professional sports teams, this book extends research on this important topic by providing largely missing illustrations of consequential interpersonal dynamics that actively shape professional relationships in sports teams. Written in an approachable style, this book offers linguists, social scientists and sports practitioners a frame of reference for greater understanding of how language directly shapes relationships of power and solidarity.

Reviews

A welcome and long-overdue contribution to the burgeoning field of applied linguistics and sport. Files work is ambitious in scope capturing the range and complexity of spoken language in the context of professional sport. At the same time, his description and analysis is extremely accessible. Anyone with an interest in the role language plays in relationship building in sport should read this book. -- David Caldwell, University of South Australia, Australia
Drawing on unique ethnographic data of recorded talk among members of a professional rugby team, this highly insightful study offers a very original and well-informed account of the relational dynamics of communication in contexts where power and solidarity intersect with hierarchy and leadership. This book is an invaluable resource for all scholars working on the linguistic negotiation of relationships not only in sports teams but also in all kinds of transactional social interactions in group-based workplace communication contexts. -- Jan Chovanec, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Author Bio

Kieran File is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches professional communication, qualitative research methodology and sociolinguistics.