'Let me tell you a story': story-telling as a tool for claiming trustworthiness in organisational settings
| Dates: | 23 March 2023 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| How much: | Free |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Dr Christina Efthymiadou |
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CTIS Research Seminar 2
'Let me tell you a story': story-telling as a tool for claiming trustworthiness in organisational settings
Narratives are primary means of constructing identity and research has shown that they can be powerful resources for teams that have worked together for a long time (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003). This paper reports on a completed project investigating trust in business partnerships and shows how narratives can be turned into local resources for doing trust. The project has an ethnographic character. The data include 56 hours of semi-structured ethnographic interviews with business partners from seven SMEs and audio and video recordings of natural interaction including formal meetings, dinners, visits and everyday talk. The data were analysed from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, drawing on narrative analysis. The findings of the project suggest that there are specific set of stories that keep coming back in different instances from participants. These stories draw on the partners’ shared past and illustrate critical moments of their relationship. Partners are familiar with these stories and seem to include them in their everyday talk when they are all together. By doing this, they claim abidance to the group’s norms and rules, and express their affinity and emotions towards their partners. All these then add to their perceived trustworthiness. Given that different workplaces develop their own ways of doing things (Angouri, 2012), I consider these stories as local resources for doing trust in the given context. In this presentation I will present a set of narratives that seem to be significant for partners’ relationships and demonstrate how these recur across data sets and participants and contribute to sustain interpersonal relationships and trust.
Speaker
Dr Christina Efthymiadou
Role: Speaker
Biography: Dr Christina Efthymiadou was awarded a PhD in Intercultural Communication by Warwick University in 2019. Her doctoral thesis was fully funded by the Chancellor's Scholarship and falls into the field of Intercultural Communication investigating the discursive construction of trust in cross-border business partnerships between Turkey and Greece. Between 2019-2022 Christina Efthymiadou worked as a Lecturer in International Management at Bristol Business School, where she taught modules primarily on Intercultural Communication, International Business and Research Methods. Since September 2022 she works in the Greek education sector as a research fellow of the University of Thessaly. Her research interests include professional discourse, culture, trust, identity and multilingualism.
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