7.1 Introduction
A final distinctive feature of complex interaction rituals to be discussed in Part II of this book is liminality. Liminality is a term of anthropological origin, which has been used perhaps even more rarely in pragmatics than mimesis and self-displaying behaviour – it only occurred in the work of a very small circle of ritualists, such as Reference BaxBax (2001, Reference Bax, Culpeper and Kádár2010).
Liminality comes from the Latin word līmen meaning ‘threshold’, and it gained momentum in anthropological research under the influence of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner who were already mentioned in this book. Similar to the notion of anti-structure discussed in Chapter 3, liminality in its original anthropological sense typically occurs in the narrower contexts of rites of passage, which bring the participants through a particular lifecycle ‘threshold’. Furthermore, following Reference TurnerTurner (1974), ritualists often distinguish tribal liminal events from modern and industrialised liminoid ones – the latter include theatre plays and performances where both the performers and members of the audience leave their ordinary lives behind for a short while, i.e., pass a threshold temporarily. As previously noted, in the current book the term ‘liminoid’ is not used because none of the case studies includes theatrical data – readers with interest in this area can find further information relating to this area in my joint work with the performing artist Siân Robinson Davies (Reference Kádár and Robinson-DaviesKádár & Robinson-Davies 2015). While certain datatypes studied in this book such as the MMA event in Chapter 3 have liminoid elements because they include an audience, they are not liminoid in the fully-fledged sense of the word. It is also important to clarify here exactly what the expression ‘liminality’ itself covers in this book as I use it in a specific pragmatics-anchored way, similar to ‘anti-structure’ (see Chapter 3). Since the concept interaction ritual covers a broad cluster of rituals, liminality in my view should not be restricted to the ritual triad of separation → liminality (communitas) → incorporation process as in a rite of passage (see Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3, although I did not include liminality in that figure). Rather, for the pragmatician, liminality is present in every complex ritual – including, for example, the epistolary rituals studied in the previous Chapter 5 – which remove one or more participants from the pragmatic conventions holding for ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, while certain conventions like epistolary (self-)display are only temporarily liminal, some others bring one or more participants into an interactional process which has long-lasting or even permanent effect on the participants. In other words, such rituals – which are the focus of this chapter – operate with a sense of ‘irreversibility’. This sense of irreversibility not only includes rites of anti-structure but also rites of structure: for example, ritual public apologies (see Reference Kádár, Ning and RanKádár et al. 2018; Reference House and KádárHouse & Kádár 2021b), which in my view are structural rather than anti-structural rituals, are typically liminal in nature because the person who realises such apologies passes a threshold with no return.1 This implies that the public apologiser puts his face at the mercy of the public, i.e., even if the apology is accepted – although public apologies may never be unanimously accepted! – it represents a point of no return.
As Chapter 3 has already shown, liminality strongly correlates with an underlying sense of moral order. Since liminal rituals tend to have a significant impact on the participants, they are supposed to be realised according to often uncoded rights and obligations and pragmatic conventions. In rites of anti-structure, it usually comes from the nature of the ritual that the participants have to discern themselves what is afforded or tolerated by the moral order of the ritual. Yet, even in structural liminal rites – representing the realm of ‘orderly’ pragmatic behaviour – pragmatic conventions and the related moral order tend to be uncoded: unless a ritual is scripted, the participants need to formulate the ritual by following what they believe is acceptable in the frame of the ritual. Such pragmatic competence in ritual performance becomes particularly relevant in those liminal rituals which are public and where the person who realises the ritual has the role of the animator in Goffman’s sense. In summary, the sense of irreversibility implied by liminality can be said to ‘enhance’ the moral order: while the moral order is clearly important in the operation of any ritual because violations of the ritual frame have impact on the participants rights and obligations (see Chapter 2), the participants may be more sensitive to perceived violations of the moral order in irreversible liminal rituals than in other simpler rituals.
Figure 7.1 visualises liminality as it is interpreted in this chapter:
Figure 7.1 Visualising liminality.
As Figure 7.1 shows, irreversibility correlates with the pragmatic complexity of a ritual: simple interaction rituals such as urban context rituals may rarely have such a sense of irreversibility. This, in turn, also prompts one to reflect again on exactly what ‘complexity’ involves for the pragmatician when it comes to ritual. In my view, it can involve both interactional complexity (i.e., the way in which this notion has been interpreted in this book thus far) and relational complexity. Interactional complexity does not need an explanation. As regards the latter notion of relational complexity, it is relevant here to use again Example 2.1 from Chapter 2 (replicated here as Example 7.1), representing a public realisation of the speech act Welcome:
It gives me a great pleasure to welcome here as our guest this evening Professor Quatsch from the University of Minnesota Junior.
This Welcome is realised on the utterance level, and as such it is not complex in an interactional sense by default. However, it is complex in a relational sense because it has significant influence on the recipient. Therefore, if the person (author and/or animator) who realises this utterance ‘tampers’ with its default and expected style, the utterance becomes subject to complex evaluations and follow-up metapragmatic comments and interactions, i.e., it also becomes interactionally complex – this is why interactional and relational complexity often come hand-in-hand. The trapezoid shape of Figure 7.1 indicates that the number of complex rituals is necessarily fewer than that of simple ‘contact’ rituals to use Goffman’s previously mentioned term. Also, Figure 7.1 displays the previously mentioned argument that the moral order becomes salient when it comes to complex rituals with a liminal character, even though it is important in any ritual. This salience manifests itself in a strong sense of metapragmatic awareness of the realisation of the ritual.
In order to examine the pragmatics of liminal rituals in its whole complexity, in this chapter I present a case study featuring descriptions of ‘inappropriate’ workplace dismissals and subsequent metapragmatic behaviour reflecting evaluations. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Workplace dismissal is a rite of structure: the person who realises such a ritual unavoidably acts as an animator on an institution’s behalf, and so he is expected to follow strict pragmatic conventions and an underlying sense of moral order. However, as the case study will show, such conventions are rarely defined and coded, and so rites of dismissal can become controversial and subject to intensive metapragmatic reflections if they are perceived by some as ‘inappropriate’. At the same time, quantitative evidence shows that most participants and observers tend to be aware of the moral order and contextually expected order of the liminal ritual.
Along with serving as an example par excellence for liminal rituals, workplace dismissal can also be said to be a piece of cake for the pragmatician because it is a ‘secretive’ urban ritual. While many – including myself when I started to study workplace dismissals – may think they know what such a ritual looks like, one (ideally) never, or at least rarely, encounters this liminal ritual in one’s daily lives either as a participant or an observer. Also, as a pilot study outlined below will show, there is intriguingly little information about how such rituals should be realised on the official websites of larger companies. At the same time, perceived trespasses of the moral order of this confidential ritual tend to trigger public uproar and subsequent metapragmatic reflections on the ritual.
The structure of this chapter is as follows. Section 7.2 introduces the methodology and data of the case study, Section 7.3 provides the case study, while Section 7.4 concludes this chapter and Part II of the present book.
7.2 Methodology and Data
The present case study focuses on various types of evaluative metapragmatic reflections to perceived breaches of the moral order in the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. This metapragmatic lens2 allows one to examine and even quantify how language users talk the moral order of the rite of dismissal into being when breaches occur. The metapragmatic focus also helps one to keep the scope of one’s inquiry pragmatics-anchored, hence avoiding interpreting dismissals through ‘abuse’ and other psychological notions.
In a metapragmatic investigation of the present scope, it is worth considering the following phenomena:
the metapragmatic stance (for an overview, see Reference JaffeJaffe 2009) of the narrative which reports on the liminal ritual event;
follow-up metapragmatic comments.
As mentioned above, when the moral order is perceived to have been breached in a liminal ritual, metapragmatic awareness prompts both the participants and the observers to realise morally loaded metapragmatic comments. Such comments are often centred on norms – in the case of dismissal, such a typical norm is the breach of dignity, which triggers a strong sense of face threat (see Reference HoHo 1976; Reference Ting-Toomey and KurogiTing-Toomey & Kurogi 1998; Reference Bargiela-ChiappiniBargiela-Chiappini 2003). In the present book, I do not focus on norm(s), but rather on tendencies (or, one may say, conventions) of evaluations that breach the moral order underlying the rite of workplace dismissal trigger. Because of this, while I used ‘dignity’ as a search word together with ‘dismissal’ to identify relevant data, I did not attempt to speculate about exactly how ‘dignity’ should be interpreted from a pragmatic viewpoint.3
The present investigation has a tri-partite structure. First, I conducted a pilot study to examine whether rites of workplace dismissal are scripted or not. This was a key question to consider because if language use is prescribed by law or workplace regulations in such rituals, moral order may only be of a secondary importance to legal order when they are realised. When I started the present investigation, my hypothesis was that such rituals must be scripted to some degree, considering their impact on all parties included. Second, in the main analysis I examined breaches of the moral order through the lens of metapragmatics. This main part of the investigation was bipartite, i.e., I first investigated evaluative stances in reports of such breaches and then comments on such reports from both qualitative and quantitative points of view.
The corpora consist of the following:
In the pilot study, I examined whether there is any legal criterion in Anglophone linguacultures as regards the interactional style of workplace dismissal. I also examined fifteen online workplace ‘Dignity at Work’ descriptions, in order to see whether they mention anything about dismissal. I collected these descriptions in an ad hoc fashion, by conducting a Google search.
The first sub-corpus of the main body of this research consisted of 120 online narratives of Anglophone workplace dismissals in Britain, Australia and the United States, collected via Google searches (conducted in February 2017). This Google search was based on the two phrases ‘unfair dismissal’ and ‘dignity at work’ used together. The size of this corpus was established at 120 on a purely practical basis: as I read through cases that were triggered by the Internet search – which were then entered into a single file to facilitate the analysis – I wanted to ensure that the size of the corpus was manageable for both qualitative and quantitative purposes. I only included longer (above 300 words) narratives in the corpus.
The second sub-corpus of the main study includes 341 online comments on the above-outlined 120 news accounts, collected from news websites such as the Guardian and the Daily Mail which allow those who have registered with the websites to comment on news items. Among the 120 incidents studied, only eighty-one are featured on websites that allow (evaluative) comments to be posted, and the online comments that I collected relate to these eighty-one narratives.
Table 7.1 summarises these three types of corpora:
Table 7.1 The corpora of the case study
| Pilot study | First sub-corpus | Second sub-corpus |
|---|---|---|
| Fifteen ‘Dignity at Work’ descriptions | 120 | 341, based on eighty-one websites |
An advantage of studying these corpora is that they represent the different evaluative and related metapragmatic layers.
First sub-corpus: Online Reports on Incidents
The majority of online narratives represent the views of the participants regarding both the dismissed person and the employer, in the form of quoting (‘reporting’) comments, hence reflecting the participants’ evaluations of the appropriateness of the ritual. Only eleven texts exist in the corpus that report a dismissal without quoting the participants. In twenty-three texts the employer is reported as either declining to comment on the dismissal, or they are not featured. From the pragmatician’s point of view, the lack of reporting on the employer’s view of the incident is of equal interest to the comments made by the employer, since it represents a particular evaluation made by the author of the news.
Importantly, narratives, like news reports, are not ‘objective’: an important goal of engaging in reflecting on the language of a rite of dismissal is to trigger reactions from a lay observer. Such reactions may be simply a passive interest (which implies that the given news is widely read), but also intensive metapragmatic participation (i.e., the readers will comment on those items of online news that permit this). As the present case study will show, narratives tend to represent evaluative stances, which implicitly influence subsequent evaluations and metapragmatic reactions (see also Reference Houston, Hansen and NisbettHouston et al. 2011).
Second sub-corpus: Comments on the Reports
Online comments ‘below’ news reports are worthy of study from both qualitative and quantitative points of view because they reflect observer evaluations.
In sum, the two corpora provide insight into the following evaluation types:
Employee/employer reported in the first sub-corpus: i.e., participant evaluations;
The evaluative stance of the report in the first sub-corpus: i.e., quasi-professional evaluations;
Commenter reactions in the second sub-corpus: i.e., lay evaluations.
7.3 Case Study
The present analysis consists of the following parts. In Section 7.3.1, I report on the pilot study where I considered whether liminal rites of workplace dismissal tend to be scripted, or not. Section 7.3.2 presents the study of the first sub-corpus and Section 7.3.3 presents the study of the second sub-corpus through the lens of the above-outlined three types of evaluations of perceived ‘inappropriate’ workplace dismissals.
7.3.1 Pilot Study
As mentioned above, in investigating the liminal rite of workplace dismissal I set out from the hypothesis that the language of such rituals must be scripted or legally prescribed to some degree. However, this hypothesis turned out to be false because only certain very specific realisations of dismissal are legally problematic in Anglophone linguacultures.
Legal frameworks acknowledge the fact that any dismissal may, inevitably, cause distress and pain; however, such frameworks only penalise those realisations of dismissal which are explicitly and demonstrably abusive (Reference PerrittPerritt 2006: 6–96). As the pilot study has shown, workplaces themselves rarely define what they regard to be ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ forms of dismissal, as far as interactional style is concerned. If one explores workplace descriptions of ‘dignity at work’ – which tend to be provided by many larger organisations – it becomes evident that these descriptions generally discuss broader ‘principles’ for the employer as to how to treat employees, rather than specific pragmatic conventions such as how a dismissal is meant to be announced. The following ‘Dignity at Work Statement’, taken from a university website, illustrates this point:
Example 7.2 All employees are entitled to:
• a workplace free from bullying, intimidation, harassment or victimization
• experience no form of unlawful discrimination
• be valued for their skills and abilities
The vagueness of such descriptions correlates with the problem that, from a legal perspective, there is a fundamental difference between ‘unfair dismissal’ triggering legal consequences and ‘unethical dismissal’. ‘Unusual’ pragmatic realisations of dismissal, which lack explicit rudeness, typically represent the realm of unethical and pragmatically ambiguous rather than unfair and unambiguous.4
On the basis of this observation in the pilot study, I set up a simple typology of ambiguous and unambiguous dismissals. One can argue that in unambiguously inappropriate dismissal normally the legal order gets violated, while in pragmatically ambiguous ones only the moral order is trespassed. The following examples represent these two types of the rite of dismissal:
After reading about Angel Clark, the talk-radio host who was fired via Facebook recently, I got to think about what would be the worst way to get the bad news about losing your job … Amazingly, however, nothing I imagined could top your stories …
The Poster As Pink Slip
When I was in college I was fired from a job via a poster. My boss put up a neon pink sign in the break room that read ‘Alyson, find a new job.’
– Alyson, former pizza delivery girl
Sacking by text was ‘brutal and gutless’
9 May 2013
The sacking of a retail worker, after nineteen years of service, via a twenty-one-word text message, was ‘brutal and gutless’, the FW Commission has ruled.
In Example 7.3 the employer explicitly and unambiguously violated the employee’s dignity at work: the public display of humour in such a sensitive liminal ritual tends to be interpreted as being highly ‘destructive’ (see Reference BilligBillig 2005: 28). The narrator of the example also takes such an evaluative stance as he introduces the event in a moralising sarcastic way, by stating that ‘nothing I imagined could top your [i.e., the featured] stories’ (see Reference DadlezDadlez 2011 on ‘moralising sarcasm’). Example 7.4 represents a pragmatically ambiguous dismissal: while the brevity and the medium of the dismissal are both negatively evaluated, the dismissal is not demonstrably intended to cause offence and, as such, it does not trespass the legal order. Pragmatically ambiguous dismissals often feature tension between legal and moral orders. For instance, while the dismissal featured in Example 7.3 caused a moral uproar, the employee was unable to sue the employer.
7.3.2 Study of the First Sub-corpus
The simple typology outlined above allowed me to categorise the first sub-corpus of 120 news accounts as follows:
As Table 7.2 illustrates, a statistically significant majority of the online narratives represent pragmatically ambiguous dismissals, which accords with the fact that unambiguous dismissals may have legal and financial consequences for the employer. It may also not be a coincidence that all of the eight unambiguous dismissals in the sub-corpus involve employees in low-skilled jobs like in Example 7.3. In the following, I devote more attention to pragmatically ambiguous cases, not only due to their statistical salience but also because they are clearly interesting for the ritualist to investigate as they lead to the following question:
Table 7.2 Categorisation of the first sub-corpus
| Pragmatically (and legally) ambiguous dismissals | Pragmatically (and legally) unambiguous dismissals |
|---|---|
| 112 online narratives | Eight online narratives (vulnerable employees who do not normally take a legal action) |
Considering that such realisations of the liminal rite of dismissal are not demonstrably wrong, at least from a legal point of view, do participants and observers reveal metapragmatic awareness of a breach of a specific moral order?
In the study of the first sub-corpus, I investigated this question by examining both participant evaluations and the evaluative stance of the reports.
Participant Evaluations
Since the rite of dismissal is rarely scripted and pragmatically ambiguous dismissals are therefore not ‘demonstrably’ wrong, such cases allow the employer to have significant freedom when interpreting ‘appropriate’ behaviour in a particular situation. In the present sub-corpus of narratives, some employers defend their decision to dismiss employees in contradictory ways, while others opt to remain silent. Table 7.3 illustrates employers’ evaluative reactions and the lack of such reactions in the corpus:
Table 7.3 Employer reactions in the first sub-corpus
| 11/120 narratives | 24/120 narratives | 85/120 narratives |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting the dismissal without quoting the employer/employee | The employer is reported as declining to comment on the dismissal | The employer expresses some form of regret; in four cases the employer formally apologises |
This low frequency rate of apologising can be explained by considering the potential legal and marketing consequences of a corporate apology (see Reference Fuchs-BurnettFuchs-Burnett 2002). At the same time, these figures also show that the liminal ritual of workplace dismissal triggers a strong sense of metapragmatic awareness, and employers who authored and realised the ritual in a perceived inappropriate fashion also tend to acknowledge the breach of the moral order. Having argued thus, this acknowledgement often comes in a careful way: as Table 7.3 shows, only four out of eighty-five employers who expressed some form of regret realised a public apology, while the others only mentioned regret. While expressing regret can be a strategy to realise the speech act Apologise (see Reference Blum-Kulka, House and KasperBlum-Kulka et al. 1989), in the corpus it tends to correlate with the speech act Justify (see Excuse/Justify in Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House 1981), as the following example shows:
Licensee Stephen Howard has admitted ‘sacking’ staff members but says he had to act to bring in new people after what he claims were a number of issues with the existing workers.
In this case, the employer admits that he has dismissed employees but justifies the claimed abruptness of the dismissal by referring to ‘a number of issues with the existing workers’. By so doing, he makes an implicit appeal to a competing moral order of the liminal ritual, namely, that if an employee is ‘problematic’, the employer is entitled (and may even be expected) to dismiss him in writing and even in an abrupt manner. Such justifications can be reinforced by the fact that textual dismissal is not illegal. In many contexts, the written medium (and the pragmatic implications of this medium) can even be considered to be a preferred form of workplace dismissal, as the following legal excerpt illustrates:
Communicating a dismissal decision by text should be a last resort but may be acceptable in limited circumstances. For example, where there is a concern that face-to-face contact may involve some genuine prospect of aggression or violence, or the employee had engaged in gross and willful misconduct and no possible explanation could alter the decision. It can also be necessary if an employee is unable to be contacted by other means.
Compared to employers, employees evaluate such instances of dismissal in an unanimously negative way, which is not surprising. In summary, the study of participant evaluations shows that even those perceived ‘inappropriate’ ritual dismissals which are not demonstrably wrong tend to be negatively viewed. This metapragmatic tendency correlates with the liminal irreversibility of the ritual.
Evaluative Stances of the Narratives
The study of the 112 narratives in the corpus shows these narratives share various evaluative features.
Title
Discourse analysts like Reference HartleyHartley (2013: 165) argued that title represents a prime opportunity for texts like news items to take an evaluative stance. This phenomenon can also be observed in the first sub-corpus where the titles of the reports represent negative views on perceived ‘inappropriate’ dismissals, as the following examples show:
Staff ‘fuming’ after new pub landlord sacks them by text and Facebook messages
Staff at Dundee furniture store ‘sacked by text two days before Christmas’
Both these titles include evaluations which were made by the dismissed staff members and, as such, they not only adopt stances themselves, but also influence the prospective evaluation of the reader. The expression ‘fuming’ in Example 7.7 reflects the anger that has been triggered by an allegedly ‘unfair’ dismissal, while reference to the media of the dismissal (both text and Facebook) justifies this evaluation. Similarly, in Example 7.8, the statement ‘sacked by text two days before Christmas’ is a reflection on the lack of care (see Reference Haidt, Joseph, Carruthers, Laurence and StichHaidt and Joseph’s 2007 interesting discussion of ‘harm and care’ in the context of morality). In this latter case, the reported timing of the dismissal, and its medium, position it as inappropriate. While not all titles feature original quotes, there tends to be some implicit form of appeal to the expected moral order of things in a workplace dismissal in the majority of the titles in the corpus. The following example illustrates this point:
Claims workers sacked by text-message
While this title does not feature an explicit evaluation, the fact that ‘by text-message’ is included in the title indicates that the narrator construes the irreversible rite of dismissal as controversial. Practically all the 112 narratives studied feature an evaluation in the title.
Foregrounding Information
The concept of foregrounding has been widely studied (see e.g., Reference LeechLeech 2008); essentially, it refers to the ways in which a text structures information. A recurrent feature of the narratives in the corpus is that, following the title, the author first presents the alleged inappropriate behaviour, and he only introduces the circumstances that have led to the perceived inappropriacy after that; this is usually followed by reporting on the reactions of the employees, and then the reactions of the employer.
As this example illustrates, the controversial delivery of the dismissal via a short text message is exacerbated by the absence of further communication during the dismissal process. The information structuring of this and other similar texts is reasonable when one considers that narratives (a) are not ‘objective’, that is, they deliver meta-evaluations of the alleged inappropriacy either explicitly or implicitly, and (b) that their aim is to trigger further involvement (metapragmatic participation), i.e., to generate interest and, ideally for the writer of the news report, moral uproar. In Example 7.10, the employer reacts defensively to the accusation of unethical behaviour. However, it is relevant here to recall that in some other cases, such as Example 7.5, the employer reacts to criticisms with appeals to an alternative competing moral order (i.e., it is proper to abruptly dismiss a ‘problematic’ employee), usually by realising the speech act Justify. Since such appeals tend to occur late in the reports, it is clear that – insofar as one interprets moral order to be a discursive construct – it can be of secondary importance to the default moral order featured in the report of the incident.
While the above is a recurrent structure of foregrounding in the narratives, nine of the 112 narratives adopt a different structure in that they present the employer’s perspective first. However, the reason behind such alternative choices is normally not that the narrators approve the employer’s behaviour, but rather that they follow an ‘anecdotal’ line of storytelling (see Reference GeorgakopolouGeorgakopolou 1997), as shown by the following example:
The first time he fired someone, one manager explained, it took him two hours and the process was excruciatingly painful for both himself and the affected employee. Over time, he got ‘so good’ at firing employees that somewhere between the time they entered his office and walked across to take a chair, they were fired. ‘We brought you in to discuss some difficult matters. We know you are not happy here, that you are not happy with your performance … We are not happy with it either, and feel you can do better elsewhere. So today we are going to part company and we are going to wish you good luck. Here is a severance check and a letter of recommendation we want you to have, along with what we owe you. We want you to take the rest of the day off on us, and here are twenty bucks so you can treat yourself to a nice lunch.’ What goes around comes around, and this same manager reports that when it was his time to be fired he found ‘the box’ on his desk. Everyone knew the dreaded box was given to dismissed employees to fill it with their personal belongings. This manager did not have the courtesy of facing his supervisor, he received a phone call seconds after entering his office: ‘See that box on your desk? Get your belongings, report to payroll … We’ll give you a ride home.’ And if you think that was tasteless, it seems someone can always top your story. I recently read about a host of people being dismissed, … via E-mail!
The words firing and dignity hardly belong together. Nevertheless, there are a few principles we can keep in mind that will help preserve a certain amount of dignity to that employee we are ready to let go.
While the anecdotal approach of this text does not foreground the employee’s evaluation, this does not mean that the reader is intended to empathise with the employer. In this case, the Principle of Tact (Reference LeechLeech 1983) underlies the perceived moral order of the irreversible rite of dismissal: the text claims that the employer dismissed the employee in an abrupt and, as such, ‘tactless’ fashion.
7.3.3 Study of the Second Sub-corpus
The study of reader evaluations of pragmatically unambiguous and ambiguous dismissals has shown a noteworthy difference between how readers evaluate such perceived ‘inappropriately’ realised rituals. Table 7.4 shows this evaluative difference:
Table 7.4 Evaluation of unambiguous and ambiguous cases
| Negative evaluations (273 online evaluative comments) | Positive evaluations (68 online evaluative comments) | |
|---|---|---|
| ||
| TOTAL: 61 comments | 59 (96.7%) | 2 (3.3%)5 |
| ||
| TOTAL: 280 comments | 197 (70.4%) | 83 (29.6%) |
The figures here are problematic in the sense that not all the websites in the corpus possessed a commenting option. Yet, Table 7.4 shows that members of the public almost always evaluate unambiguously inappropriate rites of dismissal negatively – which comes as no surprise – while pragmatically ambiguous rites of dismissal are more divisive: the ratio of negative comments is 70.4 per cent (197) in comparison with 29.6 per cent (eighty-three) for positive comments.
Regarding positive evaluations, it would be overly ambitious to attempt an interpretation of the motivation behind each case when a commenter disagrees with the evaluation of the narrator of a dismissal, or that of the dismissed employees quoted in the narrative. However, in many cases, such evaluative discrepancies are based on some personal experience either in the given company or with the ‘archetype’ of employees associated with those being dismissed. The following excerpt illustrates such evaluations:
We visited this pub several times in December/January to find the bar staff rude and disinterested; as a group I commented on that several times so probably better if they didn’t work in a service industry. It may not be the most professional way to be told that you are dismissed but the cash-in-hand nature of the position is an indication of its transient nature.
This commenter evaluates the behaviour of the employer positively and prescriptively endorses the moral order of abruptly dismissing certain types of employees. This evaluation is based on the alleged unprofessional behaviour of the staff. If a person serves the customers inappropriately, she appears to lose her right to be treated with specific deference at the given workplace, i.e., the dismissed employee is morally sanctioned (see Reference NwoyeNwoye’s 1992 insightful pragmatic discussion of moral sanctioning). In some other cases, commenters align6 themselves with the employer on the grounds that, having fulfilled managerial functions themselves or having worked at companies, they regard written notice as ‘unavoidable’ in certain settings and relationship types.
However, because a significant majority of the commenters (70.4 per cent) align themselves with the person being dismissed, it is reasonable to argue that the cluster of lay observer evaluations that surround such incidents are anchored in a default moral order underlying the rite of dismissal with a strong sense of irreversibility, which triggers a need to be tactful under all circumstances. Comments reflect a broad array of appeals to this moral order: some are quasi-religious in nature (e.g., ‘that is one huge God complex by the Manager’), others are quasi-scientific (e.g., ‘Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow benefit for all’), while still some others simply state the emotions of the person posting the comment (e.g., ‘that company is absolutely pathetic’, ‘bit of a coward’).7
7.4 Conclusion and Summary of Part II
This final chapter of Part II of the present book has examined the phenomenon of liminality, which is a typical characteristic of more complex rituals. While in anthropology the concept of liminality is often used to describe anti-structural rites of passage, and ‘liminoid’ refers to theatrical performances, for the pragmatician, liminality occurs in any ritual which even temporarily brings the participants into an interactional setting that differs from their ordinary life. At the same time, liminality is scalar, and it manifests itself in a fully-fledged fashion in rituals with a sense of irreversibility, such as workplace dismissals studied in this chapter, representing a typically structural ritual. Irreversibility unavoidably triggers a strong sense of metapragmatic awareness: notwithstanding whether a rite of dismissal, marriage proposal, invitation to join an important society or another ritual is taking place, the participants and observers of the ritual are likely to notice if something goes amiss with the interactional flow simply due to the importance of the ritual for at least the recipient, and in other occasions also for some others – as a typical example one may refer to the devastating impact of a mismanaged marriage proposal on the families involved in many societies. Therefore, the pragmatician can pin down liminality by focusing on cases when a pragmatic issue occurs in a liminal ritual, by focusing on metapragmatic evaluations.
In this chapter, I once again avoided interpreting the phenomenon under investigation through the lens of politeness. While breaches of the expected flow of events in liminal rituals are no doubt relevant to impoliteness, as the analysis of the main corpus of the case study has shown, many participants, reporters and commenters do not interpret the events purely in terms of impoliteness but go much further, by referring to moral norms, values and other grand notions. This is logical if one considers that violations of the expected ritual flow and the underlying moral order are not simply ‘impolite’ in the strict sense of the word but often they are ‘civil’ and ‘inhumane’ and have a devastating impact on the recipient. Putting such violations under the umbrella of ‘impoliteness’ would, in my view, overstretch this term. While impoliteness conventionally involves causing offence, here one witnesses more than simple offence due to the impact of the liminal ritual on people’s lives.
The case study has shown that even in pragmatically ambiguous dismissals, evaluations follow certain tendencies. Such tendencies also apply for cases when those who are responsible for the perceived breach of the moral order may simply intend to be cautious rather than offensive by realising the dismissal in a succinct way. In turn, the existence of such tendencies reveals the existence of a default moral order which underlies any liminal ritual, even if it is not codified like workplace dismissal. Table 7.5 summarises evaluative tendencies in the case study:
Table 7.5 Evaluative tendencies in the case study
| Participant evaluations: | In the majority of cases (85/120 narratives, i.e., 70.8%) even the employer expresses some form of regret over a pragmatically ambiguous dismissal |
| Observer reflective evaluations: | The news items reporting the incidents align themselves with the employee |
| Lay observer evaluations: | A significant majority (197/280 comments, i.e., 70.4%) of the commenters explicitly align themselves with the dismissed person |
These tendencies show that while there may be two competing moral orders in such conflictive cases – including expectations towards a tactful dismissal versus tolerance for the employer to abruptly dismiss an employee if this abruptness is morally endorsed – there is ultimately a default moral order that influences the evaluations which are made in a set of different participant statuses.
Part II of this book has discussed the three key features of mimesis, (self-)displaying behaviour and liminality, which characterise interactionally and relationally complex rituals. While these features have been somewhat neglected in pragmatics, I argued that they are important to consider because they provide insight into what happens in many interaction rituals.
In the following and final Part III of the book, we will discuss various units of analysis through which interaction ritual can be studied, by devoting special attention to the methodological considerations outlined in Chapter 2.
