Politics and Social Change Commons^™

Gossip At Work: Unsanctioned Evaluative Talk In Formal School Meetings, Tim Hallett, Brent D. Harger, Donna Eder

Sociology Faculty Publications

This article uses a form of linguistic ethnography to analyze videotaped recordings of gossip that took place during formal school meetings. By comparing this gossip data against existing models of gossip based on data collected in informal settings, we identify eleven new response classes, including four forms of indirectness that operate to cloak gossip under ambiguity, and seven forms of avoidance that change the trajectory of gossip. In doing so, this article makes three larger contributions. First, it opens a new front in research on organizational politics by providing an empirically grounded, conceptually rich vocabulary for analyzing gossip in formal …