office talk
Posted on November 8, 2009
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On the nature of gossip as a subject of anthropological research
Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”?
If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back.
These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.
But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school.
The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.
Consider, for instance, the cascade of insults recorded in the earlier study of middle-school gossip by Donna Eder and Janet Lynne Enke of Indiana University. In this cafeteria conversation, a group of eighth-grade girls in the cafeteria were discussing an overweight classmate whose breasts they considered too large for her age:
Penny: In choir that girl was sitting in front of us and we kept going, “Moo.”
Karen: We were going, “Come here, cow; come here, cow.”
Bonnie: I know. She is one.
Penny: She looks like a big fat cow.
Julie: Who is that?
Bonnie: That girl on the basketball team.
Penny: That big red-headed cow.
Julie: Oh, yeah. I know. She is a cow.
The new study found that gossip in the workplace also tended to be overwhelmingly negative, but the insults were more subtle and the conversations less predictable, says Tim Hallett, a sociologist at Indiana University. Dr. Hallett conducted the study along with Dr. Eder and Brent Harger of Albright College.
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