Sometimes, Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them--not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the homeowners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud... Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven. F. O'Connor (1972: 491-2)

A Teacher and his Friends

There is a positive side to the rhetorical inability to express the structure of evaluation holistically, and to constitute the relationship teacher/administrator as a dialectical one. The rhetoric induces a tendency towards the construction of a different type of social organization in which are over-emphasized differences internal to the groups as constituted by the social structure. The teachers were not seen as an undifferentiated mass which interacted randomly, or even simply in terms suggested solely by the school administration. There were male and female teachers, younger, and older ones, smokers and non-smokers, liberals and conservatives, nice guys and tough ones, not to mention S.O.B.'s.

Nothing was more difficult for us than to make our informants among the teachers talk about each other. The principal could tell us in veiled terms whom he liked and whom he did not like among the teachers, and the teachers were continually talking about the students. We could not ask a teacher about another teacher. We could observe, however, and listen.

Three main physical areas in the school were generally associated with the teachers. There was the teachers' lounge first and foremost, then the teachers' dining room, then the coordinators' office. There were also other offices in the "media center" (library). Finally, many teachers had "their own" classroom although only a very few used them as a place to have lunch and as a center of their social life. The classrooms and offices, even when shared by several teachers, were generally associated with some of them only; other teachers were more or less formally banned from these rooms or made to feel uncomfortable if they tried to stay there longer than necessary. Neutral spaces existed only definitionally; in practice all spaces were somebody's turf:

Ralston, himself, generally ate in the coordinators' office with his friends. Obviously; He did not like the athletic teachers. One of them did have an office in the coordinator's office, but he never stayed there any longer than he absolutely had to. In contrast, Ralston all but resided there. Ralston's remarks are typical of spontaneous reactions teachers had when one of us casually implied appreciation of other teachers who were not particularly liked by those we were with. No answer was expected to a question like "Why do you want to go there?" It was simply an index to a boundary. Later, Ralston gave us the following version of the teachers' socio-territorial segmentation:

• older male teachers interested in athletics stay in the faculty dining room (this included all the coaches and a few others);
• younger, female, smoking, "gossipy" teachers sit at the center table of the teachers' lounge;
• younger male "individualized instruction" teachers stay in the coordinators' office;
• teachers who don't fit into any group sit on the couches of the teachers' lounge.

In its broad lines, this version is the same as the one any other teacher might have given. As such, it is not controversial. This list is essentially descriptive, at least in initial unreflective statements. One might add that there were also what our team identified as "loners," a few teachers who ate by themselves in their own classrooms, or in tiny laboratories attached to them. They did not socialize with other teachers and were all but forgotten.

Given the above, we tried to probe. We asked for the names of the "women who gossip in the lounge." Suddenly, things became confused. Informants would "realize" that, for example, 1) women do go to the faculty dining room from time to time and some even sit at the table with men; 2) several men regularly join the women at the table in the teachers' lounge; 3) there often are verbal exchanges in the lounge between the couches and the table; 4) rarely, if ever, are all the members of a group together; 5) many teachers cannot be easily classified as belonging to one group rather than to another and, often, teachers move their affiliation from one group to another:

Mr. Forsdale's move to the couch in the lounge reflects rather accurately his position among the teachers. He was middle-aged, somewhat unsophisticated intellectually, interested in sports, rather liberal in outlook, a thoroughly "nice" teacher. This complex of traits made it difficult for him to fit easily into the center of any of the constituted cliques. The group in which he fitted most comfortably were the "older," "athletic types." But they were not "nice., An.", And anyway, that semester their lunch hour did w not coincide with his. He could not fit with the younger teachers, and he was too unsophisticated to feel comfortable with the "individualized instruction" group.

Forsdale presents us with a good case study demonstrating the limitations of the original interpretation of socio-territorial segmentation. Forsdale "moves" and in so doing implies the existence of fixed points of departure and destination. This differentiation between a moving subject and fixed labelled social categories is very powerful. We will spend much time on it when we talk about the students who produced the most elaborated texts about belonging to "cliques" (Chapters X and XI).

To begin the analysis, let us consider something that was told in an interview by Taylor, the young teacher who had tenure difficulties. He had just explained that he used to go up to the lounge to smoke but "now that I am not smoking, I have no reason to go ... I got completely out of the habit of going up there." He was now one of those who usually ate in their classroom. The above remarks led the interviewer to ask him about cliques among the teachers:

I decided to quote this exchange[ftn 1] at length to give an idea of the way many teachers could talk about groups within the school when they shifted to a reflective mode. In this mode Taylor's initial "I don't know" is as typical as the "Why do you want to go there?" re-mark Ralston made in the "off-the-cuff" mode. In the reflective mode, boundaries become fuzzy and the emphasis shifts from qualities of the group to qualities of the individuals which make them up. The group cones to be seen as deriving from certain shared qualities of the people involved. Taylor emphasizes age, the type of work a teacher is doing (e.g., individualized instruction), shared problems (individualizing the English department). In off-the-cuff identifications other things could also be taken into account such as individual characteristics (the athletes, the gossips, etc.). Yet, in these latter identifications, less consideration is given to the possibility for individual variation within a group or for mobility. Under prodding, variation and mobility become the primary characteristic and groups lose all substance.

How are we to handle this pattern? We cannot quite see in it a social structure. The structures of work and production which we examined earlier would not seem to require such an extreme development of a segmentation internal to a group. On the contrary. Furthermore, all evidence points to the absence of any social substance to the groups: it would be impossible to group all teachers in terms of clique categories (while it is a common thing to group all participants in terms of their functional category—e.g. in administrative listing). We must, thus, approach the data from a different angle.

I have already given two examples of remarks and observations dealing with the grouping of teachers. Here is another instance:

This took place in the dining room. Henry, Bridge and Altman are "athletic types" but Dolby is one of the "individualized instruction" types who is generally in conflict with the others. That day they ate together. Furthermore, some women did come to eat in the dining room, though at a different table. Conversely, the teachers' lounge could become, for a while, male turf. A variation in the relationship membership/location can occur but the differentiating process remains. T33 is a report of two "groups" differentiated spatially (two tables, either of which could have seated the eight actors in this scene), sexually (the field-worker moved partially because she was a woman and under strong implicit pressures), and in terms of life style (sports vs. beauty parlors, etc.). What we have, then, is a variety of spaces, a variety of life style choices and a set of operators who maneuver from one table to another, from one subject of discussion to another. These observations allow us to reconcile the fact that 1) there are no truly solidified "groups" among the teachers, 2) that there is no teacher without some sort of symbolic identification with a clique, however temporary it might be, and 3) "the teachers" cannot be seen in any way as a unified body. We can understand how the same informant could, on the one hand, say "I don't know what the cliques are" and, on the other hand, be able to discuss at length about the various areas around which more or less temporary associations of teachers could be formed.

All groups among teachers are "ad hoc." The situation reported in T33 should be considered paradigmatic. Whatever the reasons which brought the eight actors together, they immediately segmented themselves, albeit temporarily and in disregard to longer standing segmentations. Even these later ones are founded on similar ad hoc principles. The longer texts produced by Taylor or Ralston are elaborations on this theme: "I" make a decision and other "I's" (Hal, George, Mercer --first names; last names are only used by Taylor in T32 because the interviewer could not be assumed to know who was whom) make other choices. One of these decisions is who "I" will interact with and in what manner.

The obvious function of these group is to provide a human environment during breaks, and a vehicle for the sharing of information and experience about the school. There is also evidence that some of the symbolic identifications are used in power plays. Insofar as "the teachers" are not an organized entity, insofar as inevitable personality clashes are not encompassed within a social structure but rather are allowed to encompass group affiliation, insofar as they are the primary elements in group identification, it is not surprising that 1) groups form so as to maximize the possibility of individuals being with people they like and minimize the reverse eventuality; 2) areas of disagreement include matters of school policy so that certain teachers agree with the principal on such a thing as stressing "individualized instruction," and other teachers disagree; 3) the principal, in consequence, appears to "favor" certain teachers over others (and quite possiby does, as a matter of fact); 4) the teachers who feel left out react negatively.

This is compounded by the fact that the principal and other members of the administration, like the teachers, are allowed to group themselves according to lifestyle interests. In a small school like Sheffield, there is much mingling of the administration with teachers. The principal generally had lunch in the dining roan with the "older male athletes." He perceived them, probably rightly, as the true power brokers in the school who could make or break his innovations. However, he was himself closer to the "younger male individualized instruction" teachers who had the drive, conviction, and expertise necessary to initiate these innovations. This, of course, was well known.

All of the above is symbolically expressed by the terms of address used by teachers and administrators alike among themselves. The most common is the first name. It is almost universally used in face-to-face interaction. Since there is duplication of first names, it is common to refer to an absent person by his last name, e.g. as Bob Ralston. Also possible is "Mr. Ralston," which is even rarer. Different nuances of meaning are obviously implied there and we could pursue them. I just want to point out how all these ways of address or reference orient the speaker towards the individuality of the person rather than towards any of the social or cultural qualities which could be attributed to that person. In interaction, "Dick" or "Bob" are not teachers or principal; they are not even older or younger, members of this or that clique or even, I would argue, male or female, they are "individuals."

I could easily proceed from here into a discussion of "individuality." It is tempting. The preceding data are precisely the type which would allow for such an elaboration. It is not my intent to do this here. Much has been written on American individual-ism. I have contributed to this literature (1977). We must go further and turn our attention to what it is in the American data we examine that allows us to talk about individuality. What I saw was people ad-dressing each other by their first names, or people explaining and creating their social organization in terms of their personal likes or dislikes. I never saw "individualism."

I only mention a certain mode of address and its way of organizing routine interaction because this mode becomes significant in contradistinction with the other modes that informants also used to structure the overall interpretation of their social world. A single instance of a certain type of behavior, verbal or otherwise, or a large number of such instances, is uninterpretable by itself. It can only be handled in the context of other types of behavior also performed by the participants in the system under examination. Informants can and often do use last names to refer to third parties and to themselves. But they do so in very well defined contexts. They do so when a member of the interactional set cannot be sure which "Bob" is being talked about. They also use last names in all bureaucratic situations, such as the filling out of forms or the filing of these forms by names. In both cases last names are "diacritical." They help distinguish a particular person from all other persons. but as soon as the person has been identified, the diacritical mark is dropped.[ftn 2]

A distinction is made. It is a powerful one, though one which it is easy to miss. Diacritical markers for human beings are rarely used in routine interaction. When they are it is, on questioning, seen by most informants as irrelevant or even evil. Yet, such diacritical markers as last names or role labels, such as "teacher" or "principal," are used. We can see them as one realization of a major rhetorical mode typical of what I will call "administrative discourse."

The Place and Nature of Administrative Discourse

I have already introduced briefly (p. 81) the document which best exemplifies the administrative discourse. The Policies and Bylaws was, as I pointed out, an ad hoc compilation of definitions, rules and regulations pertaining to events within the school. This ad hoc character reflects both the studied in-difference of the participants towards the book and the need they have for it. I noted earlier that, on the one hand, informants would, in their verbal inter-action with us, always de-emphasize the relevance of the Black Book, pointing out, among other things, that many policies were "never written," and that, on the other hand, the policies that were written were in those areas where there had been conflict. As is noted at the end of each section, not only are all policies formally "adopted" on a certain date, they are also often cancelled, revised and re-adopted. As is also noted at the beginning of the section on the responsibilities and duties of the tteachers, these were "Developed by a Committee of the Sheffield Teachers Association in Cooperation with Administrators of the School System."

There is little doubt, then, that the expressed indifference of the participants is but a facet of their attitude towards the book, and all other such documents from the State laws to the description of procedures as to the filling of report cards, to the "parliamentary procedures" that teachers generally insist student clubs follow in their public meetings. The other facet is the quasi-sacred nature of a type of symbolic action that is triggered solely by periods of stress, anxiety or doubt. Is it legal for a school to fire a teacher for reason of hair length? Is a teacher responsible for the behavior of children in the bathrooms? How should this form be filled? These "irrelevant" documents are those towards which most participants turn in their attempts to solve their dilemmas. Not that the documents necessarily solve these dilemmas, but that consulting them is always a part of the process of problem solving.

Bureaucratic documents are an integral part of the total configuration of rhetorical modes. Further-more, administrative discourse is not the discourse of administrators (though they may be those who engage in it most). It is not either the language of otherwise defined administrative contexts. It is very much the other way around. The only clue participants have that they are in "administration" rather than, say the personal prejudices of the administrators, is the discourse itself.[ftn 3] Administrators routinely use non-administrative talk. Teachers can participate in the elaboration of regulations.

What are the linguistic characteristics of this mode? The section of the Policies and Bylaws which deals with teachers has the following heading and opening statement:

To begin the analysis, let us consider something that was told in an interview by Taylor, the young teacher who had tenure difficulties. He had just explained that he used to go up to the lounge to smoke but "now that I am not smoking, I have no reason to go ... I got completely out of the habit of going up there." He was now one of those who usually ate in their classroom. The above remarks led the interviewer to ask him about cliques among the teachers:

A description of the "responsibilities and du-ties" follow, three pages long, divided into five areas with many subdivisions. The word "teacher" appears in the plural on only two occasions: 1) in the title, 2) under the general subject (section 5) of the responsibilities of "the teacher" (singular) to-wards "other members of the staff/of the faculty/of the school administration." In other words, the plurality of teachers is recognized, but it is not what an administrative text about them is interested to recognize as the reality to be dealt with. The teacher himself ought to deal with the plurality of his colleagues; it is a part of his responsibilities and duties, as section 5 emphasizes. But it remains his responsibility.

This feature of T34 is one that is typical of the whole Policies and Bylaws. Except for titles, certain opening paragraphs and a few passages within the body of the policies which provide interesting contrasts which we consider presently, all policies are written in the third person singular: "The superintendent of schools does...," "The business director shall...," "The principal must...," etc.

Everywhere, it is, for example, "the teacher" that is being referred to, a "he" or a "she." There are few general statements about what it is to be a teacher. The personnel policy does not contain an explicit definition. One can assume, by implication that a teacher is a person who accepts all the listed duties and responsibilities and has entered into a contract to perform them with the agency which drew the policies to perform them. What makes a teacher a teacher is left to be determined by other agencies (the state which licenses teachers, the colleges and universities who train them?). What is made explicit, though not so much by a statement as such as by the form in which the statements are cast, is that the teacher is a singular, separate, entity. At the level of the formal contract, all entities are treated in this way. There is a conscious narking of the fact that the teacher is a human being: When confronted by feminist protest against a sexist vocabulary, the choice is to keep the singular pronoun rather than re-write the text in the plural. "The teacher" is not an impersonal role; it is a very personal one. It is also a singular one.

However, and this is fundamental, the third per-son singular forms of the Policies and Bylaws do not refer to any live human being. They can be made to apply to many human beings. This is assumed. One could replace all mention of "the teacher" by a proper name. This would produce a different text. The participants could use the book even when they had not performed this last operation of providing names. One may wonder whether it is appropriate to talk of the administrative mode as "personal." It is only appropriate because of the insistence on personal rather than neutral pronouns.

The third person singular form is most dramatically found in administrative language. However, as I suggested, this language is within the competence of all the participants. All of them could, in fact, pro-duce small texts in that style on the model of: "Who is Joe Smith?" "He is a teacher." In such identifications, separateness is maintained. Joe Smith is not "one of the teachers," he is a "a teacher."

One must go further. Joe Smith is not a "teacher" in his very substance as it is sym fically expressed in his name. There is no marker in the phrase "Joe Smith" that signals him as a teacher. Indeed, the question "Who is Smith?" is necessary because there are no such markers. What the whole exchange does is to identify him with the set of actions labeled "teaching" and personalized into "teacher." But as Burke reminds us "to begin with identification is, by the same token,..., to confront the implication of division" (1969:22). Joe is not "a teacher" to begin with, and he never fully "becomes" one. Indeed, he can cease to be a teacher (as all students cease to be students) without ceasing to be Joe Smith. This refusal to signify symbolically role identification extends beyond linguistic markers: Except for those adults who have to wear a special dress for external reasons (for example the janitors or the cafeteria workers) there is such a uniformity of dress in the school that one cannot easily judge whether one is talking to a teacher, an administrator, a visitor or a parent.

There were exceptions. The nurse wore a white blouse, teachers were not allowed the freedom in dress which was tolerated of the students. Very soon all interested parties knew what everybody was and it ceased to have to be marked. Like the formal administrative discourse, specific role identification is performed only in periods of uncertainty. It might be marked again in time of conflict. People might then say, "He is not acting like a teacher," or, "He is a bad administrator." The absence of realizations of administrative discourse in routine interaction should thus not be over interpreted. It is always present in the background. Participants did not "like" to use the administrative rhetoric. They could not escape it. Such rhetoric makes a special context. When the general situation demands it, whether the speaker likes it or not, he is obliged to use the rhetoric.

At the end of the earlier discussions of the quality and quantity of teaching, we came to similar conclusions about the separateness of /role/ from /person/. What we have done now, through an analysis of a smaller set of data, but in greater detail, is to specify the source of the intuition about the validity of the original analysis. That analysis was based on verbal texts. However, I could not quite say what made this analysis compelling for an essential concrete linkage was missing. To the extent that I am right in focussing on symbolic manifestation, the discovery of the linkage had to be made within symbolic expression. The concrete linkage we were searching for consists in 1) the presence of a personal form in a discourse that does not refer to a person, and 2) the separation of this form from other personal discourses (first name discourse, for example) where personal reference is direct while the role that person plays is not marked.

Manipulation

Before writing the formal statements made possible by the preceding analysis, let us return to the use and manipulation of the third person singular and plural forms in the Policies and Bylaws. The third person singular dominates overwhelmingly. But plural forms can also be found. Are these "errors"?

Until now, I have looked at variation in rhetorical realization within a single text as either simple evidence for the ability of any participants, whatever his or her position, to express himself in all avail-able modes, or as evidence of context manipulation. It might remain tempting to see certain irregularities, like the nurse's white coat which signals her role, or the relatively many instances of third person plural forms in the Policies and Bylaws, as being "errors." Even if they are indeed "errors, they occur at significant moments which tell us a lot about the various modes.

The first entry in the section of the Black Book that deals with students has to do with "age of en-trance." It starts very regularly with "A child is eligible for kindergarten..." and it goes on in the same style until the last paragraph which reads:

Is "children" a discrepancy?

A subsequent section on "non-residents" makes things clearer. It opens with the statement "Non-resident pupils may be admitted..." and continues in the plural until section C which reads "Parents who move from Sheffield during the school year and wish to have their child . . ." in the singular. The section continues to shift from referring to students in the singular or in the plural throughout but in a regular fashion. The plural is used when the policy relates to "contract agreements between the Sheffield Board of Education and the Board of the other school district or districts concerned." These are external matters. The singular is used to describe particular procedures, that is, internal matters.

This throws light on another instance where the plural is used frequently, in the article on "Camnity Relations." One policy says, for example:

"Visitors," "representatives," "citizens," but "the Board." A shift is performed: There is the school in its relationship with itself, and the school in its relationship with the outside. By "relationship with itself," t mean its internal organization, the legitimate manner to 1) define the actors (individually and neutrally, through their role we might say); 2) arrange them and regulate their relationships (on a one to one basis). This is pr rly the domain of "administration." Cert-rasti,e1 the actors are generalized when the school in con onted with the outside, the "caua:nity," other school systems, areas which are not under its jurisdiction but with which it has to deal. It is not "any citizen," "each visitor," it is "citizens," "visitors."

This particular use of the plural is best under-stood in the context of our other analyses of the use of the plural (particularly in Chapter VI). The plural is used about people who are not present, among people who generally agree with the position taken. Plural is for (and signifies) internal usage about external matters. To say that "the school" is in a state of conflict with "the community" would be an overstatement. There is no direct statement to this effect in the Policies and Bylaws (of course...), and we have one instance, at least, of just the opposite in the "Educational Philosophy" (see T29) where the school is depicted as being at the service of the community. But the Philosophy is for external usage. The participants never talk like this about the community when they are among themselves... Thus, even a positive statement differentiates the outside from the inside.

All this can serve as a restatement of my major argument: The Policies and Bylaws are very much an insider document. It is part and parcel of the school. In spite of the attempts by the authors to remain impersonal and detached, in spite of the concomitant attempts by the same people to distance them-selves from their own work in most contexts, the voice of a speaker can be heard talking, communicating, manipulating, signifying and, in the process, creating. The clincher could be found in the "Memo to the person using this book" that is typed on the second page of the Policies and Bylaws, the only place where it is acknowledged that there is an audience to the book, an audience that is a personalized and singularized, "you":

 

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FOOTNOTES 1) It should be compared to the students' texts about cliques in Chapter XI. It will then be seen that both students and teachers structure their statements in precisely the same manner. 2) The fact that it has been dropped does not mean that it has disappeared. It remains in the memory of the interlocutors as part of the history which they share. The importnat thing is that a diacritical identification is not marked routinely through a reduced cue--except in certain contexts as we will see. 3) I stress again that any audience dissatisfied wtih the regulation can accuse its author of hiding his prejudices behind teh smoke screen of administrative need. What is relevant is that the audience sees the screen for what it is, viz. "administration," because of clues internal to discourse.