A Real Leader Overlaps When a young student chooses his or her university they are unknowingly entering into

a large and confusing world of overlapping discourse communities. Author Anne Beaufort synthesized the work of Basso, Chin, Heath, Bazerman, Rafoth, Gunnarsson, and Swales to establish what discourse communities are to her. Beaufort explains that discourse communities have three critical features, communication channels- oral or written- whose interplay affects the purposes and meanings of written texts, norms for genres that may be unique to a community or shared with overlapping communities, and writers roles and tasks defined by the communication situation (33). The concept of discourse community is often thought of as too utopian or stable. An academic sees a discourse community they do not belong to and starts assuming an imaginary consensus and a shared purpose that do not reflect real experiences within communities (Devitt, 101). Diving deep into the community helps to avoid assumptions and create your own consensus. In my chosen discourse community of a sport management fraternity I had many questions I wanted answered. In order to answer these questions I need to make the community more tangible, and the problems and communication processes to be understandable to a reader. I plan to do this through ethnographic research, which is participant observation research. Seth Kahn explains that an ethnographers job is to, study cultures, the relationships, rituals, values, and habits that make people understand themselves as members of a group (202). This is a perfect way to study a discourse community. Discourse communities are defined by the relationships, values, and culture that they are made of. And just like discourse communities there are hurdles to using ethnography. According to Beverly Moss, When

ethnographers study a community as outsiders, they must spend a significant amount of time gaining access to the community and learning the rules of the community well enough to gather and eventually analyze the data (Devitt, 102). Ethnography for my sport management fraternity is easy because I am not an outsider. I have spent the last two years gaining access to the community and learning the rules so I can analyze the data. I have a jump start that I am sure other ethnographers wish they had. My main motives for using ethnography were to answer two questions: Are there overlapping discourse communities within the sport management fraternity, and if so what are they? And how do these overlapping discourse communities effect our Presidents ability to find his identity and authority. I had two methods I used to uncover the facts and answer these questions: an interview with our President, who I will refer to as Rob, and lengthy observations of three separate fraternity meetings. My interview with Rob was conducted via email. I only wanted my questions and his answers to be between him and me. Allowing other fraternity members to know of my study could alter the data I was collecting. If other members knew, Rob might be pressured to change his answers to please them. Also, members knowing I was purposefully observing the meetings could change how they normally acted and consequently change how Rob acted. I wanted pure, truthful data. Rob was not familiar with discourse communities so I had to explain the concept to him. He seemed to understand pretty quickly, So a discourse community is basically everything and everyone that makes up a group, the culture of an organization. He understood that the members of our fraternity, the rules we have implemented, and the culture we have created make it a discourse community.

I wanted to understand how Rob went from a regular student to the President of a sport management fraternity. I thought that I would not be able to answer it through observation. I had to talk directly to the source. He is the one that went through the transformative process, not me. Elizabeth Wardles work on enculturation can help us understand this transformative process. In Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write Wardle cites Sociologists Etienne Wenger as describing identity as a, negotiated experience.. a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other (155). This made me ask Rob what made up his negotiated experience. What events led to him finding who he is in this very moment. I also asked Rob to keep Wengers three interrelated modes of belonging in mind. I thought he could apply his experience of becoming a sport management fraternity president to these modes. Wengers interrelated modes included: Engagement: how did he build interpersonal relationships as a newcomer with old-timers? Imagination: how did expand his role? And Alignment: how did he walk the boundaries of the community and have his perspective accepted? The next step to understanding Robs transformative process was finding how he found his authority. Like Wenger said with identity, authority is continually negotiated within communities of practice (157). Although authority is negotiated like identity it is still very different. Elizabeth Wardle says that, authority is bestowed by institutions (157). I asked Rob how authority was bestowed to him, and how identity leads to it. Something interesting that Wardle talked about was how, authority is intangible (157). I asked Rob if he believed that were true and I think that lead to eventually finding the answer I was looking for.

My methodology for in meeting observation was low key and simple as well. I participated in the fraternity meetings as I normally would have, but kept a notebook and pen to write down notes of things I observed. I usually have a notebook and pen to take notes anyway, so it did not look like I was doing anything unusual. Throughout my observations I was making I was piecing things together on my own but as Seth Kahn says, you can, of course, learn from other peoples experiences (179). I think ultimately the experiences of others proved more valuable than my own experience. I mainly used my observations to help answer the questions of whether there were overlapping discourse communities involved with our fraternity and if so what they were. I think this was easier to find out from observation than interviews. While looking for the overlapping communities I had to keep Beauforts work on the subject in the back of my mind. She quoted Harris in her article who argued that, the boundaries of a discourse community should be drawn around a specific group of individuals so as not to become so all-encompassing as to become meaningless (186). I thought this was a really important quote to keep in mind during my observations. It helped me break down my sport management fraternity into smaller more specific communities. I stopped observing the meetings as one big picture. I started breaking down each individual interaction. I started seeing the overlapping communities. When you dont draw boundaries, everything lumps together. It becomes meaningless. Drawing the boundaries is what defines a discourse community for what it really is. The results of my interview and observations were instrumental in the formation of my findings and argument. I want to first discuss the results of my in meeting observations. I can answer one question right off the bat: my fraternity is made up of a

web of overlapping discourse communities. That became apparent right away. Our goal as a sport management fraternity is to learn the ins and outs of the sport industry. We always dress business professional and try to conduct ourselves in a professional manner. So first and foremost we belong to a professional sport management discourse community. In the first meeting I observed, one of the members arrived a few minutes late. He sat next to me and I asked him why. He had been drinking and watching the opening day game for the Cincinnati Reds. This is an example of the second discourse community we belong to: the college socialite. We are all 19-22 years old. We all have active social lives. We want to drink, we want to be active, and a lot of the time we want to do things on our own. Sometimes this part of our life clashes with the professional side. It was opening day, so he went to the bars, so he was late. His college socialite discourse community overlapped with his professional sport management fraternity discourse community. In our second meeting I observed that one of our most accountable members was not present. It was against this persons motive of operation to not be at a meeting. I texted her and found out why. She was meeting with her sport-marketing group to work on their schematic report presentation. His or her presentation was getting close and our fraternity meeting time was the only time that everyone else could meet. This is an example of a third discourse community we belong to: the college student. Outside of extra curricular groups and activities we have class. Most of us have 2-3 classes a day. It takes up a majority of our time during the week. In this case her college student discourse

community overlapped with her professional sport management fraternity discourse community. In the third meeting I was looking around and noticed where everyone was sitting. I realized that we all sit by the same people each week. I have my 2-3 people I sit by and so does everyone else. We may sit in different locations around the room, but the same people move with us. This is an example of the fourth and final discourse community I observed: the friend group. The friend group is incredibly crucial to our lives. We are almost always with our friend group. They shape what we do, how we talk, what we talk about, and what we think about. We may be friends outside of the fraternity but it overlaps into the fraternity meetings as well. Our friend group discourse community is overlapping with our professional sport management fraternity. Along with my lengthy observations, significant results were found during the interview with Rob. Rob did a good job of answering the questions I posed for him. His negotiated experience within the fraternity lead to his formation of his identity. His first step of this process started with the graduating seniors from our fraternity. Rob realized that with the seniors leaving soon, the group would need a new president quickly. This was a big moment for him, I think thats when I realized I could negotiate my position or identity (Rob). With the president spot being vacant, Rob was choosing to make his identity be the next president. I had Rob apply his experience of becoming president to Wengers three interrelated modes of belonging. He built interpersonal relationships as a newcomer with the old-timers by communicating with them outside the fraternity meetings. He tried to, make our relationships professional and social (Rob). He thought that having a

relationship outside the meetings would be beneficial. He wanted to become friends with the old-timers, because, Friends help out friends (Rob). Rob then expanded his role my taking on extra responsibility. In a fraternity there is always something to do, and he took the initiative to do it. His reasoning for doing this was, showing I cared also helped me expand my role even more (Rob). When you take responsibility you get more responsibility. Finally Rob had walked the boundaries of the community and had his perspective accepted by having a social and professional relationship with our former president. Having a strictly professional relationship with someone really puts up a lot of barriers, but, boundaries fall down when you are friends with someone (Rob). The question that really sparked a good answer from Rob was if he though authority was bestowed upon him. I guess you could say authority was bestowed upon me Rob said. But I think I earned authority more than it being bestowed upon me. I feel like his answers were a little angry. He had worked hard to obtain his position of president. It was not just handed to him. There is so much more too it than that. His philosophy on authority is, I think authority is something you have and being the president just gives you a title (Rob). Authority is something inside of you that you posses. It is like leadership. When I asked if he thought authority is intangible he replied, Your intangible authority is used to gain tangible authority. You take what is inside of you and use to produce something that is tangible. I think the results from my observations were somewhat expected. Beauforts piece on overlapping discourse communities shows that we are all apart of many different discourse communities. I guess the thing I didnt realize was that each person involved in

overlapping discourse communities puts their own level of importance on each discourse community. They rank them from most important to least important. It may not be conscious, but they do it. On the day of the Cincinnati Reds opening day game when the fraternity member went to the bar, he decided that his college socialite discourse community was more important than his professional sport management fraternity discourse community. On the day that a member missed our meeting to do her marketing project, she decided that her college student discourse community was more important than her professional sport management fraternity discourse community. I originally intended to only research overlapping discourse communities through observation, but I ended up getting great information about them from my interview with Rob. I never asked Rob about overlapping discourse communities but his answers about identity and authority referenced them without him knowing it. Overlapping discourse communities were a huge benefit to Rob. Back in the results section I mentioned that he communicated with our former president inside and outside fraternity meetings to build interpersonal relationships. Rob forcefully overlapped his college socialite discourse community and professional sport management fraternity to his benefit. Having this overlapping social and professional relationship with our former president helped him not only find his identity within the fraternity but also gain authority. Rob said many times in his interview answers that he believes he received his authority from hard work, and I think this is somewhat true. He had to work to build his relationships with our members and former president. I personally believe that his process of finding his identity and gaining authority was more due to fact that he adapted well to overlapping discourse communities, than his hard work. He was able to rank the

sport management fraternity as the most important to himself. He put college socialite next to build a relationship with our former president. Every other discourse community he put to the wayside. Anne Beauforts work shows us that we are all apart of many discourse communities. I believe that the key to navigating these successfully is extremely personal. No matter how hectic the discourse communities may be, if you can personally adapt, you will be successful. Rob proves this. The sport management fraternity was incredibly hectic. There were three to four different discourse communities colliding and overlapping at once. Despite this fact, from an outside perspective the fraternity would seem quite calm. Earlier I talked about Devitts work that academics and outsiders assume an imaginary consensus and a shared purpose that do not reflect real experiences within communities. Our purpose as a fraternity is to have a common goal with complete consensus but that is never how it works out. One of the reasons Rob was so successful at finding his identity and authority and becoming President is because he went against the common goal and consensus of the group. He put less interest into professionalism to gain a relationship with the former president. Discourse Communities are not always what they seem from the outside. They are far from Utopian. So at the end I have been able to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of the paper. My sport management fraternity does have overlapping discourse communities. They are the professional sport management fraternity, the college socialite, the college student, and the friend group. These overlapping discourse communities ending up helping Rob find his identity in the fraternity and establish his authority by becoming the fraternity president. He was able to make the fraternity be the

most important discourse community he was involved in. Not many people are able to prioritize like he did. The ones who do negotiate their identity and can obtain authority.