English and Power is a corporate learning and development programme and a process for doing sociolinguistic leadership research.
At a practical level, the workshop helps women leaders strip back the meaning in meetings and interactions and develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of power and how this is established, maintained, and challenged. In terms of research, the preparatory and workshop activities elicit linguistic data about professional identities and about the lived experience of influence, inclusion and exclusion.
In this paper I explain the steps and activities involved in the English and Power programme in detail, concentrating first on the intervention as a learning and development event. I then go on to give an overview of the sociolinguistic analysis of the data from the four programmes run in conjunction with the Professional Women’s Network in Spain between April 2013 and July 2014. Finally I ask how far it is possible to do intervention and research at the same time.