Leadership in medical teams is a multifaceted phenomenon which has significant implications for patient safety and quality of care. Although vastly investigated, leadership remains a debated concept and relatively few studies take an interactional, sociolinguistic approach especially in the context of medical emergencies. When it comes to the embodied performance of leadership, the gap is even more prominent, as previous linguistic research has prioritised talk over other semiotic resources of meaning. Viewing leadership as enacted in the situated interaction, this thesis examines the ways in which the designated team leaders claim a leadership role (or not), with a particular focus on how staff members position selves in the material space of the emergency room. The study takes an Interactional Sociolinguistics approach and brings together video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and ethnographic observations and audio recordings from real-life trauma emergencies, in order to shed light on the, largely understudied, multidisciplinary ad hoc teams negotiating leadership in situ.

The findings demonstrate that leadership is claimed, resisted, and negotiated discursively in the material space of the emergency room. The analysis illustrates the ways in which linguistic devices, notably directives and questions, are consistently mobilised by team leaders across datasets for allocating tasks and turns, controlling the conversational floor, and ultimately, doing leadership. These are intertwined with positioning in the material space, in which team leaders consistently demarcate certain material zones as their zones of expertise. The study’s methodological innovation lies in illustrating an approach for systematically studying positioning in the material space, even across different contexts and data collection methods. The findings also add to the existing body of sociolinguistic literature on discursive approaches to leadership, and build on and expand earlier conceptualisations of leadership as embodied. Positioned in the field of health sociolinguistics, this work is relevant to both workplace discourse analysts and healthcare professionals, and aims to contribute to healthcare research and feed into medical training.