Secretarial profession imaginary in flower shops online advertisements posted on “Secretary's Day”

Abstract

The secretarial profession is marked in our society by some crystallized conceptions, many of them reinforcing old practices linked to the professional exercise. Aiming to understand the constitution of these conceptions, in the discursive scope, we propose this study. This article is focused in analyzing the socio discursive imaginary (Charaudeau, 2011) built regarding the secretarial profession in online advertisements posted on the “Secretary's Day” (September 30th) in 2012 by three flower shops. As a method of analysis, we use the Discourse Analysis, which allows the researcher to seize the meaning effects of language materiality – in our work case, verb-iconic. For Orlandi (2012), Discourse Analysis does not deal with language, but with discourse, which implies the symbolic of speech and considers the general social work constitutive of a man and his history. Our theoretical contribution included the studies of Nonato Júnior (2009) and Sabino and Rocha (2004) regarding the secretarial profession, Charaudeau (2011) and Reis (2012), in the matter of socio discursive imaginary, and Farina (1990) and Guimarães (2004) regarding the meanings evoked by colors. From the analysis undertaken, it was possible to understand how the secretarial profession was represented on its commemorative date in the listed corpus, which demonstrated that, on one hand, it points to a contemporary representation of the profession, however, on the other hand, there are still recovered crystallized imaginary related to the occupation.