16.1 THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXTUAL PARTICULARS

“Contextual particulars such as setting or behavioural environment are important because they are perceived, experienced, attended to, understood, and so on.”

(Jonathan Potter, 1998b: 32: italics in original)

There is one feature of the notion of context that needs to be reiterated and made clear from the outset of this chapter. This has already been amply demonstrated in the previous discussions around trust, risk, and identity: that people invoke—script, construct, conjure, materialize, bring into being, whatever—contexts as live concerns in everyday talk and text in social interaction. So from this perspective while trust, risk, and identity can be explicitly expressed in descriptions and accounts for instance, they can also be displayed discursively as implicitly understood and constructed contexts. Recall the idea from Chapter 7 that tacit knowing is context driven with context understood as the actor’s interpretation and understanding of their environment and its contents as a consequence of unconscious and automatic abstraction of information from that environment. It is not the environment and its contents that is, in all cases, that which influences the actors’ actions but rather their interpretation of it— their sense-making. In the quotation from Jonathan Potter cited previously, he locates “setting or behavioral environment” as a subset of contextual particulars, with those particulars described as the product of perception, experience, attention, understanding, and so forth. That is, participants in any given environment act upon that environment, influenced by their often tacit understanding of contextual particulars. It is, in its simplest sense, a very circular affective action. Contextual particulars are the way in which individuals make sense of the world, and know how to act.

Similar ideas can be seen in the following brief review of some of the perspectives on context that have already been encountered (see in particular Chapter 7), which provides some further useful background to the present analysis and discussions.

In the knowledge management (KM) field, Mark Thompson and his coworker describe context as comprising the shared meanings and experiences of an organization’s members, as integral to knowledge. According to Haridimos Tsoukas, context is bound to knowing, which suggests that a strategy of removing context (which is the understood intention of some theoretical approaches to KM reviewed in Chapter 4) results in a meaningless state of affairs because context cannot be extracted. From Max Evans’ perspective, context is embedded in shared language: “(S)since knowledge is highly contextual and circumstantial, it is always developed in a specific context and rarely interpreted by the receiver in exactly the same way as was intended by the transmitter” (2013: 1350038-5). This is also reminiscent of the ideas proposed by Dorothy Leonard, for instance. Paul Duguid, again with correspondence to these ideas, claims that human action is the product of both “knowing how” (tacit knowing) and “knowing that”: “knowing how” is formulated as background context and facilitates and mediates “knowing that.” In this version, the actor’s “knowing how,” as the tacitly known understanding and interpretation of the environment and its contents, influences action. This is equally reminiscent of Max Boisot’s notion of knowledge sharing being dependent on degrees of resonance achieved between the repertoires of actors. Thus, shared understanding—sense-making—is essential to the sharing of knowledge.

From the discourse analysis perspective (while noting that “context” is the topic of some debate across the various different approaches, as touched on in Section 8.5), one proposal claims that context is integral to accounts of identity and stance-taking. Jonathan Potter proposes that context and cognition should be treated by the analyst in the same way—as phenomena formulated, worked up, constituted, and oriented to by speakers in interaction. From this perspective, cognition is context, which actually has correspondence with those ideas of context drawn from the KM field noted earlier. Moreover, all these perspectives can be interpreted as approaching context as the individual’s interpretation of the world. Specifically, from the viewpoint of discursive psychology, it is the speaker’s interpretation of the world and its contents which influences action, not the other way around.

In the previous chapters, we have investigated organizational discourse with a concern for the thematic categories of knowledge sharing. Trust, risk, and identity are shown to function corelationally in discourse as concerns made live by the speakers themselves. We have also claimed that these thematic constructs particularly influence the directions and scope of knowledge sharing actions. If, as claimed at the beginning of these discussions, these thematic constructs can be understood as contexts or contextual particulars constructed in discourse, then it follows that turning the analytic focus onto the question of what contexts speakers make live in their discourse in knowledge sharing meetings will bring those same themes to the fore. However, analysis should not second-guess findings so the question that the present chapter addresses is this: what contexts are invoked and how, in organizational meeting discourse, and with what effect on the trajectory of that discourse and knowledge sharing actions in particular?

Several meetings from both of the participating organizations are analyzed with findings organized into three principle categories: shared understanding, stance-taking, and historicity. The analysis reveals some intriguing insights and some surprising findings, which lend support to the findings in the previous analytic chapters.

16.2 DATA

Data are drawn from four meetings, three from Company A. The fourth, with Company B, is a meeting involving three participants, two males and one female; it is short (under 15 minutes) and concerned with developing proposals in response to a client’s brief. Of the Company A meetings, one involves seven participants in a conference call (not all participants speak so the gender ratio is unknown), which is a regular weekly meeting of the company’s project management team. The other two involve a different group of participants (unknown number) in two consecutive weekly, face-to-face senior management team meetings. In all four instances, participants are clearly familiar with one another, and all meetings can be categorized as “knowledge sharing” activities. Five extracts are included here.

16.3 SHARED UNDERSTANDING

In her analysis of the famous Princess Diana television interview for the BBC’s Panorama show, Margaret Wetherell (2001) shows how, in discourse, all meaning is relational. An utterance comes into meaning in the light of others’ understanding, which makes meaning-making a joint production. Recall how Paul Duguid makes a very similar point in his discussion of the importance of “knowing how”: “(A)a tacit understanding of the ground rules for interpretation thus plays a role in grounding a particular interpretation of a text—a facet of interpretation that originates outside the text to be interpreted” (2005: 112). When a speaker makes an utterance (or a writer produces a text), it is the receiver (or reader) who displays and brings into being a version of its meaning, and thus, meaning does not solely exist in the utterance or text. Meaning is relational and accomplished in social interaction.

Recall also Max Boisot’s (2002) notion of the action of knowledge sharing as contingent to degrees of resonance accomplished between the repertoires of speakers. Looking beyond the veneer of the contents of discourse, it is the constructed-in-talk context that drives that meaning. A good example of the functional accomplishment of invoked context can be seen in the University of California’s Pamela Hobb’s (2003) study of a defense lawyer’s courtroom talk, showing how she uses an American vernacular to invoke group membership and shared identity with the jury members. It is not what the lawyer said, but how she said it that works to conjure shared context—shared understanding. Although there is a caveat to add to this: in reality, one can only conjecture a sense of shared context between lawyer and jury members, as there is no corroborating account from the jury members themselves.

Drawing on two of the meeting recordings, the analysis shows how members use different discursive resources to invoke shared understanding or “common context” (e.g., Boisot’s shared repertoires). Two are considered here in detail: the “collaborative continuer” and “gisting and elaboration.”

The simplest and probably most commonly used resource is the “collaborative continuer” in which one speaker finishes the sentence of another, which is described as displaying knowledge of what is on another’s mind (Clifton, 2012b). We have all commonly experienced this: someone says something, and you know, or think you do in a kind of automatic and tacitly accomplished assessment, what is coming next. It is irrelevant to our purposes here whether the action of scripting a collaborative continuer is influenced by some sort of assessment before the fact. The point is that speakers display shared context and collaborative engagement (Drew, 2003b) through explicit displays of knowing what is on another’s mind—that is, what another is about to say. Extract 1 comes some 10 minutes into the meeting. Throughout, Andy and Peter (the same Peter as in Chapter 14) have worked up collaborative continuers as a frequently recurring pattern of their talk, which has the effect of limiting contributions from the third member.

16.4 STANCE-TAKING

In the next extracts, matters of stake and interest are brought to the fore in a constructed context of competing claims. What emerges is a highly complex mesh of connected psychological phenomena at work conjuring a live context of attribution of blame and a discourse of “them and us” as a form of identity work. The analysis further connects these themes to frustration and disagreement, reputation and risk.

16.5 DOING HISTORICITY

Extract 5 is drawn from the following week’s senior management team meeting. As background, the previous week’s meeting makes an explicit reference to a “big message” concerning resources and capacity, which needs to be conveyed to the organization’s board of directors.

The issue under discussion is why start-up on new contracts is sometimes “slowed down.” The organization employs a full-time staff of developers/designers, supplemented by hiring “freelancers.” The primary shared context invoked here is “history,” with recollection of what has happened in the past in the search for reasons. But, arguably, there is a further tacitly understood context made live by the speakers, and which relates to frustration–disagreement and power. The hint of these can be seen in the first three rhetorical transactions.

Across Lines 1–5, Roger speculates a reason for the deliberate actions of slowing “something” down invoking historically located knowledge of technology not “quite ready.” The invocation of historical events has the effect of limiting potential contributions from speakers to those who have direct knowledge of the events: it thus works as a “tacit form of addressing” (Svennevig, 2012b). There are two features about his utterance which are relevant: first, he works to mitigate against criticism or disagreement with stake inoculation work (“I think,” “I don’t know”: Edwards and Potter, 1992), orienting to the potentially contentious or problematic nature of his speculation, but he then invokes historical “fact” (“something like [client name] we weren’t we slowed…”: Lines 3/4) as a warrant for his stance. Second, he neatly attributes blame for “slowing down” to the technology, which reflexively deflects attribution from the team. Note also the scripting of “and so on and so on” (Line 5), which attempts to establish shared knowledge (Potter, 1998a), with its assumption that recipients will “fill in the blanks,” marking his account as authentic. His disconnected reference to “make decisions” is curious: he does not use the past tense, inferring that the decisions that affected the client’s project (Line 3) are still being made.

John indexes these “decisions” (Line 6), effectively reformulating (Chilton, 2004) Roger’s historical version and reflexively scripting self as eyewitness with consequential claims to knowledge. In doing so, he tacitly displays his knowledge as being relevant and appropriate and actioned within the boundaries of Roger’s earlier “tacit addressing.” He redistributes blame to “the decision-maker” by activating an alternative strategy—choosing a different technology—implying that knowingly opting for a technology that was not ready was/is misguided.

Roger, after a brief silence, corroborates his colleague’s version with a matching phrase (“could’ve”: Line 8). There is a sense of an “uncomfortable truth” lurking here. No one asks why such a decision was made, knowing that technology was not ready, and no one refers to who took that decision. Alan’s utterance in Line 10 arguably works to close down this nebulous, “between the lines” talk by scripting doubt over Roger’s version, implying a directional change is needed with the quietly spoken “slowed that down” marking the current trajectory as problematic.

Roger self-selects with a following turn in which he accounts for other reasons. The key points to notice are the hesitancy, repeat of doubt markers (Wooffitt, 2007, “I dunno”: Line 12, and “definitely don’t know”: Lines 14–15), and repair in Line 14. This is in considerable contrast to this speaker’s measured speech patterns in the earlier meeting talk (Extract 3). Roger can be heard as orienting to concerns with authenticity and stake and the problematic nature of the context of “misguided decisions” that has been made live. Further, he relocates his accounts into the present.

The excluded lines see the debate continuing, placing increasing importance on the need to “ramp up” staff numbers to cope with workload. Thus, the direction of the discussion has shifted from the troubling matter of misguided decisions about technology, to staff numbers. Vicky comments that ramping up is contingent to “profitability,” scripting herself as a “financial” person in which matters the other participants appear to accept her judgment. The “denouement” comes in Lines 33–45. In this part, Alan carefully builds a case, affiliated to (Clifton, 2014) by other members. Note how across Lines 33–37 Alan is three-part listing: (1) “it begins with PMs,” (2) “fast to react,” and (3) “having the necessary people.” This works up persuasion rhetoric (Edwards and Potter, 1992), with its associated claims to factuality. In contrast to historical accounting, Alan is projecting future actions (Clifton, 2012). This can be seen in his display of a conditional structure (Sneijder and te Molder, 2005): “↑if we DO that (then) the benefit …,” scripting him as knowledgeable of cause and effect on future outcomes (Chilton, 2004).

16.6 PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

Findings suggest that context in the sense of speakers’ interpretation and understanding of their environment and its contents is a catalytic dimension of knowledge sharing, which both influences the discursive trajectory and is consequential to these activities. In analyzing the contexts that speakers invoke as live concerns, we can also see that, in many cases, these can be categorized as contexts of identity (reputation, for instance), trust (e.g., authenticity and claims to epistemic primacy), and risk (the consequences of one team’s actions on another and the implication of decision-making beyond the control of the senior management team, for instance).

In the analysis here, findings display two ways in which speakers conjure shared understanding of context: first, through displaying knowledge of what’s on another’s mind and, second, in gisting and elaboration work. Displays of others’ cognition are an efficient way to “short hand” a meeting, for instance, where speakers share a common purpose and similar experiences and are familiar with and trust each others’ abilities. But there is a suggestion that repeated enactment leads to a potential barrier to other contributors taking up turns, with implied consequences for the sharing of knowledge in equitable measures.

With gisting and elaboration, displays are shown to work up consensus and affiliation—group membership with a shared emotional experience (“pain” and embarrassment leading to an apologetic state) conjuring mutually shared and understood context. This constructed affiliation inevitably leads to mutual exoneration: the meeting host (Extract 2) for raising the troubling issue in the first place and the two others for any wrong-doing in their actions. The important upshot is that the latter two speakers are both prompted to volunteer further knowledge of the incidents resulting in the sharing of important and useful knowledge with all meeting participants.

The construction of a context of “them and us” emerges in the analysis of stance-taking in the first of the senior management meetings (Extract 4). The extended discourse of argument initiates with the invocation of a courtroom drama (Extract 3) in speakers’ extreme concerns for truth and objectivity, claim and counterclaim, claims to knowledge superiority, and blame attribution. There is a marked pursuit of detail against an undercurrent of reputational risk made explicit in the warnings of risks and dangers to the business. When the stances become reversed, and a claim of wrong-doing at the organizational level is introduced, this quickly coalesces into a context of them and us. Arguably this emerges from the context of courtroom rhetoric. In a courtroom, the prosecution and defense are expected to “take sides,” to promote alternate versions of events, and to question claims to knowledge. This clearly has an effect on the directions of knowledge sharing.

Perhaps the most contentious interpretation is made of the final extract in which the invoking of history in the search for reasons for a particular issue raises the ghost of a contextual difficulty—the existence of a decision-maker who makes flawed decisions, which, it is implied, is the reason for the “slowing down” of contract work. The silences and absence of discussion on this matter suggests an anomaly. Analysis suggests that while meeting members have a right to discuss such issues, they have no rights to make decisions leading to the further conjecture that the disagreement–frustration, which marks both meetings, emanates from this status. Taken as a whole, Extracts 2–5, drawn from the same company but representing different tiers within the hierarchy of the business, script an organization with some profound and deep-seated organizational problems.

The final chapter brings together all of the findings from this and previous chapters in a discussion largely centered around the research questions shown at the start of Part Two. Findings are also considered from the perspective of how they can be related to those key issues and debates found to be so challenging for the field of knowledge management in the first part of this book.

POSTSCRIPT

Within a year of making these meeting recordings, Company A had been taken over by a rival with, today, the only vestige of its lengthy track record and existence maintained in the name of a legacy product.