6
DISCOURSE AS THE SITE OF KNOWLEDGE WORK
6.1 INTRODUCTION AND THE TURN TO TALK
“…to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something.”
(J.L. Austin, How to do things with words; italics in original, 1962: 12)
British Philosopher John Austin's work and ideas have been profoundly influential in shaping the development of discourse analysis (DA) and a host of related fields. The crux of his insight rests on the notion that when we speak we do much more than utter words and that these words are received and interpreted by listeners as doing more than conveying a mere description or factual account of some event, for instance. The significance of these ideas is evident in all of the following discussions.
By turning in the direction of talk as the site of knowledge work, the topic of DA, the theory and methodology for the study of the dynamics of human linguistic interaction and accomplishment, takes on paramount relevance. Certainly, as far as the study of the organization goes, there is a growing popularity and credibility in postmodern paradigms and, in particular, DA. Equally, there is evidence that discursive studies are proving significant, not just in terms of the study of organizations but also in contributing to debates around what constitutes an organization, according to a report by Cynthia Hardy, professor of management at the University of Melbourne. This is a conclusion that Nelson Phillips, of London's Imperial College, and his coworkers claim is illustrated in their discursive model of institutionalization: this emphasizes the relationship between text, discourse, institutions, and actions.
DA is located within postmodernism and social constructionism: as such, DA is diametrically opposed to conventional or traditional theoretical and methodological approaches. Recall William Starbuck's relegation of conventional methods of research as particularly useless in the study of organizations. Likewise, DA has attracted its share of criticism in, for instance, the subjective nature of its data. Nonetheless, Egon Guba and his colleague are clear that the “legitimacy of postmodern paradigms” is now well established and considered equal to that of conventional positivist-based methodologies. The growing popularity of these methodologies is described by Jonathan Potter, toward the end of the 1990s, as “mushrooming” across multiple diverse disciplines.
DA comes in a variety of forms and types, partly because it is a methodology adopted by many different disciplines including psychology, linguistics, and organization studies, for instance: see Robin Wooffitt's Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis for a comprehensive and critical review. Nelson Phillips and Maria Laura Di Domenico also offer a critical review and summary of DA brands from the perspective of organizational studies research, noting their common interest in how social reality is constituted in talk. In contrast, Jonathan Potter and his colleague draw attention to the definitional confusion where virtually all research concerned with language, in whatever discipline and whether in a social or cognitive context, uses the term “discourse analysis” (recall Stainton-Roger's useful definition of “discourse” in the previous chapter). It is perfectly possible, they claim, to have two books on DA with no overlapping content. Generally, though, what different types of DA share is an interest in how discourse displays action orientation, function and effect and a view of language itself as the topic of interest. Within critical social psychology, the most commonly cited are discursive psychology (DP), conversation analysis (CA), membership categorization analysis (MCA), and critical discourse analysis (CDA). In their fascinating study of workplace interactions, Maria Stubbe and her colleagues at the Victoria University of Wellington, apply and contrast five different DA methodologies to the same discourses. While they uncover substantial areas of overlap, they also indicate significant differences and points of tension. The implication is that choice of DA methodology or paradigm is, or should be, determined by the directions of the research and topics of interest.
The focus here is on DP as the preferred paradigm for the study of organizational knowledge work, and there are several reasons for this. First, it focuses on language as action with consequences, and as variable; secondly, it can be applied to all forms of communication—spoken and written—which offers a level of flexibility not available with some of the other types of DA; thirdly, it is both a methodology and a theoretical framework; fourthly, DP approaches language as inseparable from the processes of thinking and reasoning. Finally, and following from this latter point, discourse itself is the topic of interest, study, and action. This positions talk and text as the site of human action, performance and accomplishment in every psychological respect: hence “the turn to talk.”
The next section introduces DP in detail, followed by an overview of some of the other dominant DA paradigms in critical social psychology. This is followed by a review of some relevant themes and topics in what is shown to be a substantial, comprehensive, and broad DA research agenda. It has already been claimed that the analysis of everyday discourse reveals quite different phenomena than those reported using conventional research methodologies: now we can begin to see some substance to this claim. Novel insights, for instance, emerge in the analysis of “identity,” “gender,” and discourse in computer-mediated communications (CMCs). The penultimate section pays a brief visit to the management practice of “sensemaking,” drawing out some interesting comparisons and contrasts with the discursive fields. Some early conclusions suggest that shifting attention in the direction of organizational discourse could reveal some alternative directions for the knowledge management project with the suggestion of some concrete benefits.
6.2 INTRODUCING DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY
6.2.1 Origins
Motives and intentions (vernacularly understood) are built inferentially out of descriptions of actions and events; they are built to contrast with alternatives; they attend to matters local to the interactional context in which they occur; and they attend reflexively to the speaker's stake or investment in producing those descriptions.
(Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, 2005 : 246)
Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell are credited with being the first to introduce DA to social psychology in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. DP was developed and formally introduced by Derek Edwards and Potter in their 1992 publication of the same title. The earlier work applies the DP theoretical framework (in all but name), and its distinctive DA methodology, to the study of attitudes and behavior as examples of studying traditional psychological phenomena from a different perspective. By comparing and contrasting this to conventional theory and research, Potter and Wetherell seek to highlight the weakness of mainstream approaches, which they contrast with the advantages of DA in revealing the social world as constituted in language.
Similarly, the later work by Edwards and Potter compares DP with traditional methods of studying human memory in cognitive psychology. An important point to emphasize is that while being critical of conventional methods in psychology, and cognitive psychology in particular, Edwards and his coauthor do not claim that DP represents a “straight substitute” for the conventional paradigm. Nor do they suggest that the conventional paradigm is wrong or invalid as a basis for theory and research. They just advocate a different approach.
6.2.2 Discursive Psychology's Core Assumptions
Discursive psychology's core assumption is that language is the location of the social world—human action and performance—as distinct from behavior. This distinction needs a little unpacking because while traditional psychology is concerned with mind and behavior, DP speaks of discursive action. Recall JR Searle's Speech Acts, which the KM theorist Professor Nonaka claims to draw upon in his theory of the knowledge-creating company. According to Searle's theory, speakers make statements, blame, argue, give commands, ask questions, and so on, and these acts are governed by the adherence to certain linguistic rules. Language—speaking—then is action in the sense of behavior governed by rules. This directly connects to DP's second core assumption—that talk and text are locally and situationally organized. What this means is that the meaning of discourse cannot be divorced from the context in which it is uttered. Thus, people use language to create versions of the social world, which may vary from context to context.
Conversely, conventional social psychology approaches language as a transparent medium which reflects reality as it is manifest, evidenced in the use of surveys and interviews, for instance. Here, the topic of interest is what people report or say as a route to uncovering some hidden cognitive structure such as attitudes or beliefs, or intentions to act. For instance, discussions in Chapter 3 show the frequent use of such research methods in the context of knowledge management studies although, as seen in the last chapter, such approaches and methods have come in for considerable criticism over the last two decades. Referring to studies using self-reporting questionnaires or semistructured or structured interview methods, social psychologist Charles Antaki, of the UK's Loughborough University, claims that while these rely on memories of past events, such memories are notoriously prone to inaccuracy. Consequently, interviews and so forth are “unsatisfactory sources of evidence.” Jonathan Potter also makes the point that attitude scales, as another example of favorite conventional methods, which he labels as “arcane contexts,” cannot tell you what people are doing with their evaluations in their everyday environments. The psychologist Michael Billig claims that attitudes in particular, by their very nature, are stances on matters of public controversy not reports of private, internal mental affairs. Rather than study what he describes as “…ghostly essences, lying behind and supposedly controlling what can be directly observed” (2001: 210), if one takes the approach that psychology is constituted in language, then it becomes possible to study the processes of thinking directly.
The assumptions that flow from this understanding of language are what make DP singular: that talk is constructive, functional, consequential, and variant. It is constructive in that people construct versions of the social world (“reality”) linguistically in discourse. This in turn implies that all language is functional in that it works to achieve some accomplishment (e.g., persuasion or argument, blaming, or warranting). It is consequential in the sense that discourse construction and function lead to consequences for the speaker and the coparticipant(s). It is variable, in that one person can describe another, or a phenomenon, action or scene in completely different ways to different people.
An ongoing debate that affects not only DP but other brands of DA is the extent to which the analysis of discourse should address, focus on, or even acknowledge “cognition” and “cognitive states.” This has been the subject of some confusion and has relevance in particular for DP as a branch of psychology and indeed for the directions of the present discussions: these issues are taken up in subsequent chapters. For now, it is sufficient to note Derek Edwards and his coworker's stance on the issue in their own words: “(D)discourse analysis is particularly concerned with examining discourse for how cognitive issues of knowledge and belief, fact and error, truth and explanation, are dealt with” (1992: 29). That is, cognitive phenomena are constructed and managed in discourse itself.
6.2.3 Emerging Ideas
An aspect of DA that has been developed in analytic practice, and which was originally introduced to social psychology in Potter and Wetherell's Discourse and Social Psychology, is the notion of interpretive repertoires. These refer to the individual's stock of words, phrases, metaphors, and so on that are used to give meaning to and evaluate experience of the world and its contents. Repertoires can be linked to themes of attitudes, beliefs, and attributes—the stamping ground of the conventional social psychologist—but are not tied by group boundaries. Thus, repertoires can be specific to the individual or relate to an organization or group. Note that the subsequent formal introduction of DP by Edwards and Potter does not explicitly reference repertoires perhaps because its text is focused on memory, but the idea of repertoires is arguably implicit to their conception.
This idea about “group boundaries” raises an interesting point and topic of ongoing debate: the distinction between ordinary everyday talk and organizational (or institutional) talk. This is something that Bethan Benwell and her colleague address in their investigations of identity from the discursive perspective and in a variety of different environmental settings. Drawing on their reasoning, the characteristics that distinguish organizational talk from any other kind of talk include an orientation to organization-specific goals to be accomplished; speakers’ contributions are typically constrained by specialized and restricted contexts (e.g., a meeting agenda); and organizational “leaders” (in the broadest sense) have the right to ask questions and to expect answers.
On this latter point, Benwell and her coworker contrast the rhetorical structure of classroom talk with that of the television interviewer: the former has the normative rights to make evaluations of answers, whereas the latter does not. Faced with the recalcitrant interviewee, the challenge for the interviewer is how to achieve a “critical interview.” A further characterizing feature of organizational talk can be seen in the rhetorical devices used by speakers to align themselves with the organization: “we” and “us,” for instance, and the use of jargon as well as the display of particular types of knowledge. A recent study of organizational team talk by researcher Jonathan Clifton displays how speakers bring the “hierarchical organizational identity” into being through the negotiation of rights to make role-based knowledge claims. That is, people construct themselves in discourse as possessing this or that role (implicitly or explicitly), with particular roles implicating a shared understanding of rights to possessing knowledge (the role of finance director implicates possession of financial knowledge, for instance), and it this that warrants their rights to bring the organization into being as this or that. In Chapter 15, there is a fascinating example of constructing an organization in social talk, which has considerable consequence for the meeting in which this action takes place. This has synergies with “group construction,” which we will see a lot of in Part Two. It is also particularly resonant with the notion of repertoires.
The idea of interpretive repertoires has some consistency with Kenneth Gergen's theory of the “saturated self.” According to his reasoning, people construct a myriad number of personal identities dependent on context and circumstance. We are comfortable within contexts and environments of which we have experience—we have the requisite discursive repertoire to make sense of it. Thus, repertoires can be understood as personal lexicons that, in effect, define the individual and their multiple selves, and this notion has some connection with “sensemaking.” There are equally clear synergies with, for instance, Paul Duguid's analysis of Communities of Practice where it is the individual's underpinning, uncodifiable tacit knowing that mediates understanding and sensemaking in any given context.
6.2.4 The Thorny Issue of Variation
Unlike traditional approaches in psychology, DP is not about attempting to understand what is said in talk as a means of illuminating some underlying cognitive phenomenon. That is, the view of language as a mirror that does no more than reflect inner thought as contrasted with DP's constitution of language as the site of interest in its own right. This is an important differentiation that highlights a particular problem in traditional psychology's research methods. In the use of questionnaires, scales, and so forth, the conventionalist searches for patterns and consistencies in data with the aim of uncovering phenomena that can be generalized to the world at large. But how does the conventionalist accommodate for the variation in talk and text—the so-called outliers? In this case, the conventionalist must “sort out” any variability in the data or it may impact on results. As Potter and his coauthor note, “(V) variability of the kind seen in detailed studies of discourse is thus a considerable embarrassment to traditional attitude theories” (1987 : 54). In the DP paradigm, variability in language is sought for and studied for its consequence and function, and it is this feature that is its empirical mainstay.
Next is a brief review of some of the other leading types of DA applied in critical social psychology to provide an even-handed view of the field, starting with CDA.
6.3 OTHER LEADING PARADIGMS IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
6.3.1 Critical Discourse Analysis
For the scholar who is attributed with developing it, professor of language in social life at the United Kingdom's Lancaster University, Norman Fairclough, the purpose of CDA is to explain the relationship between language and society and, importantly, the relationship between what is analyzed and how it is analyzed. The essence of the project is an understanding of a dialectical relationship between a “discourse event” (e.g., a piece of text, or a conversation, meeting talk, and so forth) and the context within which it takes place (e.g., environment, circumstances, institution, and its social structures), claiming that one has transformative possibilities and capabilities for the other. That is, discourse can be shaped by the context in which it is enacted and vice versa. It is this transformative capability that invokes connotations of power, domination, and ideology. As Fairclough and his colleague Professor Ruth Wodak see it: “(B) both the ideological loading of particular ways of using language and the relations of power which underlie them are often unclear to people. CDA aims to make more visible those opaque aspects of discourse” (1997: 258). So, similarly to DP, CDA emphasizes the critical role of context in discourse in action but, unlike DP, constructs that role as bidirectional. This is an important differentiation, and one which illuminates a potential limiting factor in DP. This is returned to in the following chapter.
This particular brand of DA is concerned with how discourse is used to influence the direction of social and political processes using a combination of discourse analytic technique and a critical approach. More specifically, according to Wooffitt, it constitutes a method of analyzing discourse for how political and social inequalities come into being. Note however that Paul Chilton, in his exploration of political DA, makes no mention of CDA whatsoever. Even within the subgenre of “political discourse,” there are different definitions. Such notions of power and domination also raise the spectre of researcher bias.
The scholar and editor of the academic journal Discourse Studies, Teun van Dijk particularly highlights the role of the discourse analyst, reasoning that there can never be an unbiased interpretive analysis of discourse and consequently the role and position of the analyst must be treated as part of the analysis. Others locate the prospect of bias even earlier in the process in describing the act of transcription of meeting recordings, for instance, as being “inevitably selective.” The idea of the researcher's actions connected to bias is one we have encountered in earlier chapters: recall, for example, Michael Polanyi's description of the scientist's participation in the discovery and validation of knowledge as being a part of that knowledge and Kenneth Gergen's reasoning that it takes a “rare social psychologist” to successfully refrain from coloring his or her work with their personal values, methods, and so forth.
6.3.2 Conversation Analysis
Two other types of DA—CA and MCA—both emanate from the work of Harvey Sacks, the American sociologist renowned for his pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s in the study of how people use language in everyday life. Like DP, CA has the core assumption that talk is locally and situationally organized and as constituting the site of human action. It focuses on everyday “mundane” conversation with a particular interest in the constitutive processes of social action: that is, how actions such as blaming, excusing, and so forth are negotiated and accomplished with the emphasis on the organization of turns at talk—“the system of distribution.” So while speakers have a “naïve mastery” of the processes that define social action, they may have limited ability to identify and describe those processes—thus, it is the task of the analyst to dismantle or disaggregate such processes in order to study directly how people perform and understand their own actions and those of others. Paul Drew, a sociologist based at the United Kingdom's University of York, is one of several scholars who offer a detailed explanation of this methodology: he describes it as a naturalistic, observation science of actual verbal and nonverbal behavior. A key feature of CA is that it is data-driven rather than theory driven. That is, completely opposite to conventional methods of enquiry, its analysis does not begin with a theory.
It has become increasingly popular across diverse disciplines. In the late 1980s, for instance, Potter and Wetherell refer to this brand as “youthful.” By 2012 , Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social sciences at Loughborough University, likens CA to a “juggernaut” such has been the explosion of work in this paradigm. A brief survey of CA work published in 2012 includes Jan Svennevig's study of agendas and workplace meetings; Cecilia Ford and Trini Stickle's study of how turn taking is managed in work meetings; Hanna Rautajoki's analysis of how TV discussion show participants manage identity and accountability; Mie Femø Nielsen's study of how meeting facilitators use various devices to facilitate innovation in organizational brainstorming sessions; and Jonathan Clifton's study of trust in workplace conference calls, showing how trust is a relationally constructed phenomenon accomplished through the use of various rhetorical devices and practices.
A major area of debate centers on the issue of context or culture: that is, the extent to which the analyst can bring her own a priori knowledge of context to the analysis or whether analysis should be confined solely to the sense of context that speakers make live in their talk. To shed some light on this question, consider the positions of two viewpoints: on the one hand, Emanuel Schegloff, professor of sociology at UCLA, Berkeley, warns against muddying analytic findings through the analyst's application of their own contexts (e.g., gender) to discourse rather than focusing on those constructed by speakers. From this perspective, the artificial application of an understanding of context external to those of the discourse itself would effectively negate analytical findings. On the other hand, scholars Jackie Abell and Elizabeth Stokoe argue that this is too limiting a perspective in restricting the whole idea of culture in the study of socially situated identities. Later in this chapter, we will see an example of what Abell and her colleague mean by this. Nonetheless, once again, context steals the show.
There is a less troubling but ongoing debate over what types of data CA should be concerned with—video and audio and/or written texts. Some claim that the nature of CA limits it to audiovisual materials only. Others take the view that it can be applied to any type of data, including online forums and chat rooms as demonstrated in a study by Mona Nilsen and her coresearcher.
6.3.3 Membership Categorization Analysis
Compared to CA's juggernaut, MCA is a mere “milk float” according to Stokoe. Whereas CA is concerned with conversational sequential practices (“turn taking”), MCA is concerned with the meaning-laden categories invoked in everyday talk, suggesting resonance with the idea of “repertoires” discussed earlier. MCA's insight is that people are referred to using categories and that at any point an individual may be referred to or “labeled” with more than one different category: for example, manager, contractor, father, and brother. Each of these categories carries meaning and mostly come embedded with “category-bound activities,” activities considered to be typical or expected of a given category. Elizabeth Stokoe provides a comprehensive overview of the field, proposing that MCA can reveal the commonsense routine workings of society. To underline her point, she includes a number of examples of MCA analysis: “advice giving” in the context of a US television show, “account giving” contingent to the construction of the shared meanings invoked by “common knowledge components” such as “y’ know” in the context of a radio interview, call and online support services, and police interviews.
The idea that we live in a world of identity categories, each of which has a bearing on behavior, sensemaking, and discursive repertoires is a foundational theme to Gergen's “saturated self” in which the individual is seen as a multiplicity of selves and where “human significance” is determined by relationship. MCA is consequently concerned with category selection as action with consequences.
According to Stokoe, MCA is at risk of being subsumed into CA. In reality, the two methods are not mutually exclusive, nor do they necessarily overlap with one another. There are, in fact, examples of useful and insightful studies that combine both types of analysis in their methodology (e.g., Stommel and Koole's intriguing analysis of how new members negotiate joining an online help website with some surprising findings).
6.4 TOPICS OF STUDY IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Thus far, the chapter has described and summarized the theoretical and methodological stances of various types of DA, building on the idea that these constitute frameworks and methodologies that have much to offer to knowledge management. To add weight and substance to this, the following sections review and discuss some of the more popular (and relevant) DA topics in critical social psychology with a particular focus on research in DP.
The span of DA research is enormous even within the boundaries set out above. Frustratingly, it also refuses to fit neatly into a categorization of three or four manageable headings. Studies have focused on gender (e.g., Charlebois, 2010; Potter and Edwards, 2003; Rhodes and Pullen, 2009; Schegloff, 1997; Stokoe, 2012), identity (e.g., Abell and Stokoe, 2001; Ainsworth and Hardy, 2004; Benwell and Stokoe, 2012; Brown and Phua, 2011; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Condor, 2000; Crane, 2012; Davies and Harré, 1990; Giles, 2006; Greatbatch, 2009; Gulich, 2003; Hobbs, 2003; Holmes, 2005; Hutchby, 2001; Locke and Edwards, 2003; Mieroop, 2005; Myers, 2010; Rautajoki, 2012; Wetherell, 2001; Whittle, 2005), attitudes and evaluative practices (e.g., Potter, 1998a; Potter and Edwards, 2012; Wiggins and Potter, 2003), occupational roles and good practice (e.g., Cromdal et al., 2012; Ford and Stickle, 2012; Holmes, 2005; Housley and Smith, 2011; Marshall, 1994; Nielsen, 2012; Svennevig, 2012b; Wasson, 2004), and knowing as an interactional accomplishment (e.g., Gulich; Hepburn and Wiggins, 2005; Hutchby; Lester and Paulus, 2011; Marra et al., 2004; Paulus, 2007; Svennevig). Abbreviated references are retained in the text here to facilitate the interested reader in locating the appropriate reference.
The intention of this section is to draw upon this body of work to support the argument that DA methods are relevant and could make a valid contribution to the study and practice of KM. Consequently, we concentrate on two of the most popular and distinct themes of DA study—identity and CMCs—plus a brief visit to the topic of gender because of the intriguing findings that DA studies reveal in this area. CMCs are of particular relevance bearing in mind the prominence of technologies within the context of KM. These studies collectively reveal and represent a snapshot of the variety of topics and situations that DA has investigated, and some of the insights they can offer. It is not the intention here to provide a detailed critical review of the literature, but rather to give an idea of the work in this field. We will start with identity, perhaps one of the most significant and enduring topics of interest in DA.
6.4.1 Discourse and Identity
The study of identity is one of the fastest-growing areas in the social sciences. Andrew Brown, at the United Kingdom's Warwick Business School, and his colleague speculate on this growing phenomenon with an interesting perspective in their suggestion that concrete ideas of “who we are” are becoming less certain in a world in which the domination of ideas of commodification and ubiquitous technologies lead to fragmentation, discontinuity, and crisis. This is a perspective encountered before in, for instance, Kenneth Gergen's notions of the increasingly fractured nature of the self, largely in response to the presence of technology in all aspects of human life. It is ironic that in a world in which social media, Web 2.0 and so forth are promoted and positioned as enhancing and transforming our abilities to communicate, others such as Gergen see them as leading to identity fracture.
Debates
In his comprehensive appraisal of the “social science of identity,” sociologist James Côté, at the University of Western Ontario, describes the field as filled with debate, much of which is focused on what constitutes identity and how it should be researched. This sounds somewhat reminiscent of earlier discussions around the topic of knowledge management. As noted in the previous chapter, from the social constructionist perspective, there is a shift from the notion of identity as a static, enduring entity with its connotations of equally enduring personality traits that can be studied and measured. Instead, identity is perceived as dynamic, fluid, and malleable and relational to context. The essence of these arguments is that identity is a socially and relationally constructed psychological phenomenon, although perhaps not entirely at the whim of context at any given time. From these perspectives, a person's identity is a far more complex and evolving phenomenon than conventional identity theorists would have us subscribe to. It also throws into question the idea of “measuring” identity or personality with questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and scales.
Côté is drawing out more of a political argument for the streamlining of what he sees as the “Tower of Babel” state of identity research and theory. This, he argues, would result in a more potentially powerful lobbying position with policy makers. He also argues that pure identity research often has no real prescription for the practical utility of its ideas. As we touched on in the previous chapter, Madsbjerg and his cowriter are critical of the human sciences as being “notoriously difficult to understand” and, worse, irrelevant from the perspectives of the “real world” of the organization.
Before reviewing some of the DA work in the identity field, it is worth briefly speculating on what the view of identity as socially and relationally constructed in talk might mean for knowledge management. An immediate observation is that if identities are constructed and made live with function and consequence in discourse, then that function and consequence can be observed firsthand in the discourse itself. Building on this, it is conjectured that a function and consequence of identity work, intentionally or otherwise, is to influence the direction and nature of discourse that has implications for knowledge work as an action accomplished in talk.
Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, Punks, Goths, and Hippies
We begin our review of work in the identity field by focusing on three distinctive studies. First, Jackie Abell and Elizabeth Stokoe use a combination of a social constructionism and CA to investigate how Princess Diana accomplishes the business of constructing and contrasting her “true self” and her royal role as two distinctive identities in a TV documentary interview, highlighting the tensions between the two. They show how culturally situated identities are located in conversation, claiming that social identity does not exist as some private cognitive process. Their study stands as a classic display of how identity is manufactured in social interaction between people rather than being a single, individualistic, enduring and static inner self. A further feature of the analysis reveals how speakers’ references to others, for example, Diana's reference to “my husband” rather than “Charles,” constitutes a powerful rhetorical practice. “Husband,” as an identity category, invokes far more meaning, motive, relationship, and symbols than the use of a Christian name. So, how people categorize others, and the meanings that such labels implicate for the recipient, has a direct effect on the nature and direction of the conversation.
Abell and Stokoe's study has a particular aim in impressing on the importance of importing relevant cultural context to any DA (an argument also brought by Paul Chilton, in his account of political discourse) in order to locate identities as they are constructed. This is something that the CA purist would refute but that Abell and her colleague insist allows them to work with the best of both worlds—the microscopic “word scrap” detail of CA and a broader, more context-driven approach.
In the second example, Abigail Locke and Derek Edwards adopt a DP approach to study former US President Bill Clinton's testimony before the Grand Jury, demonstrating how he uses crafted rhetorical practices to both manage and mitigate the relationship between himself and Monica Lewinsky. A key finding reveals how Clinton, in his portrayal of Lewinsky as unreasonable, overly emotional, and demanding, effectively and reflexively casts himself as the exact opposite: as caring and responsible. This study also demonstrates how Clinton uses memory limitations, combined with an explicit desire for accuracy of recall, as a rhetorical resource to mitigate his accountability for “forgotten actions.” In other words, Clinton uses the rhetoric of the law, and its obsession with getting at the facts as they happened, to his own ends. In their analysis, Locke and Edwards show how claims to memory failure can serve as a device for mitigating—or avoiding—responsibility, which is a particularly effective rhetorical strategy and one which has clear consequences for the direction of the discourse. The use of this and other devices works to cast Clinton in the role of being only interested in the evidential facts, consequently as someone to be trusted and believed. These are the sorts of findings that cannot be unraveled through traditional qualitative or quantitative methods.
Clinton's concern with accuracy of recall has interesting parallels with a raft of experimental work in cognitive psychology, which study the inaccuracies of human memory (see for instance Elizabeth Loftus’ account of memory faults) and the importance of context in memory retrieval. Also note a recent article in New Scientist that announces the development of a new artificial intelligence application that identifies, for instance, the frequent use of phrases such as “as far as I can recall….” as indicators of false testimony!1 This is precisely the type of phrase that Clinton is shown to use.
In the third example study, Sue Widdicombe and Robin Wooffitt use a combination of CA and DA (Potter and Wetherell’s 1987 version, Discourse and Social Psychology: beyond attitudes and behaviour) to analyze informal interviews with subculture group members, with a particular interest in how social comparisons are used to accomplish “authenticity.” According to conventional social identity theory, people innately strive for a positive self-esteem or self-image and that this is a prime motivator in making social comparisons in intergroup and between group contexts. Accordingly, members of one group will often display prejudice against others through drawing on social comparisons.
In their analysis, they diplomatically call into question some of the underlying assumptions in the conventional prescription, arguing that if identities are socially produced and one is interested in understanding how, then the imperative is to locate study in the context of action—discourse. Their compelling analysis of punk-rockers’, goths’, and hippies’ talk draws out a clear “being/doing” distinction, a “shallowness” versus “genuineness” embedded in social comparison talk. Speakers compare groups to an external standard, compare past and present characteristics of their group, and compare new members with older members. In this way, the creation of categories is shown to be connected to the action of social comparison. The analysis also shows the recurrence of “motivation” as a linguistic resource for differentiating between group members in that motives between different members vary from “authentic” to “shallow” or “faddy.”
Identity and Categorical Groups
Leadership is a category with a history of research stretching back almost eight decades. In his discursive study of leadership in the context of an organizational meeting, researcher Jonathan Clifton defines the category as the ability to influence the management of meaning, including that of the organization, which is achieved interactionally. He approaches leadership as a “language game” in which the “…rights to assess, and, therefore, to define the organizational landscape are negotiated in talk and the person, or persons, who have most influence in this process emerge as the leaders” (2012b : 150). What his fascinating analysis reveals is the war chest of discursive resources and devices that are made live in meeting talk—negotiation of claims to superior knowledge, for instance—and their effect on accomplishing the coconstruction of the category of leadership. A key finding displays how leadership is dynamically distributed in the moment-to-moment business of the meeting's discourse: leaders can only be leaders in interaction with others who live in the identity of “followers.” A further finding shows that while “leaders” claim the rights to assess topics and define meaning for the organization, this latter is not necessarily connected to hierarchy.
Another piece of work uses the example of older workers to demonstrate how CDA can be used to unpick very real social issues. Researchers Ainsworth and Hardy show how meanings associated with “labels” influence behavior and action. CDA is particularly focused on how language is involved in the social relations of power and domination. Ainsworth and her coworker's interest lies in how the identity of “older worker,” and its associated meanings, is evoked in discourse showing how this has real consequences for people categorized in this way. Conventional research methods, they suggest, are unable to unlock these subtleties. Their point is that a CDA approach can reveal the ways in which the use of “labels” and “categories” in identity construction can constrain individuals, and how the meanings attached to those labels can influence behavior. Unfortunately Ainsworth and her colleague's work is not a report of a CDA study, but rather a well-reasoned and persuasive argument for the advantages of undertaking such a study.
Categorical groups are constructed in many different ways. For example, a linguistics study of courtroom proceedings demonstrates how a lawyer uses her rhetorical practices and resources to construct an “in group” which includes herself and the jurors, but excludes the opposing attorney. In this study, impression management practices are linked to persuasion. According to the analysis, this “in group” comes into being when the lawyer uses African American vernacular English in addressing the (African American) jury. While exemplifying the practice of impression management, it can also be seen as an example of active, dynamic identity construction with, here, the sole purpose of alignment with the jury. This is shown to be a powerful and effective resource in constructing mutual empathy.
This understanding of impression management is different from that elsewhere in the DA literature. For instance, Susan Condor, of Lancaster University, presents impression management as a device for prejudice avoidance. In her discourse study (note that she does not actually specify which type of DA she uses in here analysis) of how English people formulate their country in an interview context, she rather surprisingly finds that people deployed impression management strategies and devices to actively avoid being heard to have an explicitly national stance, or to overtly display national pride. Condor suggests that one way of interpreting this is that participants “hear” talk of English nationalism as “typical” Anglo-British xenophobia. She does conclude, however, that the apparent correlation between national and prejudice accounting, which seems to be an evident rhetorical pattern in her data, is not necessarily universal to all British citizens. Condor's study uncovers the immensely complex nature of identity work, and the effects and consequences of (un)conscious impression management work. Impression management has close ties to stance (or position) taking, which is considered next.
Stance-Taking and Status Work
Greg Myers, also of Lancaster University, investigates how bloggers use language to take stances in online forums, suggesting that the priority of the blogger is to mark their position relative to others rather than dialogic debate or collective discussion. Stance-taking, Myers claims, is not just about having an opinion on any given topic but also about using that opinion to align or misalign with someone else interactionally. Arguably, the business of stance-taking is fundamentally concerned with identity construction, and both are bound to context and social interaction.
Similarly and drawing on the DP paradigm, my own study of a knowledge managers’ online discussion forum investigated how contributors construct their identities as expert with entitlement to be heard as such. The analysis (which forms the subject of Chapter 15) shows how participants use rhetorical devices to actively and relationally construct and accomplish membership of an elite group, and that membership of this group is marked by within-group competitive rivalry. In other words, participants work to establish their expert credentials relationally which, it is claimed, has some synergies with the theory of creative abrasion (see Chapter 4).
This notion of expertise being constructed interactionally and relationally is also evident in an earlier study of knowledge transfer between experts (doctors) and nonexperts (patients). Analysis identifies three devices used in the construction of expertise: self-categorization, category-bound activities such as the use of specialist terms followed by a reformulating colloquial description, and evaluation. The primary contribution of this work however lies more in the identification of how experts share knowledge with nonexperts and to what effect. The findings clearly demonstrate how a divergence in perception between these two categories (doctor and patient) often leads to unsuccessful communications. For instance, it is shown how patients describe long-term illness as having a sudden onset, but doctors display it as having a long development and onset. In other words, doctors and patients can often construct two entirely different meanings of the same thing. This finding is reminiscent of Leonard's (2007) claim that gaps in knowledge between two or more people can result in barriers to knowledge sharing.
From this brief review, it can be seen that DA applied to the study of identity can reveal features and facets of human social and interactional life that may not be available to traditional research methods. While it is acknowledged that some of the findings are not entirely relevant to organizational management and studies, and KM in particular, the point here is to show what can be achieved.
We now turn to a brief review of some of the discourse work in the area of “gender,” which reveals some fascinating and thought-provoking research findings.
6.4.2 Discourse and Gender
From a discursive perspective, it may be unsurprising that the kind of gender stereotypes found in the lab virtually disappear in actual face-to-face interactions, since lab instruments are designed to find gender and then smuggle it into the language of sex differences.
(Neill Korobov, 2011 : 462)
What Korobov is drawing attention to here is the blunt difference between the traditional perspective of gender as a measureable, tangible, manageable, and physical part of the human experience and the social constructionist perspective of gender as an artifact that is constructed in human interaction. This, Korobov suggests, means that the relevancy of gender is something for speakers to contextualize and bring meaning to, which may in some instances have no connection to society's reified understanding of “gender.” As an artifact of talk, gender is infinitely more dynamic, ambiguous, complicated, and rich in meaning and consequence. Moreover, gender is important in the modern organization. Organizations have a moral and, in some cases, a legal obligation to have effective policies, procedures and rules on gender equality, and sex discrimination, for instance. What if, in designing and implementing such policies, organizations are looking in the wrong direction? One of the core questions that gender studies raise is this: if gender becomes a live issue or context displayed in talk and text in social interaction, then how is this action brought about, and what are its effects on the discourse participants? Who is doing the gendering, and to what effect? The reader will find an example of the construction of gender in Chapter 16’s analysis of meeting discourse.
To illuminate this point, Elizabeth Stokoe, in her review of developments in language and gender research, investigates what happens in a higher education seminar involving three male and one female students who are tasked with carrying out a collaborative writing task. Stokoe's analysis reveals how the female comes to take on the role of group “scribe” (secretary), speculating that such a move may well have influenced her resulting intellectual contribution to the task. Thus, how members of a group (e.g., team, firm, community of practice, and so on) accomplish categorization practices, such as gender, is shown to have practical consequences for unfolding events.
A review of two other discourse studies reveals some of the intricacies of gender from a discursive perspective.
Challenging the traditional view of job assignation based on gender, Mats Alvesson, professor of business administration at Sweden's Lund University, reports on a study of a Swedish creative advertising company—which he describes as a “knowledge intensive company”—showing how gender division is extreme. His findings indicate that, on one hand, what are seen as “female gender traits” are highly valued. On the other, identity work done by men places stronger emphasis on workplace sexuality in response to the ambiguous context of advertising work that, he suggests, is strongly linked with “femininity.” Thus, his analysis shows that the femininity associated with advertising work affects gender relations and interactions in the workplace resulting in greater emphasis on “doing” masculinity.
Drawing on critical DP, Justin Charlebois, of Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan, reports on a study of how Japanese women construct gendered identities through drawing on what he describes as “gendered interpretive repertoires”—ways of seeing the world. He finds evidence of an emerging gender equality (women are and should have equal rights with men) repertoire amongst young women. This, he suggests, conflicts with the traditional repertoires of “woman as primary parent” and “woman as natural caregiver.” He concludes that this signifies a culture in a state of flux where emergent and traditional repertoires compete to construct femininity. This is largely based on his exposé of a “guilty thoughts” phenomenon, which Charlebois claims to be indicative of the inner struggle and tension between desire for equal rights with men (e.g., opportunity and right to work) and societal and parental expectation for the assumption of traditional roles (e.g., as mother, caregiver). Is it possible to embrace gender equality while retaining femininity? Charlebois suggests that it is not.
Charlebois’ significant findings demonstrate how DA can be used to explore relational and identity issues and crises. However, there is the suggestion in the study that these claims can be generalized across the entire of Japanese society, although they are based on a very small sample of semistructured interviews with only limited discussion of the ever-present matters of researcher bias and subjectivity. David Silverman is critical of studies, which are based entirely on interviews and the use of selective extracts, although he does concede that “manufactured data” can never be considered to be totally “taboo.” In her review of DA in an occupational context published in the early 1990s, Harriette Marshall also makes the point that from a DA perspective even a small number of interviews can yield more valid information than hundreds of traditional qualitative survey-style questionnaires.
Drawing on these ideas, while Charlebois’ study may be questioned in terms of attempting to generalize its findings to a much broader population, it does signal two important concepts. First, it is unlikely that, as Marshall suggests, traditional interview or survey scales would be able to reveal such intricacies as this emergent-traditional gender tension. Second, imagine what analysis might uncover in everyday talk and text within an organization. What role, for instance, does gender play in knowledge sharing? While gender is not raised as an issue in the knowledge management literature discussed in the earlier chapters, is this because it is not a factor, or is it because it just has not formed a focus of interest and investigation?
We turn next to review, in detail, some of the issues and research findings in CMC.
6.4.3 Discourse and Computer Mediated Communications
I think therefore I am; I speak therefore and I am; I am perceived therefore I am; I am responded to, therefore I am.
Paraphrased from Annette Markham's essay on The methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnography (2005 )
CMCs have been a topic of interest for researchers for more than two decades. Marked by an explosion in social media and networking sites, online environments have become the magnet in the drive for recognition and status in online communities. Annette Markham, associate professor in communications at the University of the Virgin Islands, describes the “computer-mediated construction of self” as a unique phenomenon for study because in such environments individuals as selves and the “social structures” within which they exist and act are the outcome of mutually shared negotiation. From a critical perspective, this is not so removed from the conceptualization of everyday conversation as to warrant the label of “unique.” The true uniqueness of the online environment is, however, perfectly expressed by Markham in the coupling of two phrases: “I am perceived, therefore I am,” and “I am responded to, therefore I am.” This takes on a slightly darker aspect when understood in the light of Kenneth Gergen's “technologies of social saturation,” which, he claims, are leading to an erasure of the individual self because of the increasingly blurred lines between man and machine.
On the one hand, we have Markham's perspective in which CMC constitutes a fascinating and dynamic environment in which the self is constructed through interaction with others, which demands new and different research methodologies to fully explore. On the other, we have the view that technologies are fracturing the “person” through the increasing multiplication of selves needed to compete and interact in a multiplicity of different online (and offline) communities. A further issue relates to the ethics associated with using what are ostensibly public online discussion forums for research data, a topic that is returned to in the subsequent methodology chapter (Part Two).
Taking a more practical perspective, CMC is of particular interest here because of the high profile role that technology, and increasingly Web 2.0 and Social Media apps, play in the knowledge management sphere. While many argue that technology cannot and should not be viewed as the “final solution,” it is nonetheless prominent both as a feature of knowledge management and as a target of behavioral study. But, as we have shown elsewhere, focusing study down to the level of actual discourse—in CMC or elsewhere—is not something that has so far been particularly pursued in knowledge management.
Coverage
Research in CMC tends to be clustered around academic sites; online support groups for people with health or mental issues such as eating disorders; self-harming and depression; and blogs. Appearing less frequently in the lens of research are sites such as product review sites and professional practice forums. In terms of online forums, those in higher education are most frequently used in CMC research for obvious reasons—they are the most readily available to the academic researcher. Collectively, studies of CMC have raised a broad spectrum of fascinating findings. Before reviewing a sampling of these, we need to touch on one of the major issues associated with CMC research because of the singular nature of this environment, which has already been touched in during the previous discussions.
Researcher Bias
In her review of methods, politics and ethics in online ethnographic studies, Annette Markham raises the conundrum of the embodied (i.e., the researcher) versus the unembodied (i.e., the forum participants) and the consequences of this in terms of researcher role and bias. While enthusiastically endorsing CMC as a valid and rich vein for research, she warns against what she sets out as the prime pitfalls. With the embodied–unembodied issue, she is referring to the potential transfer of the researcher's own experiences and judgments to her data. For instance, Markham notes that a researcher may unconsciously attribute categories (e.g., gender) to forum participants—that is, assigning them with a body. The risk of this “embodiment” is particularly high, she suggests, with texts that display features such as misspellings or poor grammar: the temptation is to categorize the contributor as being poorly educated, for example. Worse, Markham accuses some researchers of “cleaning up” their data by editing and making corrections. This particular method of treating data is completely contrary to the DA methodologies discussed earlier in this chapter and would likely be considered unacceptable. Bearing in mind the evolution of vernacular linguistic practices specific to mobile devices, for instance, the idea of writing off contributors as poorly educated because of misspellings or even through extensive use of abbreviations would now be seen as somewhat rash.
Note that Markham's discussion of research methods in CMC is generally focused on ethnomethodology research. Originally developed by Harold Garfinkel in the late 1960s, ethnomethodology is a method of studying and understanding the social orders (or “rational orders”), which people use to make sense of their world, and the resources they bring to bear. It is thus concerned with analyzing accounts of day-to-day experience.
For Bethan Benwell and her colleague, CMC data is ideal for researchers who are concerned with issues of authenticity because there is no need for any transcription process. Nor, it can be deduced, is there a need for the researcher to take any active role as contributor in the unfolding discourse. They pursue their case arguing that, with this type of data, the researcher can assume to role of “lurker.” The implication is that without the physical presence of the researcher, even as a nonparticipative observer, the potential for influencing the course and nature of participants’ actions in any given scenario is removed. These authors devote an entire chapter of their investigation of Discourse and Identity to the analysis of discourse in virtual worlds. Thus, we have two quite contrasting views.
While acknowledging the rationale of Markham's argument over this issue, it can also be seen as a double-edged sword in that, clearly, the analyst—consciously or otherwise—brings her own embodied sensibilities to the performance of research. One is necessarily employing embodied senses (perception) and cognition. The issue is arguably more to do with how the researcher acknowledges herself as a coparticipant in the study, bringing to the fore an awareness of what effect the text is having—what is it making her think, imagine, and see—and how. Following Thomas Kuhn's thesis, what is observed is the consequence of the unconscious alliance of the perception of what is looked at and previous experience. There is a need to accept the subjectivity of analysis while paying attention to factors that might impact or influence the findings.
Orality, Trust, Advice Giving, and Identity
Stepping briefly outside of our focus on DA from the perspective of critical social psychology, it is noted that CMCs have been of particular interest with sociolinguistics workers. One of the areas that research has focused on is stance-taking, encountered earlier in the discussions of identity, and how this is used rhetorically and strategically to gain the attention of others in what is depicted as an overly crowded virtual world.
“Orality” in discussion forums is another topic of interest. Orality can refer to something as simple as underlining a part of a text, which has the effect of “increasing its volume,” or using “emoticons” to display cognitive states, or it can refer to more complex actions such as the use of parentheses, which can have multiple effects (an example can be seen in Chapter 15). One study for instance investigates orality in the context of a discussion forum for Spanish students learning English, while another focuses on a knowledge managers’ discussion forum located in India. In both cases, however, little conclusion is drawn about the presence of what may be described as actions of orality in the forums. This leaves tantalizing questions around what orality accomplishes, what is the effect on forum contributors and readers/cocontributors, and why people feel the need to simulate spoken language in a written context.
Psychologists Bethan Benwell and her colleague suggest that where there are contexts of shared understanding or experience, CMCs tend to be dominated by an orientation to orality. This echoes the idea that a group of people well known to each other often communicate in a singular form of short-hand known only to themselves. Thus, orality could be seen as a kind of “doing consensus” and “group construction”: we come across these actions in the analyses in Part Two. This also raises the idea that orality—or the vernacular—is connected to issues of virtual presence, something which Benwell and her coworker suggest is significant in cyberspace, identity, and status.
Developing this latter point, it is worth noting Jahna Otterbacher's, assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, linguistics study that investigates online product review sites and the relationship between discursive tactics and self-prominence. The study is specifically interested in how contributors use available cues to develop judgments about the credibility and utility of others’ contributions. Without the presence of visual body language clues, for instance, Otterbacher proposes that reputation becomes key to building and engendering trust, an area that she argues is ripe for more research. The relationship between reputation—with its connotations of identity—and trust, and how these categories are constructed and made live in discourse and with what function and effect, is a key topic of investigation in Part Two.
Turning back to the DA literature in psychology, we find a wider spectrum of topics with a substantial body of work investigating rhetorical practices and their accomplishments in health support CMCs. Community membership is of particular interest. Wyke Stommel and his coworker report a study of contributions posted to an eating disorder support site hosted in Germany. Using a combination of CA and MCA, the researchers are interested in how new contributors to the site negotiate membership in terms of expectations and requirements. The a priori expectation is that membership will be “low threshold”—no particular entry requirements. They use their analysis to show that this is in fact not the case. In forensically unpicking the actions in the postings, Stommel and his coworker uncover three interesting phenomena: first, that entry is dependent upon the newcomer doing “being ill”; secondly, that existing members only ever interact with the newcomer not with each other; and thirdly, that a “sequential misalignment” is evident in the newcomer's rejection of advice given by members. Sequential misalignment refers to a break in expected norms of “sequential pairs” of turns: in this instance, when advice is offered (turn first part), the expectation is that it will be accepted (turn second part), but in their analysis, Stommel and his coworker show how the advice is in fact rejected.
“Advice giving,” as a phenomenon of study, is a popular target for the discourse researcher. Similarly to Stommel and his colleague's findings, another study that finds that advice giving is largely ignored investigates postings to a support forum for young people who self-harm. The authors show advice giving to be a troublesome activity in which posters commonly use disclaimers such as “I'd probably…” and “it's been said…” as well as terms of endearment to preface potentially unwelcome advice responses. Upgrading the issues associated with advice giving, Phillip Morrow, professor of English and linguistics at a Japanese University, points to the potentially threatening nature of advice messages. He relates this to the problem-poser's self-image in his study of a support site for depression sufferers. (Note that Morrow's study is linguistic but is included here because of the topic of study, rigorous analysis, and because it includes extracts from the data). He speculates that advice may not be followed by advice seekers because they want to avoid being in the debt of the advice giver. The question is, is this action of advice rejection specific to health support CMCs?
Another interesting feature that Morrow draws out is the use of metaphor by those posting problems: for example, “…it feels like….” His argument is that metaphors are used as imperatives, as opposed to for instance stylistic choice, because of the difficulties in describing complex feelings. Arguably, Morrow does not go far enough in investigating the consequences of this phenomenon. In an earlier and equally fascinating study, Elizabeth Gülich uses a CA approach to examine patients’ use of metaphor in knowledge transfer interactions between patients and doctors, showing how metaphors situated the patient's perception of their illness markedly differently from that of the doctor, with consequences for reaching shared understanding.
In a work touched on earlier, Janet Smithson and her colleagues also investigate how advice givers in a self-harm support forum establish their credentials to be heard: “(I)in an online context where people cannot use normal interactional cues to determine the identity of a speaker, the ways in which posters use their posts to demonstrate their validity as members or expert become paramount in whether or not they are accepted” (2011: 489). This is a phenomenon that I explore in detail in a DP study of how knowledge managers negotiate and construct selves as expert in the context of an online professional knowledge managers’ forum (see Chapter 15). The findings show how forum participants use rhetorical devices such as consensus followed by elaboration, and elite group construction/membership, to construct themselves as experts. A key finding is that expertise is largely situated in interaction with others, although a superficial analysis would suggest that only limited participant interaction is taking place. The use of disclaimers as a key device to manage accountability is also brought to the fore, a practice described in many other studies.
To complete this review of the discourse literature, we draw on one of the few DA studies that focuses on the construct of “knowing” Taking a DP approach, Jessica Lester and her coworker, of the University of Tennessee, study higher education students’ blog postings in response to a course requirement to discuss their beliefs and experiences of dietary supplements. The conclusion of the analysis is that students use disclaimers (e.g., “I don't know much about it”) to minimize accountability for their blogs and that such disclaimers are often focused on the action of “knowing.” In other words, Lester and coworker are arguing that students are not talking about their lack of knowledge about food supplements, but are rather managing and protecting their identity as a student and all of the expectations that flow from this category such as intellectual competence. There is a substantial difference between the two viewpoints.
From this brief review, it can be imagined that many lessons and pointers could be gleaned from studies of CMCs to inform knowledge management strategy, even from those studies that investigate, for example, an eating disorder support site. If one speculates how these findings might be applied to different contexts—with the caveat that this may not always be appropriate or feasible—then these CMC studies, together with those in the areas of identity and gender, represent a rich vein of information for the organizational practitioner and strategist.
6.5 SENSEMAKING
It is worth giving a brief consideration to sensemaking as an organizational practice and topic of study and its synergies and contrasts with DA's framework and methodology. There are, however, two caveats to be drawn. Firstly, sensemaking is a substantial field in its own right, and consequently, there is no intention here to delve into its complexities. Secondly, because the term “sensemaking” is applied quite literally to a blizzard of different, often competing, concepts, care needs to be taken about how the term is used.
Two interpretations of “sensemaking” serve to make this point. David Snowden proposes a sensemaking model, which has the purpose of describing different “domains of knowledge” as diverse contexts, each of which connects to a different model of decision-making. His point is that each decision-making context will be singular and that to attempt to apply a uniform “idealized model” of decision-making to each one will result in difficulties. In contrast, Chun Wei Choo, of the University of Toronto, proposes a model combining sensemaking, decision-making, and the creation of new knowledge based on the perception that sensemaking is the foundation to the shared meanings that define an organization's purpose and the identification of both problem and opportunity. In his thesis, the information that any organization has is in a state of continuous flow between sensemaking, decision-making, and new knowledge creating. He defines “sensemaking” in three interrelated stages: sensing in which organizations scan the horizon, sensemaking that mediates the plausible interpretation of incoming information such that actions may be enabled, and sense giving in which vision and purpose are communicated to organization constituents. Arguably, both are talking about rather different phenomena although using the same terminology. They are, in that respect, almost incommensurable.
Christian Madsbjerg and his colleague offer a quite different understanding of sensemaking, which could be interpreted as more of an ecological, humanistic understanding of affairs. Accordingly, sensemaking draws on phenomenology, which has a focus on the study of how people experience life. Phenomenology was Alfred Schutz's (originally published in German in 1932) attempt to deal with some of the most profound and critical questions facing the social sciences in the early decades of the twentieth century (and probably still do): namely, the role of objectivity versus subjectivity in the social sciences and the nature of human action. In this project, Schutz foregrounds “lived experience.”
According to Madsbjerg and his colleague, sensemaking “…reveals the often subtle and unconscious motivations informing consumer behaviour and can lead to insights that enable transformations in product development, organizational culture, and even corporate strategy” (2014 : 82). Sensemaking from this perspective is largely occupied in the territory of organizational management and management consultancy, and the claims made for its practice have some synergies with some of those in DA. For instance, Greatbatch proposes that CA, unlike other research methods, can uncover and investigate “seen but unnoticed” or “tacit” linguistic action. Consistent with the social constructionist perspective, the sensemaking paradigm emphasizes and is sensitive to how people interact with the world through meaning making.
In comparison to DP, however, there is a subtle difference. While Madsbjerg and his coworker talk about “hidden motivations” that shape behavior and that can be “revealed” in sensemaking studies, Jonathan Potter argues that DP is solely concerned with social life as “normative and rhetorical” practice, rather than as the end result of an interaction of unspecified patterns and factors. “Norms” do not control actions: they are “orientated to” by individuals in their discourse. In sum, DP does not approach human (inter)action—discourse—as a window providing access to the “ghost in the machine,” to quote Gilbert Ryle's famous description of the soul. Instead, it studies the action itself. A point of resonance connects to DP's notion of interpretive repertoires as personal vocabularies of terms that serve to define identity from moment to moment. Similarly, sensemaking studies human experience through action (e.g., through conversation, interview, observation, and so forth) to gain a sense of how an individual “knows” of the world. But, once again, the subtle difference lies in sensemaking's search for what lies beyond the (discursive) action, while DP considers the action itself as constituting the boundaries of interest.
Notwithstanding these differences, there are some synergies between the two disciplines, with sensemaking, perhaps, offering DP the organizational management terminology that it currently lacks, and which lacking, in all truth, renders it at risk of being seen as irrelevant to organizational practice. This is a theme that is unpacked in more detail in the following chapter.
6.6 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The present discussions began with a look at how the “turn to talk” gained traction through an increasing interest in language as performative and as the topic of study in its own right. The field of DA is shown to be characterized by a wide range of different paradigms, the result of the interest in DA methodologies emerging in many different fields of study. On the most basic level they do, however, share a perspective of language as the site of human action in interaction and as action oriented. In critical social psychology, DA paradigms are also shown to be diametrically opposed to the field's conventional approaches, theories and methodologies. Importantly, DA studies, along with the theories and methodologies that they represent, are seen as credible alternatives to conventional approaches, at least as far as their proponents are concerned. Many argue that this type of research is making significant contributions to, for instance, the understanding of the organization and organizational strategy.
The origins, core assumptions, and emerging ideas, such as the notion of “interpretive repertoires” associated with DP, have been reviewed in some detail. More than any other advantage, it is claimed that DP in particular can reveal phenomena that other more conventional approaches cannot. This is particularly seen in how the paradigm handles “variability” in discourse, claimed to be the subject of concern for the conventionalist but which is actively sought by the DP researcher. A focus on variation in everyday talk is both a hallmark of DP and the foundation of one of its most persuasive criticisms of mainstream methodologies and theories. A further key claim is that the constitution of psychology in discourse itself offers the ability to study the processes of thinking directly as accomplished in discourse while noting that the issue of “cognition” remains the source of some confusion. Brief reviews of some of the other methodologies in critical social psychology—CDA, CA, and MCA—provide points of comparison with DP and give a sense of the richness and contributions of the field as a whole.
The breadth of topics and themes addressed in DA research is extensive and difficult to neatly package. Consequently, three themes (identity, gender, and CMCs) that have some resonance with the debates and interests of knowledge management, to a larger or lesser degree, have been reviewed to provide insight into how these themes are dealt with and how their findings contribute to the knowledge. The research reviewed here is just a tiny sample of the work that has been done in this broad field. While many of these cases are not situated in the organizational workplace context, their meaning for workplace discourse and organizational life is nonetheless valid and potentially consequential. They show how people do the business of constructing everyday realities and how these realities can often be shown to be at odds with assumed realities.
Studies in identity have shown how this phenomenon is dynamically constructed and situated in the moment-to-moment action of discourse in interaction, whether it is shifting footing from one identity to another in order to manage personal stake and interest in a public interview or rhetorically accomplishing a positive and moral version of oneself as a reflected mirror image of the negative construction of someone else in a courtroom setting.
The approach to and conceptualization of gender in the discourse field is not only radically different from that in mainstream approaches but also reveals phenomena that would remain hidden to such approaches. In particular, the ability to study and analyze what gender means for speakers and with what consequences and function is arguably of particular value.
The study of CMCs is seen as being particularly relevant to knowledge management and the wider interests of the organization. The curious case of “orality” in online forums, for example, is a topic that has yielded some interesting ideas but warrants much more research. Issues uncovered around the action of “advice giving” also have some resonance: in what circumstances will people accept or decline the advice offered?
To complete the present discussions, a comparison, on an admittedly limited scale, between the organizational field of “sensemaking” and DA reveals some tantalizing potential synergies. On the matter of difference, this is notably centered on whether one considers sensemaking as social practice accomplished by actors in interaction, which is itself the subject of interest, or whether one considers it as methodology applied by the researcher. Either approach would result in radically different outcomes.
So far, we have made the case for relocating the focus of interest, study, and even management to discourse—everyday talk and text—defined as both the product and the means of construction, as an accomplishment of linguistic social interaction. Thus, the argument is that if people's knowledge-sharing actions are accomplished in discourse, then the focus placed here will lead to a more direct understanding of such actions, their function, consequences, and so forth. The review of DA in general, and DP in particular, draws the conclusion that such methodologies, supported by adequate theory, are able to uncover phenomena that are simply unavailable to other more traditional research methods. Consequently, if the research objective is to study the phenomena (identified in Chapter 3) of identity, trust, risk, and context as thematic categories connected to knowledge-sharing practices, which are speculated to operate corelationally, it is reasonable to conclude that the application of DA methodology will fulfill this objective.
For a number of reasons, DP stands out as the preferred method of studying organizational discourse and knowledge work. Perhaps paramount of these is DP's perspective of discourse as psychological action. The approach to language as constructive, functional, consequential and variable as the site of that action, and as having a particular concern with knowledge in terms of how speakers’ accounts are explained, described and constructed as factual are further reasons. Of equal interest is the idea that if DP is not concerned with what speakers explicitly state (as a linguistics or content analyst might be, for instance), but rather what they discursively do, then it is the case that DP constitutes a methodology for the direct study of displays of tacit knowing as the influencing and mediating aspect of social interaction, as many KM scholars have suggested that it is (e.g., Duguid, 2005). This question is picked up in the following chapter.
But there is what can only be described as an irritating itch that is hinted at toward the end of the previous section. Is DP at risk of being seen as analysis for analysis’ sake, an intriguing and empirically robust program of academic research but with nothing to say beyond pure academic interests? This question—the “so what question”—is met head-on in the following chapter in the search for a singular contribution that this particular paradigm might offer to the field of knowledge management.
FURTHER READING
- Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E. (2012). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.
- Phillips, N., Lawrence, T. and Hardy, C. (2004). Discourse and Institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29, (4): 635–652.
- Stokoe, E. (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies, 14, (3): 277–303.
- Stubbe, M., Lane, C., Hilder, J., Vine, E., Vine, B., Marra, M., Holmes, J. and Weatherall, A. (2003). Multiple discourse analyses of a workplace interaction. Discourse Studies, 5, (3): 351–388.
- Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S. (2001). Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader. London: Sage.
- Whittle, A. and Mueller, F. (2011). The language of interests: the contribution of discursive psychology. Human Relations, 64, (3): 415–435.
- Wooffitt, R. (2005). Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction. London: Sage.