Same Context, Different Strategies

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Chan
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Politeness Theory ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Business Meetings ◽  
Practice Framework

This paper uses audio and video data to examine the discourse of a New Zealand IT company director in business meetings. Three examples of the director dealing with behaviour by his subordinates that he wants to influence are analysed by drawing on a collection of discourse analytic frameworks including conversation analysis, social constructionism, politeness theory, and a community of practice framework. The examples reveal that the director employs a range of discursive strategies to express his disapproval and to rationalise his feedback. At times he adopts indirect and mitigated strategies, while at other times he uses explicit and authoritative strategies. Moreover, the examples also demonstrate the dynamic nature and the complexity of interaction. The analysis shows that the director’s choice of strategies in these examples is a response to the specific discourse context and represents the result of negotiation between interlocutors, and that the giving of negative feedback occurs as a sequence of utterances instead of one single utterance. Finally it is suggested that the strategies used by the director are relevant resources because of the close relationships between the director and his subordinates and the shared repertoire of the focus workplace.

scholarly journals Caution and consensus in American business meetings

Pragmatics ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Wasson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Business ◽  
Surveillance Culture ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Politeness Theory ◽  
Business Meetings ◽  
Face Saving

This article contributes to studies of politeness and talk in the workplace. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which cautiousness is exercised to achieve consensus in American business meetings. This topic is elaborated against the real-world background of the surveillance culture of corporate America and a tradition of consensus-oriented decision-making, in the theoretical context of politeness theory (adding variables related to the ‘political economy’ of the investigated interactions), and with the methodological insights provided by conversation analysis. ‘Reversals’ are identified as specific turn patterns in face-saving strategies aimed at consensus. Two processes are highlighted: Attempts at protecting oneself through a reversal of opinion, and protecting others by helping them articulate a reversal.

Situating embodied action plans: pre-enacting and planning actions within knowledge communication in sports training

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajit Singh
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Action Plans ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Sports Training ◽  
Communicative Actions ◽  
Embodied Action ◽  
Micro Analysis ◽  
Knowledge Communication

Abstract This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.

Embodied orientations towards co-participants in multinational meetings

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Markaki ◽  
Lorenza Mondada
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Multinational Company ◽  
Business Meetings ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Turn Taking ◽  
The Way

The interactional organization of meetings is an important locus of observation for understanding the way in which institutions are talked into being. This article contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on turn-taking and participation in business meetings, approached within conversation analysis in a sequential and multimodal way. On the basis of a corpus of video-recorded corporate meetings of a multinational company, in which managers coming from several European branches convene, the article takes into consideration the embodied orientations of the participants as they address each other, as they turn to particular addressees or groups in a recipient designed way while describing, informing, announcing events and results, and as they make relevant specific participants’ identities – especially national categories – and, in this way, display specific local expectations regarding rights and obligations to talk and to know.

scholarly journals A Sensitive Question: Asking about Race in a Research Interview

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura O'Hare
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Variable ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Politeness Theory ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Sensitive Question ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
Face Threats ◽  
Research Interview

Conversations are significant, but often overlooked cultural sites where attitudes, beliefs, and values about race are both reified and challenged. As such, these sites deserve increased scholarly attention (Allen, 2007). We employed Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory as a framework to examine the discursive strategies used by 11 interviewers in a research context as they asked 115 patient participants (taking part in a larger study of patients at a community-based family medicine residency clinic) to identify their race, as well as to identify the discursive strategies used by patient participants who answered this question. Our analysis revealed that in their attempt to temper potential face threats from patient participants when asking the “race question,” interviewers used a number of discursive strategies including clarifying the question, grounding the question, and disarming the participant. Our analysis also revealed that in answering the “race question,” patient participants used various levels of face-threatening strategies, including joking, derisive humor, and bald, on-record face threats. In our discussion, we use our own research experience as a springboard to emphasize the need for researchers to examine critically the often taken-for-granted research convention of including race as a demographic variable in their work.

scholarly journals Relational Practice in Meeting Discourse in New Zealand and Japan: A Cross-Cultural Study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kazuyo Murata
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Small Talk ◽  
Business People ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Business Meetings ◽  
Relational Practice ◽  
Fundamental Value

<p><b>This thesis explores Relational Practice in meetings in New Zealand and Japan, focussing in particular on small talk and humour which can be considered exemplary relational strategies. It examines these two areas of Relational Practice, firstly in terms of their manifestations in New Zealand and Japanese meetings, and secondly in terms of the ways they are perceived in the context of business meetings.</b></p> <p>This research takes a qualitative approach to the data analysis and employs a neo-Politeness approach to the analysis, a modified version of standard Politeness Theory. The concepts of Relational Practice and community of practice also proved to be of fundamental value in the analysis. Two kinds of data were collected: firstly meeting data from 16 authentic business meetings recorded in business organisations in New Zealand and Japan (nine from a New Zealand company and seven from a Japanese company). Secondly, perception data was collected in Japan using extended focus group interviews with Japanese business people (a total of six groups from three business organisations).</p> <p>The research involves a contrastive study using interactional sociolinguistic analytic techniques to examine manifestations of small talk and humour in meeting data collected in different contexts. The first phase of the study is cross-cultural, comparing meetings in New Zealand and Japan, and adopting a combined etic-emic approach. The second phase of the study analyses and compares the use of small talk and humour in different types of meetings, i.e. formal meetings (known as kaigi in Japanese) and informal meetings (known as uchiawase/miitingu in Japanese) in New Zealand and Japan. A further aim is to explore how Japanese business people perceive New Zealand meeting behaviours in relation to small talk and humour and to consider what might influence people‘s perceptions of these aspects of relational talk.</p> <p>The analysis of the authentic meeting data indicates that the important role of Relational Practice at work is recognised in both New Zealand and Japanese meetings, although the data also highlights potentially important differences in manifestation according to the community of practice and the type of meetings. The data demonstrates that Relational Practice is constructed among meeting members discursively and dynamically across the communities of practice and the kinds of meetings.</p> <p>The analysis of the perception data indicates that while Japanese business people do not have identical evaluations of the manifestation of any particular discourse strategy, their perceptions are mostly similar if they work in the same workplace. The data also demonstrates that the participants‘ international business experience influences their perceptions. Furthermore the analysis indicates that manifestations of small talk and humour in New Zealand meetings are not necessarily evaluated by the Japanese business people in the same or similar way as by New Zealand people.</p> <p>Through both the analysis of the meeting and perception data, this study indicates that people‘s linguistic behaviours and perceptions regarding Relational Practice are influenced not only by underlying expectations of their community of practice but also by those of the wider society in which the community of practice is positioned.</p>

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