New Directions in Micro Research

Chapter four assesses a series of proposals in the literature for refinements to, and escape routes from, the dilemmas posed in chapter three. They reject a series of amendments that contextualize deliberation in somewhat crude ways, often through simple typologies that link communicative and setting types. Such approaches fail to appreciate the fact that deliberative acts can mean different things given goals and contexts, and underplay both agency and social creativity in complex settings. Instead, the authors recommend disentangling deliberation from other communicative modes and deploying a much broader range of methods to understand meanings in context, as well as a broader understanding of what contextual awareness entails.