Decision Premises, Learning and Organizational Resilience Addressing Novel Adversities

Organizational resilience is traditionally associated with the ability to understand and to respond to the ongoing situation, even under unusual conditions. The capability to detect novel and unexpected situations plays a fundamental role in this process. Following (Simon‚ 1991), we believe that decision premises affect the problem representation and, ultimately, the possibility to detect, interpret and respond to novel situations, thus enhancing resilience. From this perspective, the ability to expand the perceptual limits of observation and to conceive a novel representation of the problem requires revising the initial decision premises. This theory of how organizations learn how to solve novel problems provides the foundation to introduce a role designed to legitimately challenge the decision premises and, ultimately, the spectrum of alternatives that are taken into consideration as possible solutions. To illustrate our proposal to increase organizational resilience, we introduce an exemplary real case stemming from the practice of the emergency management organizations under scrutiny of our research team; this case is reconstructed as a conversational narrative of the two key participants.

Pre-verbal Children’s Participation in a New Key. How Intersubjectivity Can Contribute to Understanding and Implementation of Child Rights in Early Childhood

Children’s participation and involvement has increasingly been on the agenda for the last few decades. The right for children to participate was established in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). However, even though the UNCRC gives the right to participate to all children, national policy and practice seems to draw a line on verbal language and exclude pre-verbal infants from participation. The spur of this paper is to challenge the exclusion of infants, to describe how pre-linguistic children communicate their intentions, and to show how an understanding of children’s participation grounded in intersubjectivity, can inform and reframe the participation of all children as being fundamentally about close relationships with sensitive and containing adults who look within themselves for the voice of the child. The infant’s proto-conversational narrative communicates interests and feelings through sympathetic rhythms of what infant researchers have named “communicative musicality,” and it can surface in the mother’s narrative about the child and their relationship. Intersubjectivity oppose the monadic view of man as separate and left only to imitate others and claims that humans from the very start are intertwined in a fundamental thirdness of co-created reality. Infants are powerful communicators who actively engage in intersubjective relationships with their caretakers only days after birth, and newborns actively influence and even control the mental process of those who communicate with them. Early childhood participation then, would be to find within ourselves the voice of the child. A research project building on the theories and ideas described in the first part of the article, is presented.

Narrative as a Radial Category

Narrative is a complex and elusive category of cognition, culture, communication and language. An attempt has been made in this article with a large enough theoretical scope to consider the possibility of treating narrative as a radial category. To this end, the definition and characterisation of radiality is provided together with explanation of what it might mean to apply this term to the complex language-discourse unit of narrative. The prototype of this category involves features, functions, and ICMs. It has multiple representations with only family resemblance, involves more obvious exemplars and variable abstract knowledge structures. In particular, section one looks at the radiality question and what it might mean to think of the meaning of narrative in general. Section two focuses on centrality. Sections three to five deal with schematic representations of narrative and provide examples of extending the most subsuming schema of the Action Chain Model from cognitive linguistics and Labov’s Narrative Schema to various other types of conversational narrative, children’s dramatic plays, tactical narratives, story rounds, jokes, poems, current news articles on the Internet, images, and advertisements.

‘The words has been immigrate’: Chronotopes in context-shaping narrative co-construction about Taiwanese loanwords with Taiwanese Americans

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.

The historical present in Spanish and semantic/pragmatic structure

The historical present (HP) is the use of the present tense to refer to past events, usually as part of a narrative. Most work on this topic has dealt with the functions of English HP, mainly within the context of tense switching in conversational narrative. Relatively little work focuses exclusively on HP in Spanish, and most of it deals with the function of HP in conversational narratives. There is a gap in the literature regarding the specific interaction between the semantics and pragmatics involved in the use of HP, especially with respect to the formal representation of this interaction. In order to fill this gap, this paper analyzes the use of HP within the Parallel Architecture framework (Jackendoff 2002) and examines the implications for the semantic/pragmatic structure. Language samples produced by native speakers of Spanish and data from a large Spanish corpus are used as part of the basis for analysis. The present study also explores how the use of the preterite and imperfect in narrative in the past parallels the use of the simple present and the present progressive in narrative within the present timeframe, and shows how this can also be fruitfully analyzed employing the Parallel Architecture. The result is an original model that extends the formal apparatus of the Parallel Architecture to an area where it has not been applied before, the interface between semantics and narrative structure.

Changing the font size on recovery: a co-produced dialogue between service user and psychologist

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to co-produce the meaning of the word recovery and highlight the challenges to recovery in a secure inpatient setting. Design/methodology/approach A conversational narrative between a service user and psychologist focussed on the topic of recovery. Findings It is a reflective account, therefore no findings are required. Originality/value This is a co-produced paper highlighting a service user’s and psychologist’s perspectives on recovery.

Understanding bilingualism in La Mancha schools

This article discusses narratives of bilingualism told in parental group interviews conducted as part of the critical sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in public and semi-private bilingual schools of the autonomous region of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). School stakeholders in this region are still adapting to the rapid implementation of bilingual programs in this region, which are transforming classroom linguistic practices and circulating discourses about bilingualism, bilingual education, and the bilingual subject. Among them, families are trying to reconcile their language desires and aspirations for English and bilingualism with the understanding of the type of bilingual education their children are receiving. By taking a social interactional approach to narrative combined with anthropological approaches to the study of conversational narrative, this article analyzes parents’ emotional and moral stancetaking in narratives of bilingualism. The narrative analysis will shed light on how families in Castilla-La Mancha are appropriating bilingualism as ideology and practice in the highly commodified global market of English.