Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings; Edited by Jan-Ola Östman, Anna Solin

Edited by

Jan-Ola Östman [+–]

University of Helsinki

Jan-Ola Östman is professor of Scandinavian languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and President of the International Pragmatics Association. In addition to degrees from the Åbo Akademi University in Finland, he has an MA from Reading University, U.K., and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, U.S.A. He has previously worked as professor of English, and professor of General linguistics at the University of Helsinki, and as invited scholar and guest researcher in Antwerp, Brussels, Tromsø, and Freiburg. His research focuses on pragmatics, discourse and the media; constructional approach to language; minority languages, esp. signed languages and immigrant languages; socio-dialectology and socio-onomastics; language contact; and language policy and the sociology of language. He is the co-editor of Handbook of Pragmatics (John Benjamins) and of the book series Constructional Approaches to Language.

Anna Solin [+–]

University of Helsinki

Anna Solin works as senior lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Finland. She gained her PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, in 2001. She currently directs a research project on language regulation in academia, with a particular focus on the shifting norms of English use.

Debates on social and professional responsibility have proliferated in recent years both in the public sphere (e.g. in connection with corporate responsibility reports) and in more local practices (e.g. as manifested in the publication of in-house codes of conduct). However, there is little academic research on professional discourse which systematically addresses the ways in which responsibility relations are construed in language use.

This volume contains a number of case studies focusing on different professional settings: media, health care and social work. The types of data examined range from globally available mass-consumed discourse (such as news agency dispatches) to local and essentially private face-to-face encounters (such as counselling sessions). The studies examine different linguistic features (such as reported speech in written texts and backchannelling in spoken encounters) and different types of meanings (such as agency and causality). The studies draw on different methodological approaches (mainly pragmatics, conversation analysis and (critical) discourse analysis). A common thread running through the contributions is that responsibility is not a stable quality of people or institutions, but a dynamic and variable resource that language users negotiate in interaction.

Series: Studies in Communication in Organisations and Professions

Prelims

Preface [+–] vii

Jan-Ola Östman FREE

University of Helsinki

This volume strengthens the case for analysing discourse from the point of view of discourse participants’ accountability and responsibility. It adds an important and largely neglected strand to research in discourse studies and pragmatics by analysing the expression and attribution of responsibility, particularly in professional discourse. Debates on social and professional responsibility have proliferated in recent years both in the public sphere (e.g. in connection with corporate responsibility reports) and in more local practices (e.g. as manifested in the publication of in-house codes of conduct). However, there is little academic research on professional discourse which systematically addresses the ways in which responsibility relations are construed in language use. This volume contains a number of case studies focusing on different professional settings: media, health care and social work. The types of data examined range from globally available mass-consumed discourse (such as news agency dispatches) to local and essentially private face-to-face encounters (such as counselling sessions). The studies examine different linguistic features (such as reported speech in written texts and backchannelling in spoken encounters) and different types of meanings (such as agency and causality). The studies draw on different methodological approaches (mainly pragmatics, conversation analysis and (critical) discourse analysis). A common thread running through the contributions is that responsibility is not a stable quality of people or institutions, but a dynamic and variable resource that language users negotiate in interaction.

I Discourse and responsibility

Chapter 1: The notion of responsibility in discourse studies [+–] 3-18

Anna Solin,Jan-Ola Östman £17.50

University of Helsinki

The chapter introduces the volume Discourse and responsibility in professional settings and gives a general overview of different types of responsibility, and thus different manners in which responsibility can be approached: legal vs. moral; individual vs. collective; formal vs. substantive; and sociocultural vs. interpersonal vs. responsibility to self. The chapter further places the notion of responsibility at the heart of discourse studies and distinguishes responsibility from accountability and ethics. The central aim of the volume is to show the importance of analysing discourse from the point of view of discourse participants’ agency, accountability and responsibility and by so doing, add an important dimension to existing strands of research in discourse studies, in pragmatics, and in applied linguistics.

Chapter 2: Taking ‘responsibility’: From word to discourse [+–] 19-36

Robin Tolmach Lakoff £17.50

University of California, Berkeley

Robin Tolmach Lakoff is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests have included: Latin syntax; syntactic theory; semantics and pragmatics; language and gender; the relationships among language, gender, and power; psychotherapeutic discourse; language and law; and discourse analysis. Her publications include: Language and Woman’s Place, Talking Power, and The Language War.

The chapter explores the concept, or rather concepts, encoded in the English word ‘responsibility.’ Since at least the seventeenth century, the word has been used in two nearly antithetical ways: meaning ‘accountable for something bad,’ and ‘reliable and trustworthy.’ This conflation is not due to any historical accident (i.e., two etymologically unrelated forms falling together); but rather to the complex and contradictory ways speakers view the role of being responsible; the word’s problems arise from our psychological and interactional selves, not from language per se. The study discusses several fields in which responsibility, word and concept, plays a role, e.g. discourse analysis, literary theory, law, psychology, political science, and gender theory. It considers the relationship between what speakers use the word to mean, and their political stance, liberal or conservative. It then examines another term both speakers and linguistic analysts have found fraught with difficulty, ‘lying,’ and discusses the relationships between our difficulties in confronting both concepts, suggesting that they have something in common. Finally, the importance of coming to a clear understanding of the word and the concept in all the areas that study human communication is considered: what constitutes ‘responsible’ communication, and what does not?

Chapter 3: Owning responsible actions/selves: Role-relational trajectories in counselling for childhood genetic testing [+–] 37-63

Srikant Sarangi £17.50

Aalborg University

Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University, Wales, UK (www.cf.ac.uk/encap/research/hcrc). He is also Professor in Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Aalborg University, Denmark; and Honorary Professor at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in discourse analysis and applied linguistics; language and identity in public life and institutional/professional communication studies (e.g., healthcare, social welfare, bureaucracy, education etc.). He has held several project grants (Funding bodies include The Wellcome Trust, The Leverhulme Trust, ESRC) to study various aspects of health communication, e.g., genetic counselling, HIV/AIDS and telemedicine. The other areas of healthcare research include communication in primary care, palliative care, with particular reference to assessment of consulting and communication skills. He is author and editor of 12 books, 5 journal special issues and has published nearly 200 journal articles and book chapters. He is the founding editor of Communication & Medicine, editor of TEXT & TALK: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies (formerly TEXT) as well as co-editor (with C. N. Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. He is also general editor (with C. N. Candlin) of three book series[es]: Studies in Applied Linguistics; Studies in Language and Communication; and Studies in Communication in Organisations and Professions. He serves as an editorial board member for other journals and book series[es], and as a consulting advisor at many national and international levels. His involvement in professional societies include membership of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL, 1997-2002) and Member-at-Large of the Executive Board of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA, 1999-2002). He is also the founder of the annual interdisciplinary conference series, Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET) and Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (ALAPP). Over the last ten years, he has held visiting academic attachments in many parts of the world.

The chapter offers a role-relational perspective on responsibility, as a complement to the agency-and-intentionality dimension usually associated with responsible action. A role-relational perspective foregrounds a dynamic notion of role vis-à-vis self-other relations in owning responsible actions/selves. The counselling context of childhood genetic testing is used as a way of illustrating the complex role-relational trajectories which underpin parental accounts of moral and causal responsibility. Drawing upon the distinction between ‘excuse’ and ‘justification’ in accounting for conduct, and by adopting a thematic discourse analytic framework, the study suggests that parental accounts orient towards the following: balancing of advantages and disadvantages of childhood testing; benefits of knowing for present and future purposes; and the role-relational work underpinning the decision about testing. Although articulation of moral and causal responsibility is nuanced in parental accounts, justifications for actions/decisions mainly take the form of causal responsibility, expressed typically in the ‘if-then’ format.

II Constructing responsibility in health care and social work

Chapter 4: Negotiating parental/familial responsibility in genetic counselling [+–] 67-95

Gøril Thomassen Hammerstad,Srikant Sarangi,John-Arne Skolbekken £17.50

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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I am a Full professor in Applied Linguistics and Professional Discourse Studies, with a specialization in Health Communication. My main research areas are discourse analysis in institutional and professional domains. Based on my work on Professional Discourse Studies in various healthcare and medical settings I have engaged with how concepts like co-construction, communicative activity type, discursive power, and interactional management can be employed to understand patient participation and have practical implications for user involvement.

Aalborg University

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

John-Arne Skolbekken has a PhD in health science and is professor in the Department of Social Work and Health Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests are within modern medical risk discourse, including risk communication in such settings as advertisements for pharmaceutical products, genetic counselling and various forms of medical screening. A common theme in his research is the ethical implications of risk communication.

The notion of responsibility is central in healthcare encounters, especially when it involves decisions about others, e.g., parents making decisions for children’s wellbeing. In the context of genetic counselling, given the familial basis of genetic disorders, decisions surrounding offer/uptake of genetic testing to determine the risk status of children become salient. Previous studies have shown that both genetic counsellors and parents routinely orient to others’ perspectives. Extending Pilnick’s (2001) finding that genetic counsellors allude to ‘what other people do’, Sarangi’s (2010) proposal which distinguishes between ‘family-others’ and ‘general-others’ vis-à-vis role-responsibility offers a useful framework to examine how parental/familial responsibility is contingently negotiated between genetic counsellors and parents. The data for the present study consist of 20 genetic counselling sessions within a hospital department of medical genetics in Norway. The parents are either affected by cancer or at a high risk of inheriting cancer because of family history. Using discourse analysis we demonstrate how parental responsibility is framed and responded to differentially to cover genetic risk assessment, the testing process and the dissemination of test results. Our findings indicate that counsellors tend to be more directive about the process of decision making, which may amount to shifting attention from at-risk children to the parents themselves. We link our findings to the professional ethos of (non)directiveness in genetic counselling.

Chapter 5: Whose business is it anyway? Distributing responsibilities between family members and formal carers [+–] 96-119

Outi Jolanki £17.50

University of Jyväskylä

Outi Jolanki received her PhD in health sciences from the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she works as post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. Her research interests include family care, combining work and eldercare, the cultural meanings of old age and ageing, older people’s housing and moving decisions and qualitative methods.

This study reports on a discourse analysis of how responsibilities for the care of older people are defined and distributed in the interview talk of working caregivers in Finland. The analysis focuses on how the interviewees depict their encounters with professionals (e.g. social and health care workers) and the responsibilities attached to the position of a family member versus a professional. In the interview talk, the roles of the professionals range from authorities and experts who ally with family members to adversaries or failing experts whose actions require involvement of the client’s family members. Being a trustworthy professional requires not only having expert knowledge and technical skills but taking overall responsibility for the wellbeing of the client. The findings show that family members categorize professionals as competent or as failing to fulfil their responsibilities. The central question is whether both parties have an equal opportunity to express their views and whether open communication is possible to develop professional decision-making and client interaction.

Chapter 6: “Getting placed” in time: Responsibility talk in caseworker-client interaction [+–] 120-140

Maureen Teresa Matarese £17.50

Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

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Dr. Matarese is an Assistant Professor in Developmental Skills at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She also teaches Linguistics Foundations courses for Masters students in Bilingual Education and TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her discourse analytic, ethnographic research examines the intersection of policy and practice in institutional contexts.

The study describes one caseworker’s construction of responsibility through her interactions with three homeless clients in an urban homeless shelter, revealing the significant impact of the shelter, shelter policy, and personal contexts on the construction of responsibility in talk. It explores how responsibility is constructed through a series of discursive choices, including deontic modality, personal pronouns, expressions of time and space, and accounts. These discursive choices expose the ways in which the caseworker’s responsibility talk changes depending on the category of client. Specifically, the study compares the caseworker’s responsibility talk with an undocumented homeless client to her responsibility talk with long-term staying clients. Given policy mandates to place long-term clients (in shelter 9 months or longer) more quickly, responsibility talk with these clients as they near the 9-month benchmark is more aggressive. The study shows how the caseworker’s talk with the new undocumented client surprisingly resembles her talk with the long-term clients nearing the 9-month benchmark. She discursively treats this new undocumented client like persisting ones. “Imagined time” and “imagined space” are introduced to aid in describing the projected, future non-compliance of a new undocumented client as established in the caseworker’s responsibility talk.

Chapter 7: Reflexivity in the institution, and how it entangles with research [+–] 141-159

Chris Bulcaen £17.50

Ghent University

Chris Bulcaen is curriculum manager for the programme in Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He holds a master in African Languages and Literature (Universiteit Gent) and an M.A. in Cultural Studies (Lancaster University).

The chapter focuses on the self-reflexivity of practitioners in social work discourse, and in particular on the ways in which counsellors topicalize the institutional context in their interaction with clients and colleagues. The data come from action research at shelters for battered and homeless women, and discusses especially the counselling given to women with a migration background. Bulcaen argues that reflexivity is intrinsic to social work discourse, but asymmetrically topicalized and distributed according to perspective. The study illustrates the dilemmas that researchers may face when their analyses take on an exonerating role (e.g. by corroborating counsellors’ existing views about institutional ‘realities’), and when the research subjects’ reflexivity acts not only as an ally but as an impediment to the researcher’s ethical aims.

III Responsibility relations in the media

Chapter 8: Political interviews and responsibility: A case study of its interactional organization [+–] 163-196

Anita Fetzer £17.50

University of Augsburg

Anita Fetzer is a full professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her research interests focus on pragmatics, discourse analysis and functional grammar. She has had a series of articles published on context, political discourse, discourse relations, and the communicative act of rejection. Her most recent publications are The Pragmatics of Political Discourse (2013), Contexts and context: Parts meets whole (2011, with Etsuko Oishi), and Context and appropriateness (2007). She is editor of the book series Pragmatics & Beyond: New Series (John Benjamins). She is a member of several editorial boards, including Pragmatics & Cognition, Journal of Language and Politics (John Benjamins), Research on Language and Social Interaction (Taylor and Francis), Text & Talk (de Gruyter) and Studies in Pragmatics (Elsevier), and she is an elected member of the Consultation Board of the International Pragmatics Association.

The chapter analyses the interactional organization of responsibility in the genre and media event of political interview. Political interviews are defined as negotiating validity claims in context distinguishing between first-frame interaction (interviewer and interviewee), and media-frame interaction between first frame and media frame. The first part of the chapter examines responsibility as a concept and assigns it a presuppositional status, indexing felicity conditions. Responsibility differs from speech act theory’s individual-oriented sincerity condition in so far as it is a dialogue principle anchored to the set of coparticipants. The second part of the chapter presents a case study of the interactional organization of responsibility in political interviews and pays special reference to the communicative functions of explicit and implicit references to the media frame, such as TV, programme and institutional roles. In prototypical interviews, explicit references to the media frame tend to occur in the opening and closing sections only. If employed in a topical-sequence section, they may be used to secure the discourse common ground between first- and second-frame coparticipants supporting the interactional organization of responsibility. Alternatively, they can be used to express conversationally implicated meaning, such as challenge, criticism or irresponsibility.

Chapter 9: Roles, dramaturgy and responsibility in Swedish TV-debates [+–] 197-238

Christian Svensson Limsjö £17.50

Linköping University

Christian Svensson Limsjö is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the Department for Studies of Social Change and Culture, Linköping University, Sweden. His main research interests are in media and journalism and its relation to democracy and the public sphere. The chapter in this book builds on his PhD thesis (Samtal, deltagande och demokrati i svenska TV-debattprogram ‘Dialogue, participation and democracy in Swedish TV-debates’) in which he uses conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis to study the democratic potential of Swedish TV-debates. He has further written on narrative structures and self-presentation in crisis journalism, the use of hidden camera in investigative journalism and, more recently, on the intrinsic relationship between media and tourism and how different media agents, in various roles and functions, influence the tourism sector.

The chapter focuses on Swedish TV-debate programs which deal with current topics of societal relevance and where both official representatives and representatives of the public participate. The research interest lies in what different voices can be heard in mediated debate programs and in which ways and in what sense this is done. Using Goffman’s dramaturgical social theory and Sacks’s notion of membership categorisation, the chapter examines the possible roles and identities of the guests within the dramaturgy of the show and relates this to the distribution of responsibility and the guests’ societal roles. The analysis shows that the activity roles and the communicative limitations and expectations attached to them affect who is discursively construed as socially responsible. The recurrent distribution of activity roles (to representatives of different societal categories) also indicates a cultural understanding of how to handle, and conceive of, issues of societal responsibility. In short, we encounter a debate where different individuals and their personal experiences are construed as affected by the power elites and their decisions. The general perspective is that individuals are subjected to different problems by society and its institutions, without being able to influence them on their own. The ordinary citizen is therefore portrayed as a passive victim of a system he or she cannot influence. Citizens can only be helped by authorities changing decisions (on the initiative of media producers).

Chapter 10: Responsibility and the conventions of attribution in news agency discourse [+–] 239-258

Maija Stenvall £17.50

University of Helsinki

Maija Stenvall is a researcher in the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, at the University of Helsinki. Her doctoral thesis, published in 2011, explores objectivity and factuality in the discourse of two global news agencies, the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. She is currently working on historical news (agency) discourse.

The study examines conventions of attribution in the discourse of two global news agencies, AP (the Associated Press) and Reuters, from the point of view of responsibility. In news agency reporting, the notion of responsibility is central on various intertwining levels. At the macro-level, news agencies bear responsibility as powerful distributors of news. They are important agenda-setters for other media and they are also to a large extent responsible for creating and reinforcing conventions of news writing. At the micro-level, the study explores two kinds of responsibility in the attribution of claims: the responsibility of news actors, i.e. those who have been quoted in news reports, and the responsibility of journalists. The analysis illustrates how the traditional structure of a news report affects attribution routines. Discontinuous topic realization, together with the tendency of proceeding from general to specific, opens up various rhetorical options to the journalist and can lead to ambiguity. The study further deals with the complex issue of sharing responsibility between the journalist and the news actor, for example, when sources remain anonymous.

Chapter 11: Who has the power to act in the world? Social actors, agency and voice in a Catholic newspaper [+–] 259-284

Karin Tusting £17.50

Lancaster University

Karin Tusting received her PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University and is currently Lecturer in Linguistics and Literacy Studies at Lancaster University. Her research interests include workplace literacies, accountability and audit culture; learning and identity in communities of practice; and linguistic ethnography. Her current research focuses on academics’ everyday writing practices in university workplaces.

The chapter investigates the construction of social responsibility in a sample of articles taken from The Universe, a popular Catholic newspaper, in the late 1990s. It explores the representation of society, agency, voice, and social responsibility in a selection of articles dealing with social issues. The analysis identifies the principal social actors referred to in the texts; which of these are constructed as playing active roles; which are given voice; and for what purposes this voice is used. A distinctive pattern of construction of social responsibility is identified, in which there are three main groups of social actors: those who need help; those who are in a position to provide help (principally Governments, politicians, and multinational organisations); and those who speak on behalf of the former to the latter (principally Church organisations). The study argues that this constructs a representation of the world in which the power and responsibility to act for change is largely held by elite groups, and the role of activist organisations is largely to appeal to the powerful to change things. Ordinary people watch this happening, and those disadvantaged groups who are acted for in these texts have little or no voice or active agency.

Chapter 12: Construing professional norms in journalism: Responsibility and risk reporting [+–] 285-303

Anna Solin £17.50

University of Helsinki

The chapter explores the way journalists construe their sense of professional responsibility when they talk about practices of writing news, and particularly news about environmental risks. Reporting on risks is ubiquitous in the press and can be assumed to be influential both as agenda setting and as a source of public information and advice. The study discusses two salient norms of newswork, accuracy and autonomy, in relation to risk reporting. It analyses how journalists align themselves with such norms while also orienting to competing norms, such as the need to produce a competitive news product. The data consist of four interviews with environment and science journalists working in the UK quality press. The interview data are analysed from a discourse studies perspective. Salient tensions which emerge in the data are the tension between accuracy (e.g., avoiding exaggeration) and news values (e.g., the value of unambiguity) and the tension between autonomy and the need to produce stories which ‘interest the editor’. While ethical ideals are not construed as irrelevant, they are positioned as in conflict with local demands on writing, such as lack of time and editorial gatekeeping.

End Matter

Index [+–] 305-310

Jan-Ola Östman FREE

University of Helsinki

Reviews

Given its exploratory nature, this collection is successful in highlighting the theoretical as well as methodological implications of analysing responsibility in situated interactions that take place in professional settings. The work is therefore an excellent reference, directing readers (particularly researchers and professional practitioners in language studies and other fields) to approach professional discourse from the perspective of responsibility. Although the articles vary slightly in their respective treatment of responsibility in discourse, the volume as a whole provides a rich inter-disciplinary, and multi-cultural description of the topic.
Pragmatics and Society

This book represents a welcome advance in theoretical sociolinguistic analysis in professional workplaces. Its focus on responsibility in the professions is timely and important considering the reductionist attention to individual responsibility undergirding dominant political discourses and the widespread codification of professional responsibility in workplaces. Whereas there has been ample critical analysis of these developments in academia, there is a clear need for further investigation of their enactment in practice.
Current well-established theoretical perspectives on discursively constructed identities and positioning underpin this publication, extending the work of other research in this broader area. Its strengths lie in the contributing authors’ careful unpacking of responsibility as it is enacted dynamically across contexts in multiple workplaces. Their analyses will resonate strongly with readers’ own knowledge of professional workplaces across many sectors.
Discourse Studies

[Brings] important contributions ... by investigating the discursive construal of responsibility, a central theme in organizational contexts. The combination of theoretical exploration and real-world cases ... is a welcome addition to the body of knowledge about discursive practice in professional settings.
Discourse and Communication

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Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings

Jan-Ola Östman [+–]

University of Helsinki

Anna Solin [+–]

University of Helsinki

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