1 - workplace communication

Workplace communication:an Introduction

Lingua Inglese IIGiuliana Garzone

April 2011

Based on: Domain-Specific English and Language Mediation in Professional and Institutional Settings

Workplaces

Workplaces: places where people are engaged in work.

In social terms: a workplace is an institution where resources are negotiated, problems are solved, power is exercised, professional identities are constructed and played out, mainly through verbal interaction.

Definition of workplace

Not only the physical location of the organisation or business concern, but also professional services that fall within the scope of its activities, but are performed outside it, e.g. professional visits to a client's home.

Workplace communication

In workplaces people are engaged in a set of communicative practices:

talk (face-to-face and indirect or remote interaction, e.g. telephone conversations)

production and reception of texts: letters, memoranda, instructions, regulations, etc. (cf. Sarangi - Roberts 1999: 2).

The concept of interaction order

Workplaces are highly regulated environments (even when they are informal). So interactions follow explicit and – more often – implicit rules.

From the viewpoint of communication, every workplace setting is characterised by its own interaction order − to use Goffman's term (1972).

Interaction order

The interaction order in a given workplace setting is the order implicitly regulating specific communicative practices in that setting and relies on an interaction-based notion of talk. (Sarangi and Roberts 1999: 2)

Interaction order

It sees interpersonal relations not as given and fixed, but rather actively produced by participants in the interaction itself.

This concept is based on Goffman’s theory of the self as an actor that plays a role which is defined and redefined in an interaction. (Goffman 1959)

Institutional order

Whereas the interaction order is the order regulating social relations in general, worplace settings are also defined by institutional order.

Institutional order operates at a higher level overarching that of interaction order.

Institutional order: definition

It comprises the whole set of interaction orders, i.e. shared habitual practices, which govern people's behaviour within a given institution and is the result of its history and its general organisation.

(to be noted: both concepts are based on Foucault’s concept of “order of discourse”)

Institutional order vs interaction order

When acting in an organisation, people rely both on interaction order (face-to-face encounters with individuals or in groups), but also on their knowledge of how the institution functions.

For instance, they know what the appropriate procedure is to get something done and they will structure their talk accordingly.

Knowledge about institutional order

Members of an institution know how to call things, how to apply institutional labels and categories and they can recognise such labels and categories, when they are applied by colleagues.

This concept is similar to that of organisational culture, developed specifically for companies and business concerns.

Institutional discourseIt is generated within the framework of an

institutional order.

It comprises “those features which are attributed to institutional practice, either manifestly or covertly, by professionals (and clients). […] In social-theoretical terms … this will be characterised by rational, legitimate accounting practices which are authoritatively backed up by a set of rules and regulations governing an institution” (Sarangi-Roberts 1999: 15)

Recontextualization of knowledge

professional knowledge usually has to be recontextualised as institutional knowledge.e.g. doctors have to re-code the information they collect from patients in order to transfer it into institutional record-keeping lawyers and judges have to organise the elements they collect from clients into a "case" and their investigations into appropriate and coherent documents

Instances of professional discourse

Instances of professional discourse:doctor-patient or lawyer-client

conversations,doctors' discussion and categorisation of

patients' complaints,immigration officers' discussing a

problematic case, etc.

Institutional order and professional discourse

Notice that institutional order predominates over professional discourses

This is because "professions are regulated discursively by a higher order" (Sarangi - Roberts 1999: 19).

Workplace communication research

In terms of research domains, the study of institutional order is predominantly a field of interest of sociology

Linguists, on the other hand, have usually focussed on interaction order

Most widely investigated themes

In particular, in the field of worplace communication, attention has been mainly paid to three types of interaction:

1. Professional-lay encounters

2. Communication within professional groups;

3. Communication across professional groups

A case study: orders and discourses in helpline call

Typical client-consultant interaction orderRequest for advice;Context constructed entirely in the conversation;

Interplay between interactional and institutional order (think of the way in which H frames himself)

professional discourse and institutional discourse

A case study: orders and discourses in helpline call

Structure of a helpline call:caller requests advicehelper offers advicecaller accepts advice

before 3. there could beone 'third turn' option that is open to the first

speaker is the explicit correction of repair of any misunderstanding which was displayed in the second speaker's turn (Heritage 1984a)

A case study: orders and discourses in helpline call – cont. 2

I. Caller requests advice

First part of adjacency pair 1

II. Helper offers advice

Second part of adjacency pair 1 = first part of adjacency pair 2

III. Caller accepts advice

Second part of adjacency pair 2

Three moves = two adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schlegoff and Jefferson 1974)


More in detail

2-6a Request for advice 25b6a-b

Story prefaceStoryRequest proper

7-13 Insertion sequence 1012

3 adjacency pairsunpacking of storyC's weak report of store's no acceptance of fault


14-26 Advice given 14-2324-26

General explanation - technical termsSpecific, practical suggestion

27-36 C's counter-position

27-3536

New unpacking of the storyCounter-position

37-52 Negotiation of C's counter-position

37-514752

H's repetitionInterrupted byC's attempt to repair (with overlapping)acceptance of H's position


52-54b

C's weak acceptance (always present in helpline calls

54c Insertion sequence: C's reassessment of her previous report at 12

55-59 H's suggestion to renegotiate with storeLeaves matters pending


Advice is only partly negotiated; H has a unilateral stance, which is the result of his institutional position -

He is at pains not to take sides (helplines can be contacted by stores, too)

It is also part of his institutional position that he cannot resolve the dispute, but only advise.


So he negotiates, taking in the first part the position of the store, in the second part that of the client-

The locally produced and interactionally-achieved discourse structure of the helpline call exhibits stable patterns of discourse structures.

The calls make visible and reproduce the institutional framework within which they are embedded.

References:Sacks H., Schlegloff E., Jefferson G. (1974), A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-talking for conversation, Language, 50(4), 696-735.Gulliver P.H. (1979), Disputes and Negotiations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, New York, Academic Press.Heritage J. (1984), Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, Cambridge, Polity.

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