No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics
Abstract
When people respond in interaction they will invariably indicate whether they cooperate with aspects of the utterances they respond to.Keywords:language and social interaction;methods;pragmatics;research methods in applied linguistics
... Hazel, Mortensen, and Rasmussen 2014), this paper looks into the ways in which participants in the same physical location make problems related to hearing, speaking, or understanding relevant during distant meetings by constructing sequences of alignment and affiliation with each other. Both alignment and affiliation are forms of cooperation of which the former functions on the structural and the latter on the affiliative level of interaction (Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig 2006;Steensig 2012). Previous studies on multiparty interactions show that alignment and affiliation are powerful means in the organization of alliances (Kangasharju 1996(Kangasharju , 2002 and in advancing in-progress activities (e.g. ...
... Alignment and affiliation are both forms of cooperation (Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig 2006;Steensig 2012). On the structural level of social interaction alignment is about projecting mutual understanding of the unfolding of the interaction, accepting in-context roles (e.g. ...
... On the structural level of social interaction alignment is about projecting mutual understanding of the unfolding of the interaction, accepting in-context roles (e.g. speaker/hearer, chair/ participants) and supporting ongoing actions or turns-in-progress (Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig 2006;Stivers 2008;Steensig 2012;Rendle-Short, Cobb-Moore, and Danby 2014;Riordan, Kreuz, and Olney 2014). For instance, vocal continuers ('mm', 'yeah') and embodied actions, such as gaze, are common ways to facilitate the proposed action and signal focus on a speaker's turn. ...
Technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings are complex settings that involve distributed participation frameworks and the coordination of actions in multiple interactional spaces. This paper examines how problems with hearing, speaking, or understanding in the overall meeting space enable the negotiation of alignment and affiliation by co-present participants in the same local meeting space. Conversation analysis is used to investigate the local accomplishment of alignment and affiliation achieved through the sequential and temporal organization of verbal, embodied, and material resources of interaction in three types of situations: during technological trouble, silences, and disagreements. The analysis shows that the local participants draw on their physical setting and the material environment to make interactional problems relevant amongst themselves. During these parallel interactions, the co-construction of alignment and affiliation enhances the sense of local community and enables the building of alliances that are not made public in the overall meeting space.
... In light of this absence of findings linked explicitly to the current analytical focus, the following expands the discussion of the functional spectrum of interrogatives to include other disaffiliative actions -that is, actions which "[dis]agree with or take … [a different] stance as co-participants" (Steensig & Drew, 2008, p. 9). 27 Stivers (2008) discusses the terms (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation, the former referring to the "structural level of cooperation" (Stivers et al., 2011, p. 20), and the latter to "the affective level of cooperation" (Stivers et al., 2011, p. 21; see also Steensig, 2012). The following uses the terms (dis)affiliation and (dis)alignment interchangeably. ...
Strategies for successful classroom management have been readily available to practitioners for at least half a century. However, despite the vast body of knowledge available, there appears to be a great deal of scope for further research in terms of developing a more detailed understanding of the interactional details of classroom management practices. Drawing on a corpus of 58 hours of video and audio recordings in English as a Foreign Language classrooms in Germany, the book provides a micro-analytical perspective of foreign language classroom management. It contributes to the body of current research by focusing on how foreign language teachers respond to pupils’ classroom norm violations using interrogative constructions (i.e. interrogative reproaches). Through a Conversation Analytic investigation of these social actions, the paper provides valuable insights into the details of the in-situ production of classroom management strategies and their underlying interactional mechanisms.
... La afiliación se introduce dentro del marco teórico del análisis de la conversación a partir de los trabajos dedicados al estudio de la organización secuencial de las narraciones de problemas (Jefferson, 1980(Jefferson, , 1988Jefferson & Lee, 1981). En múltiples obras recientes, este fenómeno interactivo ha ganado mayor relevancia y se ha tomado como objeto central de estudio (Stivers, 2008;Heritage, 2011;Stivers, Mondada & Steensig, 2011;Couper-Kuhlen, 2012;Steensig, 2012;Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013;Peräkylä, Henttonen, Voutilainen, Kahri, Stevanovic, Sams & Ravaja, 2015;Voutilainen, Henttonen, Stevanovic, Kahri, & Peräkylä, 2019). Existen diferentes propuestas de definición de la afiliación (Jefferson, 2002;Stivers, 2008;Stivers et al., 2011;Couper-Kuhlen, 2012;Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013), pero todas ellas coinciden en identificarla como una respuesta de cariz empático o afectivo. ...
In this paper the functions of the Spanish discourse marker ¿no? are analysed from a pragmatic and an interactive perspective. Specifically, we explore the values of ¿no? taking the pragmatic phenomena of mitigation and boosting, as well as the notion of affiliation as described in conversation analysis. The previous literature devoted to the study of this linguistic form has consistently identified its uses as a confirmation request or a phatic device (Fuentes, 1990, 2009; Santos Río, 2003; García Vizcaíno, 2005; Montañez, 2008, 2015; Rodríguez Muñoz, 2009; Móccero, 2010; Santana, 2017). This work, however, analyses how the mitigating uses interact and share features with neighbouring categories such as boosting and affiliation. As a result, this allows not only to gain a better grasp of how ¿no? works, but also to establish how these concepts interact and intersect with each other.
... Instead of complaining about his (understandably) miserable behavior, she expresses compassion for him and enjoins the others to put themselves in his shoes ('Can you imagine?'). Other team members, especially PHARM, encourage her compassionate emplotting of the patient's perspective through affiliative conversational moves such as 'Yeah' and 'Oh!' (Steensig, 2012), thereby marking their agreement. ...
How can interprofessional health care teams be more patient-centered in their team talk in the clinical backstage? This article addresses this question in the practice of an acute care team to achieve a twofold purpose. First, we develop the notion of joint emplotment to conceptualize our observations of how acute care teams work out understandings of the patient’s situation through narrative practice, in particular in rapid-paced daily interprofessional team meetings. Second, we draw on illustrative data from a longitudinal naturalistic study of communication in interprofessional team meetings in acute care to demonstrate the usefulness of this conceptual lens for investigating a core element of patient-centered care, namely how different perspectives of the patient’s situation are made relevant and meaningful in team talk. Thus, this article makes important contributions to the literature on the role of communication in interprofessional collaboration and provides useful recommendations for practice.
... Assim, expressar um ponto de vista compatível com aquele construído por quem acabou de contar uma história, por exemplo, é considerado uma ação afiliativa. Para Steensig (2012), turnos afiliativos em segunda posição são os que (a) demonstram empatia, (b) oferecem suporte a posicionamentos, e (c) mostram-se colaborativos com a preferência das ações. ...
This article investigates interactions between oncologists and women patients of breast cancer in follow up appointments along their treatment or post treatment follow up appointments. In particular, we analyze how patients and physicians interactionally deal with the impossibility of certainty within this context. We also discuss on the implications of such interactional management for the medical practice. The theoretical and methodological perspective is that of Conversation Analysis or Talk in Interaction (SACKS, 1992). The interactions analyzed (24 audiorecorded consultations) were collected at a hospital in Southern Brazil, transcribed by using the conversation analytical conventions (JEFFERSON, 1984), and then analyzed. The analysis reveals the means by which the actions of evaluating and requesting for evaluation undertaken by oncologists and patients operate so as to deal with the impossibility of certainty in these consultations. In
the management of uncertainty in the oncological consultations, the analysis also shows which and how positive evaluations produced by the physicians might have interactionally-demonstrated tranquilizing or
alleviating consequences to the patients.
... Assim, expressar um ponto de vista compatível com aquele construído por quem acabou de contar uma história, por exemplo, é considerado uma ação afiliativa. Para Steensig (2012), turnos afiliativos em segunda posição são os que (a) demonstram empatia, (b) oferecem suporte a posicionamentos, e (c) mostram-se colaborativos com a preferência das ações. ...
Este artigo apresenta a investigação de interações entre oncologistas e mulheres com câncer de mama em consultas de acompanhamento ao longo de seus tratamentos ou de revisão. Especificamente, analisa-se como pacientes e médicos lidam interacionalmente com a impossibilidade de certezas nesse contexto. Além disso, reflete-se brevemente sobre as implicações desse gerenciamento para a prática médica na oncologia. A metodologia utilizada advém da abordagem teórico-metodológica da Análise da Conversa ou Fala-em-Interação (SACKS, 1992). Os dados (24 consultas gravadas em áudio) foram gerados em um hospital da região sul do Brasil, transcritos segundo convenções próprias da área (JEFFERSON, 1984) e então analisados. A análise revela como as ações de avaliação e solicitação de avaliação realizadas por oncologistas e pacientes operam de forma a lidar com a impossibilidade da certeza nas consultas. No gerenciamento das incertezas envolvidas em consultas oncológicas, a análise também revela que e como as avaliações positivas produzidas pelos médicos podem ter consequências tranquilizadoras para a paciente.
... When the previous language choice is followed, we say that the speaker aligns himself or herself with the choice of the interlocutor. By alignment we mean cooperation at the level of the structure that facilitates the exchange (Stivers, 2008:31;Steensig, 2012), defined as a means to facilitate cooperation among interlocutors (Stivers, Mondada and Steensig, 2011:20). ...
This paper investigates what form journalistic questioning takes within the international press corps when representatives of different press systems work in close proximity. Within the U.S. context, adversarial questioning is valued as a key resource to ensure an independent press. Yet independent journalism is not universally upheld in media systems worldwide; Russian officials have explicitly criticized adversarial reporting by Western journalists in their coverage of Russian affairs. Questions posed to Russian Presidents Putin and Medvedev in G8/G20 press conferences 2000–2015 were assessed for two indicators: (a) initiative, and (b) critical content, with the aim to determine whether journalistic practice will converge in an international context, and whether the rise in adversarialness documented within U.S. presidential press conferences parallels a more general international phenomenon. Findings show a significant increase in both indicators over time and by presidential term. Questioning practices exhibited by Russian, non-Western, and Western journalists are discussed.
In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages (Danish, Estonian and Finnish) we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to be either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses.
In this article I analyze the family language policy of trilingual transnational families (Arabic, Turkish, French or German) through a comparative study of their intergenerational language practices in France and Germany. This study is based on a multi-sited ethnography, with recordings of individual interviews and socially situated heterogeneous language practices involving two families of three generations with similar trajectories and socioeconomic and linguistic profiles. The analyses of their language practices demonstrate that family language policy is based on individual freedom of choice; it is not explicit, fixed or rigid but unconstrained and ?uctuating. With respect to the inherited familial languages, contrary to expectations, I observe that they are maintained relatively well, especially in the case of Arabic; this is true even for the youngest participants, the third generation. I show that the factor supporting the maintenance of Arabic in the third generation is the grandparents’ alignment with the youngest participants’ language choice as well as their caring attitude, expressed mainly in Arabic, but also, though less regularly, in Turkish.
It is customary for an Alzheimer patient to be accompanied by a family member or companion during appointments with his or her physician. This three-way consultation allows the doctor to interview the patient while the companion witnesses the interaction, having the opportunity to
then confirm, modify and, at times, correct the patient’s answers, thus informing the doctor’s ongoing evaluation of the patient. In sequential terms, the doctor questions the patient, setting up a dyadic relationship in which they are ratified speakers, whereas the co-present companion
orients to the role of bystander. These endogenous categories are frequently renegotiated by the patient who projects initiation of a multi-participant conversation, looking to the companion for assistance, thereby mobilizing the categorization device “patient/caregiver” and orienting to a search for the “right” response to the doctor’s questions. Although this is not an improper action per se — the patient is calling on the epistemic resources of his interactional environment for-allpractical-
purposes — the physician and the companion treat these attempts as a forbidden misalignment, which in turn generates a side sequence of disagreement that we describe within the ethnomethodologically inspired perspective of Conversation Analysis. The doctor and
companion, on the other hand, exhibit their mutual alignment along a common sequential and categorial trajectory as they marshal both verbal and multimodal interactional resources to locally redefine the endogenous categories and the categorization device “patient/witness” thus orienting to the proper goals of the consultation at this occasion. In addition to analyzing this practical accomplishment, our study invites reflection as to the recognizability of the doctor’s questions
by the patient who seems not to categorize the interview as an evaluation activity.
The growing use of peer observation in teacher professional development has created an interest in understanding how it is carried out and what the benefits are. Post-observation feedback is a crucial component of peer observation practices. This study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of peer observation feedback in foreign language teacher’s professional development. Adopting a conversation analysis perspective, we aim to establish how the interactional infrastructure is developed between observers and observees after a negative assessment during peer observation feedback. The results show that, when the observer is assessing a specific teaching action negatively and the observee expresses alignment with the observer’s position, the observer adopts an affiliative stance through the use of his/her epistemic expertise in two ways: either putting his/her self in the shoes of the observee or, in other cases, expressing the affiliative stance by appealing to the epistemic community to which they both belong.
Resumen
Este trabajo tiene dos objetivos. Desde el punto de vista conceptual, nos proponemos contribuir al conocimiento del concepto de voz y su construcción conversacional a partir de la (des)afiliación y el (des)alineamiento en el proceso de validación o rechazo de la voz de los participantes. Desde el punto de vista práctico, esperamos contribuir al desarrollo de los métodos de la investigación participativa, entendidos en ciencias sociales como una metodología de investigación y aprendizaje colectivo, a partir del análisis crítico de un caso.
Para ello, adoptamos sobre el análisis de la interacción verbal un punto de vista discursivo que nos permite definir el concepto de voz como un conjunto de regularidades semióticas que indexicalizan una trayectoria biográfica a través de los discursos sociales que la componen. De este modo, la voz individual es producto de la trayectoria social -y discursiva- del hablante, la cual, al recibir validación o rechazo de los demás participantes, se pone a prueba en cada interacción. En ese sentido, proponemos que la (des)afiliación y el (des)alineamiento conversacionales permiten validar o rechazar las dimensiones de voz propuestas por el hablante.
Exploraremos esta hipótesis en un corpus de reuniones de un proyecto de investigación participativa desarrollado en Buenos Aires, Argentina, con la participación de investigadoras e investigadores académicos y dirigentes sindicales, deteniéndonos especialmente en el caso de una de las participantes, que abandonó el proyecto al poco tiempo de comenzar.
In this paper, we demonstrate how the collaborative and sequential unfolding of a story ties into the constitution of a membership categorization device which we have glossed as ‘us and them’. The data come from a focus group activity where first and second generation immigrants to Denmark have been asked to discuss their situation in Denmark. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation and Membership Categorization Analysis, we present one story which involves a story-teller and his family and an elderly Danish couple living in the same block of flats. In the telling of the story, co-participants align and affiliate, and disalign and disaffiliate, at sequentially relevant junctions. We will argue that not only do such phenomena indicate listenership and possible agreement to the moral of the story in its telling, but also to the morally implicative categorical work involved in the story’s telling.
The authors sought to study underlying processes of alliance
formation, a multimethod and multimodal research procedure
was developed and applied to a 6-minute episode from
one couple therapy case. The participants were a couple and
two male cotherapists. The interaction was analyzed at the
levels of the conversational exchange, bodily postures, and
movements, and autonomic nervous system responses. Data
were also obtained from stimulated recall interviews and an
alliance measure. When there were clear markers of alliance in
a dyad’s conversation, markers of nonverbal synchrony (such
as posture or movement mirroring, or sympathetic nervous
system synchrony) were also observed in one or several
modalities. Moreover, markers of nonverbal synchrony were
often observed, not only between those who participated
actively on the conversational level but also between listeners.
These markers of nonverbal alliance served important balancing functions by providing support and maintaining the connection to a client. Even more than previously assumed,
implicit nonverbal attunement between clients and therapists
may be relevant in the formation of the therapeutic alliance
The present study takes a reflexive approach to the analysis of coordinated identity work in qualitative interviews in 2 study abroad (SA) contexts, Argentina and Germany. To do this, the authors bring together 2 autoethnographic projects and take a collaborative approach (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013; Lapadat, 2017) to the analysis of semi‐structured interviews and identity memos (Maxwell, 2013) collected in their respective SA contexts. The results of an interactionally grounded analysis show that cross‐sectionally, in qualitative interviews with SA students, different facets of one researcher's national identity became relevant and were contested, affecting how she approached this topic and her participants across multiple interviews. The results also show that longitudinally, in qualitative interviews with 1 SA student over time, different facets of the other researcher's professional identity became relevant and affected how she approached particular topics with her participant over time. The findings reveal that researcher identity work and the co‐constructed nature of interviews result in qualitatively different interview data (e.g., in terms of elaboration, openness, and language use) made available for analysis.
In this paper, we identify and describe a new practice for responding to unfinished requests, which we call telescoping responses, due to their being designed for telescoping the request sequence forward in the face of troubles with progressivity and in producing the request. Considering cases from an American shoe repair shop, we demonstrate that telescoping responses serve to telescope request sequences exactly because they are neither syntactically, prosodically or pragmatically fitted to the unfinished requests that they respond to.
There's something about meetings that makes researchers and participants want to change them, control them, order them, and make them predictable. But there is also something about meetings that makes them resist these efforts at change, improvement, order, and predictability. In this chapter I explore the impact of this order-disorder dynamic on the study of meetings and suggest some reasons why investigators have been concerned with ordering meetings and continually troubled by the disorder that meetings may produce. This volume illustrates how our understanding of meetings in the workplace is both broadened and complicated when meetings are conceptualized as communicative events and when the focus is on examining “what happens before, during, and after meetings in the workplace” (see Chapter 1). This approach requires researchers to challfree the dominant urge to order meetings while at the same time emphasizing the importance of understanding the production and value of meeting disorder. I suggest that the order-disorder dynamic may be related to a series of “folk theories” about meetings, as well as the role of individuals in organizations, and I discuss the ways that individual chapters in this volume contest the folk theories that have been so prominent in guiding our research theories.
This chapter explores factors that may enhance or inhibit creativity in team meetings. Teams may have additional creative performance benefits compared to individuals, but research on creativity at the team level has not found consistent results. In past research, the context in which teams work has received limited attention, and no research has focused exclusively on creativity in the context of meetings directly. The purpose of this chapter is address that research gap. We begin with a definition of creativity and a discussion of its importance to organizations. We then discuss the ways in which meetings provide the opportunity for teams to be creative. Specifically, we review the cognitive process of creativity, including problem identification and construction, identification of relevant information, generation of new ideas, and the evaluation of these ideas. Next, we outline the social processes that take place in team meetings, including communication, trust and psychological safety, team support for innovation, and team conflict. Finally, we provide recommendations for facilitating creativity in team meetings.
Meeting effectiveness can be enhanced when member expertise is used effectively. This requires that the group be composed of participants who possess the needed expertise and that meeting procedures encourage the use of expertise. Patterns of uneven participation and tendencies for participants to discuss common knowledge rather than unique knowledge limit the extent of expertise available to the group as a whole. Social and political factors can further limit the discussion and use of information. Meeting procedures that promote problem analysis, generation of multiple ideas, thorough and candid evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of various options, and action planning promote greater use of expertise and enhance meeting effectiveness.
Meetings consist of people talking to each other. While they talk, they also make use of other resources. They use embodied resources such as gaze, gesture, and body posture, and they make use of artifactual and spatial aspects. This chapter deals with meeting interaction from a multimodal perspective focusing on the orderly and structured ways in which meeting participants make use of themselves and the world around them to accomplish meeting-relevant activities. It starts with an introduction to basic conversation analytic assumptions that are of relevance for a multimodal approach to meetings, followed by an outline of the central steps in the move to a multimodal perspective within conversation analysis. It then presents central studies on meetings applying a multimodal perspective. This is followed by a brief discussion of some of the challfrees related to data collection, data transcription, and analysis when a multimodal perspective is applied. Finally, two excerpts from two different sets of strategy meetings are analyzed to illustrate how a multimodal conversation analysis can contribute to meeting research.
Debriefs are an effective tool for increasing learning and performance within organizations. They are regarded as “one of the most promising methods for accelerating learning from experience” (Eddy, Tannenbaum, & Mathieu, 2013, p. 976), and meta-analytic evidence supports their effectiveness (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). Research also suggests that the success of a debrief is reliant on proper execution techniques. In this chapter, we identify and define debriefs and review scientifically supported strategies for achieving a well-executed debrief. Moreover, we present a table of recommendations based on this review of the debrief literature. Our intention is that these recommendations will serve as guidelines for the practical application of debriefs.
Hybrid meetings – a combination of virtual and face-to-face attendance – represent an increasingly popular form of meeting. This chapter reviews factors that we contend are instrumental in the effectiveness of such meetings. It is important that the decision to hold a meeting with virtual presence is congruent with the meeting type or purpose and attendee goals; this chapter also acknowledges the contribution of attendee behaviors and cultural styles of communication to the effectiveness of hybrid meetings. Future research directions, emphasizing the importance of taking a holistic approach, are discussed.
Virtual teams, whose members may be freaged in interdependent tasks while geographically dispersed, are highly prevalent workgroups within organizations today. Because these global virtual teams must rely on technology to fulfill team goals across time and space, they may warrant unique meeting styles and structure. This chapter reviews the literature on virtual team meetings, providing evidence regarding the factors that may aid in the facilitation of such meetings based on existing research, and offers practitioners and professionals guidelines for successfully facilitating virtual team meetings. Drawing on previous meeting and global virtual team research, we make the following recommendations: Select a facilitator, select appropriate information and communication technology, set meeting norms, set and reinforce team roles, acknowledge time zone and cultural differences, and follow up with action items.
In this chapter, we explore the role of team diversity as an input factor for organizational meeting processes and outcomes. Team diversity refers to aggregated differences among group members that can be either relations oriented (social category diversity; e.g., age, gender, race) or task oriented (functional diversity; e.g., education, functional background, tenure). We posit that these two diversity dimensions may have either positive or negative effects on meeting effectiveness contingent on various contextual conditions. Specifically, we argue that interaction processes taking place in team meetings constitute the mediating link between diversity as an input factor and meeting outcomes. Based on this assumption, we develop a model linking both types of diversity to functional versus dysfunctional interactions in meetings. We use this model to derive a number of propositions regarding the links between diversity as an input factor, interaction processes during meetings as mediating mechanisms, and meeting outcomes. By connecting the dots between team diversity and meeting dynamics, we aim to deepen our understanding of the role of participants' diversity in meetings and inspire future research testing the suggested propositions.
Emotion regulation is the human ability to manipulate or control the experience of and the expression of emotions. Recent research demonstrates that emotion regulation occurs in workplace meetings. In this chapter, we describe workplace meetings as emotion regulation episodes and construct a multilevel conceptual model of emotion regulation in workplace meetings. Drawing on status characteristics theories, we develop a series of propositions to suggest that power and status dynamics are predictive of emotion regulation in workplace meetings. We also propose individual (e.g., personality) and group-level (e.g., psychological safety climate) differences that may affect the relationship between status and emotion regulation. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of emotion regulation in workplace meetings and provide suggestions for meeting facilitators.
Previous research on work meetings has mainly been conducted in the Anglo-Saxon context. In this chapter, we add an international perspective that addresses this question: Does the national context of the meeting influence how it is structured and perceived? We provide a descriptive-comparative empirical analysis of differences and commonalities in both structural (i.e., size, lfreth, frequency, lateness, the use of an agenda, and action points) and psychological (i.e., participation, satisfaction, and mood) meeting characteristics. Our analysis is based on a survey study with 710 participants from 45 countries. We first provide a comparison using a framework that classifies cultures according to the dimensions of space, time, and context using seven country clusters identified in the GLOBE study: Anglo (n = 91), Confucian Asia (n = 94), Eastern Europe (n = 242), Germanic Europe (n = 136), Latin Europe (n = 37), Middle East (n = 33), and Northern Europe (n = 70). We found important similarities, but also noteworthy differences in work meetings between locations. We discuss the emerging profile of cross-cultural meeting similarities and differences in light of their theoretical and managerial implications and provide ideas for future research on meetings across cultures.
Premeeting talk (PMT) consists of the verbal and behavioral interactions that occur before a meeting begins. Such talk can be classified as one of four types: Small talk, meeting preparatory talk, shop talk, and work talk. Empirical research on PMT is still in its preliminary stages; thus far, only two studies have focused on PMT, and only small talk has been found to be a significant predictor of meeting effectiveness, above and beyond good meeting procedures. Although PMT is often considered to be insignificant and trivial, initial research on the small talk variation suggests that it has the potential to positively affect an upcoming meeting. Theoretical support for the effects of PMT can be found in a variety of mechanisms, including those found in research on the ripple effect, affective events theory, setting the tone in groups/teams, and emotional contagion. We discuss why investigating how each variant of PMT may be influenced by personality factors is an area that merits further attention, as well as why certain PMT findings in one setting may not be generalizable to other environments. Finally, we conclude the chapter by discussing the future direction of PMT research and provide practical suggestions for managers.
Experienced leaders with decades of successfully leading organizations are much more likely today than in the past to make poor decisions or to be unceremoniously removed from their positions of authority. The underlying causes of these actions seem to be the failure to realize that complexity is the “new norm.” The new norm is responsible for subtle changes that are affecting meeting process, team composition, and the way problem solvers need to view the world as it grows more diverse. This chapter provides an understanding of the causes and impacts of complex systems on modern meeting planning. It introduces the concepts of a collective knowledge team (CKT) that uses diversities in a positive way to solve complex, nonlinear problems and of cognitive style theory as a powerful tool for managing team diversity and change. It also identifies 10 team task and work task competencies that appear to be crucial to team process success. Finally, it presents a complex meeting process model that incorporates complex theory, team and cognitive theory, critical skills and competencies, and the management of diversity and change into a meeting process model that, when used effectively, could increase success in modern-day problem solving.
Collaboration is a ubiquitous phenomenon in organizations that often takes place in the setting of a meeting. Organizations use meetings as a focal point to bring people together to collaborate, coordinate, plan, or accomplish some result. This chapter focuses on a specific type of meeting: Co-creation meetings, where teams collaborate to produce tangible deliverables. The chapter begins with a discussion of co-creation meetings and the role of facilitation in leading groups in these settings. We then introduce two key concepts to support facilitators. First, patterns of collaboration are the building blocks of the collaboration process in a co-creation meeting. Second, the ThinkLets pattern language represents a collection of codified packets of facilitation skills to achieve predictable, repeatable patterns of collaboration. Thinklets can be used as a form of collaboration Lego to design and execute co-creation meetings. To illustrate the applicability of ThinkLets, we present a case study with the American Telehealth Association (ATA). We discuss our use of ThinkLets in the design of four collaborative writing workshops, specifically, meeting process design, results, and participant perceptions. We conclude with an examination of the broader applications of ThinkLets, including other types of co-creation meetings, some limitations of the work presented here, and directions for future research.
As a relatively new field of scientific study, many questions persist regarding meeting science. For example, what meetings science is, who meeting scientists are, and what distinguishes meeting science from other related fields of inquiry. The purpose of this chapter is to address these commonly asked questions. In this chapter we review what meeting science is, discuss the nascent nature of the field, describe who meeting scientists are and what they do, and disentangle the relationship between meeting science and team science. To close, we outline directions for future meetings research.
Team meetings are affect-laden environments where team members may motivate and energize, or frustrate and agitate each other. The importance of affect in teams generally and in team meetings particularly has led to a growing body of research that focuses on group affect. Existing conceptual and empirical work has contributed to our understanding of the nature of group affect and its implications for critical organizational phenomena, including emotion convergence and divergence, emotional contagion, emotional norms, and leadership. In this chapter, we review and integrate this literature and suggest directions for future research on affective dynamics during team meetings. We first briefly review contemporary research that has used a compositional approach to group affect. We highlight the need for a dynamic approach to group affect and call for more research in this area. We assess what has been learned and discuss suggestions for future theoretical development and methodological approaches for meetings researchers invested in this important interpersonal, dynamic construct.
This chapter offers an overview of the unique contributions of conversation analysis (CA) to research on the science of meetings. We introduce CA as a sociological framework for studying the structures and processes of talk and interaction, showing how this approach enriches our understanding of human activity in meeting interaction. Following a sketch of CA theory and method and the ways that basic interactional mechanisms are adapted to meetings, we review CA research on face-to-face meetings, including practices for distributing turns at talk, the interactional constitution of organizational identities, practices for displaying affect and building relationships with team members, and interactional resources for decision-making in meetings. Moving into current developments in CA and meetings, we detail one interactional strategy used to manage disagreement during decision-making episodes in scientific peer review meetings. This involves the use of " formulations, " discourse practices in which interactants summarize and paraphrase the prior talk of other participants. We provide initial evidence of the use of formulations in peer review meetings to collaboratively navigate interactional troubles, allowing participants to work toward resolution of trouble, move ahead in the progression of meetings, and to possibly introduce individual biases into meeting deliberations and decision-making.
This first volume to analyze the science of meetings offers a unique perspective on an integral part of contemporary work life. More than just a tool for improving individual and organizational effectiveness and well-being, meetings provide a window into the very essence of organizations and employees' experiences with the organization. The average employee attends at least three meetings per week and managers spend the majority of their time in meetings. Meetings can raise individuals, teams, and organizations to tremendous levels of achievement. However, they can also undermine effectiveness and well-being. The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science assembles leading authors in industrial and organizational psychology, management, marketing, organizational behavior, anthropology, sociology, and communication to explore the meeting itself, including pre-meeting activities and post-meeting activities. It provides a comprehensive overview of research in the field and will serve as an invaluable starting point for scholars who seek to understand and improve meetings.
Meetings are not static events, but instead are dynamic in nature. The course of the meeting is affected by participants' responses to one another. In this chapter, we argue that these responses among meeting participants can be understood as ties in an interaction network. This network perspective to meeting interaction allows us to focus on the relationships and connections between meeting participants who are embedded in a web of interrelations. Social network analysis helps us systematically uncover these connections. By applying social network analysis to meeting interaction, we take into account the relational nature of social interaction and use a structural perspective to meeting interaction. In this chapter, we introduce the central principles of the network perspective and explain how meetings can be conceptualized as social networks. Next, we focus on typical social network measures and explore how these network measures can be applied to meeting interaction. We further provide a detailed example to showcase how social network analysis can be applied to real team meeting data. We close this chapter by discussing the benefits and challfrees of using social network analysis in team meetings.
In this article I examine one practice speakers have for confirming when confirmation was not otherwise relevant. The practice involves a speaker repeating an assertion previously made by another speaker in modified form with stress on the copula/auxiliary. I argue that these modified repeats work to undermine the first speaker's default ownership and rights over the claim and instead assert the primacy of the second speaker's rights to make the statement. Two types of modified repeats are identified: partial and full. Although both involve competing for primacy of the claim, they occur in distinct sequential environments: The former are generally positioned after a first claim was epistemically downgraded, whereas the latter are positioned following initial claims that were offered straightforwardly, without downgrading.
Within the general framework of agreement on a state of affairs, the matter of the terms of agreement can remain: determining whose view is the more significant or more authoritative with respect to the matter at hand. In this paper we focus on this issue as it is played out in assessment sequences. We examine four practices through which a second speaker can index the independence of an agreeing assessment from that of a first speaker, and in this way can qualify the agreement. We argue that these practices reduce the responsiveness of the second assessment to the first; in this way they resist any claim to epistemic authority that may be indexed by the first speaker in “going first” in assessing some state of affairs.
In responses to English questions, prefacing with the particle oh indicates that, from the viewpoint of the answerer, a question is problematic in terms of its relevance, presuppositions, or context. In addition, oh-prefacing is used to foreshadow reluctance to advance the conversational topic invoked by a question; it may also be part of a “trouble-premonitory” response to various types of How are you inquiries in conversational openings and elsewhere. (Conversation analysis, English, utterance design, particles.)
Through stories, tellers communicate their stance toward what they are reporting. Story recipients rely on different interactional resources to display alignment with the telling activity and affiliation with the teller's stance. In this article, I examine the communication resources participants to tellings rely on to manage displays of alignment and affiliation during the telling. The primary finding is that whereas vocal continuers simply align with the activity in progress, nods also claim access to the teller's stance toward the events (whether directly or indirectly). In mid-telling, when a recipient nods, she or he claims to have access to the teller's stance toward the event being reported, which in turn conveys preliminary affiliation with the teller's position and that the story is on track toward preferred uptake at story completion. Thus, the concepts of structural alignment and social affiliation are separate interactional issues and are managed by different response tokens in the mid-telling sequential environment.
A number of Conversation Analytic studies have documented that question recipients have a variety of ways to push against the constraints that questions impose on them. This article explores the concept of transformative answers – answers through which question recipients retroactively adjust the question posed to them. Two main sorts of adjustments are discussed: question term transformations and question agenda transformations. It is shown that the operations through which interactants implement term transformations are different from the operations through which they implement agenda transformations. Moreover, term-transforming answers resist only the question’s design, while agenda-transforming answers effectively resist both design and agenda, thus implying that agenda-transforming answers resist more strongly than design-transforming answers. The implications of these different sorts of transformations for alignment and affiliation are then explored.
This paper is an investigation of conversations in which people talk about their troubles. I describe a series of recurrent, positioned elements as comprising a "candidate" troubles telling sequence. That is, the collection of troubles tellings showed a shape and a trajectory that was well-formed in some conversations and distorted in others. Thus, the array of elements in the sequence could be characterized as "vaguely orderly." I consider whether this is due to a "rough" ordering of "big packages" in conversation (i.e., relatively long sequences of talk), or due to problematic local and general contingencies that disrupt an otherwise tight overall design.
This study investigates uses of the response-token ‘no’ by British and American speakers. Results of the study indicate that the token is used differently by members of those two cultures: ubiquitously—as a ‘continuer’—by the British, and selectively—as an ‘affiliative’—by Americans.