Karen Tracy

Emotion labor at 911: A case study and theoretical critique

Abstract This study of 911 call‐takers describes the different ways human feeling is understood, expressed and managed in the emotionally‐charged atmosphere of an emergency 911 communications center. After reviewing past work on emotion labor and organizational burnout, we describe the data, qualitative methods, and the role of call‐takers at Citywest Emergency Center. The heart of the paper is a description of the emotional landscape at 911, the organizations emotion rules, and the communicative devices call‐takers use to manage their emotion. Based upon this 911 case, we critique several assumptions made in past emotion labor and organizational burnout studies. The paper concludes with implications for emergency communications call‐taking.

Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis

Action-implicative discourse analysis is the name for a new type of discourse analysis, developed to be useful in the critique and cultivation of communicative practices in society. Developed within the metatheoretical framework of grounded practical theory, an extension and formalization of Craigs earlier ideas about communication as a practical discipline, action-implicative discourse analysis seeks to characterize the communicative problems, conversational techniques, and situated ideals of communicative practices. After overviewing the methods metatheoretical framework, the article proceeds to highlight what is distinctive about this new method. By comparing and contrasting action-implicative discourse analysis with four markedly different discourse analytic approaches-conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology-the article seeks to make the methodological approachs distinctive character visible. The articles final section explicates criteria that could be used in assessing interpretive discourse approaches generally, and action-implicative discourse analysis in particular.

Meetings: Discursive Sites for Building and Fragmenting Community

Meetings are talk-saturated events in which people come together to tackle a variety of explicit goals and tacit concerns. They enable accomplishments of people’s most valued ideals (e.g., democracy, voice); at the same time, meetings are also practices that are the frequent objects of derision and complaint. The review synthesizes and critiques descriptive and normative ideas about meetings, drawing on both academic and popular literature. After a definitional discussion of the term and a brief history of how meetings came to be, the chapter turns to its main focus: the routine and problematic practices of organizational work meetings and public meetings. Within each type, special attention is given to how meetings build and fracture community and communities. The conclusion argues why future communication research should foreground meetings and take them as objects of study—rather than, as has been the usual practice, treat them as noninteresting containers for other communication processes.

The identity work of questioning in intellectual discussion

This article examines how questioning practices in intellectual discussion do identity work. Drawing upon the discussion discourse of a Ph.D. departments weekly colloquium, as well as several other sources, three aspects of intellectual identity are identified that are routinely at stake for academic presenters in discussion periods: their knowledgeability, originality, and level of intellectual sophistication. We identify and describe questioning practices that support and challenge these desired identities. Analysis of the discussion discourse shows how use of marked and unmarked question forms implicate a question recipients knowledgeability level, how time references and interest queries imply a persons degree of originality, and how lexical choices can problematize presenters’ intellectual frameworks, which in turn can become challenges to their intellectual sophistication. The concluding section considers how the identity—implicative discourse analysis developed and used in the paper could become...

Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: an introduction

This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, research interviews, education, and mediated political exchanges. The introduction concludes with a preview of the articles in the special issue.

Intellectual discussion in the academy as situated discourse

Intellectual discussion is a form of talk hailed as important but not much studied. After suggesting why it should be given scholarly attention, the paper reports on interviews conducted with graduate students and faculty who attended a weekly colloquium in an academic department. Drawing upon the interviews the first part of the paper provides an in‐depth examination of the multiple, often conflicting concerns, which arose as this academic group “did” intellectual discussion. In the second part of the paper the interview data are extended to offer a model of how intellectual discussants generally make attributions about each other. In the third section, results from the case study are used to critique context‐general communicative theories (attribution, politeness, multiple goals). Finally, the conclusions draw out implications for future study of intellectual discussion as well as academic institutional practices.

The Discourse of Crisis in Public Meetings: Case Study of a School District's Multimillion Dollar Error

School districts are both big businesses and a form of local governance that is part of American democracy. When a crisis makes a districts democratic face relevant, the organization will experience a dilemma that does not occur in business-only organizations. This study examines the public meetings of a school board in the western United States as it confronted a multimillion dollar error. After reviewing the organizational crisis literature, background is provided on the district, the crisis, and the method—action-implicative discourse analysis. The districts crisis, the paper shows, was constructed through six discursive practices. Each is identified and illustrated. Because school boards are democratic bodies, they depend on having citizens willing to attend and speak out in public meetings, and they depend on a smaller set of citizens willing to run for and serve in these elected, unpaid school board positions. In crises, these two groups of citizens will have partially competing needs. As a result, local governance organizations will experience a dilemma regarding how to design their public participation. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on organizational crisis and public meetings, and practical implications for citizens and elected officials.

Not to Change the Topic But …: A Cognitive Approach to the Management of Conversation

A cognitive approach to the management of conversation is sketched and exemplified in a series of three studies of topic change strategies. The first study establishes that naive subjects can relia...

Building Grounded Practical Theory in Applied Communication Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research presents five studies, each using principles and methods of grounded practical theory (GPT) to investigate a topic in applied communication. GPT is a metatheoretical and methodological framework for developing empirically grounded, normative theoretical reconstructions of particular communication practices with regard to their problems, techniques, and situated ideals. GPT uses qualitative methods, especially action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA). In the traditions of Aristotelian practical philosophy and Deweyan pragmatism, GPT is distinguished from empirical scientific theory, which does not advance normative claims, and philosophical normative theory, which may lack empirical relevance. GPT potentially complements several related approaches including constructivist grounded theory, critical discourse analysis, and other forms of practical theory, especially communication as design (CAD). Problems and challenges of GPT include managing tensions inherent to the approach (descriptive-normative, theoretical-applied, and positioning-universalizing), expanding the technical repertoire, and questioning assumptions about agency. The studies comprising this special issue extend and adapt GPT methodology, while contributing normative theory and applied recommendations for: (1) physician-patient exchanges regarding the need to move to daily injections for diabetes, (2) language selection choices in international healthcare teams, (3) managing disagreement in deliberation groups, (4) citizen testimony in public hearings, and (5) instructor-facilitated college classroom discussions.

Identity Enactment in Intellectual Discussion

This article examines the ways in which academics (faculty and graduate students) go about claiming an nteractionally appropriate face during intellectual discussion. In particular, it examines discussion situations to see how participants enacted the institutional and intellectual identities that prior interviews had suggested were salient. Discourse analysis of the discussions suggests that different intellectual identities were established through some identifiably distinct ways by which speakers framed the work they presented. Institutional identity (rank) was enacted through three primary activities: talk and silence patterns, question types, and responses to noncomprehension. Implications of this work for other areas of inquiry are highlighted.