Abstract
Conversation analysis (CA) has been hesitant to deal with “power.” Recently the analysis of deontics has changed this situation. Deontics refers to participants’ relationships to obligations and permissions in interactions in which a party states a proposal or plan that recipients either accept or reject, as well as the party’s right to make it. Although deontics helps CA to pay attention to “power relations,” we show that this is only a partial solution, which needs to be complemented with a broader grasp of institutionality. We discuss cases in management meetings of public research organizations (PRO), where a party—or parties—accountably impacts decision-making processes. The actions include pre-emptions of another party’s talk, competing for the floor, and value statements concerning issues at hand. Our multimodal analysis shows how participants continuously influence each other in their interactions, narrowing or broadening their possibilities for participation and coloring descriptions of issues in the direction wanted. Only by opening up the institutional tasks of managerial work in the management meetings, we can reveal power relations between parties.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to space restrictions, only the translations are shown. The analysis can be followed with them. Originals available from the authors.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank participants, stakeholders, and funders of the Merger project, and Birte Assmus, Melisa Stevanovic, and Jan Svennevig for their comments.
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Transcription Notation
Transcription Notation
[yeah] [okay] | Overlapping talk |
= | End of one TCU and beginning of next begin with no gap/pause in between (sometimes a slight overlap if there is speaker change). |
(.) | Brief interval, about 0.1 seconds |
(1.4) | Time (in seconds) between end of a word and beginning of next. |
wo::rd | Colon(s) indicate prolonged vowel or consonant. |
.,? | Final falling intonation (.)Slight rising intonation (,)Sharp rising intonation (?) |
WORD | Upper case indicates syllables or words louder than surrounding speech by the same speaker |
°word° | Degree sign indicate syllables or words distinctly quieter than surrounding speech by the same speaker |
word- | A dash indicates a cut-off. In phonetic terms this is typically a glottal stop |
>word< | Right/left carats indicate increased speaking rate (speeding up) |
<word> | Left/right carats indicate decreased speaking rate (slowing down) |
.hhh | Inbreath. Three letters indicate ‘normal’ duration. Longer or shorter inbreaths indicated with fewer or more letters. |
#word# | Hash sign indicates creaky voice |
(word) | Parentheses indicate uncertain word; no plausible candidate if empty |
(( )) | Double parentheses contain analyst comments or descriptions |
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Arminen, I., Kallio, A., Mälkiä, T. (2022). Beyond Deontics: Power Relations in Decision-Making Processes in Management Meetings. In: Porsché, Y., Scholz, R., Singh, J.N. (eds) Institutionality. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_2
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