Power Talk

Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse

Joanna Thornborrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317879077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The concept of social power, who holds it and how they use it is a widely debated subject particularly in the field of discourse analysis, and the wider arena of sociolinguistics.

In her new book, Joanna Thornborrow challenges the received notion that power is necessarily held by some speakers and not by others. Through the detailed analysis of communication and interaction within a range of institutional settings, she examines power as an emerging, negotiated phenomenon between participants with different status and goals.

Written in a clear style which combines attention to technical detail with accessibility, Power Talk includes:

• a comprehensive introduction to the theme of power including the analytic approaches to power in language
• a wide-ranging discussion of theory and practice
• and, in-depth contemporary case studies.

Power Talk

is the first book to focus on the topic of power in situated interaction across a range of contexts. As such, it makes a timely, and important contribution to the debate surrounding social power and language use, and will be of value to both students and researchers alike.

1

POWER, TALK AND INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE: SOME KEY CONCEPTS

This book is about talk that takes place in institutional settings. Through some detailed analyses of various contexts for institutional talk, I explore the idea that power relations between the participants in such settings can be observed and analysed as interactional phenomena; that power relations emerge in the interplay between participants’ locally constructed, discursive identities and their institutional status. I will therefore be focusing particularly on the practices of talk as interaction, and on the kind of discursive resources that speakers use to get things done in their talk. I also show how speakers are able to draw on those discursive resources in different ways, and with differing outcomes, as the talk unfolds, by examining the relationship between institutional status and the interactional positions this makes available to participants in the talk event.

In this introductory chapter I set out some of the key background concepts that underpin the theoretical and analytic approach I take throughout the book. These are broadly grouped under three main thematic headings: (1) the problem of what we mean by ‘institutional’ discourse, (2) the relationship between power and language and (3) the available methods we have for analysing this relationship. There will of course be overlaps between these three areas. The concepts of power and social institutions, and the theoretical positions that researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis adopt in order to analyse them, tend to be intricately linked, so in this introductory chapter I will also try to point out where these links occur and where they are at their strongest.

INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE

I begin with the question of institutional discourse – what it is, how it has been characterised and what the problems are in using this as a defining label for certain types of talk. There is now a growing body of research which focuses on talk in institutional settings, from the workplace to the TV studio, but there are still disagreements as to what institutional discourse actually is and how it might be defined. I therefore spend some time in this section discussing the various theoretical positions that characterise current approaches to analysing institutional talk and suggest a working definition for the data analyses I offer in subsequent chapters.

In what ways has ‘institutional’ discourse been identified as a category of talk which in some way is different from what we might experience as non-institutional or ‘conversational’ interaction? Jurgen Habermas (1984) described institutional talk as an example of ‘strategic discourse’, which he distinguished from another form of talk, ‘communicative discourse’. Strategic discourse is, he claims, power laden and goal-directed, while communicative discourse, in its ideal manifestation, is about speakers symmetrically engaging in achieving mutual understanding. Harris (1995) points out that Habermas’s ‘ideal’ speech situation remains a theoretical preconstruct, and that in reality, ‘communicative action … is distorted by power and inequality’ (p. 121), and so his description of institutional discourse as a somehow less desirable form of interaction than an idealised form of communication is not particularly helpful if we are dealing with the analysis of empirical data. However, it is nevertheless worth noting that Habermas made a distinction between goal-directed talk, on the one hand, and the achievement of symmetrical understanding, on the other, since these two concepts have played an important role in the way institutional interaction has been characterised in other traditions of research into language in use.

A great deal of the work on talk in institutional settings has been undertaken within the field of conversation analysis (CA). CA traditionally holds that ‘ordinary conversation is the predominant medium of interaction in the social world’ and that institutional interaction involves ‘systematic variation and restriction of activities and their design relative to ordinary conversation’ (Drew and Heritage, 1992: 19). These variations and restrictions include speakers’ orientation to particular tasks or goals (for example, calls to an emergency service or the delivery of a medical diagnosis), as well as specialised constraints on what ‘one or both of the participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand’ (p. 22). There are also specialised inferential frameworks for a given institutional context, so how questions are received and interpreted in a job interview, in a news interview or courtroom interaction is very much tied to that specific setting. Steven Levinson (1992) has suggested that the talk that takes place in institutional settings differs from ‘non-institutional’ conversation in these three essential respects: firstly, it is goal or task oriented; secondly, it involves constraints on what counts as legitimate contributions to that goal or task; and, thirdly, it produces particular kinds of inferences in the way speakers interpret, or orient to, utterances. Describing these constraints on talk, and the specialised, goal-oriented nature of institutional interaction, has been one of the central concerns of conversation analytic approaches to institutional discourse, and there is now a well-established set of findings relating to the organisation of talk in a range of different settings (cf. Drew and Heritage, 1992; Boden, 1994).

Another key concept which is central to the notion of restriction and constraint on talk in interaction is that of ‘asymmetry’ in talk. In CA this term is most often used to describe the distribution of different types of turns between different participants. Institutional talk has been described as ‘characteristically asymmetrical’ (Drew and Heritage, 1992: 47) in contrast to ordinary conversational interaction between participants of equal status. For example, in a diagnostic medical interview, the doctor usually asks questions, the patient usually gives answers; similarly, in a courtroom setting, the examining magistrate or attorney asks the questions, the witness gives answers. So what participants do in an institutional setting is to some extent open to description in terms of the types of turns they take.

A rather different view of asymmetry is captured in Habermas’s definition of institutional discourse as ‘strategic’. For Habermas, asymmetry is much less a question of turn distribution between participants and much more one of unequal distribution of social power and status. But there are also some points of comparison between Habermas’s account of institutional discourse and the conventional approach taken by practitioners of conversation analysis. Evident in both is the comparative notion that institutional talk is in some respects different to ordinary conversational talk, as is the reference to goal-oriented aspects of institutional talk. I will return to the question of asymmetry in more detail in chapter 2, but there is an important counterview to this binary division between institutional and ordinary conversational talk that needs to be mentioned here.

In a recent critique of the comparison between ordinary and institutional talk that I have just outlined, Bonnie McElhinny (1997) argues that this comparative account constructs yet another ‘false dichotomy’ between the two forms of talk (p. 111). She points out that such contrasts between the political and the personal, the economic and the domestic, work and home environments continue to reinforce the distinction between public and private domains of language use, and it is the view of many feminist scholars that this is an ideological distinction which has obscured the political nature of what counts as ‘ordinary’. Any analytic approach which regards ‘ordinary’ conversational talk to be the unmarked, baseline form of social interaction may mask, on the one hand, hierarchies and inequalities that exist in gender, class, ethnic and other social relationships between the participants in ‘ordinary’ talk and, on the other, the incursion of ‘ordinary’ talk into contexts for institutional interaction. Consequently, McElhinny suggests that institutional talk is better regarded as a cultural classification, an ideological label which will mean different things to different people.

Where, then, does this leave the analysis of the relationship between social relationships of power and the organisation of talk in such contexts as a school classroom or a radio recording studio? In this book, I describe the contextual settings for my data, using the conventional label of ‘institutional’. It will become clear, through the analyses in subsequent chapters, that in these various contexts for talk there is an orientation towards a specific task – the business of the talk as it unfolds is to ask questions, to provide answers (or to resist providing them), to have a discussion, to make a complaint, amongst others. However, these are all activity types that can and surely do just as easily take place outside an identifiable organisational or institutional context. And, similarly, talk that is conventionally associated with non-institutional settings can equally easily occur within settings that are conventionally defined as institutional.¹ In many ways, then, the concept of ‘ordinary’ talk turns out to be just as problematic, and perhaps just as theoretically pre-constructed, as Habermas’s concept of an ideal state of ‘communicative discourse’. But, if we think of talk as action, then actions have outcomes, and are taken to accomplish communicative goals in particular social settings. So, rather than defining institutional interaction simply in terms of its points of difference to ordinary talk, I prefer to see it as talk which exhibits a combination of characteristics. This position is still far from satisfactory, and the list of characteristics may well be incomplete, but it attempts to take into account some of the problems inherent in pinning down types of talk as institutional or otherwise. The distinctive features of different kinds of talk in each context will emerge more sharply through the analyses I offer, but some of the primary characteristics are listed below. Institutional talk is, then:

1. Talk that has differentiated, pre-inscribed and conventional participant roles, or identities, whether it takes place in a school classroom, in a TV or radio studio or in a police interview room. In my data these conventional institutional identities include categories such as phone-in host, caller, interviewer, school pupil, policeman.

2. Talk in which there is a structurally asymmetrical distribution of turn types between the participants such that speakers with different institutional identities typically occupy different discursive identities; that is, they get different types of turns in which they do different kinds of things (for example, interviewers conventionally ask questions, interviewees answer them; teachers nominate which pupil will talk next, pupils respond).

3. Talk in which there is also an asymmetrical relationship between participants in terms of speaker rights and obligations. This means that certain types of utterances are seen as legitimate for some speakers but not for others (for example, an examining magistrate is expected to ask questions, a defendant is not).

4. Talk in which the discursive resources and identities available to participants to accomplish specific actions are either weakened or strengthened in relation to their current institutional identities.

In short, institutional discourse can be described as talk which sets up positions for people to talk from and restricts some speakers’ access to certain kinds of discursive actions. For instance, in media settings, the role of a TV or radio news interviewer typically (although not exclusively) involves doing the questions, while the role of interviewee involves doing the answers; in the context of a family meal-time, research has shown that children typically are the ones who are asked to tell the story of their day, while it is mostly mothers who elicit the stories and fathers who are the primary recipients, and evaluators, of the events being recounted (Ochs and Taylor, 1992; Blum Kulka, 1997). So, despite being a very different kind of talk event, a family dinner can in many respects be considered to be just as much of an institutional context for talk as a news interview.

I want to close this discussion of what constitutes institutional discourse with two observations made by David Silverman (1997). The first is that ‘[institutions] structure, but do not determine, what may be said in social settings, how it may be said, and who may say it’ (p. 188) and the second is that participants’ social roles ‘better position some interactants to strategically use available resources to achieve their practical interactional ends, while restricting others’ strategic moves’ (p. 189). With this in mind, institutional discourse can perhaps be best described as a form of interaction in which the relationship between a participant’s current institutional role (that is, interviewer, caller to a phone-in programme or school teacher) and their current discursive role (for example, questioner, answerer or opinion giver) emerges as a local phenomenon which shapes the organisation and trajectory of the talk. In other words, what people do in institutional encounters is produced, overall, as a result of this interplay between their interactional and discursive role and their institutional identity and status.

POWER

The term ‘power’ is another conceptual can of worms for discourse analysts; what it is, where it is located and how it can be analysed in or as ‘discourse’ are all questions that continue to be hotly debated in the broad field of language and discourse studies. Chapter 2 contains a much more detailed discussion of these issues, so here I will only give a preliminary sketch of the concepts of power which have informed sociolinguistic and critical discourse analytic research. The simplest place to start in a discussion of such a complex and highly theorised phenomenon as power is probably with a commonsense, non-theoretical definition. Power means different things to different people; it is multi-faceted, and can take many different forms. It is often seen as a quantifiable thing – some people have more of it than others. Thus we tend to talk about power as measurable in terms of the amount of physical power, political power, military power, disciplinary power, economic power and so on, that people or organisations might possess. This quantifiable notion of power also means that we can describe some person, or government, or army, or other form of organisation as more or less powerful in relation to another. So, for example, in a global political context the president of the US is often seen as wielding considerably more power than the president of a much smaller nation; in the social contexts that are the focus of much sociolinguistic research, men have been regarded as having more power than women, professional middle classes more than impoverished underclasses, white communities more than black communities; in a family context, parents more than children. In a commonsense way too, power tends to be associated with rank and status, and hierarchies are built around these relative positions of social, professional and political power. We also conceptualise power in a qualitative way when we talk about such things as a ‘powerful performance’ or a ‘powerful argument’, when we describe someone as a ‘powerful speaker’, and when we talk of ‘powerful emotions’ or relationships.

But leaving these commonsense understandings of power aside, once we begin to theorise the concept there are complex and often conflicting traditions at work in explaining what power means and what it does. In the paragraphs that follow I set out a necessarily brief and selective discussion of some of the most recent of these traditions which have been the most relevant to the analysis of institutional discourse.

Social theories of power

Within the social sciences there have been various attempts to produce theoretical models of what power is and how it can be seen to work, and these models have been based on some rather different conceptualisations of power. From the behavioural perspective of the early 1960s, power was a matter of individual agency, residing in individuals rather than in organisations (Dahl, 1961). According to this model power can be said to exist only in so far as it is empirically observable in the world, measurable according to people’s responses to it (much like the notion of power in physics, where the action of one force can be measured in terms of the effect it has on another). In his succinct discussion of theories of power and ideology, Stuart Clegg (1993) gives the following summary of this view of power and its effects: ‘Whatever could not be observed could not be said to be. The unobservable was not seen to be a suitable case for treatment as data’ (p. 19).²

In contrast to this position is the structural model of power developed by Stephen Lukes (1974), in which power is conceptualised in a much more abstract way, as ideological and hegemonic. Stuart Hall has described the effect of hegemonic power as shaping people’s perceptions, cognitions and preferences ‘in such a way that [social agents] accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they see it as divinely ordained or beneficial’ (1982: 65). This view of power as an ideological phenomenon and the notion that people accept the prevailing order of things, the world as it is, as natural and unchangeable even though it may not be in their best interests, have been pervasive in many accounts of the relationship between power, ideology and social discourses. They are also to be found in the work of Louis Althusser (1971), who was among the earliest theorists to describe power as a discursive phenomenon. Althusser’s account of ‘interpellation’, and his claim that power operates through discourse by constructing particular subject positions for people to occupy, have been influential in much of the early work in critical discourse analysis (CDA) (cf. Macdonell, 1986).³ However, more recently it has begun to be superseded by poststructuralist theories which consider identities and subjectivities to be multiple and shifting rather than fixed within a particular ideological structuring, or hegemonic, view of the world.

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1992) account of power as ‘symbolic capital’, whereby some social practices take on more value and status than others, and where knowledge of and access to those practices put some people in potentially more powerful positions than others, has also been found by many sociolinguists to be a productive framework for understanding the relationship between language and power. The notion of ‘communities of practice’, where language has a symbolic function alongside oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Key to transcription conventions
• 1 Power, talk and institutional discourse: some key concepts
• 2 Perspectives on power: approaches to the critical analysis of language and interaction
• 3 Institutional discourse as asymmetrical talk: power and orderly interaction in a police interview
• 4 Questions and control: managing talk in a radio phone-in
• 5 Resources for control: discursive strategies in media interviews
• 6 Participation and control: the organisation of classroom discussion talk
• 7 Power and institutional interaction: some conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index