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Representations of Talk at Work : Performatives and 'Performability' Peter Case Management Learning 1995 26: 423 DOI: 10.1177/135050769502600402 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mlq.sagepub.com/content/26/4/423

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Oxford Brookes University

PETER CASE

Representations of Talk at Work Performatives and 'Performability'

Introduction

Scene. A meeting within a management learning institution convened to discuss the ongoing development of a proposed MSc in International Management. About an hour into the event the discussion has moved onto a specific debate about a 'module' designated International Management Competencies by its designers, Carolyn and Bob. Ron, institutionally senior to the others, is concerned that the word 'competence' may be problematic in the eyes of a future audience (the Course Validation Committee) if used alongside the notion of 'transferable skills'. The dialogue runs as follows:

Ron:

Can I just comment on the question that I think Bob specifically raisedahh there and that is-ahh about language. I mean, I don't know whether perhaps .. .circumlocution, it seems to me that if we have this sort of module description which talks about 'transferable skills' and that sort of thing, we may get ourselves into deep water if we also start using 'competence' language.

James:

Yeah.

Derek:

Yes.

Ron:

And that maybe if the people working on that particular module felt able to translate, I mean they're going to have to write the module description in that language, they may as well stick with that language. I mean that may cause some problems but it's going to cause some problems in the other direction I think because people are going to start saying:

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Management Learning © 1995 Sage Publications (London. Thousand Oaks. CA and New Delhi) Vol 26 Number 4 Pages 423-443

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'Well, if you use competence language', they're going to say, 'how do these things fit together?' It's going to raise unnecessary issues you see. The flavour of the above exchange may be familiar to those who work in institutions whose ostensible purpose is 'management learning'. Management educators, along with western academics and educators of all shades, occupy a conspicuously logocentric world; it is one in which debate over the nuances of particular word usage is rarely a question of 'mere semantics' but, on the contrary, where phrasing and selection of terms is very much the last word. It is a world in which, moreover, the choice of words carries distinct implications for future organizational thought, talk and action. As the American literary critic Kenneth Burke (1968, 1969a, 1969b) would have it, 'words', whether written, spoken or silently rehearsed, are 'symbolic actions'. There is, in short, an intimate relationship between linguistic representation of any form and the physical relationship with the world which we characterize as 'action'. Words inherently carry implications for the way we go about creating and co-creating the worlds we inhabit (Mills, 1940). Yet often the implications of the language we use in any context is hidden from view, if not deliberately ignored. It is the ongoing demands to engage in non-problematic interaction with our fellows that prevents us from reflecting on the subtler aspects of connotation and temporal transformation of meaning and action. In the language of ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967) and the phenomenology upon which much of their work is premised (Schutz, 1967, 1975) we occupy a Lebenswelt or 'life-world' which is routinely 'taken for granted'. We enjoy the apparent safety and security of the 'local rationalities' (Boden, 1994) which the episodic and contextual exchanges of words entails. None of us can avoid using language and, inadvertently or not, perpetuating and modifying the regimes of discourse which preoccupy our logocentric social environments. In better moments, of course, we can reflect on various verbal performances and produce the most erudite critique of the 'value' or 'poverty' of 'modularizing' this or that course; of talking the language of 'competence' or 'transferable skills' in relation to a given programme; of the errant 'absurdity' of introducing 'quality validation' procedures into a system which is so obviously deteriorating before our very eyes, and so on. But in the heat of the conversational moment, as I hope to show, it is very much more difficult to escape being drawn into using language which 'on reflection' would not be of our choosing or by which we might even be ashamed and embarrassed: 'Did I really say that?' Even the most 'liberated' and 'aware' social constructionist cannot escape being thus compromised if for a moment they reflect on what they have said or if


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confronted with the unassailable interactive facts as transcribed. As social beings, we are destined to engage in talk with all its mundane and practical consequences, however 'exalted' the performances of our consciousness at other non-interactional moments. What follows can be most usefully seen as a kind of 'meditation' on workplace talk. The experiences documented and reported here represent a somewhat ingenuous experiment on the part of the author. It is an attempt to track the conversational encounters of a management educator over a short period of time during his daily rounds. The intention is that readers will be able in some measure or other to identify with the kinds of exchange reproduced. It seemed both intellectually appealing and appropriate to locate research on talk at work reflexively within a generic framework of 'talk at work' .1 The project does not stop, however, at re-presenting spoken exchanges. A supporting narrative is introduced to interact interpretatively with the data garnered. As a consequence, an attempt is made to trace the manner in which the commissioning of this article was translated into talk at work and how, in turn, that talk reflected back upon the article's composition. These traces and reflections are then used to derive practical lessons from the experiment. Through its process of inquiry, the article 'discovers' a useful criterion for the representation of talk at work which, in turn, is mobilized to produce an alternative and more holistic approach to the interpretation of communication conduct.

A Word From Our Sponsor

Scene. At home, ]ames dials Professor Gavin Chester's telephone number. He hears a dialling tone and the sounds of a receiver being lifted. Turns at talk commence:

James:

Gavin. It's-a-James Clinton speaking. How are you? ... Uhh. I'm much better... I have been yes. I was rather seriously illlast-uhm, last June. I had a ... picked up a viral infection and-a I was in hospital and all sorts. Pretty unpleasant affair in fact ... Yeah. Well, news doesn't travel fast does it? ... Yeah! Well I mean, Mick knew that I'd been ill but-a, there's a prob ... [short loud guffaw] a problem with your communication channels I think [sharp in-breath] ... Yeah. They're not what they were, Gavin [sustained laughter from both]. Yeah. No-uhm which is why I've been rather silent-uhm on lots of fronts. Because, remember we were working on this-a this edited collection for Ancient University Press. Well, I mean par ... Oh you are? Right [laughs] ... Ah yes. Okay. Well I mean there are a couple of reasons for calling you: (a) obviously in response to your, to your letter and-a (b) to tell you what's happening with the-a, with the book. Well, perhaps to deal with the latter first uhm. Well, my illness meant that I couldn't do work on it and meanwhile Richard was up to his eyeballs in, in, in-a work, to put


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it politely, and-a teaching and then recently has been over in Poland interviewing Polish managers. So-uhm we've got a chapter from Cynthia who very kindly has written something very interesting for us and, and-a Richard and I are planning to, to, to write the introduction by the end of the, by the end of the month. And that's, that's really a rewrite of something that we've worked on before, so that, that should be fine. And then we'll, we'll put that in and see wha ... where it goes from there, we'll take it from there. Does that seem reasonable? Okay-uhm! The other thing is obviously the-a Management Learning piece. Ah well when I first saw the call for papers I did obviously think about uhm, about writing something-or, putting in a proposal. Uhm, and I've got one or two ideas uhm which I could talk to you about. Ah, do you want to talk about them? [Laugh] Okay. Right. Well, there are two, two options I think. One, one is a sort of lowrisk, boring option which would be to basically rework-a a couple of conference papers which ... That's right. .. Okay, well if, if you wanted that then I could, you know, clearly I could, I could produce that. The higher-risk one-uhm would ... well I, I, I've got some ideas about a higher-risk-uhm project. Uhm. It would be to do a reflexive study of talk at work. Uhm, and-a I was wondering actually, could I actually record this, this conversation because [guffaw] I'd quite like to potentially use that as part of the piece? ... You don't have a problem with that? Oh splendid. Gavin:

I'm into ... [inaudible]

James:

You're into, sorry, what?

Gavin:

High risk. [Laughs]

James:

High risk. Okay. Well this is high risk. .. But on the other hand I think it, you know, it promises potentially to be very interesting indeed. So, it could go either way I think frankly. But the idea is-uhm to look at two aspects of, of talk at work. The first would be-ah-looking at-ah talk as kind of literal signification. So like talk at work as it were. And the other thing would be to look at-uhm performative aspects of talking, i.e. making talk work. Uhm, now, I could ... what I envisage is like, ultimately, a kind of pastiche which would be built up of, uhm, a kind of phenomenological stream of consciousness about talk which would be based on introspection. Uh, transcriptions of taped talk at work. Uh, and some more recognizably kind of academic narrative, I suppose for want of a better word, about talk. Okay.

Gavin:

Talk about talk.

James:

Talk about talk. .. Oh! What I thought might be a good title would be 'representations of talk at work' as a kind of working title. So begin


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perhaps with a representation of the letter which actually invited the work followed immediately by talk about the commission with various people, yourself included. And then-uhm, then a kind of int. .. what I'd be interested in doing is an intellectual deconstruction of the various elements of the notion 'talk at work'. Gavin:

Yes.

[Later]

James:

Uhm ... So I don't know how that sounds?

Gavin:

That sounds, that sounds good. What I'm looking for you see is sort ofah. . . Uhh, a lot of work in this field relies on anecdotal data. You sometimes see this in books on language. A lot of the time in these books they kind of pick up on anecdotes rather than it actually being the stuff of interaction. Now. The more talk there actually is in the paper, the better I would feel about it. I don't want to convert 'talk at work' into being disquisitions which don't do any study of 'talk at work'.

James:

That was ... Which is why I want to take the high-risk strategy.

Gavin:

Yes.

James:

But obviously I think what we need to do as well in addition to just doing that is to think about phenomenologically what talk is and what work is ...

Gavin:

Yes.

James:

.. .in order to put some kind of boundary ...

Gavin:

Oh yes.

James:

... and frame around it.

Gavin:

Yes. It's a question of balance, but usually what happens is when people write about talk at work in effect it turns into intellectual reflections on talk with very little treatment being given to what people actually say.

James:

Well I think you can rest assured that that won't be a problem [both laugh loudly] ... Okay. Right. In terms of the deadlines you want something, you want a piece of text by the end of March.

Gavin:

If I could have something by the end of March. Yes. Actually we've got

to have everything in by sometime early in May I think. James:

Yep. Okay. I'll probably try and get something to you before then if possible ...

Gavin:

Yep.


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James:

... and what I'll do is, I can drop you a line with, I mean I've written a side of A4 outlining some ideas really which I've just outlined to you over the telephone. Would you like ... I'll give you a copy of that as well.

Gavin:

Yeah. Smashing.

James:

Okay?

Gavin:

Okay.

James:

Thanks for your time Gavin and all the best with the work. Cheers then. Bye-bye.

The first question to ask is: 'are you still awake'? As other people's talk Performative when abstracted and represented is so boring, you may be forgiven for Aspects of Workplace Talk having nodded off. But more of that later. Assuming that you are still with it and that you want to pursue this interrogative sojourn into talk at work, let us begin by making some preliminary observations about the extract presented above. Speech-act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Harre, 1979; Harre and Gillett, 1994) has long recognized the existence of at least three dimensions to word usage (whether spoken or written) which can help in the process of reflection on talk. At one level, word usage bears a so-called 'locutionary' relationship to the world: that is, it is intelligible and meaningful. This is the sense that most users have of the combination of words they use referring directly to observable or knowable phenomena in their world. To rephrase this in terms of Saussure's (1974) work, words operating as signifiers relate to things or events or phenomena signified. So when James makes reference to the 'letter' he has received from Gavin in the above verbal exchange there is a distinct and meaningful sense that they both are referring to the same 'thing' -a tangible artefact denoted 'letter'. At a second level, words have 'illocutionary force'. In addition to signifying things, they do things in a more abstract social sense. When the two interlocutors above exchange words about James's health, what is important is not so much the locutionary or 'literal' substance of the conversation, that is, 'James's present physical condition', as the subtle and diverse ritual affirmations and accomplishments which are effected through that talk (Simmel, 1950; Goffman, 1967, 1974, 1981). Interlocutors perform one to another. In their conversational moments people ritually 'tell' each other, through the ostensive talk, that they know each other; that there is a history to their relationship; that they are concerned about each other; that certain status differentials obtain between them; and so on and so forth. 2 The illocutionary aspect of talk is akin to what dramatists of the Method school refer to as 'subtext' (Stanislavsky, 1942; Marowitz, 1986;


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Strasberg, 1988).3 Method actors are encouraged constantly to invoke a subtext to inform both their linguistic and paralinguistic gestures in the performance of a given dialogic exchange or episode of action. In their self-conscious replication and articulation of taken-for-granted social processes dramatists and actors are acknowledging and making practical use of the performative operation of words. By drawing this parallel, we can see how verbal performatives may be multi-layered within a given exchange. To take an example, when James asks Gavin whether he minds having the conversation recorded and Gavin says, 'I don't have a problem with that', not only is there a performative act of one researcher acknowledging the other's intention as 'perfectly right and proper under the circumstances' but also an array of possible additional subtexts. One subtext to James's request, for example, is a concern not to offend Gavin. And whilst Gavin outwardly acquiesces to the request, one possible subtext for him might be characterized as momentary anxiety concerning James's intention. For the most part, as post hoc interpreters of social interactions or, indeed, as interactants ourselves, we can only speculate about the performative subtexts with which others are motivating the moment-by-moment exchange. The methods afforded by account analysis of the form advocated by Scott and Lyman (1968), Harre and Secord (1972) or Czarniawska-Joerges (1992), for example, offers one way of approaching and closing this hermeneutic gap. We can always simply ask the interactants what subtextual motives are in play. But this procedure, in turn, relies on the sophistication of the analyst's apprehension of the milieu within which the accounts were provided and so we are back at the beginning of a new interpretative cycle. As Sacks (1963) explicitly noted, we can never achieve hermeneutic closure. The final dimension to words according to Speech-act theory concerns their consequences. So-called 'perlocutionary effects' occur when the intentions embodied within a given sentence or utterance are converted into 'actual results'. In the context of this present research, when someone accedes to having his or her talk recorded, one immediate perlocutionary effect is that the micro tape-recorder is switched on in order to capture any subsequent turns at talk, thus facilitating their representation here. The agreement 'gives licence' to record. In a wider sense this entire text is a grand perlocutionary effect of the performative agreement struck in the above exchange. A day or so after the telephone conversation, the author took a micro taperecorder into his place of work-an institution of management learning-and proceeded electromagnetically to register audible events around him. In large measure, the sounds emanated from other human beings. Correspondingly, because of the presence of an artificial recording device, the author felt morally obliged both to gain permission to record others' utterances and to make explicit his research


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intentions. The material and social network of entities involved in this project expanded rapidly as the perlocutionary force of the initial agreement translated into 'research activity'. Actor-network theory (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1986, 1991, 1993; Law, 1986, 1991; Woolgar, 1991), and particularly the notion of 'translation', is helpful in interpreting these developments. Whilst the prescriptions of this theory have been restricted primarily to the sociology of science and technology field, they carry implications for a wide range of organizational investigations. 4 As an illustration, for example, take the following exchange in which the original agreement translates into an episode involving the appropriation and colonization of new agents, words and actions.

Scene. James's office. Reg, a part-time colleague approaching retirement, is seated at one of the three desks in the room. Carl, a lecturer in his late thirties, has just entered the room and is standing by the door. James:

The idea is as part of my research, I'm doing this paper on-ah, it's called talk at work.

Carl:

Is that right?

James:

And so what I'm going to do is just record 24 hours' worth of talk at work. [Loud laughter] Yeah. Yeah, Reg's already buggered up, buggered up the research! [More loud laughter]

Reg:

Well, technically, yes ... [Peals of laughter] Ohh no I haven't.

Carl:

How can you? You can't. If it's genuine research you can't do that!

Reg:

No. No. It can be. But it's not a typical day is it? But there we are [with

resignation]. James:

Ahh! What is a typical day? ...

Reg:

Yeah, yeah sure.

James:

... because I think the important point. .. I mean I've talked about, y'know, talked about it with the person who invited the work, and he's concluded that what he wanted wasn't speculation about talk at work but talk at work.

Reg:

Well of course you'd need to look at Stewart and Mintzberg and those guys. Y'know the self-reporting stuff using journals and whatever.

James:

But, but, but that, I mean that self-reporting stuff ...

Reg:

Yeah .

James:

. . . didn't get to the actual stuff of, of interaction ...


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Reg:

No, no .

James:

. . . y'know.lt seems to me. Over the course of 2 days, the author set about sampling talk whilst engaged in activities which he would recover, phenomenologically, as 'work'. Most of the recorded talk and utterances during that period took place in and around a spacial location which he sees as a 'place of work', namely, 'the campus', and within architectural structures which form part of that location: 'my office', 'other offices', 'seminar rooms', 'corridors', 'the lavatory'5 and so on. Selectivity inexorably crept into the research process in terms of recording only those workplace interactions in which consent was forthcoming (deliberately disregarding unintentionally recorded utterances); transcribing talk which illustrated the broadly performative, reflexive and metamorphic features of workplace talk; and representing only a fraction of the transcribed talk. In short, at every phase the author was generating a priori interpreted 'capta' (Gherardi and Turner, 1987), immanently conscious of the contradiction inherent in 'representing data'. As James said to Dorothy, in her office:

James:

... The idea you see is to embed everything in the data, so actually not have any analysis there that actually, that falls outside of the data. That's, that's one aspiration.

Dorothy:

That should be easy [breaks into staccato laughter, mirrored by James].

James:

Yes. Well the thing is, the other thing about talk is there's an awful lot of it. That as soon as you start transcribing, even if you just narrow yourself down to what strikes you as being interesting bits, it's enormous.

Dorothy:

Hmn.

James:

Ahhh. Ahh. It's copious in its-ahh, in its extent. You eat up the words. The following strip of interlocution is less directly reflexive in tone. Extracted from an otherwise seamless flow of activities which made up one particular day's work, it centres on such routine tasks as 'agreeing marking procedures',6 'advising a student' and such like. This stretch of dialogue illustrates particularly well the manner in which, as Simmel (1950: 51-3) noted, talk can shift effortlessly between effecting sociability, on the one hand, and achieving pragmatic ends on the other. The switch from social 'talk for its own sake' to an ostensively substantive concern for work can happen with relative rapidity either within a given turn at talk or in the change-over from one turn to another. A number of writers have observed and commented on this


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