DEN SOCIALE KONSTRUKTION AF IDÉER - Københavns Universitet

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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF IDEAS:
A multimodal interaction analysis of how ideas are created by participants’affiliative or
disaffiliative response-formats
This thesis is about how participants develop new ideas during idea generation meetings in Danish
organizations. The data consist of eleven video recorded meetings from the communications
departments of three Danish organizations. Topics during the meetings are among others;
development of Christmas cards, events, content for internal communication channels, production
of video clips and development of campaign materials, etc. Focus is on how ideas are created within
this situation when participants interact turn-by-turn and by the use of multimodal resources.
This research fills a gap in the existing literature on innovation and creativity. Everyone talks about
innovation and creativity, but few have studied in detail how ideas are generated in specific
situations where employees interact. Therefore, the thesis offers a detailed description of how ideas
are created from the perspective of two related research questions: how ideas are created when
participants affiliate with the idea, and how ideas are created when participants disaffiliate with the
idea. In addition, a third research question is, which type of social actions (formats) participants use
for doing idea development.
In response to the first question, the thesis shows:
• How ideas are developed sequentially on a turn-by-turn basis.
• How there exists what is called a three-part structure consisting of: idea-proposal, ideacritique,
idea-critique-management.
• How there is a strong preference for response when an idea is proposed and how critique is
produced with a praxis dispreference, that is; a lot of communicative work.
• How critique is a disaffiliative action that prompts face work.
• How the institutional organization of the situation defines the goal oriented tasks of doing
idea-development.
In response to the second question, the thesis shows:
• How ideas are developed by participants’ co-constructions and use of different semiotic
resources.
• How participants’ ability to think “along the same line”, or “be at the same page”, is a
cognitively distributed phenomenon.
• How affiliation not only is a question of positive minimal response, but participants’
distribution of cognition.
• How distributed cognition is observable by the way participants project and recognize what
is a next relevant action in the stream of speech; for instance their ability to complete each
other’s sentences.
• How affiliation is maintained by embodied discourse markers.
• How material structures and embodied actions inform participants and supply them with
inspiration, associations and thereby serve as powerful resources.
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