Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

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Christopher N. Candlin
• What is their source?
• How are they drawn upon or co-constructed in critical moments
in given sites?
• What is their relationship to work and action in particular sites?
• How pervasive are they across discourse types and activity types?
• How are they realized textually and semiotically?
• How are they recognised as significant and by whom?
• What role does their deployment play in underpinning
professional expertise?
4. Focus on research
We have claimed at the outset of this chapter that coping with the
challenges of interdiscursivity is a characteristic of professional
expertise. We further came to the conclusion that in order to explore
and attempt to explain such interdiscursivity and such expertise it was
inadequate only, or even primarily, to focus our attention on the
descriptive features of text. In making this claim, and directing our
attention towards activity type, discourse type and, in particular,
strategy, we do not, of course, avoid the need to carefully describe
realizations multi-modally, and in any case semiotically, and not
merely linguistically. One might then begin this focus on research
with the assertion that given this stance, interdiscursively managed
communication requires an interdiscursive methodology, one that
employs a range of methodologies in a multiply-focused study of the
available data – such a data set being understood as not merely what
was, or significantly was not, articulated or displayed, but also what
drew in as relevant data participant narrative, institutional and
organizational analysis, both in the context of the historical as well as
the immediate, and involving micro and macro perspectives.
Candlin (1997: xii) makes the following claim in this context:
[…] what emerges is a requirement for […] a complex interdiscursivity of
analysis, matching the interplay between the micro and the macro, the actual
and the historical, the ethnographic and the ethnomethodological, the