Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

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Christopher N. Candlin
work, organizations and bureaucracies, and within these in specific
sites; for example, in the domain of healthcare we may contrast the
typical face-to-face professional encounter with the less familiar ITmediated
tele-consultation. Within these we may identify as foci of
research the activity types, discourse types and strategies we have
already referred to. We may also, in any comparative study, involve
the nature and importance accorded to evidence in such sites, to the
maintenance of professional neutrality, the quality of professional and
lay reasoning and argument, or the role of communication in the
appraisal and assessment of professional practice.
Any research model which will be adequate in relation to the
questions and challenges raised so far will need to address a number
of issues: firstly, how to situate discursive practices, texts and
accounts within a model which is inclusive of all relevant features of
discourse; secondly, how to accommodate the distinctive perspectives
and relevancies appropriate to all participants, both ‘motivational’ and
‘practical’, as Sarangi and Candlin (2001) argue; thirdly, how to make
a connection between the macro-sociological focus on the testing of
theory, underpinned by large-scale quantitative analysis and micro
interactional analysis, emphasising qualitative and grounded,
participant-centered accounts; and finally, how to incorporate these
descriptive methodologies into a useful, workable, and accountable
system. One such model framework has been made available by the
sociologist and social theorist Derek Layder in a number of recent
publications (1993, 1997) under the general title of a resource map for
research, the essentials of which we sketch in what follows.
In this cartography, Layder sets out four research elements,
each of which is interconnected with the others, and each of which has
a particular, and equally connectable, research focus. Layder (1997:
132ff) argues that none of the elements is prime, and research may
begin with any, providing that all are severally and differentially
addressed. From the interplay of the data arising from each element,
theory ‘emerges’. We take it this is the basis of his construct of
‘adaptive theory’.
It is significant also that the four research elements: context,
setting, situated activity, self are all set within a frame of history,
although we need to note that in Layder’s conception, all elements, as
social processes, have their own time-space frames. Interactions