Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

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Christopher N. Candlin
in and of itself Layder’s elements of context and setting, and certainly
not the overarching construct of history. The significance of context
and setting only emerges from the talk and writings of the
participants, from their narratives when set against socio-historical
accounts and studies of organizational change, shifts in national
policies, analyses of decision-making over time. Including this
dimension, as Layder argues one must, moves the research agenda
from description and interpretation to what one can call critical
explanation. Finally, in Layder’s resource map, what is the
significance for the researcher of his fourth element, the self? If we
see self, with Layder, as invoking identity within the context of social
experience, what he refers to as the ‘unique psychobiography of the
individual’ (1993: 71) located within the time-space of a life career,
then the struggle between the individuality and the collectivity of the
self as at once body, mind and person is revealed.
Layder is, of course, writing as a social theorist and sociologist,
not as someone directly connected to the analysis of professional
discourse. It is not at all difficult, however, to map onto Layder’s
resource map discourse analytical practices which are familiar to those
concerned with professional communication. Conversational analysis
focusing on charting interaction, and interactional sociolinguistics
focusing on participant interpretation and inferencing can be readily
married to, say, systemic-functional grammatical and prosodic
analyses of textualisations, whether they be drawn from spoken,
written or otherwise semiotically realized modalities. From our
perspective, what Layder’s model research framework calls for is the
discursive and textual analysis of identified texts, linked to an
ethnographically motivated dimension which draws on qualitative
evidence from participants’ narratives and accounts, in response to the
siting of such texts in terms of their conditions of production and
reception. Following our argument throughout in this chapter, such
accounts will need to be set within an appraisal of the socio-historical
and institutional-organizational conditions under which particular
social practices arise and are privileged in various ways, and under the
constraints imposed, by which particular discursive practices – for
example, topic introduction and control, and speaker/writer
participation rights more generally – are either promoted or
proscribed. What seems important to us is that the perspectives of this