Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

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• Motivational relevancies
Christopher N. Candlin
Here we focus on the discussion offered by Sarangi and Candlin
(2001) on the choice of two methodological positions: one where
analyst and participant are assumed to bring distinctive perspectives
on the data, very much in the objectivist, scientific mode of inquiry,
leading, as they say, analysts to impose or transform the ‘observed’
into a form of order; or the second, where analysts and participants are
held to view the world in the same way, through the same lens, using
the same coding devices, very much in the hermeneutic, ethnomethodological
mode of inquiry.
• Operationalisation
Here we focus on how to achieve that methodological integration
implied by the discussion earlier on research, how to achieve what
Miles and Huberman (1994) call for when they say that any coding
process has to be both systematic and inductive, connecting (in the
terms of this chapter) description, interpretation and explanation.
• Authentication
Here we focus on the work of researchers in organisational discourse
studies, notably Iedema (2003), Grant / Iedema (2005), Reed (2000),
Putnam / Fairhurst (2001), where considerable concerns have been
raised against inadequately sited and located text and discourse
analysis, leading to what has been termed ‘linguistic instrumentalism’,
in essence implying that there are problems of authentication of
discourse-based research where language is seen as the origin, logic
and source of organizational practices. Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s work
(2002) into what they refer to as ‘the tacit order of teamwork’
resonates with Hak’s chapter in Sarangi / Roberts (1999) where he
cautions against ‘talk bias’ in research into health care, both studies
resonating with the call ‘to bring work back in’ to studies of
professional and organisational communication. Professional practice