Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

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Christopher N. Candlin
[…] there is compelling evidence from a range of studies in health care and
other fields […] that certain discursive features and discursive strategies do
recur in discussions about the relation of discourse to the display of expert
behaviour. Such features and strategies are best seen as professional resources
that accompany or constitute actions, open to be drawn upon and linked to
particular displays of professional expertise. […] (A)mong these resources is
the ability of expert practitioners to manage interactions across distinct planes
of discourse – transactional and interactional – and more specifically, their
ability to manage complex recontextualisations intertextually and
interdiscursively […] by employing a variety of voices polyphonically […] as
the context and the expert’s shifting roles warrant.
Given the links claimed at the outset of this chapter between
discourses and social practices, such a close relationship would be
expected. Furthermore, if such practices are increasingly marked by
interdiscursivity, it is to that construct that we should address our
research attention in the context of professional communication. In
doing so it is the ways in which we interpret interdiscursivity which
then become important. As we noted in the reference to work on
ADR, discourses are regarded there in terms of what Foucault (and
Fairclough) designate as orders of discourse – that is to say
incorporating both discursive practices in a range of semiotic
realisations (seen in terms of performance and interpretation) and the
ideologically invested systems of belief and knowledge within
particular institutional orders, constructed and maintained by such
discursive practices. In attempting to provide an account of such
practices, not unnaturally, researchers coming from a linguistic and
textual analytical tradition have oriented themselves to the description
and analysis of their textualisations. In short, in the context of this
chapter, their focus has been on the intertextual indices of this
interdiscursivity. While such hugging of the textual ground is
important and indispensable, its elevation to the prime focus of
research into professional communication practices runs some risk.
Primarily, it runs the risk of failing to maintain the twin focus on
structure and process indicated earlier by Cicourel. The emphasis is all
too frequently on structure, with the consequent (and second) risk that
structure is released from the context of activity. The conditions of
production and reception of such texts – their links to activity and
practice – remain hidden, if ever recorded and noted. The third risk is
that our descriptions and analyses display only a researcher’s