Accounting for Interdiscursivity: Challenges to Professional Expertise

8
Christopher N. Candlin
and more local way in which strategy is used and it is this that we
propose to focus on in this section of the paper.
As one example of such a local use of the term, let us provide a
brief summary account from an early study of Family Planning
Counselling talk (Candlin / Lucas 1986). The setting is a community
public welfare clinic, although sponsored by a religious organisation,
and frequented by many, often indigent, welfare clients. Attending the
family planning Counselling sessions in this centre there were a good
number of teenagers seeking advice, sometimes in relation to
terminations of pregnancy. The Counsellor, by virtue of the ethics and
regulations of her profession, was precluded from giving advice (since
Counsellors may not make evaluative judgements); furthermore, she
was also institutionally forbidden to do so as such matters were the
prerogatives of licensed physicians in that community. Yet, her clients
nevertheless sought advice. What was to be done? The recourse of the
Counsellor was to couch her remarks about actions, such as smoking,
which might affect the health of the unborn child, as anecdotal stories
of her experience, personal to her and her family, about how such
practices could have negative effects. Thus the message was being
delivered, but without compromising either her professional position,
or transgressing her institutional authority. In fact, as the study shows,
Counsellors had recourse to a number of these person-focussed
strategies and used them to telling and expert effect.
At the time of the study, there were rather few analytical
methodologies which seemed, taken singly, to offer an explanatory –
as apart from a purely descriptive – resource. Textual description
would have provided an account of the extensively modalised
utterances of the Counsellor; genre analysis in terms of moves would
have permitted some insight into the staged nature of the encounter;
conversational analysis would have offered a local and contiguous
interpretation of the exchanges of the participants and how responses
could be, as it were, ‘heard’ and made locally relevant; but none
seemed to offer an explanation of how the Counsellor expertly
negotiated the pragmatic space as a kind of discursive continuum
between the poles of information-giving on the one hand and contraindicating
of harmful actions on the other, with the illocutionary force
of ‘providing advice’ where no advice was, in fact, ever explicitly
given, for the professional reasons alluded to above. Certainly,