This paper discusses the role of narrative in the expression and transmission of social knowledge as a specific type of tacit knowledge. Narrative is a central mechanism by which social knowledge is conveyed. Narrative provides a bridge between the tacit and the explicit, allowing tacit social knowledge to be demonstrated and learned, without the need to propositionalize it. Institutions can best maintain their stock of stories by providing occasions on which they can be told. Archival systems such as data bases, lessons learned systems, and video records are less effective, particularly when they attempt to store records or transcripts of oral stories. However, they can be improved by attention to key design dimensions, including appropriate allocation of the effort required from system administrators and users, and attention to translation between genres.
Sociolinguistics has never been a closed or autonomous discipline, but rather has considered relations between linguistic variables and so-called real-world variables, such as age, sex, and social class. Developments in discourse analysis now permit the analysis of the effectiveness of utterances in their real-world context. This study of communicative success uses as its data transcripts of eight aviation accidents, as well as transcripts of fourteen flight simulator sessions. The linguistic variable considered is mitigation; the real-world variables are success or failure of the individual communication, and peer judgments of the overall effectiveness of the simulator crews. To quantify the use of mitigation, a four-degree scale was established by using the judgments of several linguistic analysts and was validated against the judgments of members of the aviation community. Using this scale, a number of hypotheses were confirmed: (1) Utterances going up the chain of command are more mitigated than those going down, showing that mitigation is sensitive to social rank. (2) Utterances introducing a new topic are more likely to fail if they are mitigated than if they are direct. (3) Suggestions by a crew member to the captain are more likely to fail if they are mitigated than if they are direct. These results show a strong effect of mitigation on several measures of communicative success. This study shows that a quantitative study of communicative success is possible and suggests the necessity for further studies of this type as a necessary direction for discourse analysis. (Pragmatics, discourse analysis, communicative effectiveness, politeness, mitigation, perlocutionary force, man-machine interface)
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