Mediation is a widely used form of third-party conflict management for which research has primarily focused on the role of mediators, but how are the relations between disputing parties constituted in communication involving written texts, such as official letters or medical reports, during mediation sessions? To gain deeper insight into the communicative dynamics through which third-party disputes are created, sustained, and resolved, this paper proposes a new theoretical perspective on mediation by focusing on how human beings and written texts can act as vectors for each other. The value of this vectorial perspective on mediation is subsequently shown through an inductive analysis of video-recorded sessions that took place at an administrative tribunal in Canada. By showing how texts (or their absence) can act as (1) conjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting disputants’ compatibilities and help them find common ground, or (2) disjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting their incompatibilities and obstruct their dispute resolution, this paper makes important contributions to the academic and professional literature on the role of communication in conflict mediation work, and reveals significant implications for the study and practice of conflict management in organizations, as well as scholarship on relational ontologies.
Historically, media studies and interaction studies have been estranged from each other. As John Durham Peters noted, this unfortunate situation can be traced back to the quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates, which can be summarized as the perennial opposition between the doctrine of dissemination, today represented by media studies, and the doctrine of dialogue, represented by interaction studies. This chapter calls this opposition into question by proposing to study media from a ventriloquial perspective. Communication is not only a question of co-construction and co-orientation, aspects on which interaction studies often focus, but also of delegation and tele-action, aspects that highlight the mediated dimension of any communicative act. The chapter illustrates the value of this perspective by providing an in-depth analysis of a videorecorded conflict mediation session. More specifically, it shows how a mediator acts as a medium in third-party dispute resolution by giving each party an opportunity to recognize their interests and positions in the other’s expressed interests and positions. The mediator thus acts as a ventriloquist who aims to help parties say things that reflect the compatibility of their respective interests, which seem incompatible at the onset of the mediation.
In this article, we propose to mobilize a communicative constitutive approach to analyze sessions that took place in the context of online suicide prevention chats in France. By analyzing the detail of a specific excerpt, we propose, more precisely, to draw a portrait of various figures that appear to express themselves in what could be called online help in action (see also Bartesaghi, 2014). Beyond the various psychotherapeutic approaches that are supposed to inform what volunteers are saying and doing, our goal is to start with their practices to determine the figures that they implicitly or explicitly stage in their turns of talk to help out the callers. By analyzing the relational aspects of these conversations, we thus show that these sessions can be compared to a form of modern exorcism, where the callers’ distress, uneasiness or suffering is meant to pass in and through the conversations. It is the conditions of these passages that we are exploring, especially regarding the tensions that they generate.
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