Describing know‐how about group discussion procedure: Must the representation be recursive?

Abstract

While formal agendi and some descriptions have characterized the group discussion process as an overall sequence of linear stages, other descriptions have noted the presence of short, proposal-centered, "reach-testing" sequences embedded within these stages. To the extent that group members' beliefs about ideal group discussion procedures appear to influence actual manifested procedures, an explanation of the basis for group discussion processes requires an understanding of whether group members believe that ideal group discussion procedures should involve linearity or reach-testing. A study was performed to examine the structure of participants' conceptions of ideal group discussion procedures. The results revealed that about one-half of the participants favor a reach-testing procedure, about one-fifth a linear procedure, about one-fifth a procedure beginning with reach-testing and ending with a linear stage, and about one-tenth a procedure beginning with a linear stage and ending with reach-testing. These findings can be adequately represented by a "recursive MOP" formalism.

The Association between Group Procedural MOPs and Group Discussion Procedure

“…The methodological background for the present study was established in a two-part study described in Pavitt (1992). The first part was performed to establish a list of consensually agreed on procedural steps.…”

“…Another significant application of the MOP concept has been Honeycutt and Cantrill's (Honeycutt, Cantrill, & Allen, 1992;Honeycutt, Cantrill, & Greene, 1989) exploration of stages in relationship growth and decay. Pavitt (1992) performed a study intended to discover whether a sample of participants could be said to have group procedural MOPs and the degree to which the content of these MOPs was shared. Participants were asked to imagine that they were members of a group making an important decision and that during their discussion three possible solutions would be proposed, discussed, and evaluated before the best of the three was chosen.…”

“…Such beliefs would be an example of what Schank (1982) titled a "memory organization packet" (MOP). Recent work (Pavitt, 1992) has identified a typology of MOPs relevant to group discussion procedure, with each type representing a set of beliefs about ideal procedure shared by a significant proportion of people. The goal of this article is to examine the association between these ideal types and group discussion procedure.…”

A Sympathetic Reaction to the SM and DLCM as Group Communication Theories

“…This would actually be possible within the context of the SM if group members shared beliefs relevant to the content and correct sequence of group procedural stages (i.e., problem definition, evaluation criteria creation, and proposal analysis in that order; Bales & Strodtbeck, 1951) and used these beliefs as a blueprint for their own cognitive and verbal activity, such that group members’ verbalizations were simultaneously relevant to the same decision stage. Poole and Doelger (1986) proposed the existence of culturally shared knowledge concerning group procedure, and my own work provides evidence of commonality among individual implicit theories of group procedure in their most general outlines if not in their details (Pavitt, 1992). In other words, perhaps the SM is accurate at the procedural level of analysis.…”

The Third Way: Scientific Realism and Communication Theory

“…Here again theorists have often come up short, particularly in the area of procedural knowledge. Theorists have gotten useful mileage out of the MOP (Kellermann, 1995;Pavitt, 1992) and plan (Berger, 1995) formalisms for structure, but without linking them with any accompanying description of cognitive process. As Greene ( 1984) noted, without specifying a process, there will always be a way of interpreting any possible data set with any proposed structure, so that current plan and MOP formalisms are unfalsifiable.…”