Negotiation of entitlement in proposal sequences

Abstract

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this paper examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles.

Establishing joint decisions in a dyad

“…The participants' ways of dealing with the established decisions might also be more 'serious' than in typical family encounters: participants usually write down the decisions on their notepads immediately after each decision has been reached. 2 Notably, even if pastors and cantors have their distinct rights and responsibilities in certain domains of power and expertise (such as the cantor has in the domain of music), these are also negotiable in interactionjust like in families (Goodwin, 2006) and organizational meetings (Asmuss and Oshima, 2012). Thus, while the participants' institutional roles are sometimes reflected in the recurrent patterns of the present data, in this study, they are nonetheless not assigned an explanatory status in accounting for interaction (however, see Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012).…”

Coordinating talk and practical action

“…Much work on multimodal interaction has concentrated on demonstrating that talk and the uses of the various bodily and artefactual media of communication that we commonly employ in face-toface encounters are precisely coordinated (e.g. Goodwin and Goodwin 1986, Heath 1986, Streeck 1993, Bolden 2003, Asmuß and Oshima 2012, implying that the production of integral multimodal "packages" is the characteristic form and organizational achievement of multimodal interaction. This is in line with the contention by many conversation analysts, notably Schegloff (e.g.…”

“…Streeck 1996). Many studies have focused on the sequential coordination of vocal and bodily practices in organizing specific courses of action, such as the "collaborative imagining" of a future building by a group of architects (Murphy 2005), the assessment sequence while trying on of clothes in a fashion atelier (Fasulo and Monzani 2009), proposal sequences during strategy meetings (Asmuß and Oshima 2012), and directive/response sequences in the family activity of parents getting children ready for bed (Goodwin and Cekaite 2013). Professional competences in any given field may thus include the professionals' ability to strategically use multimodal resources for communicative and instructional purposes.…”

Spelling out consequences: Conditional constructions as a means to resist proposals in organisational planning process

“…Some other studies have, for their part, investigated decision making and organisational planning, concentrating on actions -such as directives -occurring regularly in workplace meeting interaction (e.g. Asmuß and Oshima, 2012;Stevanovic, 2012;Svennevig and Djordjilovic, 2015; see also Bolander and Sandberg, 2013). Nonetheless, they have largely focused on single conversations where the activities at hand are completed then and there.…”

“…However, the proposal may, for instance, be framed as a thought (Stevanovic, 2013) or as a quotation or a formulation (Nissi, 2015) in order to modify the way the idea is imposed on the recipient or to present a proposal that does not solely belong to the speaker. Proposals may also be intertwined with embodied action and the material resources of the setting (Asmuß and Oshima, 2012;Nissi, 2015;Pälli and Lehtinen, 2014).…”