Communication and the reflective practitioner: a shared perspective from sociolinguistics and...

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Communication and the reflective practitioner w 185International Journal of Applied Linguistics w Vol. 14 w No. 2 w 2004

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Communication and the reflectivepractitioner: a shared perspective fromsociolinguistics and organisationalcommunication

Deborah Jones and Maria Stubbe Victoria University of Wellington

This paper provides an overview of an interdisciplinary project which drawstogether sociolinguistic analyses of workplace discourse and recent work inthe field of organisational studies. The starting point for this collaborationwas a set of questions which arose from attempts to apply the findings ofa large-scale sociolinguistic study into workplace language: (i) How cansociolinguistic tools and models generate useful feedback for practitionersand contribute to organisational learning? (ii) How can the understandingresearchers have developed of workplace discourse help individuals and teamscritically reflect on their own communication practices? (iii) What can theaction research process add to our theoretical knowledge about workplacediscourse? The authors explore these questions in the context of a number ofcurrent issues in the field of organisational studies, including an increasinginterest in language and communication; emerging critical perspectives onthe notion of competence in workplaces; and debates over the relationshipsbetween expert and practitioner knowledges. The concept of ‘reflective prac-tice’ is presented as a framework to address these issues in the evaluationand development of workplace communication.

Introduction: reflecting on a collaboration

This article gives details of a collaboration between sociolinguistics andorganisational communication, engaging with the question: How can socio-linguistic research address the needs of workplace practitioners? By workingtogether on a series of workplace–based development projects, we createda dialogue with each other’s disciplines in practice, rather than on a meta-theoretical basis. Practitioners were asking sociolinguistic researchers whatthey could do with the detailed descriptions of workplace communicationthat had been generated by the Language in the Workplace Project (LWP)1 atVictoria University. In collaborating to respond to this challenge, and bycreating a model of communication evaluation and development, we were

186 w Deborah Jones and Maria Stubbe


also able to engage with questions about what our disciplines could offereach other.

We set out to invite researchers in applied linguistics to consider howthe analysis of workplace data can be made useful to practitioners. Inthe process of our interdisciplinary collaboration we drew on approachesfrom the organisational communication literature, and the broader organisa-tional development literature with which it is linked. We describe a processwhereby we changed how we responded to practitioners as researchers,moving across a continuum from research on workplace practice to researchwith practitioners.

Our account parallels the Communication Evaluation and Develop-ment (CED) process that we describe here, one based on reflective practiceand action learning. It is presented as an interdisciplinary dialogue, co-creating a model which we then tried out in action in workplaces. Wedescribe how, through cycles of action and reflection, we collaborativelydeveloped our thinking on how sociolinguistic research can be put to work,at work.

The researchers involved in the project shared a central commitment: tomove away from the notion of prescribed communication competencies andtowards a more flexible and complex approach to workplace communica-tion, based on the idea of ‘reflective practice’. This commitment provided anexus which enabled connections to various ways of working with conceptsof communication, competency, organisation, and change. Rather than settingout to make a theoretical synthesis, we set out to respond to communicationpractitioners by loosely coupling our approaches.

Here we emphasise the dialogue, and therefore the distinctions, betweenour disciplinary locations in organisational communication and sociolinguist-ics. But – as is often the case – in practice the situation is messier: we haveboth had relevant workplace experiences, read each other’s literatures andtaught in the same communication programmes. This messiness of practicegenerates creative possibilities that are not often captured in discipline-basedacademic writing. We argue that this kind of interdisciplinary project canbe seen as what organisational communication scholar George Cheney calls“affirmative action”, understood in its older sense – to push beyond “ourtraditional disciplinary networks, identifications and routines, to help over-come the tendency toward closure, self-affirmation, and self-legitimation”(Cheney 2000: 135).

In the next section, we briefly outline the key elements of the dialoguethat developed between the sociolinguists and workplace practitioners whoparticipated in the first stages of the Language in the Workplace project, andhow this opened up the issues of “practical relevance” (Roberts and Sarangi1999) which led us to experiment with developing an interdisciplinary CEDmodel to build on the wealth of information about real-life workplace inter-action generated by the research.


Communication and the reflective practitioner w 187

A sociolinguistic perspective: creating a dialogue betweenresearchers and practitioners

The Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) began at Victoria Universityof Wellington in 1996, aiming to identify characteristics of effective commun-ication between people, diagnose possible causes of miscommunication, andexplore possible applications of the findings for New Zealand workplaces(Holmes and Stubbe 2003; LWP 2003a). The workplace provides an obviousresearch focus for sociolinguists interested in exploring the nexus betweenlanguage and society, and for looking explicitly at areas such as language,power and politeness, cross-cultural communication and gender issues.Until quite recently there has been a dearth of sociolinguistic research onworkplace communication which is based on genuine ‘real life’ data drawnfrom actual interactions and participant observation in a range of work-place contexts. The LWP team set out to address this gap by developingparticipatory methodologies to collect natural interaction data depicting talkin a variety of different workplace contexts (see Holmes 2000; Holmes andStubbe 2003; Stubbe 1998; Stubbe 2001; Stubbe and Ingle 1999). The projectteam began collecting recordings of workplace interactions in 1996 in fourgovernment organisations, and in 1997 the project was extended to includerecordings from workplaces outside the government sector, including majorcorporations, small businesses and factories. Volunteers in each organisationtaped everyday work-related meetings or discussions in government policyunits, management groups, project teams, factory production teams and smallbusinesses. They also recorded some telephone calls and social conversa-tions, and the project team videotaped a number of larger, more formalmeetings from most workplaces.

In this article we reflect on the ways that we pursued the objective ofexploring “possible applications of the findings for New Zealand workplaces”,and how this pursuit gradually drew us away from a diagnostic approachto a more participatory approach in which practitioners were involved inidentifying communication issues for development, identifying and collect-ing data, and generating and evaluating possible actions to create changes.While our key focus is the CED model, the broader LWP project and itsevolution is an important contextual factor. In Figure 1, we set out the keyproject phases to show how the model developed, and also the points fromwhich we derive our cited data. The citations from practitioners in thissection refer to Phase Three of the project, when they responded to feedbackgiven by the LWP team, based on the analysis of data collected from theirown workplaces.

A number of commentators have remarked upon a trend towards a greaterfocus on effective communication in today’s organisations (e.g. Cameron2000; Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin 2001). One reason for this may be thatin the new work order, roles and relationships have become less clearly



Phase 1:Research “on”workplacepractice

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4:Research“with”workplacepractitioners

Phase 5?

LWP team developed proposal based on literature andconsultation with a range of practitioners:• 3 key objectives were based on investigating language in the

workplace to meet theoretical purposes and applied agenda• Methodology included practitioners collecting data themselves

Negotiations in workplaces to carry out applied research:• LWP team realised that an applied approach involved taking

on practitioner research questions, i.e. participatory agenda• Practitioners asked for ‘quick’ feedback, i.e. 3–6 months

Feedback process – in workplaces and through seminars andpresentations to the public:• Questions from practitioners about how the feedback could be

used in their workplaces• Response to feedback led to realisation that the applications

were most powerful when people were working with theirown workplace data

• Experiments with how the feedback could be used led todevelopment of CED model

• CED model drew in action research and organisationalcommunication perspectives; social constructionist modelsespecially about communities of practice

Piloting CED model:• Development of specific workshop and mentoring processes

for evaluating and developing workplace communication• Further questions raised about role of sociolinguists as

‘experts’• Need to integrate wider ideas about communication processes

along with local data• Engagement with organisational development processes

Possible next phase:• Refining CED based on pilot• Further application case studies• Using action research to address issues identified in Phase 4

defined and more open to negotiation, and talk itself increasingly is thework, not just a means to an end (cf. Iedema and Scheere forthcoming;Stubbe 2000). This in turn places greater demands on the interpersonalcommunication skills of workplace practitioners and may lead practitionersto reframe communication as a key aspect of organisational developmentand change, as this manager pointed out in the course of the research (seeAppendix for transcription key):

Figure 1. Developing the CED model



. . . we’ve chosen people who are really good open confident commun-icators at a business level and at an interpersonal level . . . so hopefullywe’ve moved the culture ahead a step further . . . + um obviously we metall the technical competencies we needed but largely we made the choiceamongst a HUGE pool of really good applicants on interpersonal skills. . . and communication as being a big part of that + their WAY of working.

However, exactly what constitutes individual ‘competence’ or ‘effectivecommunication’ within an organisation, and how these might be evaluatedand developed, is less clear. Practitioners we consulted in the early stages ofthe research sought clear answers to these questions. At the same time, theyalso expressed their dissatisfaction with traditional prescriptive models ofassessment and training which tend to focus on a set of discrete, rigidlydefined communication skills or tasks, which it is assumed can be learnedin isolation and readily transferred into different workplace contexts. Theseconcerns were tied in with the two broad aims of the LWP research, whichare (1) to identify the characteristics of effective communication in naturalworkplace interaction, and (2) to explore possible applications of the findingsfor workplace practitioners. From early in the project, the LWP team stressedthat there are “no simple rules” for effective communication at work (LWP2003b), and that strategies based on specific contexts are the key to effective-ness. These contexts involve not only organisational processes but specificworkplace communication sites or functions such as meetings, decision-making, giving directives and so on (see the LWP 2003c website for summariesof analyses based on these contextual issues). This emphasis on context wasthe basis for the later development of the CED model which looks forcontext-specific definitions of communication objectives and ways to meetthem.

We established an ongoing dialogue with the individuals and organ-isations involved, based on the action research principle of “research on, forand with” our participants (Cameron et al. 1992: 22). The LWP team were“committed to research that would inform . . . practice and would not simplybe addressed to fellow linguists and discourse analysts” but would achieve“real world outcomes” (cf. Sarangi and Roberts forthcoming). However, it isfair to say that, initially at least, we were still strongly influenced by thetraditional model of applied research where the findings are fed back inan accessible form to practitioners, leaving open the question of how thesewill actually be translated into practice.

As the research progressed and our relationship with practitionersevolved, we began to reflect on and question this approach, and we graduallymoved towards a more reciprocal dialogue between academic researchersand workplace practitioners (cf. Rampton 1997). This was achieved in variousways. We held regular debriefing sessions with groups of volunteers as wellas interviews with selected individuals, and once preliminary analysis wascomplete, formal feedback sessions were held at each workplace. These were



open forums, including a summary of key findings from the researchers andmutual discussion of any issues arising from and possible future directionsfor the research. We were also invited to run workshops in participatingworkplaces, where we were able to offer a sociolinguistic framework forlooking at commonplace interactional processes such as decision-making inmeetings based on our analyses of the participants’ own interactions. Thisinput helped to illuminate and bring to conscious attention for workplaceparticipants issues that had previously gone unnoticed, such as turn-takingpatterns or the underlying structure of an interaction.

We received a great deal of positive feedback from informants about thebenefits to them, both personally and professionally, of their involvement inthe data collection and feedback processes. For instance, people often reportedthey had gained useful insights simply by monitoring their actual inter-action patterns as compared to their perceptions, or by listening to their ownrecordings:

. . . but what was interesting was that because of this project I realisedhow . . . it’s just constant? you’re working on something and your boss isthere talking about something completely different and um yeah . . . likewhen Leila- she’s not in there AT ALL you actually get all this workdone [laughter] . . . it wasn’t till I started doing this and had to turn thetape on and off that I realised the interruptions?

This feedback led us to experiment with facilitated reflection as a tool forevaluating communication (Daudelin 1996). This process involved combiningthe researchers’ ‘outsider’ perspective and tools with the more subjectiveand detailed insider knowledge of the informants and was valuable toboth parties. From our perspective as linguists, it enabled us to fine-tuneour analyses and to develop grounded theories about the characteristics ofworkplace communication. The practitioners for their part suggested thatthis process made them more critical and open-minded observers of theirown communication practices:

I found reading the written transcript and listening to the tape a totallydifferent experience and I realised that so much of what was going onwas non-verbal . . . and . . . that . . . we all rely a huge amount on implicitunderstanding of all the stuff, that we say things to a member of anotherunit and they don’t necessarily get it only we don’t know they haven’tbecause we’ve spoken to them as we would to another of our ownunit and they don’t understand all the background and can’t unpickall the implications . . . and then we get irritated if they haven’t got thepoint . . .

Because the resultant learning was rooted in their own experience andworkplace contexts, participants reported that it was inherently meaningful



to them and thus more likely to be acted upon – resonating strongly andstaying with them in a way they felt information from more general andprescriptive courses seldom did. For example, even several years on, weoccasionally encounter participants involved in the early stages of the studywho still clearly remember details of their experiences during the research,even down to the dynamics of particular interactions they had recorded andreflected upon.

The practitioners who attended our presentations and seminars werefascinated by the practical examples of workplace communication issuesgenerated by the project, and they clearly felt they had benefited from anincreased awareness of typical communication patterns and interactionaldynamics. Nevertheless, despite our stated reluctance to take a traditionalfunctionalist approach and present a set of ‘rules’ for effective communica-tion from ‘on high’, we were still frequently cast in the role of the ‘expert’who was expected to provide a list of simple do’s and don’ts, as in thisexample from a workshop:

. . . I’d be quite interested in knowing whether that was the right way ofgoing around it + it would be really interesting to get your feedback-from a professional point of view . . .

However, the results of data analyses undertaken by various members ofthe LWP team supported a dynamic social constructionist model of workplaceinteraction, which suggests that effective workplace communication involvesgeneric skills, such as being flexible and responsive to a communicationsituation as it unfolds, taking account of interpersonal as well as task-relatedgoals, and being pro-active in trying to minimise the potential for misunder-standings and conflict. For instance, practitioners were surprised when theLWP feedback identified and affirmed the complex communication skillsinvolved in a meeting which the practitioners had seen as full of irrelevantdigressions. On reflection and after further analysis they found that almostall the so-called “digressions” had served a valuable purpose, though notnecessarily in relation to the immediate problem they were currently discuss-ing. The digressions had in fact provided invaluable background preparationfor further larger meetings they were to attend at a later point. Similarly,LWP research indicates that good managers skilfully balance the need foraction with the importance of constructing and maintaining rapport. Thistypically involves assessing the complex interacting demands of many dif-ferent contextual factors. The ability to negotiate in order to reach an agreedunderstanding of what needs to be done is one crucial skill. One managerreported, for instance, that she became more aware of the range of strategiesthat she used to get things done with different people in different contexts.Another commented that before being involved in our research she wasunaware of the important role that humour played in maintaining good staffrelations in her workplace.



We therefore gave feedback which encouraged reflection in contextand were unable and unwilling to provide the sort of definitive ‘scientific’generalisations or ‘expert advice’ that many people seemed to expect froma research project such as this (cf. Sarangi and Roberts forthcoming), andthere seemed to be no obvious and immediate way to take what had beenlearned a stage further into organisational practice. As one human resourcespractitioner commented:

. . . it was really interesting when you came and did that feedback sessionwith us . . . you know lightbulbs go on when you do the explanations. . . some of it was not unfamiliar to me but to others I think it really wasquite a revelation . . . yeah and the step beyond that which is . . . whattool you actually use . . . what you could do to change the situation . . . ifyou can identify that something’s going on what strategies could you useto to get a good outcome . . . but it’s made me think well + are there ways+ are there things you could learn from this research that could help youto work out what is really effective for your own organisation . . .

Our goal, then, in developing the CED model was to create new waysto make the research carried out under the umbrella of the LWP projectmeaningful and useful to New Zealand organisations. Specifically, we wantedto create a model which could be used flexibly for the evaluation and thendevelopment of communication in a given organisation. Our challenge hasbeen to develop a research-based model that has integrity in sociolinguisticterms, makes coherent connections between relevant models of language,communication, organisation and change, and can respond to the specificityof different organisational contexts. This goal requires an innovative ap-proach, which goes well beyond presenting central ideas as research findingsthrough seminars or publications. Our solution was to introduce relevantperspectives from organisational studies to the project and develop a set ofuser-friendly reflective tools for observing and analysing actual workplaceinteractions, thus providing a framework for looking at organisationalissues and their relationship to our ongoing sociolinguistic research onlanguage in the workplace.2

An organisational communication perspective:creating a model of organisation, communication and change

Organisational communication

In spite of the rich potential for interdisciplinary work, there has until nowbeen little interchange between two fields which are both concerned withworkplace communication: workplace discourse studies based in sociolin-guistics (e.g. Sarangi and Roberts 1999) and the organisational communication



literature with disciplinary roots in communication studies (e.g. Littlejohn1996). Part of the value of the organisational communication literature lies inits convergences with the more general literature of organisational studies,opening up the possibilities of looking at organisational issues in commun-ication terms, not just at communication in workplaces. This perspective canmake communication central to workplace practitioners – more than just aset of personal skills, no matter how useful. It is in the overlapping spacebetween organisational communication and sociolinguistics that our CEDmodel is located.

Organisational communication was brought into this project becausesociolinguistics in itself was judged to be unequipped to deal with issues oforganisational practice and change. The original brief was that an organisa-tional communication approach would be used to supplement the kinds ofknowledge and methods already developed in the Language in the WorkplaceProject, “to develop a model for an interpersonal communication evaluationand development process, to be used in organisations by organisationalfacilitators”. This model was to draw somehow on the LWP research butmust be able to be ‘given away’ to, and operated by, practitioners themselves.

As we said in our introduction, we began with a commitment to moveaway from the notion of prescribed communication competencies and to-wards a more flexible and complex approach to workplace communication,based on the idea of ‘reflective practice’. From this starting point, our versionsof organisational communication and organisational change were determined.It could have been otherwise. Although there are as yet very few contribu-tions from sociolinguistics to the literature of organisational communication,those that do exist tend to work within what organisational communicationscholar Linda Putnam (1983) has distinguished as a functionalist model,which tends to match fairly seamlessly with the more traditional positivistforms of sociolinguistics (see e.g. Morand’s 1996 and 2000 studies of polite-ness in organisations). This work does demonstrate within its own contextwhat sociolinguistic research can do: provide powerful and finely nuancedobservations of how organisational behaviour plays out in language.

However, we use another theoretical context, one which is oriented to-wards context-sensitive knowledge, collaboration, and multiple perspectives.What we call ‘organisational communication’ is an inter-disciplinary fieldwhich has developed in the USA in the last few decades, based in a rangeof sites from management schools to communication departments anddrawing on a wide range of traditions in the social sciences and humanities.Recently, versions of the field have emerged in New Zealand and Australia(More and Irwin 2000; Zorn 2002). In the last two decades the field of organ-isational communication has moved away from seeing communication as atool of managers, as a set of discretely specific individual skills or as theglue of organisations. These versions of communication do still occur withinthe literatures of management, organisational behaviour and informationmanagement, but the field which calls itself ‘organisational communication’



is more centrally defined by the proposition that communication is organisa-tion, taking its cue from influential organisational scholars like Karl Weick(1979) who emphasise that collective sense-making is central to humanorganisation and so make communication the core process of organising(Taylor et al. 2001).

More recently, these approaches, drawn from areas such as systems theoryand social psychology, have begun to converge with the linguistic turn inthe social sciences, with interpretive and post-structuralist theories of com-munication, taking the “communication = organising” proposition further tochallenge the ontology of organisation, to emphasise the communicative ordiscursive processes by which organisations and their members come to beconstituted. When all social phenomena can be seen in communicative terms,what then can be the distinctive contribution of a field such as organisa-tional communication? This question has pervaded recent discussions aboutthe field and its future (Ashcraft 2001), and it also arises in workshopswhen practitioners struggle to define a ‘communication’ issue to address asopposed to an ‘interpersonal’ or ‘management’ issue.

Reflective practice

Associated with a broadly social constructionist move in the field is aninterest in problematising the literatures of organisational and managementstudies by drawing on communication theory in various ways: for instance,by problematising ‘voice’ – contesting the “monolithic managerial voice” bybringing in “multiple voices that challenge dominant ways of thinking orfeeling” (Mumby and Stohl 1996). As Mumby and Stohl argue, opening upto multiple voices tends to displace any central or “best practice” notion ofwhat effectiveness might be, whether in communication or any other aspectof organisational life. Reflective practice is one technique which opens up arange of conversations on what effective communication might be in a givensetting.

Donald Schon introduced the idea of ‘reflective practice’ into the organi-sational learning literature in his book, The Reflective Practitioner (1983). Heproposed an alternative to the technical rationality perspective that dominatedacademic writing about professional practice, and often still does (Schon1983: 30). Schon argued that professional situations are unique and oftencomplex, and that standardised applications of generalised theories arenot effective. Instead, he proposed a professional model based on reflection-in-action, a contextual reading of a problem in context. This approach putsthe experiences – the tacit knowledge – of the practitioner at the centre.Reflective practice is about more than observing what you have done andtrying to do it better next time: it encourages re-thinking professional valuesand goals by subjecting them to critical scrutiny, and by developing newprocesses for doing so (Argyris and Schon 1974).



Since his first book, Schon has worked with others to link the idea ofindividual reflective practice to system-wide organisational learning (e.g.Argyris and Schon 1996). These ideas pick up on the systems approachesto organisation introduced by scholars like Weick, and as we have pointedout, these systems-based approaches put communication at centre stage fororganisational development and change. In particular, Peter Senge’s Learn-ing Organization approach (Senge 1993, 1999; Senge et al. 1999) has beeninfluential in theorising and developing a body of practice that emphasiseslearning from reflective practice as a collaborative and organisational way tocreate and share knowledge. Lately, the reflective approach has gained newimpetus from the recent focus on knowledge work, knowledge diffusion,clustering and innovation. Senge’s work and related approaches are premisedon a strong argument that organisations are most effective when they learnsystemically, and individual “mental mastery” is needed only to the extentthat it will enable participation in organisational learning. This can be anextremely challenging approach for practitioners in a corporate environmentwhere developing individual ‘career capital’ is stressed and where it is mucheasier to think in terms of sending individual organisational members offon training courses or ‘managing’ individual performance.

Our model of evaluation and development was framed within this systemsperspective as an organisational development process called “appreciativeinquiry” (Srivastva and Cooperrider 1990; Hammond 1996; Mellish 1998;Mellish and Limerick 1997). This approach avoids looking for communication‘problems’ or applying packaged solutions to individual communicationskill issues. Rather, it sees the organisation holistically as a communicativesystem. It seeks to involve the whole organisation in a reflective learningprocess which builds on existing strengths, and it enables a focus on organi-sational rather than individual competencies.

Making social worlds

Another key premise of the CED model has been that it would have to bebased on a theoretical framework for workplace communication which wasshared by the team. Such a framework could be related to sociolinguisticand critical discourse analysis perspectives already employed in the LWPproject, as well as to organisational studies perspectives. The frameworkshould be able to provide an interface between the academic researchrequirements of the project and the evaluation and learning needs of theorganisation. We take a broadly social constructionist approach which makescommunication central to workplaces by framing communication as the cre-ation of our social worlds, rather than as an activity that we do within them.There are many possible versions of social constructionism in sociolinguisticanalysis, and most current ones are derived from feminist theory (see e.g.the review in Holmes, Stubbe and Vine 1999, which draws on LWP data).



We do not want to downplay the differences that reside within a broadly-framed social constructionism, and at times and in some situations thesedifferences may emerge as critical.

However, here we have used a spacious model – Barnett Pearce’s work(1994) on the Co-ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) – which pro-vided the basis for a social constructionist theoretical framework that couldaccommodate interpretive or post-structuralist organisational communicationperspectives, as well as the results of the sociolinguistic research conductedby the LWP team. Rather than drawing on the sender/receiver or transmis-sion model which is the staple of most communication texts, Pearce’s frame-work is based on a model of communication as “making social worlds”.We have focused on Pearce’s model because, while relatively simple, it iscapable of being used with great theoretical sophistication, and his conceptsand analytic strategies (based around forms of conversational analysis) arequickly meaningful to practitioners, who can use them to reflect on theirown communication practices.

In particular, this method provides a new way to think about compet-ence. Unlike some versions of competence discussed in the organisationalcommunication literature, communicative competence is not seen here as “alist of things that you know or can do” (Pearce 1994: 81) but rather as “anability to perform in unique ways that are responsive to the demands ofspecific situations” (ibid.: 85). In other words, first, communication compet-ency is itself seen as a “language game” – it is not an essential quality.Secondly, as researchers we can theorise it as “the fit between the situationand the mode of acting by the communicator” (ibid.: 82). Pearce emphasisesthat competence is therefore intersubjective, but that at the same time wecan think of competencies on an individual level, in much the same terms asset out in the LWP findings: in terms of learning to be self-monitoring andreflective in communicative contexts.

In taking this approach, we are joining with critics of the competency-based approach that is still powerful in the management literature anddominates important organisational sites like job descriptions, performanceappraisals, development plans and training programmes (Antonacopoulouand FitzGerald 1996). Critiques of competency-based methods in humanresources include the argument that they restrict creativity, are too generic,and cannot be meaningfully measured (ibid.). For instance, practitioners arefrequently required to ‘demonstrate’ communication competencies with littleunderstanding on the part of the evaluator or the communicator of what thatmeans. Attempts to systematise the process have the unfortunate effectof reducing communication competency to a series of discrete and rigidlydefined tasks. Like Henderson (1993), and in sympathy with the BarnettPearce model, we suggest that competencies are best re-framed as the basis foran open and critical conversation about competence, and that action learn-ing provides a way to open up this conversation rather than close it down.



A model for change

Many aspects of a model for change are already embedded in the theoreticalpremises we have outlined: a developmental, systems-based approach, basedon action and reflection. In developing a CED model, we specifically wantedto avoid the assumptions of the most well-known tool of assessing andchanging organisational communication: the communication audit (CA)(Downs 1997; Goldhaber and Krivonos 1977; Tourish and Hargie 2000a).The communication audit involves both diagnosis – “the assessment of currentpractice” – and prescription – “what steps are required to secure improve-ments” (Tourish and Hargie 2000b: xv). The auditor is both an outsider andan expert who can see what practitioners cannot, and who can tell themwhat to do. The consulting model is one in which the external expert ‘fixes’a discretely-identified organisational problem, in contrast with alternativeconsulting approaches based on the kinds of organisational learning modelswe used in our CED pilot. (See D. Jones 2002 for a fuller critique and discus-sion of alternative consulting approaches.)

By contrast, we have framed both evaluation and development asreflective processes that draw attention to what is already happening in theorganisation, and to what people want to create for the future. The CEDmodel was therefore based on ongoing self- and peer-evaluation. It was notintended to require experts (linguistic or otherwise) coming in and observ-ing (or auditing) or training (in the sense of an expert teaching new skills).While various forms of action learning are widely accepted for use by prac-titioners in fields such as education, they are very marginal in business andin other parts of the public sector compared to the technical rationality ofmost forms of communication or other personal-skills training. In our model,action learning has a developmental aim based on practitioner objectives. Wetake the position that problematising the boundaries between learning andpractice emphasises the capacity of practitioners for reflection on their ownaction, rather than enforcing the split between the practitioner (practice) andthe outside expert (theory). This avoids a ‘best practice industry standard’approach, focussing instead on what works in a given context and location.This doesn’t mean that learning cannot be shared, but rather that contextis critical, and that practitioners learn most usefully and powerfully whenthey guide the inquiry and the values that inform it. Action learninginvites practitioners to use versions of the analytic tools also used by LWPresearchers in order to inquire for themselves into the communication issuesthey identify as most important.

In this section we have outlined how a social constructionist view oforganisational communication provided the basis for our CED model. In thenext section we discuss the cycles of action and reflection we went throughas we put the model into practice in a series of workplace sites.



Sociolinguistic research meets action learning

By this stage, we had agreed on a set of theoretical principles which, togetherwith the research findings and analytical tools developed in the course ofthe LWP project to date, provided a sound rationale and practical basis fora workable communication evaluation and development model. Figure 2provides an overview of the theoretical framework for the CED model. Thekey link that we want to make here is between systemic perspectives and theaction learning model that we drew on for the CED model. From a systemsperspective, organisations are enacted through communication systems, andorganisational learning can take place at any communication site. Action learn-ing approaches are related to systems perspectives through the proposition

Sociolinguistics: studying language in the workplace

• Identifying contexts and patterns of communication• Descriptions of discourse processes and strategies• Key concepts:

– Flexible use of communicative repertoires– Intertextuality and localised practices– Communication as joint construction– Interactive resources for ‘doing’ identity, power etc.

• Tools for observation and analysis of discourse

⇓ ⇓ ⇓

Practitioner objectives Change-oriented, Identifying strengthsbut not prescriptive

ACTION RESEARCH REFLECTIVE PRACTICE APPRECIATIVE INQUIRYCollaborative –researchers and Based on practitioner Building on success,

practitioners knowledge/setting not ‘fixing’ problems

⇑ ⇑ ⇑

• Organisational communication as a system• Organisational issues as communication issues• Key concepts:

– The learning organisation– Collaborative learning versus individual competencies– Performative models of communication

• Action-reflection tools

Organisational development: the role of communication

Figure 2. Theoretical framework for the Communication Evaluation andDevelopment Model



that action learning approaches can feed into changing behaviour in thewhole system – not just an individual or a unit. This means changing com-munication processes and making change through communication processes.

The next step was to develop these principles into a practical frameworkor process which would enable practitioners to integrate the tools andconcepts we had developed with their own organisational concerns. In thefollowing section, we describe how we went about putting the CED modelinto practice using an action learning cycle as the core process and outlinesome of the issues that arose for us as the model first encountered theresponses of practitioners.

What does action learning involve in practice?

Action learning, as we have applied it here, is a structured tool for learningfrom experience through reflection. It has two key elements: (i) evaluation(developing insights from reflection on past events and observation of currentpractices), and (ii) planning (applying these insights to future actions).Action learning works in cycles, which often start with a question. This isthen followed by structured observation and reflection, which may lead to aplan for action, and further observation and reflection, at which point thecycle begins again. Asking the right questions is a powerful tool for reflectionand learning about communication, and it also helps structure the progres-sion through the action–reflection cycle.

We used a simple but robust action–reflection sequence adapted fromone proposed in an article by Daudelin (1996). She identifies four “coreprocesses” of reflection:

a) articulation of an issue to be addressedb) reflecting on and analysing the issuec) formulating and testing a theory (devising an experiment)d) action (tracks back to reflection and new actions).

The following are some possible models of how a CED process could beapplied in practice:

1) A facilitator works with a group, perhaps 4–6 colleagues who worktogether or in related areas so they have some shared knowledge as astarting point. The group could work on a common issue/process or onsmaller individual issues.

2) One-to-one coaching for individuals – either with a mentor/managerwho has been through the core process themselves or an outside facilitator.

3) A facilitator works with managers and/or training or human resourcesspecialists who can then work with groups/individuals in their ownorganisation.



As practitioners involved in a CED process would be unlikely to havemuch knowledge either of our theoretical framework or of how an action–reflection/organisational learning approach might work in practice, the firststage of the process needs to include a workshop backgrounding the natureof workplace communication and providing some practice with tools andframeworks for evaluating it, before going on to learn and practice using theaction–reflection process described above. Once participants are conversantwith the tools, it would then be possible to begin a new cycle where thefocus is on a specific communication issue.

Next we briefly review two trials of the CED process, the first with agroup as part of an organisational development process, and the secondwith two individuals. These trials were set up specifically to pilot the actionlearning and analysis tools we had developed.

Working with a group of practitioners

As a first step towards putting the CED model into practice, we approached agovernment organisation where some of the original LWP research had beencarried out to see if they would be willing to collaborate in trialling the process.As we have explained, the CED was framed as an organisational developmentprocess, drawing on the philosophies of the learning organisation and ofappreciative inquiry. This approach was seen to be a good fit with the strategicapproach and values of the organisation as they expressed them. After aninitial positive approach we wrote a proposal for a pilot to be conductedwith the members of one particular work group. The process was packagedinto three action–reflection cycles which encouraged the participants to collectinformation from acting in their own work situations, while periodicallyreconnecting with the LWP facilitators to reflect on that they were learning.

During a series of meetings with staff, a number of issues emerged whicheither required re-thinking our original premises or developing them inspecific directions. We had originally planned that the CED process wouldbe run completely by organisational members who had been provided withmaterial and perhaps a small amount of training by the LWP team. However,it was eventually agreed that the LWP team would provide input at a numberof points: as the basis for a self-evaluation model; as contextual material forevaluating the results of the participant’s own evaluation process; and as anoptional extra in the evaluation process, where expert evaluation by theLWP team could be carried out along with evaluations done by membersof the organisation. One of the strengths of the CED model must be to drawon its association with the LWP project to offer distinctive research-basedinformation about, and approaches to, communication in local workplaces.

In the event, the organisation withdrew from the pilot after the initialworkshop session. Although we worked hard to make sure that the workinvolved would be strongly integrated with existing processes of coaching



by managers, the managers expressed anxiety that our process would requiretoo much time and extra work (as this was a pilot, money was not a factor).We argued that this kind of development process is more time- and cost-effective than sending staff offsite to communication courses (see S. Jones1996 for a convincing argument). In the end, the organisation decided not totake up our proposal, and focussed instead on what they defined as anindividual communication problem asssociated with one person. They choseto contract in an organisational psychologist to counsel and ‘fix’ that person.While there may be many reasons why our model was not taken up, it wasclear from the meetings we attended, where the issues outlined were openlydiscussed, that in this instance, the diagnosis–prescription model was morepowerful than one based on reflective practice.

Piloting the process and tools with individuals

We next approached another organisation that had participated in the originalresearch and successfully negotiated a less ambitious arrangement wherebyseveral staff members and two members of the LWP team would take partin a series of three workshop sessions specifically to trial one complete cycleof the action–reflection process and associated observation tools. The pro-gramme was designed to work at three levels: (i) as a pilot of one aspect ofthe CED process, (ii) to introduce participants to an action–reflection processfor evaluating workplace communication, and (iii) to provide them with anopportunity to explore a specific workplace communication issue.3

By the time the pilot began, after several false starts, only two staffmembers from the original group of volunteers were still available to takepart, due to staff transfers and changes in workload. This is typical of theissues which arise when we have tried to engage busy people in organisa-tional development work of this kind. Although most people will agree thatcommunication is a crucial issue in modern organisations, it can be verydifficult to get people to commit time on an ongoing basis. We decided toproceed, nevertheless, with three workshop sessions over a period of 5 weeks.This included time spent evaluating the pilot in the final session. The parti-cipants spent a further 3–6 hours of their own time between sessions makingobservations and notes. The programme ran as follows:

Session I: Introduce action–reflection model and toolsFormulate and analyse issue→Structured observation and reflection

Session II: Evaluate issue on basis of observations and reflectionPlan new actions→Implement changes →Observation, reflection

Session III: Evaluate actions on the basis of observations and reflectionEvaluate CED process



The participants each identified a problematic communication issue theywished to work on and used observation logs to make notes (post hoc) onone or more interactions they had relating to this issue. They chose to focusmainly on observing and evaluating their own approach to the problematictype of communication and possible ways of adapting this to achieve adifferent outcome. Other people in the organisation were therefore not directlyinvolved in the CED process this time, although this was discussed as apossible option, and some practical tools and advice were provided for futurereference.

One question which arose at the stage where we were defining issues tofocus on was exactly what constitutes a communication issue. For instance,one of the participants identified a problem he wanted to work on but initiallyframed it as a personality issue, and thus not something he was able orprepared to change:

I could look at- I think it would be helpful for me the way I requestinformation from people because sometimes the information comesquickly and sometimes the information takes some time and the reactionof different people to the way I request the information is differentdramatically different okay so but [coughs] I- now if that’s useful I coulddo that and that would be useful for me however that’s probably apersonality thing as much as a communication thing if that makessense . . . but I’m not going to change my personality . . . well um in thisshort time that you’ve met me you’ve probably realised I’m probably asblunt as a meat axe so um I generally approach people in that mannerand some people find that okay and some people find that offensive . . . soI could do that . . .

He nevertheless decided that he would observe and experiment with hiscommunication in this type of context and ended up making some signific-ant changes to the way he dealt with potential conflict situations of thistype. As a result of a great deal of discussion with the facilitators, whichresulted in some experimentation with alternative discourse strategies, bythe end of the trial he had reframed this as primarily a communication issueafter all. This is an example of where we had some success in reframing the‘problem’, which was initially diagnosed as a personality problem, as anissue of developing a communication repertoire.

Other important questions which arose in the course of the pilotrevolved around the implicit models of communication the participantswere using, and the related issue of perspective in instances of problematiccommunication. For example, in cases of conflict or collaborative problemsolving, the traditional transmission model is unlikely to provide an adequateexplanation of what is going on in an interaction (or indeed a set of relatedinteractions). Furthermore, a communication strategy or process which is



unsuccessful or unhelpful from one person’s point of view may well bemeeting the instrumental or relational goals of the other interactant(s). Thesepoints were highlighted by the communication issue on which the otherparticipant in our pilot chose to focus. She was having ongoing difficultieswith a subordinate who was failing to look after a customer account properly– he was always “too busy” to do particular tasks within the necessarytimeframe. This created a series of problems which she was ultimatelyresponsible for resolving. Her analysis of the situation led her to concludethat because her colleague was not usually uncooperative, he did not havea clear understanding of how important the tasks involved actually were,so she decided to focus her efforts on finding a way of communicatingthe importance of the task more clearly. In her reflection on the interactionwhere she attempted to do this, she initially concluded that although sheknew beforehand what she wanted to achieve, she was unsuccessful becauseshe “didn’t go about it in the right way” – in other words, she failed to “gether message across”.

However, during the second CED session, the group questioned theassumption that the problem was simply one of unclear communicationby exploring several alternative scenarios. The discussion focused on thestrategies the subordinate appeared to use to avoid doing the required work(i.e. saying he was too busy to do it, or simply not doing it, and leaving hiscolleague to pick it up) and the possible reasons underlying the use of suchindirect communication. Perhaps he was unable to cope with the moretechnical aspects of the task but did not want to lose face by signalling thisexplicitly, or perhaps he really was too busy, and this was an indirect way ofsignalling there were workload issues that needed to be addressed? Alterna-tively, he may have been contesting his manager’s authority because he didnot see this work as part of his job description and saw it as interfering withother, more legitimate priorities, but did not wish to go ‘on record’ byconfronting his manager directly. Such analyses, of course, rest on a shift froma simple transmission model of communication to a more complex inter-actionist or social constructionist model, and also on the idea that multipleinterpretations are possible. The point is that it would have been impossibleto know for sure what the problem was or to resolve it without engagingin further interaction to tease out the underlying issues. Simply repeatingthe effort to communicate more “clearly” was unlikely to have achieved thedesired outcome for either party.

Feedback from the participants in this pilot was largely positive. Both feltthey had achieved a clearer understanding of the communication issue theyhad explored – why it was a problem and what the barriers to a satisfactorypractical outcome were, both from their own and the other person’s point ofview. Although they commented that they routinely reflected informally onwhat happened and why in a particular situation, the CED approach didprovide a structured way to consider changing the way they did things and



brought the process to a more conscious level. This had positive results. Forinstance, after completing the second stage of the process, the two participantsreported feeling more satisfied with the way further interactions had goneafter the planned change in approach and agreed that what they had learnedwas much more likely to stay with them than it had in the past when theyhad attended courses away from the work context:

P1: about nine years ago when I came back from overseas I went ona . . . Dale Carnegie course you know but I never got past stage one whichwas the three Cs of Dale Carnegie which is don’t complain criticise orcondemn . . . I never adapted my personality into that sort of mould

P2: well it’s not something that you can go to for you know X number ofhours and come back . . . you just leave it behind and forget and you’reback to where you were

The participants found it particularly useful to get feedback from col-leagues within the organisation as well as from people outside. They thoughtit would also be useful to look at an issue from the perspectives of all thoseinvolved. Both participants felt they had understood the CED process andconsidered that they had experimented with a number of alternative waysto analyse and handle a communication issue and now had a greater under-standing of the way in which different approaches produce different resultsand reactions. The great advantage of using an action learning approachwhich we observed as facilitators is its potential to alert practitioners tothe complex and specific contextual factors which are crucial in accountingfor the dynamics of interaction. Developing the ability to observe, analyseand reflect on the communicative challenges in one’s own particular workenvironment, and then to initiate cycles of change, is empowering for theindividual and provides a pathway to developing a learning organisation.

Reflections

In this final section we reflect on the key understandings that we developedduring our pilot process and on the questions that are still open for us. Akey paradox in our project (and where it differs from other projects dealingwith this issue) is that we propose a collaborative, action-learning model ofevaluating and developing organisational communication, yet our startingpoint was a body of work designed and carried out as a sociolinguisticresearch project. The ‘applied’ part was included in the objectives but wasseen as coming later, after at least the first stage of research was completed– in what Sarangi and Roberts (forthcoming) call the typical “lock-step”process of applied linguistic research, of discovery followed by discussionsof usefulness. Yet our process is different from this traditional binary of



research and application, to the extent that an audience of practitioners askedfor the project data to be made useful, and in that we went on to experimentin practice with how this might work. In these pilot projects we encountereda range of professional demands and managerial agendas, all of which re-quired the ‘usefulness’ to consist of real-world outcomes rather than simplyacademic discussion (ibid.).

First and crucially, we came to realise that we were involved in anorganisational change process and that we were required to have an explicittheory of organisational change. This kind of theorising is beyond the realmof sociolinguistics and requires interdisciplinary work which includes insightsfrom organisational studies. More than this, though, we needed consultancyskills. Even for experienced consultants, successfully introducing changesbased on organisational learning models is tough (Abell and Simons 2000;Senge 1999: Senge et al. 1999; Sumison 2000). It goes against the dominantgrain of technical rationality (Schon 1983), and it requires a major commit-ment to change. The limits of our skills and commitments as linguistics ormanagement scholars need to be carefully thought through, and some kindof partnership with experienced consultants, or skilful change agents withinorganisations, may be needed. Our main point here is to make explicit theoften implicit and untheorised models of organisational change that may bepresent when linguists set out to work with practitioners and to argue that itis essential to consider the consequences of them carefully. Related to thisquestion of change is the question of whose agenda the communicationresearch is fulfilling. The agendas and understandings of senior managers ordecision-makers may not be those of the people that scholars are workingwith most directly. Whose communication needs are being served? How arethese needs constructed? Do sociolinguists have an ethical requirement to becritical about whose interests they are serving?

We were also introducing a model of communication competence thatdid not necessarily map on to the communication models held by organisa-tional members, including the senior decision-makers who are the organisa-tional gatekeepers. For instance, we were at some points uneasily drawninto a more or less explicit request to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’, or sometimes the‘problem person’, as defined by people in an organisation. Here we struckthe difficulties that can arise when we seek to verify our own interpretationsand theoretical understandings as applied linguists or discourse analystsagainst the “theories of practice” implicitly held by participants (cf. Sarangiand Roberts forthcoming). What if these theories of practice are premised onmodels that we don’t share or even actively disagree with?

The reflective practice approach attempts to mediate the often oppositionaldialogue between theory and practice but, not surprisingly, frequently getstrapped on one side or the other of the divide. For practitioners, reflectivepractice and its associated concepts (organisational learning, the learningorganisation, appreciative inquiry, etc.) can look like just another groupof buzzwords. Although they are frequently sceptical of any truth claims



based on theoretical generalities, practitioners also often feel frustrated whenacademics seem to prevaricate rather than just explaining the ‘right way’ todo things. From this point of view, what is the value of taxpayer-fundedresearch like the Language in the Workplace Project if it can’t produce thiskind of prescriptive truth? In addition, the strongly action-oriented modelthat still dominates discourses of management has created an aversiontowards, and anxiety about, the reflection process (Mintzberg 1989).

Practitioners believe their knowledge comes from and addresses the realworld, while at the same time they frequently do not trust their own tacitknowledge, or the knowledge of their colleagues, over the contributions ofan outside expert. For academics, the traditional theory–application modelmaintains the more conventional register of scientific rigour that fundersand referees tend to prefer (Newell, Swann and Kautz 2001). Research that isgenuinely informed by collaborative and action inquiry approaches becomesvulnerable in this context.

Like other practitioners and academics working with reflective practiceand action learning approaches, we believe that they have great value. Inreviewing the field of organisational communication recently, Zorn (2002)argues that innovative and interdisciplinary work “beyond fragmentation”is generated when scholars work together on practical issues of communica-tion rather than through re-working the theoretical issues. In particular, ourcollaboration has emphasised the various ways in which communicationand action are inseparable.

We see directions where we could more fully develop our CED modelalong the lines of our theoretical commitments. One key element missingfrom the current CED model is an effective approach to working on the levelof identifying and transforming organisational and professional discourses(Opie 1997, 2001; Shotter 1993) or “conversations” (Pearce 1994). Pearce’sCMM model could generate research designs and analytic frameworkswhich incorporate aspects of sociolinguistic research but which also workat a broader organisational level. This kind of analysis could incorporatesocial constructionist approaches which enable practitioners to become morereflexive in distinguishing the ways that language constructs the organisa-tion itself, its work, its members and its policies, to enable professionalassumptions to be questioned. In this case we are not just talking aboutunderstanding or negotiating with certain professional worldviews butabout showing how a reflexive approach to language can subject them tocritical scrutiny.

The category boundaries of ‘language’ and ‘action’ are increasingly break-ing down in a range of disciplinary fields. In organisational communication,and in organisational and management studies more broadly, there is anincreasing interest in language at work and an increasing sophistication abouthow language is implicated in organisational change. There are now so manyacademics and consultants involved in various forms of language work inorganisations, albeit under headings like ‘organisational learning’, that there



is a challenge to linguists to show that they have distinctive understandingsto offer. Forms of action research which draw on sociolinguistics offer newpossibilities for both theoretical development and practical applications forpractitioners in organisations. They require re-thinking the relationshipsbetween language, organisation and change.

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our appreciation to all those who allowed their workplaceinteractions to be recorded, and the individuals who participated in the pilot CEDprogrammes. We also acknowledge the contribution of other members of the Lan-guage in the Workplace Project team – Janet Holmes, Bernadette Vine and MeredithMarra – to the theoretical development of the CED model, and also that of theresearch assistants who helped collect and transcribe the data. Our thanks go alsoto the various colleagues who reviewed earlier drafts of this paper, and whose sug-gestions have greatly improved it, although of course any errors or infelicities whichremain are solely the responsibility of the authors. The research has been supportedby grants from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technologysince it commenced in 1996.

Notes

1. The Language in the Workplace Project is based at the School of Linguistics andApplied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.More information about the project can be viewed on its website (LWP 2003a).

2. Since 1999, LWP researchers have also been involved in more structured actionresearch (focussing specifically on communication evaluation and development)with the members of a factory production team (Stubbe 2000; Stubbe and Brown2002), and with nurses on duty in a hospital ward (Holmes and Major 2002).

3. Meredith Marra, Research Officer with the LWP project, assisted with the designand preparation of materials and also participated in some of the workshopsessions.

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[Received 20/10/02; revised 20/10/03]

Deborah JonesVictoria Management SchoolVictoria University of WellingtonPO Box 600Wellington 6005New Zealande-mail: [email protected]

Maria StubbeSchool of Linguistics and Applied Language StudiesVictoria University of WellingtonPO Box 600Wellington 6005New Zealande-mail: [email protected]



Appendix

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