The interplay of virtual communication and emotion in dispute sensemaking

The interplay of virtual communication and emotion in

dispute sensemaking

Accepted article for Human Relations, 2007

Piers Myers

Faculty of Business, London South Bank University

[email protected]

Definitive version: Myers, P. (2007) Sexed up intelligence or irresponsible reporting? The interplay of

virtual communication and emotion in dispute sensemaking. Human Relations, 60(4), 609-636.

© The Tavistock Institute, 2007. http://hum.sagepub.com/content/60/4/609

Abstract

In the context of an exploratory case study of an interorganizational dispute between

the BBC and the UK Government, this article develops a conceptual framework

through which the interplay of emotion, sensemaking and virtuality in disputes can be

better understood. One contribution of the article is reconsideration of the general

relationship between emotion and sensemaking. It is suggested that emotions as

temporary social roles complement sensemaking itself, enabling plausible accounts

to be constructed when there would otherwise be no socially acceptable bridge

between beliefs and behaviour. A second contribution is appreciation of the

difficulties for virtual communication arising from the capabilities for review and

replication of messages which it affords, so that discourse is explicit, irrevocable and

potentially public. When, particularly across the lines of a dispute, communications

are contentious this can lead to sensemaking through behavioural commitment and

the evocation of justifying beliefs; or it can lead to emotional dynamics justifying

communication as passion or obviating the need to attend to others’ responses. The

article reflects on implications for the development, escalation and resolution of

disputes.

Keywords

Emotions; Sensemaking; Emotions and sensemaking; Organizational discourse;

Passions; Communication; Electronic communication; Emails; Virtuality; Conflict

management; Interorganizational disputes; Behavioural commitment; Cognitive

dissonance; Organization theory; Journalism; Politics and the media; Hutton Inquiry;

BBC and UK Government; Iraq war

Introduction

This article uses material and ideas drawn from an exploratory case study of a

dispute between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the United Kingdom’s

public radio and television broadcaster, and the UK Government in the early summer

of 2003 to reconsider connections between virtual communication, emotion and

sensemaking, and their implications in the context of disputes.

In the UK, the BBC is widely regarded as independent of Government and as

providing the most authoritative voice on news and current affairs. On Thursday 29

May 2003, Today, the flagship early morning current affairs programme on BBC

radio, broadcast a set of allegations that were to have severe ramifications for the

relationship between the corporation and the Government. The offending news item,

attributed by the BBC’s reporter to an anonymous source, concerned intelligence

about dangers of the Iraqi regime that the Government had published in a dossier in

September 2002, prior to the US-led invasion of March 2003. The most damaging

allegations were about the inclusion of intelligence to the effect that Iraqi weapons of

mass destruction could be ready to launch within 45 minutes. Here is an extract

from the initial item, broadcast shortly after 6am:

. . . what we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that

dossier was that, actually the Government probably erm, knew that that forty five minute

figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. What this person says, is that a

week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather erm, a bland

production . . . Downing Street [the Prime Minister’s office], our source says, ordered a

week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting . . . [The

dossier] made the Intelligence Services unhappy, erm, because . . . it didn’t reflect, the

considered view they were putting forward . . . the reason [the 45 minute point] hadn’t

been in the original draft was that it was, it was only erm, it only came from one source

and most of the other claims were from two, and the intelligence agencies say they don’t

really believe it was necessarily true . . . Clearly . . . things are got wrong in good faith but

if they knew it was wrong before they actually made the claim, that’s perhaps a bit more

serious. (BBC/4/0222-0223)1

Various versions of these allegations were broadcast during the remainder of the

three-hour programme (BBC/4/0222-0237) and in subsequent BBC coverage.

The original broadcast was picked up by the Downing Street Press Office then

relayed to the Prime Minister’s party who were on an official visit to Iraq, and the

Press Office phoned the Today programme office by 7.15am with an initial rebuttal of

the charges (BBC/4/0238; MOD/31/0012). Later that day, a fax from the Prime

Minister’s office complained that this rebuttal had not been carried on all news

broadcasts (BBC/4/0252-0254). In the meantime, a Government minister was

interviewed at 8.10am and denied the allegations, with the exception of an

acknowledgement that the 45-minute intelligence had come from a single informant.

But the BBC and other outlets continued to broadcast multiple versions of the other,

more serious, charges during the day. In the days that followed, additional

Government denials failed to stem BBC suggestions that some part of what had

been alleged might not have been fully rebutted. To further complicate the

broadcast allegations, three days later a newspaper article, by the same BBC

reporter, stated that his source had indicated that it was the Prime Minister’s Director

of Communications and Strategy2 who had instigated the inclusion in the dossier of

the 45-minute claim.

Following this, an increasingly acrimonious dispute developed between the

BBC and the Government. As the dispute escalated it was conducted principally via

a mass of remote exchanges across the interorganizational divide, classified in this

article as forms of ‘virtual communication’. Many faxes were exchanged, both sides

held frequent media briefings or issued press releases and, on a number of

occasions, senior figures in the two organizations put their case in television or radio

interviews as well as parliamentary hearings. Documents and recordings in the

public domain reveal that this was also a profoundly emotional arena on both sides

of the organizational divide:

I started to look at this point by point, but it’s all drivel and, frankly, it’d be easy to get as

confused as [the Prime Minister’s Communications Director] is. The man is flapping in the

wind. (Editor of Today in e-mail to his line manager, 9 June, BBC/5/0066-0067)

. . . the sense of anger and frustration that is building when you have been accused of

something very, very serious which you know you have not done, when your efforts to

seek to resolve it privately are met with a mixture of disdain and indifference, and then

when it becomes a public issue that the allegations are then sort of redefined and the

BBC just try to sort of wish away what they had said and try to pretend they had never

said it. I think that . . . I was extremely angry, I was very frustrated, I was increasingly

dispirited about the whole thing . . . (Prime Minister’s Communications Director, Hearing

40: 125-6)3

The discourse of the dispute, as it evolved, focused less on the truth of the original

allegations than on issues that derived from them. These concerned, for example,

whether the BBC itself subscribed to the allegations they had attributed to their

‘source’, whether the Today programme should have (or, in fact, did) put the

accusations to the Government prior to broadcast, and what the actual content of the

allegations made on 29 May had consisted of.

This was a clash that went well beyond the normal limits within which

intermittent disagreements between the broadcaster and the Government had

previously been played out. Both sides recognised their interest in returning to a

more customary relationship (e.g. Hearing 22: 97; BBC/6/0137), but the dispute

continued to escalate. By the end of June 2003 it was something of a maelstrom.

Then on 18 July a Government weapons inspector, who had been named as a

possible source of the BBC story, was found dead, apparently having committed

suicide. An inquiry, led by Lord Hutton, was set up to investigate the circumstances

surrounding his death. The Inquiry report (Hutton, 2004), issued the following

January, led directly to the resignation of both the Chairman and Director-General of

the BBC.

In the sections that follow, first there is a discussion of sensemaking and

emotion with general applicability beyond dispute scenarios and virtuality. It is worth

noting in advance that within Karl Weick’s corpus of work, in which the discussion of

sensemaking here is rooted, there is a tension between sensemaking as beneficial,

to be accomplished effectively, and sensemaking as a ubiquitous phenomenon with

effects that may be beneficial, detrimental or neither. This article takes the latter

standpoint. A perspective on emotions is introduced here, suggesting that they too

have a necessary role in the construction of sense, complementing that of

sensemaking itself, again with positive or negative outcomes. Second, in light of this

discussion, the nature of virtual communication is considered and it is argued that

there has been a focus on challenges for sensemaking caused by the deficiencies of

virtual communication while, in fact, keys to understanding the challenges for

sensemaking and the development of emotions in disputes conducted virtually may

be found in extra capabilities afforded by virtual communication. Third, the case

study methodology employed, and the process of abductive inference adopted, are

explained. Fourth, the case of the BBC–Government dispute is returned to, relating

the frameworks developed to virtual communication, emotion and sensemaking in

practice. Finally, the various threads in the article are drawn together in a discussion

section, which also examines their implications and how they relate to the

contributions of organizational discourse theory.

Sensemaking and emotion

This section of the article begins by outlining Weick’s concept of organizational

sensemaking, prior to examining how emotions can be regarded as a

complementary means of constructing sense. Organizational sensemaking is not

limited to the cognitive process of interpretation, but instead it denotes the mutual

incorporation of interpretation and ‘the ways people generate what they interpret’

(Weick, 1995: 13), so that sensemaking is an ongoing, interlaced action-

interpretation process. People strive for plausible links between their actions and

beliefs,4 not only by tailoring actions plausibly to beliefs, but also by tailoring beliefs

plausibly to action. Crucially, this kind of plausibility does not correspond to

objectivity but instead is rooted in credibility and, particularly, social acceptability.

Sensemaking is an effort to tie beliefs and actions more closely together as when

arguments lead to consensus on action, clarified expectations pave the way for

confirming actions, committed actions uncover acceptable justifications for their

occurrence, or bold actions simplify the world and make it clearer what is going on and

what it means . . . [S]ensemaking involves taking whatever is clearer, whether it be a

belief or an action, and linking it with that which is less clear . . . The outcome of such a

process is a unit of meaning, two connected elements. And the connected elements are

beliefs and actions tied together by socially acceptable implications. (Weick, 1995: 135,

emphasis added)

So sensemaking results in accounts (Weick, 1995; Maitlis, 2005), explanations

linking actions and beliefs which, whether they are expressed or are rehearsed in the

mind, need to be socially acceptable and are therefore contingent on the conduct of

real and imagined others. Moreover, different situations may evoke alternate

identities within the person, requiring accounts acceptable to different audiences

associated with different salient beliefs and actions (Weick, 1995).

Sensemaking is also itself a social process (Weick and Roberts, 1993; Maitlis,

2005). Within the social milieu of the organization, shared stories, schemas and

routines provide a degree of continuity and coherence, but not stasis, to action-

interpretation processes. In particular, accounts shared as stories are themselves

negotiated or contested directly in social interaction (Currie and Brown, 2003; Sims,

2003; Greenberg, 1995). The redrafting (Weick et al., 2005) of stories as they are

exchanged can be acknowledged, unacknowledged or out of awareness (El-Sawad

et al., 2004) and, as interaction progresses, accounts can be altered or

supplemented to tailor them to audience responses, and even what has already

been uttered can subsequently be nuanced, ignored or adapted, leading to a mutual

re-establishment of coherence. This by no means implies reaching consensus,

particularly in the context of dispute sensemaking; on the contrary, interlocutors may

buttress differences and judgements of one another more effectively (Selsky et al.,

2003).

However, according to sensemaking theory, stability and evolution in

sensemaking are punctuated by discontinuities when the flow of ‘sens-ible’ events is

interrupted. An interruption can take the form of any situation characterized by

uncertainty or ambiguity (Weick, 1995) and calls for novel sensemaking processes

on the part of personnel, individually or collectively (Helms Mills, 2003). As Weick

indicates in the quotation above, interruptions can be overcome, and interlaced

action-interpretation processes restored, when arguments based on beliefs lead to

decisions; when beliefs in the form of expectations become self-fulfilling through

action; when action is taken that simplifies interpretation of the situation; and,

perhaps most remarkably, when ‘committed actions uncover acceptable justifications

for their occurrence’.

Commitment binds an individual to his or her behavior . . . when he makes sense of the

environment, behavior is the point on which constructions or interpretations are based . .

. People develop acceptable justifications for their behavior as a way of making such

behavior meaningful and explainable . . . acceptable explanations in a given social

context. (Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978: 231 & n2)

Four factors, explicitness, irrevocability, publicness and volition, influence the degree

to which behaviour commits sensemaking, constraining the range of future accounts

that can be socially acceptable (Salancik, 1977). Behaviour is explicit if it is hard to

deny in that it has been observed and is unequivocal; behaviour is irrevocable if it is

hard to rescind; and publicness is the degree to which the behaviour is known to

audiences that matter to the person. Explicitness, irrevocability and publicness bind

people to their behaviour, so that they require socially acceptable accounts which

can justify it (Weick, 1995). Binding behaviour is committing to the extent that it is

also of the person’s own volition. Voluntary binding behaviour requires the moulding

of interpretations or other beliefs to the need to account for the behaviour. In the

next section it will be argued that virtual communication can be regarded as

committing behaviour, or at least binding behaviour, and that this has particular

significance for virtuality and emotion. But, first, the association between

sensemaking and emotion requires clarification.

It has been noted for the past decade that the place of emotions in

sensemaking is an underdeveloped area of sensemaking theory (Weick et al., 2005;

Gioia and Mehra, 1996; Magala, 1997) while, in everyday experience including in the

workplace, beliefs and actions are permeated by emotion (Fineman, 1993;

Shrivastava et al., 1987; Fineman, 2000). For Weick (1995) interruptions are the link

between sensemaking and emotion because, during the interregnum between sense

being challenged or breaking down and being renewed, the autonomic nervous

system is aroused. This arousal produces emotions and, though temporarily aiding

focus on the source of the interruption, thereafter degrades cognitive functioning

(Weick, 1990, 1995). However, this standpoint offers only a limited analysis of the

role of emotions in relation to sensemaking. It provides a causal framework for the

emergence of emotion, but it does not deal with its contribution to the construction of

sense, the detail of why and how a particular affect predominates, or the place of

ongoing emotion.

The view of emotions as temporary transformative roles, encompassing

behavioural, cognitive and physiological features but fundamentally social in nature,

is helpful here. This has been elaborated by Averill (1982, 1983), de Rivera (de

Rivera and Grinkis, 1986; 1984, 1977), and Parkinson (1995, 1996; Parkinson et al.,

2005). According to Averill, ‘emotions may be defined as socially constituted

syndromes (transitory social roles) which include an individual’s appraisal of the

situation and which are interpreted as passions, rather than as actions’ (1982: 6,

emphases in original). There are three central features here. First, emotions are

‘social’ in a dual manner (Averill, 1983; Parkinson, 1995). On the one hand they are

socially constructed syndromes in which cognitive, behavioural and physiological

aspects are channelled by societal (and organizational) norms. On the other hand,

they themselves consist in large part of a transitory shift in social relationships:

. . . each type of emotion (anger, fear, love) reflects a different kind of transformation. A

transformation is not a passive reaction to a given stimulus situation, rather it is . . . a way

of organizing the relation between the person and the other . . . (de Rivera, 1977: 35-36)

Second, they also normally include appraisals, that is, interpretation of the subject’s

situation. It is important to distinguish this from the position taken in cognitive

appraisal theories of emotion (Roseman and Smith, 2001; Lazarus, 1982). In such

theories the claim is that emotions are caused by prior appraisal. Here, in contrast,

forms of appraisal or, perhaps more precisely, appraising are viewed as part of the

shift in social role that the emotion itself consists of (Parkinson, 1997).

Note that on the basis of these two features there are deep-seated similarities

between emotion and sensemaking itself. Emotions, like sensemaking, can refer to

the mutual incorporation of interpretation and ways that people generate what they

interpret. For example, Parkinson and his colleagues write of emotions:

Rather than seeing emotions only as reactions to interpretations and evaluations, we

view them as moves that adjust relations in ways that produce and convey these

interpretations and evaluations. (Parkinson et al., 2005: 252)

While, Weick writes of sensemaking:

The key distinction [between sensemaking and interpretation] is that sensemaking is

about the ways people generate what they interpret . . . The concept of sensemaking

highlights the action, activity, and creating that lays down the traces that are interpreted

and then reinterpreted. (Weick, 1995: 13)

Just as sensemaking involves the formation of socially acceptable ties interlacing

action and beliefs, so this perspective views emotion as an interlacing of conduct

and beliefs within the ‘syndrome’ of a temporary social role. However, the third

feature attributed to emotion in Averill’s definition sets emotion apart from

sensemaking. Emotions are roles that are ‘interpreted as passions’, not actions, that

is they are regarded as involuntary. This contrasts with the ‘action, activity, and

creating’ that Weick ascribes to sensemaking above. As Averill (1982) and Solomon

(1976) point out, much of the language used to discuss emotions speaks to this

absence of volition: people lose their temper, fall in love, burst with pride, etc.

Rather than the interlaced action-interpretation processes of sensemaking, emotions

are interlaced passion-interpretation processes.

This perspective allows a reconsideration of how emotions and sensemaking

interrelate. Emotion can be seen not simply as a by-product of intermittent lacunae

in the accomplishment of sense but, instead, as a complementary form of

accomplishing sense in situations which would otherwise remain equivocal or

contradictory. Thus fear can sanction socially acceptable accounts of avoidance

behaviour within an identity that entails meeting challenges head-on; love can

sanction socially acceptable accounts of adulation of a partner amid norms for parity

of esteem; and anger can sanction socially acceptable accounts of fierce

condemnation of an antagonist while preserving an identity of benevolence (Averill,

1982; de Rivera, 1984; Parkinson, 1995; Solomon, 1976). In practice, sensemaking

and emotion, action-interpretation processes and passion-interpretation processes

respectively, intertwine in the assembling of accounts connecting conduct and belief

within identities. In particular, behaviour which is binding, that is, explicit,

irrevocable, and public to audiences that matter, can be accounted for through

sensemaking as committing, volitional action, evoking or reinforcing consonant

beliefs in the process, or it can be accounted for emotionally as non-volitional

passion. Both may feature at different times or to different audiences. The following

section now discusses virtual communication as a particular form of action – or

passion – in relation to the challenge of constructing socially acceptable accounts.

Virtual communication and sense construction

There are differing views as to what constitutes virtuality. Many authors have

focused on radical, networked organizational or cross-organizational structures

(Chesbrough and Teece, 1996; Davidow and Malone, 1992; Walker, 2006), or the

use of temporary, distributed project teams (Kristof et al., 1995; Breu and

Hemingway, 2004; Sarker and Sahay, 2004) supported by an infrastructure of high

technology. At the same time, much of the academic literature also focuses on the

nature of the remote communication needed to support these innovations, and that

now also supports more traditional modes of organizing, referred to here as virtual

communication. Such communication has been characterized in terms of the

boundaries which need to be crossed in communicating or the means adopted to

traverse those boundaries. Typically, boundaries considered include geographic or

spatial dispersion; organizational, community, or cultural dichotomy; and lack of

synchronicity in working hours or availability (Gristock, 2002; Jarvenpaa and Leidner,

1999; Kanawattanachai and Yoo, 2002; Martins et al., 2004; DeSanctis and Monge,

1999); or simply the extent to which face-to-face contact is absent (Fiol and

O'Connor, 2005; Griffith et al., 2003). In terms of the means of communication,

virtuality is considered to involve interaction mediated by computers or more

generally by technology (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1999; Ahuja and Carley, 1999;

Furst et al., 2004; Martins et al., 2004). Communication between the BBC and the

UK Government during the period of the 2003 dispute can be thought of as virtual in

both respects, in that it took place across the boundary between organizations and

between professional communities with almost no face-to-face contact between the

principal protagonists on either side (e.g. Hearing 7: 109), and it was mediated by

the technology of faxes, broadcast interviews and committee hearings, press

releases and media briefings, etc. In relation to the literature, this was in some ways

an untypical instance of virtuality: there were common interests in resolving the

dispute but no clearly identifiable teamwork across the boundary; computer-

mediated communication was not the principal mode of traversing the boundary; and

some messages from both sides were delivered through BBC broadcast interviews.

But, while the dispute did not instantiate some normal features of virtual

communication, by the same token it highlighted features that have been neglected

in the literature.

Underpinning much of the literature on virtual communication is an emphasis

on its possible deficiencies as against face-to-face interaction due to boundaries,

and the technology of communicating across them, interfering with or inhibiting the

transfer of information and leading to ambiguity, misunderstanding and conflict.

Several reasons have been put forward to explain this. One is the impact of

impaired media richness (Daft and Lengel, 1986) or perceptions of media richness

(Carlson and Zmud, 1999) due, for example, to an absence of body language and

tone of voice information, particularly in text-based communication technologies.

Another reason is paucity of ‘back-channel information’, the vocal and non-vocal

confirmation, disagreement, puzzlement, and interjection that characterize everyday

conversation (Krauss and Fussell, 1990; Cramton, 2001). A third reason that has

received much attention is limited or misunderstood contextual information, either

about communicators themselves (Watt et al., 2002) or concerning their situation

(Cramton, 2001).

In contrast, it is argued here that it may not be chiefly the deficiencies of virtual

communication that make sensemaking in disputes conducted virtually most

problematic, that lead to emotionality, or that were central to how the particular

disagreement between the UK Government and the BBC developed. Instead,

pivotal challenges for the construction of sense are posed by the potential for

reviewing and replicating communications (Clark and Brennan, 1991; Brown and

Lightfoot, 2002; Friedman and Currall, 2003), and these are capabilities which

extend those that face-to-face interaction offers. Reviewability and replicability are

consequent on the mediation of virtual communication, whether via computers,

faxes, video-conferencing, letter-writing (O'Leary et al., 2002) or indeed, as in some

aspects of this case, via ‘the media’. They connect virtuality in communication with

the discussion of sensemaking through behavioural commitment in the previous

section.

On the one hand, reviewability leads to explicitness and irrevocability, rendering

adaptation of past messages, or simply inattention to them, acutely vulnerable to an

interlocutor re-presenting records of previous positions. As Brown and Lightfoot

(2002) put it, virtuality leaves actors ‘shackled to their archives’ (p. 227). On the

other hand, the capacity for replication of messages, for example the forwarding of

e-mails or the copying and leaking of faxes and letters, means that virtual

communication is also potentially public to an indeterminate degree. So, in Weick’s

(1995) terms, it is binding behaviour. Review and replication interact: contentious

virtual communications may be re-presented in the future, not just by the intended

recipients, but by any audience that can access them. Virtual communication,

especially across the lines of a dispute, has then a brittle quality because it requires

justification in socially acceptable accounts and is vulnerable to feedback from

multiple audiences (Fleming, 1994).

These factors lead to several possibilities for how a communicator’s

construction of sense can proceed in disputes when their own binding virtual

communication is contentious. First, non-volitional accounts may justify the

communication as passion, reflective of emotion and not necessarily requiring the

communicator to stand by consonant beliefs. This suggests that, if a message might

be particularly difficult to justify to one or more of its possible audiences, people may

be more likely than in unmediated situations to account for their communication in

emotional terms, and hence conform to norms associated with emotional discourse.

For example, anger or indignation can allow sending accusatory messages to be

accounted for; this includes, in particular, the re-presentation to an interlocutor of

their inconsistency, which virtual communication affords so well. The appraisals that

such emotional accounts entail can diffuse among groups of colleagues through

accounts shared as stories, as well as direct emotional contagion (Hatfield et al.,

1994; Barsade, 2002), informing their future sensemaking and emotions, and

reinforcing the likelihood of further contentious dispute communications. Second,

volitional accounts may justify the communication as action, evoking or reinforcing

consonant interpretations and other beliefs through the sensemaking processes of

behavioural commitment. In this way, plausibility can be shored up but at the cost of

reducing flexibility (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2003) and intensifying vulnerability to

re-presentation of any incompatible past or future position. Accounts shared as

stories can disseminate these beliefs among groups of colleagues, again leading to

future contention.

Third, even when communicating virtually, it remains natural and familiar to

develop tailored accounts, volitional accounts of the contentious communication that

revise its recollected content in response to actual or anticipated reactions of

particular audiences, and this can occur without awareness (El-Sawad et al., 2004).

When these tailored accounts are shared as stories then, in the face-to-face context,

both parties might be complicit in allowing them to stand. If, instead, an interlocutor

re-presents previous exchanges there is the flexibility to deny or nuance one’s

previous communication. However, in the context of virtual communication,

reviewability and replicability mean that there is the potential for multiple audiences

to highlight inconsistency and re-present evidence of it, and that these junctures are

acutely difficult to account for in a socially acceptable way. Accounts which

acknowledge inconsistency sit so uncomfortably within organizational identities that

even a retrospective emotional justification is not customary. However, qua

transitory social role, certain emotions, such as contempt (including disdain and

derision), indignation, horror and dread, reframe and downgrade the social standing

of their targets (de Rivera, 1984; Pelzer, 2005; de Rivera, 1977; Sims, 2005). In this

way they allow otherwise unavailable accounts, socially acceptable to people who

‘matter’, of the (in)significance of an interlocutor re-presenting inconsistency. For

example, disdain allows a lack of respect for their intervention, derision allows it to

be treated as meaningless, and indignation allows it to be demonized. In the case

illustrations below it will be seen that detached fascination can have a similar effect.

Accounts shared as stories and emotional contagion are likely to disseminate such

judgements among colleagues, whether or not they are expressed explicitly across

the divide of the dispute and, again, this will reinforce the likelihood of further

contentious communications.

Figure 1 summarizes these dynamics. The dispute between the BBC and the

Government illustrates that, in reality, non-volitional, volitional and tailored accounts

can combine and intermingle. Prior to a section examining this, the section below

considers aspects of the methodology and approach to theory development adopted

in the case study and in preparing this article.

Methodology

The retrospective case study, on which this article is based, examined the dispute

between the BBC and the Government during the seven-week period between the

contentious broadcast on 29 May 2003 and the death of the Government weapons

inspector on 18 July which led to the establishment of the Hutton Inquiry. The case

study was exploratory (Yin, 2003) in that, rather than having predetermined goals or

Virtuality and Emotion Dynamics on Either Side of Dispute

FIGURE 1

Instigation

Reinforcement

Social propagation

Volitional accounts Regarding communications as action. Evocation of consonant

beliefs/ interpretations

Retrospective redrafting of communications. Emotions enable audience-discounting

Regarding communications as passion. Interpretation

conforms to emotional norms

Tailored accounts

Contentious dispute communications

Non-volitional accounts

•Accounts shared as stories

•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion

•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion

Virtual communication•Explicitness•Irrevocability•Publicness

Virtuality and Emotion Dynamics on Either Side of Dispute

FIGURE 1

Instigation

Reinforcement

Social propagation

Instigation

Reinforcement

Social propagation

Volitional accountsVolitional accounts Regarding communications as action. Evocation of consonant

beliefs/ interpretations

Retrospective redrafting of communications. Emotions enable audience-discounting

Regarding communications as passion. Interpretation

conforms to emotional norms

Tailored accounts

Tailored accounts

Contentious dispute communications



•Accounts shared as stories•Accounts shared as stories

•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion

•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion•Accounts shared as stories•Emotional contagion

Virtual communication•Explicitness•Irrevocability•Publicness

testing specific propositions, it focused initially on a broad purpose of investigating

and understanding emotion, narration and sensemaking within and between the

Government and the BBC. The data employed were mainly archival, based on the

large volume of documents released to the Inquiry, supplemented by other material

put in the public domain before and since,5 including video and audio recordings of

broadcasts and of Parliamentary committee meetings, transcripts of the examination

of witnesses at Hutton Inquiry hearings, and various official reports. Out of more

than 8000 pages of documents examined, about 400 complete documents most

relevant to the research were transcribed and coded. These included: faxes, press

releases and newspaper articles; internal e-mails, memos and meeting minutes; and

transcripts of broadcasts, Parliamentary proceedings, press conferences, and

witness testimony. Appreciation of the case was augmented by recording several

interviews with participants across the interorganizational divide. These confidential

interviews were only used to contextualise the dispute within the broader dynamics

of the two organizations and their relationship; to better understand the significance

and history of documented exchanges; and to appreciate the durability of

dichotomous beliefs, and emotions, more than a year after the events themselves.

The initial coding of the archived material primarily tracked the development of

event-sequences and key disputed issues, the involvement of the various

protagonists and, particularly, beliefs and emotions reflected explicitly or implicitly in

their communications. For example: ‘anger’ was a code (with subcodes for ‘outrage’,

‘exasperation’, etc.); there were codes for specific beliefs regarding the charges in

the original allegations, the status of the source, whether one side or the other was

distorting the allegations, etc.; and there were codes for accounts reflecting broader

mindsets such as there being ‘anti-war bias’ at the BBC, or a ‘Government vendetta’

against a particular journalist. As analysis proceeded, based on the data the

boundaries of some codes were redrawn, while some were partitioned into ‘trees’ of

associated codes and, conversely, other codes were clustered into such trees of

association. For example, both ‘a sense of injustice’ and ‘bitterness’ were

associated with ‘anger’; and beliefs in a ‘Government vendetta’ against a journalist,

‘defending the independence of the BBC’, and a ‘preplanned attack’ (all ‘in vivo’

codes, i.e. having names taken from the documented exchanges) were grouped

together under a general category of the BBC ‘under attack’.

The primary mode of inference adopted in preparing this article was overtly

abductive. Starting with surprising, anomalous, or unexplained data, ‘abductive

inferences seek to go beyond the data themselves, to locate them in explanatory or

interpretive frameworks . . . to come up with new configurations of ideas’ (Coffey and

Atkinson, 1996: 156) so that the framework of the researcher’s previous knowledge

is ‘modified, rebuilt and reshaped on the basis of empirical material’ (Kelle, 1995:

41). As codes were refined, communication methods and their consequences (e.g.

publicness and references back to the text of previous exchanges) were coded for,

and clear links emerged between these categories and emotionality in the

exchanges. Connections were made with the literature on virtuality in terms of

communication across the organizational and community boundary between

protagonists as well as mediation of communication via technology. However, it also

became clear that frameworks in the literature did not allow an appreciation of the

interplay between emotion, virtuality and sensemaking in this case or, indeed,

between sensemaking and emotion in general. The publicness of the dispute, and

prevalence within it of emotion-laden references to records of previous interaction,

drew attention to the significance of emotions instigated by access to records and by

added clarity in virtual communication rather than reduced clarity (the focus of much

of the literature), as well as to the involvement of emotions in maintaining

contradictory stances despite reference to records that could resolve them.

Reflexive consideration of the way that I myself had become an unintended audience

of the exchanges, also absorbed in the records, further highlighted these

characteristics. It was these unexplained phenomena that led to the direction taken

in reviewing the literature, the focus on reviewability and replicability, as well as to

efforts to understand the relationship between sensemaking and emotion. This led

on to the development of the model presented in Figure 1. Work on this article has

therefore been rooted in a segment of the case study analysis, focusing on the

interplay of virtuality, sensemaking and emotion while leaving other aspects of the

case and its analysis for separate consideration elsewhere.

The following section examines some of the ways that the dynamics outlined in

Figure 1 do indeed appear to have played out in the dispute between the BBC and

the Government. From the multiple elements that made up this controversy,

limitations of space mean that only a fraction can be conveyed here. The extracts

chosen primarily focus on conflicts concerning what the original allegations had

been, because these provided a foothold for later branches of the dispute, in many of

which the involvement of similar processes were observed.

Emotion and sensemaking in (virtual) practice

There were sustained and substantial differences in how the BBC and the UK

Government characterized the original Today programme allegations and this

became a central aspect of the dispute. During an initial inchoate period of a few

days, descriptions of the charges that had been made on the morning of Thursday

29 May 2003 varied wildly. Then, from the middle of the following week, for most of

June, some stability emerged. However, only the charge that the Government, or

specifically the Prime Minister’s Communications Director, had asked for the dossier

to be ‘sexed up’ (meaning made more convincing or exciting) was common to the

BBC’s and Government’s descriptions of what had been alleged. On the morning of

Wednesday 4 June, after the previous Thursday’s allegations, the reporter who had

broadcast the allegations was again interviewed on the Today programme:

. . . nobody has actually ever quite denied the central charge made by my source, and

just to repeat that charge was that uncorroborated evidence of a forty-five minute threat

was given undue prominence in the dossier at the behest of the Prime Minister or his

staff and to the alarm of the intelligence community . . . (BBC/18/0034)

The charge that the 45-minute claim simply had been given undue prominence in the

published dossier, or that prominence had been requested by the Prime Minister or

his staff, had not in fact been made at any point in the reporter’s original 29 May

broadcast. So, this summary communicated a tailored account, tempering his report

to the listeners as a whole; but both versions were, of course, also available to

members of the Government (in fact BBC radio broadcasts remain available to

review on the internet for some time).

Later that same morning, a Government Minister, the Leader of the House of

Commons, responded on the programme. He vehemently condemned the reporter’s

new summary of their source’s allegations and repeatedly referred to a transcript of

the first report at 6.07am on 29 May. Here is one such reference:

Right well let me give you the final untruth this morning. The final untruth this morning

from your reporter was that his central claim was that we had erm sort of

overemphasised the erm information put into the dossier last week. That was not his

central claim. At seven minutes past six last week when this story started [he] said this:

‘The Government probably knew that the forty five minute figure was wrong, even before

it decided to put it in’. The central and original allegation, was that we deceived

intentionally the people of this country . . . (BBC/18/0043-0044)

Exasperation in the Minister’s tone, in what was part of a mediated virtual exchange

between the Government and the BBC, would have allowed a non-volitional account

of his condemnatory style as passion.

Reactions from BBC personnel to his re-presentation of inconsistency are

instructive. In an e-mail on Saturday 7 June, the reporter responsible for the original

story sent a proposed Sunday newspaper article, about the Minister’s appearance,

for vetting by the Today programme editor:

. . . the Leader of the House of Commons . . . was preparing a kamikaze dive-bombing

raid of his own, on me . . . Smoke pouring from his afterburners, sheaves of old Today

programme transcripts flapping from his flying overalls, Dr Reid went into close air

combat . . . The good Doctor could not entirely escape the impression that he was trying

to divert attention from the message by attacking the messenger, but it certainly made

jaw-dropping radio (BBC/7/0077)

The editor replied 20 minutes later proposing only minor changes to other aspects of

the article. Here, derision allows a mocking, dismissive account of the

re-presentation of the substance of the original allegations, allowing the tailored

account of them to be maintained. Meanwhile, the Director-General of the

corporation had also listened to the Minister’s interview (Hearing 32). The BBC’s

Controller of Editorial Policy told him it was riveting, so he asked to be sent a tape

and agreed with that view; ‘It was just a riveting piece of radio. Not remarkable in

terms of things – just as a piece of theatre it was remarkable’ (pp. 137-8, emphases

added). Here, fascination is a passion: the executives are ‘riveted’ by the interview.

An account of the content as a spectacle, ‘a piece of theatre’, was made plausible

while the ‘things’, re-presentation of the substance of the original allegations, could

again be discounted. Indeed, at the same Inquiry hearing, shortly after giving this

evidence about listening to the Minister’s interview, the Director-General was

specifically asked whether he had been aware that the original report had alleged

that the Government probably knew that the 45-minute figure was wrong even before

it was included in the dossier. Despite the Minister’s vehement restatements of this

(repeated three times), the Director-General was adamant that he had not become

aware of it for several more weeks (p. 138). The tailored account of the original

allegations could continue to be maintained within the BBC.

Meanwhile, after returning from a private trip to America, the Prime Minister’s

Communications Director sent a fax to the BBC Head of News, received early on the

morning of Friday 6 June:

I am writing to complain about [your journalist’s] irresponsible reporting . . . With regard to

the report on the BBC Today programme last Thursday at 0607 (transcript enclosed), can

you explain to me how it conforms with the BBC’s own producer guidelines . . . You will, I

imagine, seek to defend your reporting, as you always do. In this case, you would be

defending the indefensible . . . (BBC/5/0060-0063)

The emotional tone of indignation here may have made available a non-volitional

account of his offensive stance in this virtual message. Unlike anger, however,

indignation tends towards giving up any prospect of explanation of the other (Sims,

2005). In accord with this, while the Communications Director’s inclusion of the

6.07am transcript suggests that he too was focusing on the most serious allegations,

in other respects his fax lacked the clarity around the content of the Government’s

grievances that had been evident in the Minister’s interview two days before. In

reaction to this message too, internal BBC communication had a derisory tone. In an

e-mail to his manager on the Monday afternoon, 9 June, the editor of the Today

programme referred to the Communications Director’s fax as ‘all drivel’ (BBC/5/0066)

and, in a further e-mail later in the afternoon, suggested that he may have ‘gone

bonkers’ (BBC/5/0070), adding:

For what it’s worth, I don’t think [he] has anywhere to go on this - he isn’t going to shift

our story: not by endless transcripts, not by regurgitating producer guidelines.

(BBC/5/0070)

Likewise, the BBC Director-General was given a copy of the fax and later

commented that the Communications Director ‘clearly suffered from verbal

diarrhoea’ (Dyke, 2004: 265). Emotions incorporating dismissal of the standpoint of

Government interlocutors and inattention to the content of their communication had

enabled a shared account to be constructed within the BBC, in which the transcripts

and reference to the seriousness of allegations they contained were not salient. The

Head of News was able to send a fax in reply to the Prime Minister’s

Communications Director on Wednesday 11 June, reasserting a version of the view

that the original allegations had focused on prominence accorded to the 45-minute

claim:

We have not suggested that the 45 minute point was invented by anyone in Downing

Street against the wishes of anyone in the intelligence community. We have suggested

that there are pertinent and serious questions to be asked about the presentation of the

intelligence material - a rather different point and one which I am not convinced your

letter recognises. (CAB/1/0248-0249, emphasis in original)

Behavioural commitment to vulnerable inconsistent messages, supported by

emotional discounting, had been heightened among BBC executives, while anger

and indignation had become central to the construction of sense on the

Government’s side. Further exchanges of faxes continued these themes.

Meanwhile, early in June, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of

Commons had announced an investigation into the decision to go to war in Iraq. On

25 June, following an earlier appearance by the BBC’s reporter, the Prime Minister’s

Communications Director himself appeared before the Committee in a televised

session. He took up the theme that what had been said in the 29 May broadcast

was being deliberately misrepresented by the BBC, and also angrily spelt out how he

saw its contents:

. . . let’s get to the heart of what the allegation is – that the Prime Minister, the Cabinet,

the intelligence agencies, people like myself, connived to persuade Parliament to send

British forces into action on a lie. That’s the allegation. I tell you [now banging table], until

the BBC acknowledge that is a lie, I will keep banging on, that correspondence file will

get thicker and they better issue an apology pretty quick. [Fading and raising hands] I’m

sorry if I get a bit. (FAC/2/0313)

This narrative not only presents a very forceful account (‘send British forces into

action on a lie’) of the most serious charge in the original allegations, that the

Government included the 45-minute claim in the dossier while probably knowing that

it was false, but also characterizes that charge itself not just as untrue, but as a lie.

Again, anger or indignation as passions allow an explicit, public, and irrevocable

indictment while overtly signalling lack of volition in the context of multiple,

indeterminate audiences (‘I’m sorry if I get a bit [emotional]’). This non-volitional

account was combined at the hearing with a separate volitional account justifying

condemnation of the BBC, which invoked a belief that from the start there had been

‘an agenda in large parts of the BBC’ (FAC/2/0308) against the war that had now

manifested in allegations of Government deceit. This narrative reinforced the sense

of onslaught on the BBC’s side: ‘Downing Street is currently launching a full frontal

assault against the BBC’s impartiality and independence’ (e-mail from BBC Chair of

Governors to the Board, morning of 27 June, BBC/14/0083).

On 26 June, the morning after the Communications Director’s appearance

before the Foreign Affairs Committee, the BBC Head of News was himself

interviewed on the Today programme and disdainfully rejected the Communications

Director’s characterisation of the original allegations: ‘[He] can try and pretend we

said all sorts of things we didn’t say. We’re absolutely clear about what we said’

(CAB/1/0339). He reasserted that the allegations had been limited to unhappiness

over presentational issues. Later that day, the Communications Director responded

to him with a three-page fax plus three further pages of addenda (BBC/5/0094-

0099). He set out a series of questions pertaining to the Government’s view of what

had been originally alleged. The fax, received at 3.50pm and released to the press,

requested a response by the end of the day. In the event, a group at the BBC,

including the Director-General, the Head of News, his deputy and the reporter who

broke the original story, spent the next day, Friday 27 June, constructing a response

together (Hearing 7; Hearing 32). The BBC Chair of Governors also reviewed a draft

(BBC/14/0053-0062) in the early afternoon before it was faxed through to the

Government.

The finalized 12-page reply (CAB/1/0355-0366), also released to the press,

summarised ‘the nub’ (CAB/1/0359) of the original report in innocuous terms as

unease about the use of intelligence in Government dossiers by some people in the

intelligence community, and the assertion of one source that the 45-minute claim

was mistaken and inserted late. At the same time, in answer to the Communications

Director’s direct questions, it stood by the position that the source’s allegations had

been far more serious, including the charge that the Government had probably

known that the 45-minute claim was false when it was published in the dossier.

Dismissive indignation was central to accounting for this equivocality:

This week you have misrepresented our journalism.

You have said we accused the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and other

ministers of lying. We have not.

You have said the BBC deliberately accused the Prime Minister of misleading the

House of Commons and of leading the country into war on a false basis. We have

not. (CAB/1/0359)

This combined in the fax with an account elaborating the belief that a personal

vendetta was behind the Communications Director’s stance: ‘We have to believe that

you are conducting a personal vendetta against a particular journalist whose reports

on a number of occasions have caused you discomfort’ (CAB/1/0366).

The fax’s contents were conveyed by telephone to the Communications

Director who was out with his son, and his rejoinder was almost immediate. He

telephoned the Press Association and read a statement shot through with anger and

contempt: ‘12 pages of weasel words, sophistry and a defence of unethical

journalism. Far better would be a 12 word apology that says “The BBC allegations

were wholly false and we apologise sincerely for them”. The story was a lie. It is a

lie . . .’ (CAB/1/0367). Outrage here again allows room for a non-volitional account

of this extremely harsh denunciation, while contempt may pre-empt re-presentation

of inconsistency between his assertion that the allegations were wholly false and his

colleague’s earlier acceptance of one element of them, that the 45-minute

intelligence came from a single informant. Over the following week, more

Government Ministers became involved in the dispute, the number of faxes

exchanged increased from one every few days to several every day, and many new

branches of the dispute developed.

Discussion

This concluding section of the article first discusses the model summarised in

Figure 1, then considers how these insights relate to the organizational discourse

literature as well as the conceptual links between sensemaking and emotion that

have been developed here. Finally, some prospects for ameliorating the difficulties

of dispute resolution in virtual settings are proposed. The article has drawn on work

of Averill, de Rivera and Parkinson, in which emotions are regarded as temporary

transformative social roles, to develop a new perspective on the relationship

between organizational sensemaking and emotion that, in turn, informs an

understanding of the impact of virtual communication in disputes. The focus here

has been on the effect of contentious virtual communications on the communicator

rather than the recipient. The capacities virtual communication offers for review and

replication of exchanges mean that they can be regarded as binding, that is, explicit,

irrevocable and potentially public. The communicator needs a socially acceptable

account of their communications and it is suggested here that their options are

limited, and represented by the arrows in Figure 1.

A communicator’s non-volitional, emotional accounts treat their contentious

communications as binding but not committing, and so explain them as passions.

For example, the exasperation of the Leader of the House of Commons in his 4 June

broadcast interview, and the later outrage of the Prime Minister’s Communications

Director reflected in his 6 June fax, his 25 June Foreign Affairs Committee

appearance and his 27 June press statement. The contrast here with insights into

virtuality and emotion from a deficiency perspective on virtual communication is

clear-cut. While virtual communications can be ambiguous, causing

misunderstanding that provokes emotion, the suggestion here is that explicitness in

contentious virtual communication (i.e. lack of ambiguity), together with its

irrevocability and potential publicness, can lead to emotionality in the communicator

themselves.

Alternatively, a communicator’s volitional accounts treat their contentious

communications as not only binding, but also committing, and so explain them as

actions. Interpretations and other beliefs are evoked that support such accounts.

For example, the Communications Director’s belief that the BBC’s report of

allegations was motivated by a longer-standing opposition to the war, and the belief

of the BBC’s Head of News and his colleagues that the Government protests

reflected a vendetta against one journalist, supported volitional accounts of their

communications.

Lastly, tailored accounts treat contentious virtual communications as not, after

all, even binding. In particular, their explicitness is disregarded as if the virtual

communications were equivocal or unobserved. However, tailored accounts can be

protected by emotions, such as contempt, which establish a temporary perceived

social order enabling others’ re-presentation of inconsistency in virtual

communications to be discounted in a ‘socially acceptable’ way. For example, the

emotional responses of BBC editorial staff and executives to the Government’s

re-presentation of transcripts of their original broadcast allegations, including

derision, disdain and being ‘riveted’, seem to have fitted this pattern.

The model predicts that associated with accounts of each type, on both sides of

a dispute, there will be social propagation of interpretations and other beliefs through

shared stories, and of emotions through direct emotional contagion, stimulating

further contentious communications. Between the BBC and the Government, some

of these effects are described in the previous section. Additionally, the case

indicated that accounts of different types can combine together to help sustain links

between a communicator’s conduct and their beliefs. The importance of this model

lies particularly in the attention it draws to challenges posed by clarity of

understanding, rather than misunderstanding, in disputes conducted through virtual

communication, and the fresh perspective it offers on emotionality and

belief-development in such exchanges. This may be especially significant for

geographically distributed work teams because of their dependence on methods of

virtual communication, and may supplement previous findings (Hinds and Bailey,

2003; Hinds and Mortensen, 2005; Cramton, 2001; Mannix et al., 2002) regarding

the development of disputes in such groups. However, further research, both in the

form of case studies and experiments, is needed to establish the degree to which the

dynamics discussed in this article are actually prevalent in disputes conducted

through virtual communication in general; their influence vis-à-vis other factors in the

origination and development of the disputes; and the strength of the explanatory

framework offered here.

This article has been grounded in the sensemaking rather than the discourse

literature because the latter has tended to offer less focus on how the internal world

of actors informs their communication (Marshak et al., 2000). However, there is an

emerging interest within organizational discourse theory in both the emotional

dynamics of discourse (Mangham, 1998; Samra-Fredericks, 2004) and the effects on

discourse of technological mediation (Boczkowski and Orlikowski, 2004; Panteli,

2004) to which the ideas here may contribute. The approach and conclusions are

directly relevant to binding discourse in general, that is to mediated discourse with

capabilities for review and replication of exchanges so that messages are explicit,

irrevocable and may be made public. These forms are becoming more prevalent:

not only computer-mediated communication but also video- or audio-recorded

interaction is binding discourse in this sense. For example, meetings of many

present-day statutory institutions are now televised, along with other political arenas,

so that they can be regarded as forms of binding discourse, giving the present study

possible implications for contemporary political science.

A distinctive theoretical contribution made by this article is the depiction of

sensemaking and emotion as complementary processes interlacing action with

interpretation and passion with interpretation respectively. It has been explained

here how this perspective allows an understanding of why particular emotions are

required for the construction of sense. The suggestion is not that emotions can be

viewed as interfering with sensemaking, or that they signal stalled sensemaking. On

the contrary, the suggestion is that accounts in terms of both action and passion are

required, at times, to establish ties between conduct and beliefs as both develop.

This standpoint invites emotion to be written back into some archetypal examples of

sensemaking. A case in point is Weick’s classic, oft-repeated tale of a group of

Hungarian soldiers lost in the Alps who are energised by the discovery of a map and

then find their way back to base, only to find that the map that aided them shows the

Pyrenees. This becomes a tale in which new hope galvanizes the troops, enabling

decisive behaviour despite uncertainties. Equally, early work on sensemaking

through behavioural commitment made frequent reference to how behaviour that

was explicit, public and irrevocable, might nevertheless not commit an individual to

developing beliefs that cohered with it if the person had had no choice, for instance

with ‘a gun to his head’ (Salancik, 1977: 5). Again, this may be shorthand for fear

allowing a coherent passion-interpretation account. Solomon (1976) argues strongly

that passions are a myth: we ‘must give up the self-excusing illusion that we suffer

our emotions . . . and see them as our own creative activities’ (p. 428, emphases in

original). But both action and passion, as voluntary and involuntary conduct

respectively, can be regarded as social constructions. To see our behaviour and

judgements as passion is not, as Solomon (1976) contends, to see them as

something that comes from outside of us; rather, action and passion are ‘two ways in

which something is part of us’ (Blum, 1980: 183). Correspondingly, sensemaking

and emotion can be regarded as dual moments in the construction of sense, of

interlaced conduct and beliefs.

Finally, the article also lends support to a familiar maxim that when disputes

arise it is best to meet or telephone rather than continue virtual interaction (since

unrecorded telephone conversations, like face-to-face dialogue, are not mediated).

But there will be many situations in which this is not practical and, in suggesting how

virtual communication may make the resolution of disputes (intra- as well as inter-

organizational) more problematic, the framework discussed here also intimates how

social, technological and emotional developments might begin to ameliorate these

effects. Weick and Sutcliffe (2003) introduced the concept of ‘tempered

commitment’ in which levels of volition, publicness and irrevocability are moderated

by reframing them as collective responsibilities. In the present context of dispute

communication, tempered commitment would translate as declared collective

responsibility for progressing and resolving disputes; for the choice of media through

which they are conducted; for the public profile they attract; and for enabling

revocability by fostering ‘escape routes’ (p. 83) for protagonists, for example, easing

the withdrawal of public assertions6. Alternatively, the issues described in this article

could come to be regarded as a short-term disjunction between emotion and the

technology of communication. There are embryonic technological developments

which are directly relevant to the reviewability and replicability of communications. In

particular, recent e-mail systems have included a facility to constrain the storing and

forwarding of messages. Conversely, just as other emotions have evolved over

periods of only decades in response to functional and cultural issues (Stearns and

Knapp, 1996), so emotions appropriate to virtual, mediated exchanges may evolve;

for example, inconsistency might come to evoke a variety of respectful compassion,

or a form of contradictoriness might be accepted as emotional rather than

reprehensible.

______________________________

Notes 1 References in this format correspond to numbers assigned to documents submitted in evidence

to the Hutton Inquiry and available at the Hutton Inquiry website, http://www.the-hutton-

inquiry.org.uk. In many cases multiple versions of the documents, submitted by different parties,

are available but unless there are significant differences only one reference is included here. In

a few cases, minor corrections to citations of transcript documents have been made after

comparison with audio or video recordings. Although all names are in the public domain, they

are not germane to this study, and those involved are referred to by their role where possible. 2 Henceforth abbreviated to ‘Prime Minister’s Communications Director’. 3 References in this form correspond to Hutton Inquiry hearings, numbered 1-48, held primarily

during August and September 2003, and to page numbers within the official transcripts.

4 Following (Weick, 1995), the term ‘beliefs’ is used here to refer to presumptions and

expectations as well as retrospective interpretations of events. 5 Sources included: BBC Radio website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio; Channel 4 News

Homepage, http://www.channel4.com/news; Government Press Briefings archive,

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1866.asp; Prime Minister’s Question Time archive,

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page306.asp. 6 Eventually, in September 2003 at the Hutton Inquiry, the reporter who broke the original story

explained that he had not intended to attribute to his source that the Government probably knew

the 45-minute claim was wrong when it published the dossier; it had been ‘a slip of the tongue’

which ‘just came out’. Still later, in 2004, it was announced that the British Intelligence Services

had withdrawn the intelligence assessment on which the 45-minute claim had been based.

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