Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings (Studies in Communication in Organisations and Professions)

This volume strengthens the case for analysing discourse from the point of view of discourse participants’ accountability and responsibility. It adds an important and largely neglected strand to research in discourse studies and pragmatics by analysing the expression and attribution of responsibility, particularly in professional discourse.

Debates on social and professional responsibility have proliferated in recent years both in the public sphere (e.g. in connection with corporate responsibility reports) and in more local practices (e.g. as manifested in the publication of in-house codes of conduct). However, there is little academic research on professional discourse which systematically addresses the ways in which responsibility relations are construed in language use.

This volume contains a number of case studies focusing on different professional settings: media, health care and social work. The types of data examined range from globally available mass-consumed discourse (such as news agency dispatches) to local and essentially private face-to-face encounters (such as counselling sessions). The studies examine different linguistic features (such as reported speech in written texts and backchannelling in spoken encounters) and different types of meanings (such as agency and causality). The studies draw on different methodological approaches (mainly pragmatics, conversation analysis and (critical) discourse analysis). A common thread running through the contributions is that responsibility is not a stable quality of people or institutions, but a dynamic and variable resource that language users negotiate in interaction.

Jan-Ola Ostman is Professor in Scandinavian Languages in the Department of Finnish, Fino-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Anna Solin is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki.