Consideraciones finales del capítulo 3

In recent times, trust has also attracted some interest in discourse analytical studies. The central argument that underlies this work is that trust is a discursive achievement, something people do when they interact with each other. This position is well illustrated in Pelsmaekers, Jacobs and Rollo’s (2014:7) words: ‘whether we trust others has a lot to do with what they say (including what they do not say), and with how they say it, as well as with what we tell them and how we do that’. Having that as a starting point, a number of studies have approached trust through the close analysis of communication, either verbal or not. I will briefly report on two studies that are regarding medical contexts, but constitute prime examples of how professional trust is accomplished through language.

An illustrative example is the study of Hewett et al. (2013) which focuses on professional trust among hospital doctors. Hewett et al. (2013) analysed communication between doctors in written medical records and found that professional trust is developed and negotiated in intergroup terms. They discerned between in-group and out-group trust, the former referring to trust between doctors of the same specialty and the latter between doctors of different specialties. The establishment of both forms of trust seems to be facilitated by the use of accommodative language in written records. Accommodative language in their study is interpreted as the use of ‘expressions of respect, politeness or the like’ (Hewett et al., 2013:40). In-group trust was found to be linked to allegiance of salient social identities and constructed through the demonstration of competence and respect for senior colleagues. At the same time, the development of out-group trust was found to be related to the demonstration of respect, deference and cross-cutting group memberships.

In a similar vein, O’Grady and Candlin (2013) investigated the development of trust through discourse in consultation sessions between a doctor, a parent and an adolescent patient. As their analysis demonstrated, the doctor managed to create a climate of mutual trust and acceptance in the consultations through a series of strategic discursive choices. These choices included gaze patterns, attention to bodily

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movements of the young patient and careful choice of terms of address when talking to him. These actions ultimately contributed to a repositioning of the adolescent patient: from being interactionally dependent on his mother, the young patient acquires a more independent position and becomes responsible for monitoring his own health.

Still within health-care context, Elsey, Monrouxe and Grant (2014) explored doctor- patient-student triadic bedside teaching encounters and showed how trust was achieved interactionally. More specifically, using a symbolic interactionist framework they focused on the functions of pronoun use and laughter and showed how these affected the construction and negotiation of social roles and identities of doctors, patients and students in the interactions under examination, which then affected trust levels between the doctor and patients. Although in a different context, the findings of these studies are still considered significant for my project, since they illustrate how the particular discursive choices of interlocutors can contribute to the construction of a climate of trust in interactional contexts.

As it has become obvious from the above discussion, trust takes different forms in different contexts. It is constructed through discourse in many possible ways, depending on what people say, but also on non-verbal choices, such as gaze patterns and body language. The construction of trust seems not to follow general overarching rules that can be applied in all situations; instead it seems to be sensitive to the particular contexts in which it is embedded. Also, as shown, it can be conceptualised in different ways, e.g. in terms of in-groups and out-groups, or as institutional and interpersonal. This dynamic and context situated conceptualisation of trust seems to match well with Candlin and Crichton’s (2013) understanding of the notion as a momentary accomplishment of people who interact, i.e., trust becomes constructed between people at the very moment that they interact with each other. Based on these insights, my project aims to study how participants do trust in different contexts and interactive events.

Work within discourse studies has recently shed light on the discursive strategies through which trustworthiness is claimed and negotiated in organisations. For example, Jones and Sin (2013) have investigated the factors that contribute to the

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building of a trustworthy persona for professional accountants. They analysed original accounts of practitioners taken from interview data, in which participants talked about the challenges they faced as recipients of trust from different social actors and their efforts to be seen as trustworthy. Their analysis showed that trustworthiness was constructed as a result of a certain degree of communicative expertise, which was indexed by behaviours that reflected recognition and respect for difference, such as frequent use of critical enquiry (questioning, probing, double- checking figures and facts), explaining (both to lay people and specialists), advising (on a wide range of matters) and negotiating (persuading, compromising, resolving disagreements and conflicts) but also of other non-verbal factors, such as one’s appearance, manner and overall style. Trustworthiness thus was found to be a complex construct, shaped by specific forms of communicative expertise and reinforced by non-verbal cues.

In a similar vein, Temmerman (2014) investigated the communication of trustworthiness of a Flemish women’s magazine to its readers. She examined the use of the first-person plural pronoun, as well as that of imperatives and pseudo-dialogue in the magazine’s discourse and found that the magazine communicated trustworthiness through the adoption of an expert position towards its readers. Another useful contribution comes from the work of Kusmierczyk (2014), who applied multimodal interaction analysis to video recording of job interviews and examined how interviewees manage to claim trustworthiness for themselves within interaction through various modes. Having as starting point the argument that engagement and mutual understanding facilitates positive evaluation of the candidate (Kerekes, 2003), she delves into identifying the discursive actions that contribute to building mutual understanding between the interviewer and the interviewee. Kusmierczyk’s (2014) analysis shows that mutual engagement and understanding are facilitated by the amount and frequency of supportive overlaps, latching and drawing on each other’s contributions, which all contribute to establishing an engaged conversational style that allows more flexibility for interviewees to construct their answers. In addition to that, through the multimodal angle taken, her analysis demonstrates also the critical role of gestures, gaze, body

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movement and object handling for the encounter under examination. All in all, her works shows that gestures, gaze, as well as written text all intersect with speech in meaning-making and are important for establishing trust in the face-to-face interactions.

Still within a corporate communication context, Fuoli (2017) conducted a corpus- based analysis of annual and corporate social responsibility reports (CSR) investigating how companies use stance expressions to construct a trustworthy corporate identity. The findings suggest that companies claim different identities in the different types of reports. While in annual reports, they make use of stance to come across as unbiased, rational and competent decision makers, in CSR reports they claim for themselves the identity of committed, honest and caring corporate citizens. The different representations of the companies are interpreted as strategic self-representations that enhance the persuasive appeal of the reports by being tailored to/guided by the specific expectations of the target audience.

I adopt a discursive view of trust for the purposes of my own project too. Trust, in the context of my work, is perceived as an interactional achievements of individuals. It has a dynamic and relational character, in the sense that it can change over time and that it depends on attitudes or beliefs of people towards others (Pelsmaekers, Jacobs and Rollo, 2014). Last but not least, trust seems to be enacted at multiple levels, both professional and more personal (Candlin and Crichton, 2013; Manderson and Warren, 2013).

I devote the next section to discussing another factor that has been argued to affect trusting relationships, namely identity.

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