The discussions about the workshop are utilised as a resource in a very different way in Kerry's exit interview. We had just been talking about key moments of change in the project group's relationships, and Kerry had suggested that working with Nina informally had helped to address some of the friction in the early days of the project. Then she noted:
K: Yeah, like things like, you know, we made the decision like you can't come to the visioning workshop, they were cool with that, if we'd said that at the start there'd have been a real... ((she grimaces))
C: Yeah
K: you know, but there wasn't, I think she [Nina] was the one that was most concerned about the co-inquiry process so was ... as as [design team member] said, she was our client, she was our .. the happier Nina is, the easier this is
The contrast between Kerry's account and Nina's account of the workshop's
interaction is striking. Kerry points to the workshop discussion as evidence to show how the council officers had become happier with the project ('they were cool with that'). The lack of argument is conceptualised as showing how the co-inquiry process had become more accepted and that Nina was now happier. Yet Nina raises the interaction in relation to feeling unloved, and to show how it had become no longer worth fighting for involvement.
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The possibly obvious point emerging from Nina and Kerry's contrasting perspectives is that what is not talked about in social interaction is just as open to interpretation, and to being used in constructing others' intentions and emotions, as what is talked about. The resources that Kerry uses to construct the contentment of the council officers at this point in the project relies on a discursive absence and a lack of open conflict, as much as any linguistic content.
7.6 Summary of emergent themes
This chapter has discussed the idea of silence as a discursive construction in relation to processes of learning and knowledge accumulation. In accounts presented here, participants discursively embedded the phenomenon of silence within the early stages of learning about a new subject or when someone is still uncertain about how to perform a role, and with the inference that speaking up would become easier once more experience and knowledge had been accumulated. While Kerry's account of staying silent drew on her position as a novice in relation to Sean and the
professional language of co-inquiry that she was not yet able to use convincingly, the practice of staying silent in other accounts from Paul and Sean was associated with the demonstration of expert role performance. Staying silent in this regard takes on a variable social meaning in relation to the discursive categories of novice and expert.
The suggestion in these accounts is that different roles performed by different individual role-holders demand different patterns of silence. To be identified as a competent professional would require both learning the appropriate professional discourse - the terminology, the concepts associated with the role, and so on, as noted in Chapter 6 by Alison and Paul - but also learning the normative patterns of when, where and with whom to use (or not) that discourse. Hence, while in Chapter
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6 Nina was the subject of Sean's criticism for talking in a way that he suggested was not helpful for his research team's development - and thus she became excluded from, and silenced in relation to, certain parts of the project delivery - in this chapter Martin was the subject of criticism for talking at the wrong time, for being involved inappropriately and not demonstrating sufficiently well an understanding of the times when he should have remained silent. It is worth noting that in these discursive constructions, silence is evaluated far more positively than in much of the OB literature, and that it is voice that is positioned as the problematic activity.
A number of different forms of silence have started to emerge more strongly in the data in this chapter. Some of the discursive constructions of staying silent in
participants' accounts pertained to very specific moments in meetings - silence as the withholding of particular thoughts within the conversation - such as in Kerry's account of her unexpressed thoughts about Nina's possible attendance at the workshop, and her own uncertainty about how to organise the invitations to the workshop. However, there were also more diffuse feelings, about the quality of engagement between people, that were formulated as silence in other accounts. Nina's talk about not having fought for attendance at the workshop situates a practice of staying silent in relation to her not feeling able to get her point across and be heard in the desired way in this project setting rather than as an action of not
speaking up at all in the project group meeting (a voiced utterance being empirically demonstrable from the transcript of the project meeting). As such, I start to question the nature of what constitutes silence and to raise the possibility that silence is not simply an opposite of voice, where an action of speaking up would somehow cancel out an action of staying silent. More specifically, the data in this chapter provokes questions about how silence might be conceptualised temporally: as an act situated
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within a discrete, empirical moment of social interaction or in much looser but more embodied emotional and relational terms, as a phenomenon that ranges across time and social space.
Finally, this perspective on silence as a relational phenomenon was further
developed in another way in this chapter: in relation to how someone's lack of verbal communication, an absence of talk, in a social situation can contribute to how others interpret their psychological state and their motives in that social interaction.
Different personal perspectives about what happened in the project group meetings in this chapter were based on what was not said as well as what was said. Nina's lack of speaking up was used by Kerry as evidence for Nina's happier psychological state at that point in the project. Kerry's perlocutionary account of Nina's absence of discourse can moreover be contrasted with Nina's own illocutionary explication of her silence as an action of 'not fighting for'. In addition, a lack of speaking may contribute to the moments when someone is interpreted as being engaged in a practice of withholding. I inferred that Nina might have been withholding her thoughts during the first discussion about the workshop based on how I had
interacted with her previously and what I had been told about her by others up to that point in the project. My inference was based on an anticipation of what she might do and say. The chapter therefore picks up a point made in Chapter 2, that an
individual's social silence, as an absence of sound, is an integral part of
communicative meaning-making, but notes from a Bakhtinian perspective that the precise meaning that is inferred is socially embedded and contingent in nature.
The next chapter offers some further accounts of silence, this time dealing more explicitly with the theme of conflict. The discussion turns to how choices between
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speaking up and staying silent might be properly negotiated and justified, and how silence and voice become connected to argument, embarrassment and risk.
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