Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities: Studies from a social interaction perspective

Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen, Christian Doctoral Thesis Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities: Studies from a social interaction perspective PhD Series, No. 40.2018 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen, Christian (2018) : Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities: Studies from a social interaction perspective, PhD Series, No. 40.2018, ISBN 9788793744271, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, https://hdl.handle.net/10398/9678 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/209087 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ STUDIES FROM A SOCIAL INTERACTION PERSPECTIVE CONSTRUCTING CHANGE INITIATIVES IN WORKPLACE VOICE ACTIVITIES Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies PhD Series 40.2018 PhD Series 40-2018 CONSTRUCTING CHANGE INITIATIVES IN WORKPLACE VOICE ACTIVITIES COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL SOLBJERG PLADS 3 DK-2000 FREDERIKSBERG DANMARK WWW.CBS.DK ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93744-26-4 Online ISBN: 978-87-93744-27-1 Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities Studies from a social interaction perspective Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen Supervisors: Associate Professor Magnus Larsson, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School Assistant Professor Mette Mogensen, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School Professor Andreas Holtermann, National Research Center for the Working Environment Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies Copenhagen Business School 2 Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities Studies from a social interaction perspective 1st edition 2018 PhD Series 40.2018 Print ISBN: 978-87-93 74426-4 Online ISBN: 978-87-93744-27-1 © Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen ISSN 0906-6934 The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies is an active national and international research environment at CBS for research degree students who deal with economics and management at business, industry and country level in a theoretical and empirical manner. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 3 Summary In recent years, a growing number of workplaces have implemented activities where employees are invited to voice problems and suggest initiatives directly to their managers in a group setting. Such direct group-based voice activities (DGVAs) are typically inspired by human resource management and production improvement techniques, and they are claimed to have a number of positive effects for both the organizations which host these activities and for their employees. However, others have questioned whether they provide employees with a reasonable opportunity to influence their working conditions, or if they instead mostly assign new responsibilities to the employees and promote overcommitted employee identities. This ambivalence regarding the activities is reflected in how the circumstances regarding voice in the workplace are sometimes described as messy and paradoxical. The aim of this dissertation is to understand an important aspect of how employees can influence their workplace through DGVAs, specifically how the participants construct change initiatives which can improve the employees’ working conditions. To this end, the dissertation presents an interaction-focused perspective on voice based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis, a perspective which addresses various shortcomings of the dominant research perspectives on voice. For example, substantial attention has been paid in the voice literature to how individual employees make choices about what messages to convey through voice and whom to address, especially in studies which have applied a psychological lens. However, in DGVAs, voicing a problem or a suggestion to the other participants is only the first step of a longer process towards potential consensus about which initiatives to implement, and the social and interactional mechanisms which underlie this process are not well understood. The dissertation contains four articles. In the first article, it is argued that an important aspect of developing initiatives in DGVAs is the interactional work performed by participants whereby they negotiate different candidate problem formulations in order to develop a coordinated understanding of the current situation – a process that is termed “problem work”. In addition to this “problem work”, the participants also engage in a related process of formulating and negotiating potential solutions which can be termed “solution work”. The employees orient to whether their problem and solution formulations are taken as credible, such as by basing their formulations on claims for which they hold epistemic authority, that is, the degree of access held by the employee to the topic at hand and thus their right to claim and present knowledge about 4 it. Thus, the limits to the employees’ epistemic authority also potentially limit the scope of issues they are likely to raise in DGVAs. Furthermore, even when they are presented in relation to topics where employees hold epistemic authority, the employees’ inferences can still be challenged by the management. The process of constructing initiatives in DGVAs is also shaped by how the participating employees construct their capacity to shape their own working conditions, a capacity which has been referred to within the literature as job control. Article two demonstrates that if employees construct their job control as being too limited to change their working conditions, they are unlikely to engage in developing new initiatives in the DGVAs, meaning that little or no action is taken on the basis of the participants’ discussions. The way the employees construct their job control is shaped by the accounts of the employees’ working conditions that are presented within the activities by various participants, as well as how these accounts are negotiated. Article three demonstrates how participants in DGVAs orient to various interactional threats, threats which may compromise the process of developing change initiatives. Specifically, supporting certain initiatives as an employee might lead to undesired identity ascriptions from the other participants, and as a result, employees are likely to refuse to assume responsibility for implementing these initiatives. Thus, engaging in DGVAs as an employee can involve trade-offs between potentially gaining influence over one’s working conditions on the one hand and the risk of losing one’s grip on how one’s identity is constructed in the interaction on the other. Relatedly, article four focuses on the perspective of first line managers and the interactional threats they face in DGVAs. Line managers’ reactions to voice have in the literature been attributed to their leadership style or personal disposition, for example their “openness” towards voice or lack thereof. Article four demonstrates how openness is also negotiated in interaction, and that managers employ various strategies to avoid attributions of being “closed” in situations where they challenge employees’ suggestions. Challenges from managers are likely to be justified through the line managers’ responsibility to support the meeting of organizational goals, even if they are also expected to encourage employees to use voice. Article four also demonstrates the importance that DGVA participants assign to maintaining moral accountability while engaging in discussions about proposed initiatives. Besides the findings of the four papers, the dissertation offers three overall contributions to voice theory: a description of key mechanisms whereby voiced suggestions for initiatives are 5 negotiated in interaction, rather than simply transmitted from employees to the management; a more developed understanding of the moral-related interactional threats that the participants face and which might compromise the process of constructing change initiatives; and a multi-faceted perspective on power and influence which more adequately captures how employees’ and managers interests are negotiated within DGVAs than current models which primarily focus on formal decision-making rights. As a methodological contribution, the dissertation introduces conversation analysis as a method to studying voice interactions in the workplace, and argues that conversation analysis might also shed new light on how concern for the working environment is topicalized and negotiated in organization members’ interactions outside of DGVAs. As a practical contribution, the dissertation argues that both the way participants negotiate their relative rights and obligations, as well as the setup of the DGVAs, such as the amount of time available, support from process facilitators, and the conceptual tools used, play a substantial role in shaping the employees’ opportunities for developing well-considered and relevant initiatives. 6 7 Resumé I de seneste år har et stigende antal arbejdspladser implementeret aktiviteter, hvor medarbejdere inviteres til at rejse problemer og foreslå initiativer til direkte til deres ledere i en gruppesammenhæng. Disse direkte gruppebaserede medarbejderinddragende aktiviteter (i afhandlingen betegnet DGVAer) er typisk inspirerede af human resource management og teknikker til produktionsforbedring, og de hævdes at skabe en række positive effekter for både de organisationer, der iværksætter aktiviteterne, og for deres medarbejdere. Omvendt har andre stillet spørgsmålstegn ved om aktiviteterne tilvejebringer en rimelig mulighed for medarbejderne til at påvirke deres arbejdsforhold, eller om de overvejende medfører nye forpligtelser og fremmer overengagerede medarbejderidentiteter. Denne usikkerhed i forhold til aktiviteterne afspejles i at forholdene for medarbejderinddragelse til tider beskrives som rodede og paradoksale. Formålet med denne afhandling er at forstå hvordan medarbejdere kan påvirke deres arbejdsplads gennem DGVAer, specifikt hvordan deltagerne konstruerer forandringsinitiativer som kan forbedre medarbejdernes arbejdsforhold. Med dette formål præsenterer afhandlingen et perspektiv på medarbejderinddragelse, der fokuserer på interaktion og som er baseret på etnometodologisk konversationsanalyse, et perspektiv som afhjælper forskellige mangler ved de mest udbredte forskningsperspektiver på medarbejderinddragelse. For eksempel er der i litteraturen om medarbejderinddragelse gennemført en række studier af hvordan medarbejdere træffer valg om hvilke budskaber de rejser og til hvem, specielt studier med et psykologisk perspektiv. Men i DGVAer er dét at rejse et problem eller foreslå en løsning til de andre deltagere kun det første skridt i en længere proces frem mod en mulig konsensus om hvilke initiativer, der skal gennemføres, og der mangler viden om de social og interaktionsmæssige mekanismer, der ligger bag denne proces. Afhandlingen indeholder fire artikler. I den første artikel argumenteres der for at et vigtigt aspekt af hvordan initiativer udvikles i DGVAer er den interaktionsmæssige indsats, som deltagerne lægger for at forhandle forskellige mulige problemformuleringer med henblik på at udvikle en koordineret forståelse af deres nuværende situation – en proces, der her kaldes ”problem work”. I tillæg til ”problem work” indgår deltagerne også i en tilsvarende proces hvor de formulerer og forhandler mulige løsninger, en proces som kaldes ”solution work”. Medarbejderne orienterer sig mod hvorvidt deres formulerede problemer og løsninger ses som 14 Co-author declarations ............................................................................................................ 259 Participant information about audio recordings ..................................................................... 263 15 List of figures and tables Figure 1. The escalator of influence (adapted from Marchington & Wilkinson, 2005), p. 47. Figure 2. Illustration of the recommended workshop setup, translated from Wåhlin-Jacobsen et al., 2017, p. 80. Table 1. A comparison of the three perspectives on voice research, p. 41. Table 2. Some overall characteristics of the two companies in which the workshop meetings under study took place, p. 85. Table 3. A list of the empirical material selected for analysis in the dissertation, p. 92-3. Table 4. Participants in the excerpts of chapter 5 and their formal work roles, p. 107. Table 5. Analyzed intervention action planning workshops for chapter 6, p. 129. Table 6. Participants in the excerpts and their formal work roles, chapter 7, p. 155. Table 7. Key categoryor predicate-based descriptions used in identity claims and ascriptions in the excerpts, chapter 7, p. 165-166. Table 8. Workshop participants, chapter 8, p. 179. Table 9. Notation symbols used in the four articles, appendix p. 258. 16 List of abbreviations DGVA: Direct Group-based Voice Activities EM: Ethnomethodology CA: Conversation Analysis DP: Discursive Psychology IB perspective: Individual Behavior perspective on voice MT perspective: Management Technique perspective on voice II perspective: Institutionalized Influence perspective on voice VMW: Visual Mapping Workshop APW: Action Planning Workshop FUW: Follow-Up Workshop 17 Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been completed without the help and support of a number of people and institutions. First, I would like to thank the National Work Environment Research Fund for funding my PhD project, as well as the Danish Rate Adjustment Pool for funding the data collection. My main supervisor, Magnus Larsson, has played an absolutely crucial role for the dissertation. You have time and again pushed my thinking and my writing forward while maintaining a supportive atmosphere in our talks. This made all the difference, especially during the hard times. My co-supervisor, Mette Mogensen, also deserves special thanks for always leading me to more fruitful roads when I had opted for the easiest. My colleagues and managers at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment have also played an important role. Thank you especially to Johan Simonsen Abildgaard for your support and advice and for co-authoring two of the dissertation’s articles with me. I also wish to thank Andreas Holtermann for trusting me throughout the process of writing my dissertation; Esben Nedergård Olsen for co-authoring an article with me and for listening to my ramblings and musings; Karina Nielsen (now University of Sheffield), Vilhelm Borg and Otto Melchior Poulsen for helping make my PhD studies possible; and Marie Louise Kirkegaard and Jeppe Ajslev for checking in on me when the project was taking up all of my attention. To the staff at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, thank you for welcoming me so warmly and for your interest in my project throughout these years. You have made me feel like a part of the department from the beginning. Special thanks to Emil Husted, Andreas Kamstrup, Roddy Walker, Frank Meier, Thorben Simonsen, Vibeke Kristine Scheller, Maibrith Kempka Jensen, and the other PhD students at IOA for great talks and laughs. Also thank you to Anne Roelsgaard Obling and Lise Justesen for helping me find my way out of “theory madness” and onto a much more interesting (and empirically grounded) path at my first work-in-progress seminar. Birte Asmuβ and Tony Huzzard deserve thanks for their constructive and detailed comments at my second work-in-progress seminar. I also wish to thank Andrea Whittle for hosting me as a visiting researcher at Newcastle University Business School. Great talks with Andrea, Frank Mueller and a number of their colleagues made the stay highly inspiring. In addition, comments 18 and suggestions from Marian Iszatt-White, Andrew Brown, members of the Communication, Organization, and Governance Cluster at Copenhagen Business School and David Speeckaert have improved both this dissertation and my writing in general. Finally, thank you Albert, Eigil and Carla for reminding me each day that there is more to life than employee voice and conversation analysis. You are your own selves and I love you for that. I know you didn’t wish for a dissertation, but I hope we’ll be wiser about these things when you reach the working age. To Sarah, thank you for being in my life and for being you. It has meant the world knowing that no matter how stressful the project has been at times, you would be there to listen and to ground me. I love you. Christian Dyrlund Wåhlin-Jacobsen Frederiksberg, June 2018 19 Preface Four research articles are included in this dissertation, all of which have been submitted for review to different academic journals. The details regarding place of submission, previous public presentations of the articles and co-authors are presented below.  The first article (chapter 5) is co-authored with Johan Simonsen Abildgaard. The article has been in review with Discourse & Communication, and we have been invited to revise and resubmit. The article is presented here in a version with minor revisions.  The second article (chapter 6) has been submitted to Human Relations. The article is coauthored with Esben Nedergård Olsen and Johan Simonsen Abildgaard.  The third article (chapter 7) has been submitted to Scandinavian Journal of Management. A previous version of the article has been presented at the 33rd EGOS Colloquium in Copenhagen, July 2017.  The fourth article (chapter 8) has been submitted to Management Communication Quarterly and is currently undergoing review. Due to the requirements of the targeted outlets, the first and second articles are written in UK English, while the remainder of the dissertation is written in US English.  20 1. Introduction Many organizations have in place one or more schemes or arrangements with the stated aim of inviting employees to voice problems and suggestions to the management about how to improve working conditions or the functioning of the organization (Busck, Knudsen, & Lind, 2010; Donaghey, Cullinane, Dundon, & Wilkinson, 2011; Dundon & Gollan, 2007; Heery, 2011; Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010). These constitute formal voice arrangements, as they are based on recurrent processes involving some degree of structure regarding what can be voiced, how the employees are to present voice to the management, and what happens after the employees have voiced a problem or suggestion; they represent a setting for voice which is distinctive from how employees might voice problems and suggestions informally in their everyday interactions with managers (Marchington & Suter, 2013). Formal voice arrangements can take place via select employee representatives, but a type of formal voice arrangement that is becoming increasingly common in recent years is one in which activities1 are held where groups of employees can discuss problems and suggestions directly with their managers, for example in “quality circles,” “problem-solving groups,” “focus groups” or “employee–manager meetings2” (Busck et al., 2010; Donaghey et al., 2011; Dundon & Gollan, 2007; Heery, 2011; Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010). These activities can be labeled “direct group-based voice activities” (DGVAs). The purpose of this dissertation is to advance our understanding of how participants in DGVAs come to agree about which actions they will take after the activities in order to address the issues they have discussed. These actions, which may be taken as parts of more or less formalized change initiatives, are important because they typically represent the most tangible outcome of the activities. Although not all initiatives emerging from the activities will end up being implemented, the long-term effects of DGVAs for both the employees and the organization are likely to reflect the number of initiatives developed, their scope, and which working conditions they target. For example, DGVAs might have a limited impact if only a few initiatives are developed within the activities, or if the initiatives have little potential to change employees’ working conditions. 1 The distinction between voice arrangements and voice activities is used here to discern the overall arrangement as a system or scheme from the actual activities in which voice is exercised. The distinction is relevant because formal voice arrangements might comprise various activities where voice is not necessarily exercised, such as activities for processing employees’ voiced suggestions, for implementing these suggestions, or for following up on their implementation. 2 My use of the term “meetings” throughout the dissertation refers to formal meetings. 21 Unfortunately, it cannot be taken for granted that DGVAs will have positive effects for employees or organizations in a given case. From a positive angle, the benefit of employee participation, more generally, has been broadly recognized as it has been recommended as a strategy for promoting health and well-being in the workplace by influential institutions such as the World Health Organization (Burton, 2010), the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2001), and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA, 2010) and has been incorporated into national policies in the UK (Cousins et al., 2004), Belgium (Malchaire, 2004), Germany (Satzer, 2009), and Italy (Persechino et al., 2013), for example. Specifically, formal voice arrangements featuring direct and consultative formal voice activities have been described as an important strategy for improving the health, safety, and well-being of the employees by enabling them effect changes to potentially strenuous or hazardous working conditions (Mikkelsen, Saksvik, & Landsbergis, 2000; Nielsen, 2013; Nielsen, Randall, Holten, & RialGonzález, 2010). In addition, formal voice arrangements are claimed to potentially provide various additional benefits such as learning opportunities for the employees, which increases their skill levels and their motivation to perform well at work (Eurofound, 2013; Mikkelsen et al., 2000). When employees feel that formal voice arrangements are effective at helping them improve their working conditions, participating can lead to “fair process effects” (Greenberg, 1990; Greenberg & Folger, 1983) such as increased employee commitment and involvement (Nielsen, 2013; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). In addition, workplace productivity and product quality may increase due to how the employees’ suggestions can improve the way work is performed (Freeman & Medoff, 1984; Wilkinson & Fay, 2011). On the other hand, empirical studies show that positive effects do not always materialize from voice activities in practice (Bashshur & Oc, 2015; Egan et al., 2007). Within the literature, a number of authors have argued that a key reason why formal voice arrangements sometimes do not lead to substantial changes is that the form and timing of the arrangements are typically determined by senior level management, while the employees’ decision authority does not necessarily increase (Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998; O’Connor, 1995). Therefore, many proposed initiatives cannot be decided on by the employees themselves, as implementation depends on the management’s support. This contingency means that employees are likely to consider which initiatives the management would be willing to support, and to only propose initiatives which are believed to hold a chance of being implemented (Morrison, 2011). For issues where the interests of the employees and management are in conflict, there is a risk that 22 the initiatives developed in DGVAs would be of a nature which is unlikely to significantly influence the employees’ working conditions. As a result, employees might experience that they hold relatively little “de facto voice” (Krefting & Powers, 1998, p. 263), and current forms of participation have been criticized for tokenism, i.e., that the employees are only claimed to be empowered (Strauss, 2006), or offered sham participation activities (Markey & Knudsen, 2014). It has been claimed that DGVAs and other types of empowerment practices actually contribute to disempowering the employees by ensuring the employees’ commitment to the overall managerial agenda through the language of empowerment and participation (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002) while forcing extra work tasks on them (Boje & Rosile, 2001). When the organizations are seen by the employees as failing to heed the complaints that are raised through formal voice systems, frustrations are likely to grow (Folger, Rosenfield, Grove, & Corkran, 1979), a phenomenon which has been dubbed the “deaf-ear syndrome” (Cohen, 1985; Harlos, 2001). And in relation to health and well-being issues, some have questioned whether direct voice arrangements provide the employees with sufficient control over their working conditions to avoid their work-related health problems deteriorating in the long term (Busck et al., 2010). Compared to the focus in the literature on employees’ limited decision making authority, practical experiences led me to become aware of another potential challenge to DGVAs having positive outcomes: that considerable intricacies are involved in developing initiatives in DGVAs and negotiating3 consensus around implementing them. As a research assistant in an interdisciplinary group including both academics and professionals, I participated in facilitating workshop meetings for an intervention study which sought to implement a formal voice arrangement to improve the health and well-being of employees in three Danish industrial organizations (Gupta et al., 2015; Wåhlin-Jacobsen, Henriksen, Gupta, Abildgaard, & Holtermann, 2016; Wåhlin-Jacobsen, Henriksen, Abildgaard, Holtermann, & Munch-Hansen, 2017). While the process of developing initiatives is not framed as decisive for the outcomes of formal voice arrangements in the literature, I and my colleagues were surprised to see that there were substantial differences in the number and the scope of the initiatives developed in different workshop meetings. We even observed these differences when comparing workshop meetings 3 In the dissertation, my use of the term “negotiation” is meant to imply both potentially a form of bargaining, i.e. that “the participants relate themselves to each other’s goals and interests and to the problems of implementing their goals” (Wagner, 1995, p. 30) and a form of maneuvering past various interactional obstacles (Francis, 1995). 23 within the same organization, and with participants who were part of the same overall work team and performed the same work tasks. These differences were closely related to how discussions among the participants played out in the workshop meetings. For example, the participants’ sensemaking regarding their opportunities for changing their working conditions seemed to be a crucial factor influencing the initiatives developed within the workshops, which, in turn, affected their chances of actually improving their working conditions. While the participants in one workshop meeting considered most of the working conditions they considered problematic as unamenable to change and therefore elected to only develop a few minor initiatives, their colleagues from another shift would sometimes develop seven or eight initiatives regarding the very same problems during their workshop meetings. We also observed employees disagreeing about what constituted problems and what to do about them, with some employees openly challenging their colleagues’ viewpoints, thereby undermining the proposed changes which their colleagues considered worth pursuing. The lack of agreement and the potential for interpersonal conflicts among the participants that follows from it is also rarely acknowledged in the literature, where little attention has been paid to how employees arrive at “voiceable” problems or suggestions. As a third example, various employees seemed to be working against the agenda for the workshop meetings, an agenda we in the project group had considered sympathetic to the employees. Some employees even chastised the arrangement for not being about increasing their well-being at all. This led us to wonder whether there were other key concerns among the employees besides those we had realized. I and my colleagues came away from the workshop meetings thinking that what went on in the workshop meeting discussions had an importance that had been overlooked in the literature. At the same time, since we were initially quite surprised about what we saw, it was not very clear to us why the discussions progressed as they did. We were not alone. In the voice literature, various authors have called for more research on the mechanisms by which the outcomes of formal voice arrangements are determined. For example, a recent review described the relationship between opportunities to use voice and the outcomes of voice as “underspecified” because of a lack of research about how voice is reacted to 30 2. Employee voice and direct group-based voice activities In this chapter, key concepts and distinctions within the employee voice literature will be presented, as well as data on the prevalence of DGVAs. I will then describe how these key distinctions relate to three research perspectives which focus on different aspects of voice and which have been applied in various subfields of voice research: voice as individual behavior, as a management technique, or as a form of institutionalized influence. I do not claim that only these three perspectives exist, but they each represent a sizable contribution to the voice literature. By structuring my review of the voice literature around these three perspectives, I aim to address various arguable shortcomings of other recent reviews, such as how relatively little attention is paid to the fundamental differences in how voice is conceptualized within the literature (e.g., Morrison, 2011; Mowbray et al., 2015; Wilkinson & Fay, 2011), the omission of perspectives which represent important aspects of voice (such as the lack of an explicit individual perspective from the model presented by Wilkinson & Fay, 2011), or the grouping together of quite distinct understandings of voice (such as those found within the human resource management and industrial relations literatures in the review by Mowbray et al., 2015). Due to how a work environment intervention serves as the empirical setting for the dissertation’s analysis, this chapter will also provide a description of how the work environment literature on voice relates to the three perspectives. Finally, I will formulate three problems within voice research based on the three main perspectives, problems which warrant a fourth perspective focusing on how voice is exercised and responded to in interactions. Voice and related concepts Within the voice literature, the term voice is sometimes used interchangeably with other terms, such as participation, involvement, and empowerment, often with no clear distinctions as to their intended meaning. Several researchers have criticized that these terms are used in ways that are “elastic” and which cover an “extremely broad” range of practices (Marchington & Suter, 2013, p. 284; see also Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010), a problem which has been attributed to the fact that the phenomena being referred to by the terms are studied in a range of research areas (Morrison, 2011; Mowbray et al., 2015). Because voice (or participation, etc.) can refer to a number of different things, it is necessary to assess what the specific phenomenon of interest is 31 on a study-by-study basis when reviewing the literature, rather than going by keywords, for example. The terms participation, involvement, and empowerment have been used in the literature to imply that employees are granted some degree of influence over relevant decisions, however the terms have been criticized because this assumption does not always hold (Boje & Rosile, 2001; Krefting & Powers, 1998; Markey & Knudsen, 2014; Strauss, 2006). My choice to instead use the term voice throughout this dissertation is motivated by the term merely implying that employees communicate some point to the management. Because this condition is easily satisfied, the term is arguably less problematic and more inclusive than either participation, involvement or empowerment. My use of the term voice is inspired by Pyman and colleagues (2006), who define employee voice as “how employees raise concerns, express and advance their interests, solve problems, and contribute to and participate in workplace decision making” (p. 543). This definition stands in contrast with those of other authors who take a more restrictive stance. For example, some studies only focus on pro-social voice, that is, voice motivated a “desire to help the organization or work unit perform more effectively or to make a positive difference for the collective” (Morrison, 2011, pp. 381–382), or critical voice, which is also referred to as dissent (e.g., De Ruiter, Schalk, & Blomme, 2016; Garner, 2016; Kassing, 1997). Key distinctions in the voice literature As mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, an important distinction is the one between voice that is expressed informally by employees in their everyday interactions with managers and voice that is expressed in relation to the various forms of formal7 voice arrangements which exist. Formal voice arrangements are found in a number of different forms, such as collective bargaining, suggestion schemes, focus groups, quality circles, upward problem-solving or continuous improvement groups, employee–management meetings at the team or workplace level, consultations with a designated ombudsperson, and written grievance procedures (Harlos, 7 It should be noted that different definitions exist of what it means for a voice system to be formal. Harlos, for example, states that “formal systems are highly standardized with clear protocols that foster consistent implementation and that reduce the discretionary powers of voice managers” (2001, p. 329), meaning that formality is equated with standardization, while others take the presence of a system or arrangement as the defining aspect of formality (e.g. Marchington & Suter, 2013). In this dissertation, my use of the term formal reflects Marchington and Suter’s use. 32 2001; Mowbray et al., 2015; Stohl, 1986). Formal voice arrangements have been especially prevalent in organizations in Scandinavia, Germany, the UK, and Australia (Busck et al., 2010; EU-OSHA, 2010; Eurofound, 2013; Harley, 1999; Lippert, Huzzard, Jürgens, & Lazonick, 2014; Wilkinson, Dundon, Marchington, & Ackers, 2004), while they are used somewhat more rarely in the US (Tarras & Kaufman, 2006). A general tendency is that organizations which primarily employ clerical, service, or manual workers are less likely to have formal voice arrangements in place than those which primarily employ more highly skilled staff (Eurofound, 2013). Another key distinction mentioned previously is that of direct and representative voice, where direct voice is expressed by the employees directly to the managers, while representative voice is exercised through employee or union representatives. Representative voice tends to be exercised in formal voice arrangements such as work councils or through collective bargaining processes (Mowbray et al., 2015), while direct voice can be both formal and informal. The focus of this dissertation, DGVAs, comprise formal voice arrangements, such as quality circles, upward problem-solving groups (also known as focus groups or continuous improvement groups), and various forms of regular team briefings or staff meetings with an opportunity for voice. DGVAs are common in Western organizations: in a large pan-European survey study, 88% of the participating management representatives reported that their organizations held DGVAs in the form of regular meetings between employees and their immediate manager, and 54% had meetings in various forms of groups or committees (Akkerman, Sluiter, Jansen, & Akkerman, 2015). A survey conducted in the US found that 37% of the participating organizations had committees of employees who met to discuss problems on a regular basis, 36% had employees participating in committees for productivity or quality, and 47% had regular town meetings between employees and managers (Freeman, 2007). Furthermore, DGVAs are used in the management of work environment problems. For example, according to Danish work environment laws, every workplace must perform a health and safety risk assessment every three years and revise the risk assessment in intermediary years. The risk assessment process must be participatory (Working Environment Act, 2010) and The Danish Working Environment Authority, which oversees that Danish organizations perform the risk assessment as required, recommends using DGVAs (Hvenegaard & Nielsen, 2009). A third important distinction is found between voice concerning how work is designed and performed locally, that is, production issues, and voice related to distribution issues, such as 33 pay, hours, how the overall operation is run, or regulations at the company and international levels (Levie & Sandberg, 1991). Direct voice tends to focus primarily on production issues, while representative voice tends to focus on distribution issues. Typically, the objectives and demands regarding distribution issues are less of a challenge to clearly define or quantify as compared to those of production issues, where it is more difficult to formulate the employees’ interests unambiguously. In some cases this difficulty may be due to the task complexity of work specialization, which leads to the employees experiencing a diversity of problems, or it may be due to various technical considerations which might go beyond the employees’ and employers’ immediate competencies (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). The scope of the issues discussed in representative voice settings, as would be expected, relates to the organizational level of the meeting, with discussions at the workplace level typically focusing on more specific and local topics than the discussions found at the headquarter level (Poole, 1978). A final distinction worth mentioning concerns whose interests are promoted by the use of voice. Some scholars approach the interests of employees and managers as being mostly overlapping, a frame of reference which has been labeled unitarism (Fox, 1966). Within studies drawing upon a unitarist frame of reference, voice is typically seen as leading to positive outcomes for both employees and managers (Wilkinson & Fay, 2011), with some studies focusing exclusively on prosocial voice as opposed to dissent8. Critical voice has instead been a main focus of research which sees the interests of employees and managers as somewhat conflicting, corresponding to a pluralist frame of reference in Fox’s terminology (Fox, 1966). For example, based on a pluralist frame of reference, formal voice arrangements have been described as potential arenas for power struggles between employees and managers (Wilkinson & Fay, 2011). Three main perspectives in voice research In the following, I will present the individual behavior (IB), management technique (MT) and institutionalized influence (II) perspectives on voice. Because the empirical setting for the dissertation’s analysis is a work environment intervention, I will also describe how the work 8 The distinction between critical and pro-social voice can be criticized for potentially conflating employees’ motivations with the way they choose to express voice; for example, employees might exercise voice out of dissatisfaction with the current states of affairs, but choose to present a constructive voice message to the management (Morrison, 2011; Mowbray, Wilkinson, & Tse, 2015). 34 environment literature on voice relates to the three perspectives9. The way DGVAs and other types of formal voice arrangements are employed in work environment interventions can be said to be inspired by voice research from the MT perspective, and more general discussions of how voice is used by organizations in their management of health, well-being and safety issues hold similarities with II perspective research, while little or no work environment research focusing on voice takes an IB perspective. This section of the chapter is terminated with a table summarizing how the three perspectives relate to the key distinctions described above. Voice as individual behavior (IB) IB-perspective research focuses on employees’ and managers discretionary behavior in relation to voice (Morrison, 2011), and thus on direct voice. Voice in formal voice arrangements is rarely the specific focus of IB perspective research, which tends instead to revolve around how employees choose whether to exercise voice, keep silent, or exit the organization when they become aware of problematic circumstances in the workplace in general. The IB perspective is especially prevalent in voice research subfields such as those of silence, dissent, whistleblowing, and issue selling (Brinsfield, Edwards, & Greenberg, 2009). The focus on choice involves paying substantial attention to those circumstances which are thought to influence the employees’ decisions. For example, Morrison (2011) presents a model which depicts the choice as being shaped by a number of factors, such as the organizational context for voice (e.g., the organizational structure and culture, or whether their supervisor is considered receptive to voice) and the employee (e.g., his/her job attitudes, personality, and previous experiences). Among the employee’s considerations are to whom the voice should be addressed, through which media, and how the voice message should be constructed (Morrison, 2011; Mowbray et al., 2015). IB-perspective voice research has tended to describe the employees’ discretionary voice behavior as shaped by two overall concerns: the potential efficacy of exercising voice in order to influence one’s working conditions and the risks that one might incur while doing so (Morrison, 2011; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). In relation to the efficacy of using voice, is has been claimed that employees expect that exercising voice should be uncomplicated, that their 9 Overall, the work environment literature is broad and multidisciplinary and covers a range of subjects related to employee health, well-being and safety. While a growing number of studies discuss the role of voice in promoting health, well-being and safety, these studies only constitute a minor part of the overall work environment literature. 35 complaints should undergo credible processing, and that replies and actions in response to the complaints should be timely (Harlos, 2001). Furthermore, as mentioned above, employees might consider access to effective voice systems to be included in their psychological contract with their organization (Rousseau, 1995), in which case, when organizations are seen as exhibiting the deaf-ear syndrome, employees might develop negative feelings about their employment relationship and harbor intentions to leave. They also become less likely to exercise voice (Ahlbrandt, Leana, & Murrell, 1992; Donaghey et al., 2011; Marchington, Wilkinson, Ackers, & Goodman, 1994; Stohl & Jennings, 1988). In relation to the risks of using voice, employees desire freedom from retribution (Harlos, 2001; Pohler & Luchak, 2014), as it is well known that using voice can have negative long-term consequences for employees, such as being fired or passed over for promotion or bonuses, especially when their use of voice concerns wrongdoings in the organization (Feuille & Delaney, 1992; Lewin, 1999). Besides focusing on employees’ decisions about whether and how to exercise voice, some studies have taken an IB perspective on how managers respond to employee voice. From the managers’ perspective, the proliferation of direct forms of voice has been described as carrying potential threats to managerial authority (Denham, Ackers, & Travers, 1997; Musson & Duberley, 2007) and also as potentially leading to changes in the workplace which go against the managers’ wishes (Donaghey et al., 2011). Although line managers are often expected to promote the employees’ engagement with voice arrangements (Detert & Burris, 2007; Detert & Treviño, 2010), managers are rarely given specific instructions about how to handle situations where heeding an employee’s voiced message compromises other managerial responsibilities, such as securing high organizational performance (Harlos, 2001). Van Dyne, Ang, and Botero (2003) found that managers’ reactions to voice are shaped by the motives they attribute to the voicing employee. For example, in instances where this attribution is unfavorable to the employee (i.e., that the employee is simply trying to attain undeserved advantages), it is unlikely that actions will be taken by the management to ameliorate the problematic circumstances (Krefting & Powers, 1998). However, some managers also describe that the growth in direct voice arrangements has brought about potential benefits for them, such as opportunities to position themselves as being open towards voice, for example by encouraging the employees’ use of voice and engaging in discussions about how to develop the employees’ ideas (Dundon, Wilkinson, Marchington, & Ackers, 2005; Musson & Duberley, 36 2007). Townsend (2014) argues that a line manager’s decision to not support employee voice (e.g., by not forwarding employees’ complaints or suggestions to other relevant management levels) may sometimes be based on a lack of incentives to do so. For example, managers’ performance appraisal criteria rarely pertain to their contributions to formal voice arrangements. In sum, a central aim of much of the research from an IB perspective is to provide a generalized understanding of the many factors that could shape employees’ decisions about when and how to exercise voice. Because many factors are potentially taken into consideration, the decisionmaking process is conceived of as complex and driven by the employees’ and managers’ cognitive assessments. As a consequence, employees and managers are depicted as acting rationally and strategically, basing their actions on assessments of which alternative will lead to the most desired consequences (Alby & Zucchermaglio, 2006). However, when it comes specifically to employees’ choice to exercise voice or not, little attention has been paid to the social and cognitive processes whereby employees arrive at a certain understanding of the circumstances which inform their assessment, for example whether they expect their managers to respond positively to voice or not. Also, there have been few attempts to establish the relationship between this individual decision-making situation and what can be termed group voice, that is, how voice is expressed, responded to, and discussed in DGVAs or other social settings (Frazier & Bowler, 2015; Morrison, 2011; Morrison, Wheeler-Smith, & Kamdar, 2011). Voice as a management technique (MT) MT-perspective voice research has tended to focus on direct, management-led and mostly formal practices which promote voice in the workplace, such as DGVAs and participatory management (Larsen & Brewster, 2003; Perry & Kulik, 2008) and various forms of empowerment systems (Appelbaum, Hébert, & Leroux, 1999; Humborstad, 2013). These practices have also been categorized under the heading of high performance work systems (Harley, 2014). As this label implies, voice from a MT perspective is seen as a means towards improving organizational performance, and a number of formal voice arrangements associated with the MT perspective are inspired by practices that originated in systems for implementing continuous improvements in production organizations, such as lean manufacturing and total quality management (Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010). The potential positive outcomes of voice for organizations include improvements to product quality and the efficiency of production which 37 result from the knowledge sharing it brings with it enabling organizations to recognize, correct, and learn from their mistakes (Brinsfield et al., 2009). Voice has also been described from this perspective as a strategy for increasing employee engagement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, factors which can reduce employee turnover (Heery, 2015; Purcell & Georgiadis, 2007). The link between engagement and effectiveness is related to the psychologically inspired viewpoint that voice is a basic need for employees (as for humans in general) which must be satisfied in order for the employees to work at their best (Kristensen, 2006; Stohl, 1986, 1987). Indeed, simply having the opportunity to express voice may contribute to a perception among employees that they are treated fairly by the organization (Harlos, 2001). In MT perspective studies, it has also been argued that the availability of well-functioning voice mechanisms can deflect conflicts or other problems in the organization which might otherwise escalate and increase group coherence among the participants (Freeman & Medoff, 1984; Mikkelsen et al., 2000; Nielsen, 2013). Furthermore, it has been found that, when voice mechanisms are available, employees have felt better informed about upcoming changes in the workplace (Millward, Bryson, & Forth, 2000), with some studies reporting that employees experience that their skill level is increased (Eurofound, 2013), and others finding that their capability and motivation to engage in attempts to further modify their working conditions is improved (Mikkelsen et al., 2000; Nielsen, 2013). Of course, the benefits listed here have not been reported only in MT-perspective research; however, it is characteristic of the MT perspective that these benefits are viewed as a key motivation for organizations to adopt formal voice mechanisms. Less attention has been paid to how the practices which are meant to promote voice might fail to do so in practice. One topic where the work environment literature on voice can be said to be inspired by the MT perspective is in relation to participatory interventions to improve employees’ health, well-being and safety (Abildgaard et al., 2018; Egan et al., 2007; Mikkelsen et al., 2000; Nielsen, 2013; Nielsen et al., 2010). These interventions typically comprise an implementation of direct formal voice arrangements, and many involve DGVAs in the form of various types of problem-solving groups where employee voice is used as the basis for identifying problems (typically mainly production issues) and planning compensatory initiatives (e.g., Bunce & West, 1996; Maes, 38 Verhoeven, Kittel, & Scholten, 1998; Mikkelsen et al., 2000; Nielsen et al., 2010; Park et al., 2004; Tsutsumi, Nagami, Yoshikawa, Kogi, & Kawakami, 2009). Besides the positive effects of voice that are typically described in MT-perspective studies, it has been argued that enabling employee participation in health and well-being interventions increases the relevance of the intervention content and facilitates smooth implementation (Nielsen et al., 2010), and that the degree of participation potentially predicts positive health and well-being outcomes (Nielsen, 2013). However, the evidence on whether these interventions improve the employees’ health and well-being or their control over their working conditions is not clear-cut, with a significant proportion of studies showing little or no relevant effects regarding these aspects (Aust et al., 2017; Egan et al., 2007). Voice as institutionalized influence (II) The II perspective focuses on the institutionalized opportunities that employees have for exercising influence through voice within an organization. II-perspective research thus tends to focus on formal voice arrangements, and both direct and representative forms of voice are covered. Compared to MT-perspective research, research from the II perspective often discusses whether formal voice arrangements merely claim to allow employees to influence decisions within the organization, or if they actually do so in practice (e.g., Donaghey et al., 2011). For example, a commonly held position is that formal voice arrangements in many cases fail to provide the employees with substantial decision-making authority to effectively do so (Krefting & Powers, 1998; Strauss, 2006). Various authors have noted that employees’ interests potentially become downplayed in the direct forms of voice arrangements (including DGVAs) that have been on the rise in recent years (Busck et al., 2010; Donaghey et al., 2011; Dundon & Gollan, 2007; Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010), especially if the employees’ interests conflict with the management’s interests (Gollan, Poutsma, & Veersma, 2006; Heery, 2015; Holland, Pyman, Cooper, & Teicher, 2009; Tarras & Kaufman, 2006). Within the II perspective, there has been debate about why direct, non-union forms of voice have been on the rise in recent years. On the one hand, some have claimed that the trend is related to a concurrent decrease in forms of voice based on union participation or other forms of representative voice (Harley et al., 2005; Millward et al., 2000). For example, Holland and colleagues argue that: 39 [l]abour market deregulation, the global decline of organized labour, increased technological sophistication, increased educational levels, widespread industry restructuring and the spread of neoliberal ideologies have created a favourable environment for the weakening of collective voice and the subsequent diffusion of direct and non-union voice (Holland et al., 2009, p. 72). However, others have found that there is a tendency for unionization and the presence of direct and representative voice arrangements to be positively correlated (Akkerman et al., 2015; J. Benson, 2000; Holland et al., 2009), and in many organizations, a variety of union and nonunion formal voice arrangements are in operation at the same time (Wilkinson & Fay, 2011). Formal voice arrangements in the workplace can operate both as a substitution for union representation or as a complementary strategy (Gollan, 2001). For example, it has been found that direct voice arrangements may increase the amount of managerial attention given to the specific issues experienced in employees’ daily work, issues which are likely to be very heterogeneous and thus challenging to address adequately through representatives engaging at a higher organizational level (Holland et al., 2009; Millward et al., 2000). However, unions have been described as more effective in promoting employees’ working conditions in general (Millward et al., 2000). Among the topics addressed by work environment scholars from an II perspective is whether direct voice arrangements provide the employees with sufficient control to avoid a deterioration of their health and well-being over time (Busck et al., 2010). Systems for occupational health and safety management tend to be more effective when they involve a relatively strong element of employee voice (Hasle, Seim, & Refslund, 2016), but, as was noted above, direct formal voice arrangements do not always increase employees’ formal decision authority. At the same time, employees might experience that participating in direct formal voice arrangements leads to them receiving responsibility for managing psychosocial work environment risks (Busck et al., 2010). Direct formal voice arrangements can also lead to work intensification for the employees, which is in itself stressful (Boje & Rosile, 2001; Godard, 2001; M. White, Hill, McGovern, Mills, & Smeaton, 2003). The strongest evidence for a positive impact on employees’ health and well-being resulting from voice is seen in cases where employee or union representatives promote the employees’ interests, (Markey & Knudsen, 2014). For example, based on data from a European context, the likelihood of organizations taking steps to improve health and wellbeing, such as through the training of employees and managers, risk assessments, or analyses of 46 The conceptualization of employee influence vs. managerial control Discussions about the balance between employee influence and managerial control in formal voice arrangements has been especially prominent within II-perspective voice research. However, these discussions have tended to focus mainly on how this balance is influenced by structural circumstances, such as the degree of formal decision-making rights held by the employees. For example, the escalator model of participation12 (Marchington & Wilkinson, 2005; Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010), used as a metaphorical illustration of how various types of employee voice arrangements can be categorized on the basis of how much influence they allow employees to have over management decisions. The original model presented by Marchington and Wilkinson (2005) shows five degrees (or “steps”) of influence, labeled, from low to high, information, communication, consultation, co-determination, and control. According to Marchington and Wilkinson, the degree of influence “indicates the extent to which employees are able to influence decisions about various aspects of management – whether they are simply informed of changes, consulted or actually make decisions” (2005, p. 400). In later presentations of the model by Wilkinson and Dundon (2010), higher degrees of influence are correlated with an increased range or scope of issues that employees can bring up and influence. Furthermore, Wilkinson and Dundon describe the escalator model of participation as a framework for analyzing whether formal voice arrangements “genuinely allow employees to have a say in matters that affect them at work” (p. 173). 12 The escalator model of participation seems to have been inspired by a ladder-type model from the field of citizen participation, developed by Arnstein (1969). Arnstein’s model has eight rungs of categories organized into three more general categories of nonparticipation, degrees of tokenism and degrees of citizen power, indicating an increasing degree of influence for the citizens. Arnstein describes the ladder model as “designed to be provocative” (p. 216), while it is not explicated how the model can be used to categorize actual forms of citizen participation in practice. 47 One implication of the escalator model is that influence in formal voice arrangements equals the amount of say that employees’ have over decisions in the organization, that is, the decisionmaking rights that are deferred to the employees within the arrangements. However, power can be understood more broadly not only as the formal capacity to achieve one’s aim and potentially impose one’s will on others, but also as the ability to control and constrain other people through other means (Wang, 2006). Different expressions of power can be observed within organizations, such as (1) control over the access to important information and settings, (2) ideology, or (3) the management of meaning as it is exercised in interactions and in written texts (Appelbaum et al., 1999; Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998; Lukes, 1974), with Garner’s description of how the meaning of voice is co-constructed providing an example of the latter especially (2013). Studying voice interactions is likely to reveal how these different dimensions of power are employed in practice (Hutchby, 1999; Jayyusi, 1991), and potentially by both employees and managers. If the escalator model is viewed as an analytical framework, an additional implication is the degree of influence available to employees within these arrangements can be compared based on their relative positions on the escalator. However, analysts’ categorizations of real-life formal voice arrangements might be at odds with how employees in the organizations concerned would describe the degree of influence attainable to them within the formal voice arrangements. In practice, IB perspective research suggests that the employees’ assessment of the efficacy of Figure 1 - The escalator of participation (adapted from Marchington & Wilkinson, 2005) 48 using voice is more likely to predict how they engage with the formal voice arrangement than the analyst’s outsider perspective (Morrison et al., 2011; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). In addition, different employees might make different assessments of the degree of influence available to them within the formal voice arrangement. Another conceptualization of the relationship between employee influence and managerial control is found in the work of Donaghey and colleagues (2011), who discuss situations where employees choose to remain silent rather than use voice. According to Donaghey and colleagues, various circumstances within the organization shape the employees’ opportunities to exert influence, such as whether reasonable and effective formal voice arrangements are in place, how employees choose to use their opportunities to exercise voice, and whether decisions in the organization accommodate the employees’ interests relative to those of the management. The interplay of these circumstances is said to shape the frontier of control between the employees and managers, that is, a “contested terrain” (Edwards, Bélanger, & Wright, 2006, p. 129) wherein both employees and managers seek to promote their interests. However, similar to the escalator model of participation, Donaghey and colleagues do not explain how organization members assess the nature of the frontier of control at their workplace, or what happens if different views exist between the employees and managers, or within each of these groups, about what the frontier of control means for them and the employees’ opportunities to exercise voice. This is problematic because others have shown that there are indeed differences between what has been called the climate for exercising voice within different parts of an organization (Morrison et al., 2011). The emphasis on structural forces in both Marchington and Wilkinson’s escalator model and Donaghey and colleagues’ frontier-of-control model implies that the interactions in which voice is exercised and responded to are not decisive for how the dynamic between management control and employee influence is negotiated at the workplace. However, as Stohl and Cheney argue, “[p]articipation is not simply a structural phenomenon, although the architecture or design of such systems is very important in shaping attitudes and worldviews, the processes of decision making, and decisional outcomes” (2001, p. 357). In order to understand how employees’ assess their opportunities to influence their working conditions, as well as their strategies for exercising this influence, it is relevant to study interactions within formal voice arrangements. 49 Positioning the dissertation in relation to the voice literature As the previous sections suggest, an interactional perspective on voice holds considerable promise for developing our understanding of a number of important aspects of the voice process, aspects which are not easily addressed through the mainly individual-level or institutional-level research approaches that have tended to dominate in the voice literature. In relation to the DGVAs which are used in a growing number of organizations specifically, studying the participants’ interactions is important because it is in these interactions that the participants negotiate which initiatives to implement at a later time. Since these initiatives are likely to be the primary path for employees participating in DGVAs to improve their working conditions, it is crucial for the employees that the initiatives put forth seek to make relevant and significant changes in the workplace, and that the initiatives have a high likelihood of actually being implemented. By studying voice interactions, it becomes possible to follow how various participants contribute to the development of initiatives, from the initial voicing of problems or suggestions to the decision to endorse them. But while Garner’s study provides various important theoretical contributions which can inform an interactional perspective on voice, the framework proposed by Garner is not easily developed into concrete methodological and analytical strategies. For one, it is likely to be difficult to identify employees who are at the precipitation stage, since these may only be privately entertaining the thought of exercising voice. Second, even if employees at the precipitation stage were successfully identified, it does not seem likely that these employees can account for how their stance in relation to a voice topic is shaped by previous interactions in any degree of detail. Third, Garner acknowledges that it is perhaps not feasible to study residual communications about a previous voice event, since it cannot be predicted when such interactions will occur, if ever. Thus, the researcher must either spend extensive time in the organization, hoping to witness this residual communication, or collect organization members’ retrospective accounts about the residual communication after it has occurred (e.g., through interviews), thereby losing a sense of the interactional dynamics within these episodes. The fourth and arguably most considerable shortcoming of Garner’s model is that the processes whereby the meaning of voice is co-created are not explicated; instead, a few references are given to narrative and conversation analytic studies (Drew, 1998; Gabriel, 2004; Holmes, 2005; C. E. Taylor, 1995) which represent significantly different understandings of how interaction is organized. 50 In this dissertation, I address the shortcomings of Garner’s approach by presenting and applying an alternative approach to understanding voice as an interactional phenomenon that is based more closely on ethnomethodological CA. CA provides a comprehensive set of analytical concepts for describing different aspects of how interactions are organized in detail, and it focuses on the organization of specific interactions, rather than how different interactions are related over time, as in Garner’s framework. In the following chapter, I will present fundamental tenets of CA, various main concepts, as well as a number of findings from CA-inspired research which are likely to also apply to how initiatives are constructed by employees and managers in DGVA interactions.  51 3. Conversation analysis The analysis of this dissertation relies strongly on the tenets and central concepts of Conversational analysis (CA), whose relevant aspects to this dissertation as well as some of the criticism it has received are discussed below. This is followed by a review of various studies that are relevant for understanding how initiatives are constructed in DGVA interactions. The roots of CA CA is the study of how social interactions are organized so as to be intelligible for the participants (Charles Goodwin & John Heritage, 1990; Maynard & Clayman, 2003; ten Have, 2002b). The approach is typically considered to have been founded by Sacks, who in a series of lectures in the 1960’s and 1970’s presented CA as a new approach to understanding a number of interactional phenomena (Sacks, 1992). Previous to this, in the 1950’s, Goffman, who Sacks later studied with, had been among the first to recognize that the interaction order has its own organization beyond functioning as an arena for structural and psychological forces (Peräkylä, 2004). In his own work, Sacks initially analyzed audio-recorded conversations, such as calls to a suicide helpline. Colleagues and students of Sacks’s at the time later built on his initial frameworks, developing CA into a research field encompassing the study of a wide range of conversational phenomena (cf. Stivers & Sidnell, 2012). Sacks argued that his use of audio-recorded conversations was not motivated by an interest in talk as such but by the fact that the recordings enabled the researcher to listen to conversations as many times as was needed in the analytical process, and it also allowed others to conduct their own analyses on the same data, thereby facilitating discussion of specific analytic inferences (Sacks, 1984). The recordings thus enable sociological analysis that is concerned with the “details of actual events” (p. 26), rather than information which was already filtered by the application of formal sociological methods. Sacks was highly critical of how sociological studies of the time tended to abstract and idealize findings so that the actual circumstances of how the phenomenon of interest is produced in practice are blurred out (Sacks, 1963). In contrast to this kind of “analysis-by-generalisation” (Francis, 1995, p. 37), studying the details of actual events involves paying close attention to what people actually do in interactions and preserving the significant details through the research process (Rawls, 2008). Although the details of actual events are taken as insignificant in many sociological analyses (Samra- 52 Fredericks & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2008), they can reveal an informal logic (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 2) that is essential to how social life is organized. Therefore, within academic analyses of interaction, “no order of detail can be dismissed, a priori, as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant” (Heritage, 1984, p. 241; italics as per the original). Sacks’s original project can be said to closely resemble the project that Garfinkel formulated for ethnomethodology (EM) in the same period (1967b), and Sacks referred to “ethnomethodology/conversation analysis” as being one research domain (1984), while Sacks was described by Garfinkel as writing in the ethnomethodological tradition (2007). However, in recent years, there have been discussions over whether current conversation analytic studies can generally be seen as ethnomethodological studies. Rawls (2002), for example, has described how it is possible to conduct “technical” CA without heeding CA’s ethnomethodological underpinnings, though she warns that such efforts might lead to the type of formal analysis which Garfinkel opposed in cases where it presupposes social order rather than rendering it a product of the member’s actions. Indeed, Pomerantz and Fehr have stated that [t]he organization of talk or conversation (whether ‘informal’ or ‘formal’) was never the central, defining focus in CA. Rather it is the organization of the meaningful conduct of people in society, that is, how people in society produce their activities and make sense of the world about them. (Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997, p. 65; cited in Cooren, 2007, p. 131) Perhaps as a result of this critique, some scholars have chosen to emphasize that their application of CA is informed by EM (Samra-Fredericks, 2010; Stokoe, 2006; Wowk & Carlin, 2004) or have simply linked the two traditions through the term EM/CA (Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2010). In this dissertation, my approach is to apply the analytical concepts of CA in a way that is primarily sociologically, rather than linguistically, oriented. Basic principles of CA Both within CA and EM, it is argued that social order cannot be explained by societal structures alone but requires active work from people engaged in social activities (Garfinkel, 1967b; Sacks, 1992). For example, it has been argued that major institutions such as “the economy, the polity, the family, and the reproduction and socialization of the population” function through social interactions (Schegloff, 1991, p. 154). At the heart of interaction is the coordination and 53 maintenance of intersubjectivity, that is, the occurrence of a coordinated understanding of some ongoing (inter)action, since intersubjectivity is a prerequisite for joint activity, both in relation to discourse and at large (Barnes, 2007). Achieving and maintaining intersubjectivity involves continuously making sense of others’ actions and designing one’s own actions to fit these and be understood. Although this is achieved relatively unproblematically in many encounters, considerable skill is required – as it might be apparent, for instance, in interactions with children or others who have not yet mastered these skills. Learning the skills for achieving and maintaining intersubjectivity are part of the process of socialization, a process which, when it is successful, allows people to perform complex joint activities with no prior formal coordination, simply on the basis of sharing culture (Sacks, 1992). This may be witnessed, for example, in the many types of encounters between customers and service personnel that do not depend on the participants knowing each other or having spoken previously to be successful. The maintenance of intersubjectivity is constant in social settings, necessitated by the fact that universal meaning is not embedded in our actions, including the act of communication; instead, utterances and other social actions are merely indexical, meaning that their understandability is always dependent on the context in which they are produced (Garfinkel, 1967b). However, as I will return to later, this indexicality also enables interlocutors to be extremely economical with their words and gestures and still convey complicated points to others when a mutual basis for coordinating understandings exists (ten Have, 2002b; Yule, 1996). In order to understand more closely how intersubjectivity is coordinated and maintained, it is relevant to first take the perspective of those witnessing a social action. A fundamental question guiding their effort to make sense of the action (or, in a technical term, their process of action recognition; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014) is “why that now?” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973, p. 299). In other words, as witnesses or targets of social actions, we attend to what we can observe or hear (i.e., “that”), how it relates to the given setting at the given time (i.e., “now”) and what the combination of these characteristics suggests as being the acting party’s intended meaning (i.e., “why”). While it is not possible to know what is going on in the mind of the witness (Heritage, 1984), witnesses’ sensemaking in response to the question of “why this now?” can still be a resource 54 for the analyst, since the witnesses’ subsequent action is likely to reveal their conclusion, indicating their understanding of the speaker’s action. For example, a “hello” uttered by someone else is visibly oriented to by the witness as a greeting if the witness responds with a similar greeting. This way of considering such actions analytically, as indications of how previous actions were interpreted, is sometimes referred to as the next-turn proof procedure (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974, pp. 728–729; see also Sidnell, 2012), and it prevents the analyst from imposing idiosyncratic interpretations on the utterances and gestures, relying instead on the interlocutors’ displayed inferences. The next-turn proof procedure is one example of how, in CA, the “methods of the study of social interaction and theory concerning social interaction are very closely intertwined” (Peräkylä, 2004, p. 166). In order for interlocutors’ actions to be recognizable to other parties to the interaction, the actions have to be designed, or structured and organized in a way that is recognizable to the recipients. In Garfinkel's words, members of society produce actions which are accountable in that they are “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes” (1967b, p. VII). The fact that an accountable production of some action is also one which allows interpretation has been described as the principle of symmetry (Garfinkel, 1967b). From the perspective of a witness to social action, it is necessary to trust that the action is indeed designed as accountable, since non-accountable actions might not allow relevant sensemaking. It is not hard to see how acting unaccountably in a social situation (in the meaning of not-visiblyrational) is burdensome to the situation’s other participants who struggle to find meaning in it, and Garfinkel’s own studies where students did not produce accountable actions in situations with their friends and families point to how accountability failures are seen as trust violations which can lead to swift and harsh sanctions from others (Garfinkel, 1967b). Thus, the meaning of actions being accountable in EM/CA reflects both that these actions are understandable for others, and that the person acting is morally responsible for producing the actions so as to be understandable, a point which Jayyusi has eloquently summarized: (...) it becomes clear, not only that moral reasoning is practical, but that practical reasoning is morally organized; that is to say, whilst we do have moral concepts and procedures of reasoning that are explicitly moral in character, the entirety of our interactional reasoning is morally and normatively constituted. (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 198) 55 The study of how actions are produced as to be structurally recognizable is referred to as action formation (Levinson, 2012). In a concrete sense, speakers make their actions accountable by engaging in recipient design (Sacks et al., 1974), making choices about their use of words or presentation of topics, for example, on the basis of what is believed to be necessary in order for others to recognize the action as intended. In addition, interlocutors know and use the fact that certain actions go in certain places in conversations to convey and interpret meaning (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984b). For example, a “hello” at the beginning of a telephone conversation is typically taken as a greeting, but if one says “hello” at a later time in the conversation, it is likely to be understood as questioning whether the other party is still on the line, possibly indicating technical problems. Interlocutors also display an awareness of the institutional context of a conversation: doctor’s consultations, for example, are organized differently than informal chats among friends – the actions that are immediately understandable and socially acceptable in these types of conversations differ (Drew & Heritage, 1992). Thus, the social context is a resource which people play off of when designing social actions and also draw on when interpreting actions (Garfinkel, 1967b). While people’s understanding of the setting informs their interpretation of that which they are observing, it is also true that their reactions inform how the setting is understood by others (Leiter, 1980; Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2010). For example, a “hello” from a person who has fallen out of favor might be ignored, thereby framing the “hello” as an attempt to reestablish a relationship (McHoul, Rapley, & Antaki, 2008). Turns of talk in conversations are both “context-sensitive” and “context-renewing” (Heritage, 1984, p. 242). This also means that even interactions which may be viewed commonsensically as more or less following a script, such as doctor’s consultation, depend on the cooperation of the interactants to be produced as such on every occasion, or what Garfinkel refers to as for “each another next first time” (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 182). Accountability is not only a result of how interactants design their actions, but also of how they verbally account for them (Antaki, 1994; Garfinkel, 1967b; Heritage, 1984)13. A verbal account 13 The interest in accounts and accounting within EM/CA has also received attention in DP, especially the strategic aspects of accounting, such as the positioning work that accounts might be used to perform. In this line of research, attention has been paid to how differences in actor’s accounts and descriptions construct the phenomenon being described in different ways, or how accounts are constructed in order to appear convincing and “objective” and to pre-empt counterarguments (D. Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter, Edwards, & Wetherell, 1993; Whittle & Mueller, 2011). EM/CA research is typically sympathetic to the idea of accounting as a strategic endeavour (see for example Heritage, 1984, pp. 150–151), but tends to focus on how intersubjective understanding is coordinated. 62 how the knowledge is presented in interactions (Heritage, 2012b; Steensig & Heinemann, 2016; Stivers et al., 2011). The misunderstanding between Russ and his mother in example 2 can be seen as related to their relative epistemic statuses, that is, their rights and abilities to claim knowledge in relation to the topics of discussion. The study of socio-epistemics has revealed that in many situations, interactants’ epistemic statuses are normatively governed, in that speakers are held accountable for whether they have the right to express the knowledge that they have (Heritage, 2012a). Speakers can manage how their epistemic status is projected in the conversation through which epistemic stance they choose to take, such as in relation to the degree of certainty with which they make claims. Thereby, differences in the speakers’ epistemic stances are one important type of asymmetry among interlocutors. Within the organizational literature, socio-epistemic oriented studies have demonstrated that possession of the status that is demanded to accountably present a type of knowledge in conversation is not granted by one’s hierarchical role within the organization, but is acquired through negotiation among the interlocutors (Clifton, 2014; Heritage & Raymond, 2005). The second, deontic order, relates to how the rights and obligations of speakers to make requests or present hearers with orders are regulated (Clayman & Heritage, 2014; Curl & Drew, 2008; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). The term deontic status can be used to describe speakers’ entitlement to give directives to others, in contrast to their deontic stance which indicates how they publically display their rights and abilities to the other interactants (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014). The deontic stance can be displayed in various ways, such as through how requests from high-entitlement speakers tend to be more direct and brief than those from low-entitlement speakers (Curl & Drew, 2008). Speakers typically strive for congruence between their deontic status and stance (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014). Svennevig and Djordjilovic also found that the benefactive stance associated with requests, a stance concerning how the potential gains of an action are accounted for and who is claimed to receive them, is also important for how the request is responded to (Svennevig & Djordjilovic, 2015). This finding suggests that the power to influence others’ actions is only tied to role-based entitlement to a certain degree; instead, people can be called to carry out actions based on their commitment to those who stand to benefit. For example, in a work setting, it can be expected that requests and directives are often framed as benefitting the organization, rather than the specific person making the request or directive. 63 The third order, the emotional order, can be said to have been inspired by Goffman’s studies on the role of face in interactions, which preceded CA (Goffman, 1955), and focuses on the constraints on which emotions can or should be expressed in an interaction (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014). These constraints vary in relation to the intimacy between the interactants and, potentially, what their professional roles are and how these roles are enacted. Emotional status would then refer to the expectations surrounding both the emotions a person is experiencing and those they can share, while their emotional stance is conveyed through which emotions are expressed on a turn-by-turn level. Research on the three orders has shown how potential ambiguities can arise regarding which of the three orders an interactant is oriented towards when performing a certain action, and that these ambiguities can lead to misunderstandings and other interactional problems (Landmark et al., 2015; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014). In addition, previous studies (especially in the ethnomethodological tradition) have argued that what is morally right or wrong to do is never determined entirely by convention but is negotiated by the participants through interaction (Jayyusi, 1991; Wieder, 1974), a phenomenon that analysis utilizing the three order concepts can elucidate. Applications of CA Within the various fields of research employing CA, two areas of applications are particularly relevant for this dissertation, regarding institutional discourse and DP. First, conversation analytic studies typically distinguish between interactions in informal settings, such as an informal chat with a friend, and in institutional settings, such as medical consultations or requesting help from the police over the phone (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Heritage, 2005). Interaction in DGVAs would thus be considered institutional. Institutional discourse is typically organized in specific ways in relation to matters such as who holds speaking rights and which sequences of talk are likely to occur, with a common example being the repeated questionanswer pattern between doctors and patients in the diagnostic steps of medical consultations (Peräkylä, 2004). Within institutional settings, the participants’ design their actions and interpret the actions of others based both on the participants’ relative roles within the setting (such as being the chair of the meeting vs. being a regular participant) and their expectations surrounding the respective 64 goal orientations that are tied to these roles (Drew & Heritage, 1992). In relation to coordinating intersubjective understanding, the participants employ inferential frameworks that are specific to the institutional context, and, in terms of the interactions’ moral aspect, there are “special constraints on what will be treated as allowable contributions to the business at hand” (Heritage, 2005, p. 106). However, in accordance with Garfinkel’s principle of reflexivity, institutions should not be seen as fixed and external to the conversation, but as “talked into being” by the interlocutors on an ongoing basis (Heritage, 1984, p. 290; see also Drew & Sorjonen, 1997). Similar to CA, DP focuses on how language is used to perform various actions, such as complaining or attributing responsibility (Sneijder & Molder, 2005), and studies in DP also tend to employ methods and analytical concepts from CA. However, compared to CA, DP focuses more directly on the rhetorical aspects of interactions, such as how accounts are constructed so as to avoid their being called into question (Edwards & Potter, 1992). The attention to how moral matters are managed in interactions that is seen within some CA analyses is also central to DP, for example in relation to how speakers position themselves relative to those being spoken to or those described in the discourse (Whittle, Mueller, & Mangan, 2008). Finally, DP is concerned with how psychological phenomena are performed through interaction, including, for example, how speakers construct what they expect others’ thoughts and wishes to be, to put it another way, what those described in discourse “might be expected to think, do or feel under the circumstances” (Edwards & Potter, 2005). Techniques from DP are likely to be useful for understanding interactions in DGVAs when the participants construct how middle managers are likely to respond to their proposed initiatives, for example, and I will return to them briefly later in this chapter and in the analysis. Criticisms of EM/CA Throughout the years, several particular lines of criticisms have been directed at conversation analytic literature which are relevant for how CA is used in this dissertation. First, some have criticized that the reluctance within EM/CA to take structural factors in society into account, such as power and hegemony, results in an incomplete theory of social life (Reed, 1997; Willmott, 2005). For Willmott, for example, the taken-for-granted understandings of social life that are produced through interaction are evidence of hegemony in operation. The response from 65 EM/CA scholars to such criticism has tended to stress that since these types of structure are rarely the discernable concern of the interlocutors (though there are exceptions, e.g., Whittle, Housley, Gilchrist, Mueller, & Lenney, 2014), explaining how the local social order is produced and maintained through structure is problematic. As Watson and Goulet state, (1998, p. 110) “ethnomethodologists refuse, as a methodological imperative, to consider power (and anything else) as existing prior to and independently of any actual episode in which it is exhibited and recognized.” Furthermore, the distinction between “macro” and “micro” levels of social life is seen within the ethnomethodological tradition as an product of academic theories rather than something that can be concluded from how social life is organized (Garfinkel, 1967b; Hilbert, 1990). While some conversation analysts have been reluctant to attribute the way interactions develop to differentials in power between the interlocutors (Fairclough, 1995; Hutchby, 1999), Hutchby (1996a, p. 114) argues that power, if understood as “a set of potentials which, while always present, may be varyingly exercised, resisted, shifted around, and struggled over by social agents,” can be studied in interactions (see also Jayyusi, 1991). According to Hutchby, CA provides a highly relevant lens for understanding power relationships “if we conceive of power as a discourse phenomenon in terms of participants’ differential potential to enable and constrain one another’s actions” (Hutchby, 1996b, p. 483). As an example, Hutchby demonstrates how the rhetorical advantages held by radio talk show hosts over their listeners can be seen as a result of the talk show format which, in terms of sequence organization, grants the host a privileged position to question the caller’s claims. It has also been claimed that EM/CA is indeed in alignment with, and can elucidate, a Foucauldian understanding of power (Heritage, 1997; Hutchby, 1996b), and Samra-Fredericks (2005) has discussed how EM/CA can provide the analytical tools for empirically studying power in the form of Habermas’ four types of validity claims. Furthermore, it can be argued that Hutchby’s overall point about power could also be demonstrated through how different statuses are negotiated among interlocutors in relation to the epistemic, deontic, and emotional orders in discourse interactions. Another and more methodologically oriented criticism that targets CA and similar research approaches is that they risk “micro-isolationism” (Seidl & Whittington, 2014). Seidl and Whittington argue that by remaining focused on specific interactions, these research approaches overlook how interactions are shaped by things which are not part of conversations but which may still be intersubjectively understood by the participants (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011; 66 Billig, 1999; Schegloff, 1997). As a related point, it has been argued that CA is structured around the analyst’s terms, and thus cannot be claimed to represent the participants’ understandings or concerns directly (Billig, 1999; Latour, 1986; Pollner, 1991). In response to such criticisms, there seems to be a broad recognition that the reason for something occurring the way it does in an interaction may not be available to the analyst, a point which has been dubbed the “analyst’s paradox” (Sarangi, 2002). Of course, the interactants might entertain private thoughts or be swayed by emotions, but any inferences to such mental phenomena would make ethnomethodological studies another instance of the formal analysis which Sacks and Garfinkel were highly critical of. Various authors have discussed how aspects of intersubjectively understood context of the interaction is potentially made available to analysis in ways not typically considered: for example, some have argued for taking a more open approach towards inferring shared cultural knowledge than what can be gleaned directly from the interlocutors’ statements (McHoul et al., 2008). However, as the academic debates surrounding membership categorization analysis (Rapley, 2012; Schegloff, 2007; Silverman, 2012; Stokoe, 2012) and, more recently, socioepistemics highlight (Heritage, 2018; Lindwall et al., 2016; Steensig & Heinemann, 2016), there is little agreement about which analytical steps are defensible and which would be problematic due to less attention being given to interlocutors’ concerns in the process. The discussion also relates to the question of whether CA should be seen as an inductive or abductive research strategy, which I will return to in chapter 4. Empirical CA studies of relevance for DGVAs Various empirical studies based on or inspired by CA hold relevance for the dissertation’s overall research question. In the following, I will highlight some main points from studies which attend to how roles are negotiated in workplace interactions, studies of meeting talk, studies of decision-making in interaction. Negotiating roles, rights, and obligations in interaction Utilizing membership categorization analysis, various studies have described how institutional roles, which tend to be viewed as stable in the organizational literature, are subject to continuous negotiation and occasional challenges in workplace interactions, and that participants might 67 adopt a number of different roles within meetings (Housley, 1999). In their study of meeting interactions, Larsson and Nielsen (2017) utilized membership categorization analysis to examine how institutional roles were negotiated. Among the findings of their study is that because different forms of authority are distributed among the meeting participants (such as managers’ superior deontic status in the organization, the rights and obligations that comes with a project manager role, or the epistemic status of experienced organization members), the way participants enact their roles in the setting depends to a certain extent on which of these forms of authority are negotiated as taking precedence in relation to the discussion at hand. In addition, Larsson and Nielsen point to the fact that the meeting participants were seen to orient more strongly to the participants’ “task-oriented, practical identities” 16 (p.1), such as being a meeting chairperson, than to overall institutional roles such as being in a leadership or follower position. The negotiation of task-oriented identities can also be seen in interlocutors’ use of personal pronouns, such as “I,” “you,” and “we,” each of which suggest different relationships between the speakers and hearers. For example, in a study of work interaction at a bank, by Larsson and Lundholm (2013), a group manager’s use of “we” was seen as indexing a shared overall responsibility for the task at hand with the other party to the conversation, an account manager. Larsson and Lundholm label this collaborative relationship as constituting an operational unit. However, the setting up of an operational unit in an interaction also makes the different responsibilities of the two parties in relation to the task relevant to the interaction. Thereby, the use of pronouns to frame work as collaborative does not imply a deontically symmetrical relationship. The means by which interlocutors negotiate matters such as relative entitlement can be very subtle. For example, Asmuß and Oshima (2012) studied a meeting interaction between a CEO and an HR manager. They found that the when proposals were made, the entitlement of the speaker to make the proposal was negotiated through the recipient’s use of aligning responses. Furthermore, the entitlement needed to accept or reject proposals was negotiated through the recipient’s use of affiliative or disaffiliative responses. 16 To be clear, the term identities in this sense refers to contextually determined identities that become relevant to the conversation at hand (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), rather than to identities that are considered relatively stable personal features in other literatures. Relatedly, my use of the term “role” does not imply that roles are fixed, but that the implications of a role for its holder and the other participants are negotiated in the interaction (Halvorsen & Sarangi, 2015) 68 Workplace meetings Although various types of DGVAs exist, they typically involve formal meetings between employees and managers, where discussions take place about problematic working conditions and/or initiatives which the employees have suggested for implementation at the worksite, as mentioned in chapter 2. Meetings play a large role in organizational life, both because of how events in a meeting may shape how work is performed in the organization, and because they constitute a common activity which takes up a significant amount in many people’s work schedule. Meetings are generally characterized by their goal-directedness in relation to solving problems and reaching decisions (Barnes, 2007; Wasson, 2016). Characteristic of workplace meetings is also that they are typically held in a certain physical space within a certain timeframe, follow a (more or less clearly stated) agenda, and involve participants holding various designated roles (e.g., the chairperson) (Asmuß & Svennevig, 2009; Boden, 1994; Schwartzman, 1989). Many meetings are conducted around a table which allows the participants to have face-to-face contact, and meeting chairs or other participants of authority are often seated at one end (Asmuß & Svennevig, 2009). The degree to which speakers are allowed to self-select relative to having the conversational floor allocated to them by the meeting chair depends on the formality of the meeting, with informal meetings typically featuring patterns of turn taking that resemble normal conversations (Boden, 1994). At a more general level, it has been argued that in “exploratory” meetings where participants engage in brainstorming or collaborative problem solving, for example, the chair is less likely to control the topical progression of the meeting (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003). I will later return to how the chair can influence decision-making in the meeting. Decision-making in interaction Decisions project and commit parties to future action, and therefore, participants in decisionmaking interaction often display a concern with the decisions that are made and their consequences (Boden, 1994; Clifton, 2009). As an interactional phenomenon, decision-making is a complex activity which involves the negotiation of a number of elements, such as “what is the problem?”, “who is responsible for it?”, “what can be done about it?” and “who will do what about it?” (Francis, 1995). According to Francis, these questions cannot be answered without a consideration of the specific circumstances relevant to the employees’ choice, since “[i]t is only the particulars of their discussion that will define what the problem amounts to concretely” (p. 69 51). The discussions that precede decisions orient the participants towards certain ways of describing the situation rather than others (Boyce, 1995; Cooren, 2004; J. R. Taylor & Robichaud, 2004), and Huisman has described decision-making in organizations as a social endeavor in which “participants jointly construct the formulation of states of affairs, and through further assessment and formulation build commitment to particular states of affairs” (2001, p. 75; see also Barnes, 2007; Boden, 1994). Interactional decision-making processes do not necessarily follow a sequence of steps or activities reflecting common-sense understandings of how decisions normally progress from defining a problem to identifying possible solutions and then making a choice about which initiatives to back. Instead, it has been argued that the decision-making process might involve rationalizing decisions that are already all but made (Garfinkel, 1967b). For example, in their study of recruitment professionals’ discussions about recruitment choices, Bolander and Sandberg (2013) provide a framework for the decision-making process comprised of four discursive activities: assembling versions of the candidates, establishing the versions of the candidates as factual, reaching selection decisions, and using selection tools as sensemaking devices. The sequence of these activities in practice depends on whether the discussants begin the decision-making process from a point of initial agreement or disagreement regarding the suitability of the candidates for the position: in the cases where the recruiters find themselves in initial agreement about a recruitment decision, they then assemble versions of the candidates which support the decision. As Bolander and Sandberg state (p. 302): “’[k]nowing’ whom [the candidates] are, the selectors ‘see’ obvious selection decisions and easily make decision claims.” When the participants’ initial assessments of a candidate are not in agreement, the decisionmaking processes end up focusing more on reducing ambiguity about how to describe the candidate. During their deliberations, the participants try to establish patterns from individual pieces of information from the recruitment interviews which are framed as especially indicative of candidates’ personalities; the patterns are then used to explain other pieces of information about the candidate, thereby implicitly confirming the validity of the pattern. Thus, the recruiters are highly concerned with building legitimacy around the choices they eventually make and seemingly less concerned with looking for indications which contradict the image of the candidates they are constructing. 70 An important aspect of decision-making in interaction is that problems are not understood as identified, but as actively constructed (Boden, 1994; Weick, 1995). How problems are defined is important because aspects of problems which are not acknowledged in the decision-making interaction are unlikely to be targeted by the initiatives that are eventually decided (Clegg, Kornberger, & Rhodes, 2004). The interactional process of constructing problems has been studied by Angouri and Bargiela-Chiappini (2011) who analyzed discussions in meetings among employees and managers about construction site safety. Their study demonstrated how problem setting can be seen as a discursive negotiation process where the participants attempt to build consensus around a problem definition. The participants’ verbal contributions to this process draw on various forms of contextual knowledge, such as references to the organizational hierarchy, intersubjectively shared understandings of what it means to work professionally, or shared experiences17. A similar point has been made by Boden, who argues that in decisionmaking settings, the organizational environment is talked-into-being in order to facilitate consensus around how stakeholders who are not present are expected to respond to decisions (Boden, 1994, 1995). According to Angouri and Bargiela-Chiappini (2011), because the process of negotiating candidate problem definitions potentially involves discussions about who is responsible for the advent of the problem and who should attempt to solve the problem, reaching consensus around a specific problem definition is potentially delicate. Such discussions might also touch on topics such as blame and obligations, thereby pointing attention to the fact that participants’ moral concerns often influence decision-making interactions. Another aspect of interactional decision making is deciding whether to implement one or more initiatives (or solutions, if a concrete problem has been defined). Concretely, the act of constructing and negotiating initiatives typically involves the proffering of proposals about initiatives that could be taken (Francis, 1995; Wasson, 2000, 2016). Proposals can be presented in various formats, including as suggestions, requests, or musings (Wasson, 2016), and sometimes utterances are framed as proposals after the fact by other participants (Wasson, 2000). Proposals make acceptance or rejection relevant (Asmuß & Oshima, 2012), and, following a proposal, sequences can often be observed in which the interactants discuss information related to the proposal or in which assessments agreeing or disagreeing with the 17 Samra-Fredericks in her study of decision-making in relation to strategy matters refers to the participants’ invocations of past events in the organization in their argumentation as “putting the organizational history to work” (2003, p. 144). 71 proposal are presented (Wasson, 2016). Counter-proposals from other interactants are also common (Firth, 1995). Huisman describes how the process of negotiating potential solutions to acknowledged problems can be seen as a form of future-oriented sensemaking, where participants assess the consequences of various proposed initiatives by formulating future scenarios in which the initiatives have been implemented: In short, a decision evolves around the assessment of a future state of affairs. During this decision-making process, participants form what is tantamount to a "virtual" future reality and shape the future of the organization. (Huisman, 2001, p. 72) Initiatives which are collaboratively constructed as leading to favorable consequences in “virtual future reality” are more likely to be accepted (Huisman, 2001). For the participants, presenting formulated future states of affairs as being credible involves a good deal of argument. Huisman’s study shows that participants are held to account for their formulations of future states of affairs being viable and presented in a balanced manner. Furthermore, one’s formulations of future states of affairs might be challenged by the other participants, a technique that may be used to implicitly promote their own conceptions of potential future states of affairs that are likely to result if an initiative is implemented. A third overall aspect of the decision-making process is that of decision announcing (Clifton, 2009). As described by Wasson: [d]ecision-making activities end more or less when consensus is reached. The consensus is articulated by someone, often the facilitator. Or the last person to hold a contrasting view may express an altered view that is in alignment with the rest of the meeting participants. The articulation of consensus may be followed by a chorus of agreement tokens, and sometimes by a ‘coda’, a reiteration of the rationale for the decision. (Wasson, 2016, p. 381). However, there are important caveats to Wasson’s description: first, since it is not always announced when a decision has been made, and the consequences of decisions are not necessarily formulated clearly for the participants, it is not always possible to pinpoint the exact moment when a decision is made (Alby & Zucchermaglio, 2006; Huisman, 2001; see also 78 manager, and the process facilitator18. Furthermore, it was typical for one or two more members of the research group to observe the meetings, though these observers had no formal role and only very rarely participated in discussions. The three workshop meetings served different but related purposes in the overall intervention: 1. In the “Visual Mapping Workshop” (VMW), the process facilitator presented the overall agenda and principles of the three workshop meetings. The facilitator also introduced the participants to the first of two visual tools developed for the project, a “map” of the work environment of a generalized industrial employee containing various symbols for different topics such as ergonomic aspects of the work task, whether there was a supportive atmosphere among the team members, and the employees’ relationship with their line manager. The map covered psychosocial, physiological and other aspects of the work environment, such as exposure to chemicals, noise, heat or cold, etc. (Wåhlin-Jacobsen, Henriksen, Abildgaard, Holtermann, & Munch-Hansen, 2017). During the meeting, the facilitator asked the participants to describe which aspects of their work environment they saw as being either conducive or detrimental to their ability and motivation to continue working in the company until the age where they could receive retirement benefits. These aspects were noted on green and red post-it notes, respectively, and positioned on the map according to topic. On average, approximately 30 post-it notes would be produced per VMW, with an equal distribution of green and red notes (WåhlinJacobsen et al., 2016). 2. Approximately two months after the VMW, the participants met again for an “Action Planning Workshop” (APW). The facilitator would first review the green and red notes on the map from the previous workshop meeting with the employees. Then, the facilitator would solicit suggestions for initiatives which could either mitigate the negative effects of the aspects mentioned on red notes, or maintain the positive effects of those on the green notes. During this exercise, the facilitator would present the employees with the other tool for the intervention, the “Improvement Board” (Wåhlin-Jacobsen, 2018), which outlines a stepwise approach to discussing the relevance and viability of suggestions for initiatives. The various steps were designed 18 Health and safety representatives only participated in their own team’s workshop meetings. 79 to help participants decide which initiatives to pursue and which to discard or assess at a later time. In order for an initiative to be accepted by the group for implementation, the initiative had to list one or more actions to take, the name of one or more participants who would be responsible for taking these actions, and a completion deadline set by those carrying it out. The facilitator also instructed the participants on how to use the Improvement Board for short, biweekly meetings in which the participants were to report to their colleagues on their progress with implementing initiatives. 3. Three to four months after the APW, the participants would meet for a Follow-Up Workshop (FUW), in which participants who were responsible for implementing initiatives would present their progress to the facilitator. If the initiatives had not been implemented as expected, the participants would discuss whether the initiatives needed to be changed or discarded. The remaining time was spent developing more initiatives using the methods from the APW and evaluating the participants’ experiences of partaking in the workshop meetings. The three types of workshop meetings followed more or less the same setup in practice: the facilitator would arrange for the participants to sit together around one table, preferably a square or round table, in such a way that even the participants sitting farther away from the facilitator would feel a part of the discussions (see Figure 2). At one end of the table, the facilitator would sit with the line manager to his or her side. The facilitator was instructed to describe the reason for the manager’s position next to the facilitator as being that it allowed the facilitator to “keep a check” on the manager, since the workshop meeting was to revolve primarily around the employees’ comments and suggestions. The facilitators’ communication style was to be rather informal, as they were instructed to chair meetings in a way that took the employees’ perspective and used their terms and descriptions as much as possible. Furthermore, the facilitator was instructed to use facilitation practices considered effective in participative decision-making settings, such as asking probing questions in order to elicit different aspects of the matter being discussed, providing formulations which summarize what has been said so far, and promoting participation in the interaction from all present (for a more detailed description of how the facilitator were instructed to lead the meetings, see Wåhlin-Jacobsen et al., 2017). The facilitator was able to decide when to progress through the workshop agenda but could not go as far as to make decisions about which 80 initiatives should be implemented. Instead, decisions about which initiatives should be implemented were made in an informal manner based on whether there was overall support for a proposed initiative and whether any of the participants were willing to assume responsibility for implementing it. Figure 2. Illustration of the recommended workshop setup, translated from WåhlinJacobsen et al., 2017. At the end of the APW, the participants were asked by the facilitator to continue meeting at the biweekly board meetings and, if possible, to develop new initiatives during these board meetings, following the procedure outlined by the Improvement Board. It was not communicated to the participants whether or when a new series of workshop meetings was to be held, as this had not yet been decided by the managements of the three companies at the time of the initial series. It is relevant to consider whether the workshop meetings constituted an unfamiliar setting for the participants. Besides being conducted for a research-based intervention, the workshop meeting concept was used in the organizations for the first time. Although the lack of familiarity among the employees with the workshop concept could suggest that they might have been more confused or hesitant about participating in the meetings than if they had been accustomed to the 81 concept, this aspect should not be taken to mean that the participants did not have shared common-sense knowledge about how to partake in the activities. For example, lean manufacturing practices were already used by the employees in the participating organizations (see Wåhlin-Jacobsen, 2018 for a description of these concepts), meaning that those elements of the workshop meetings that were inspired by lean manufacturing were generally easily grasped by the participants. In addition, the employees had experience with discussing health and wellbeing problems with their line managers in group settings, and employees from both the pharmaceuticals and plastics-packaging companies stated that the workshop program resembled programs that had been in place years prior to the intervention. Also, in both companies, DGVAs were used to perform the legally required work environment risk assessments (Working Environment Act, 2010), and conducting the workshop meetings of the intervention was thought by the participating companies to be similar to how they normally used DGVAs to meet their risk assessment responsibilities. The PIPPI workshop format also required that a brief action plan template be filled out for each accepted initiative stating which specific activities were to be conducted after the workshop, who would be responsible for conducting them, and when they had to be conducted by. Documenting such basic information is also legally required for work environment risk assessments and likely to be a common feature of many DGVAs in which initiatives are decided on for implementation. Therefore, I do not consider this requirement to have shaped the process of constructing initiatives in a way that preempts application of the study’s findings to other DGVAs. Audio recording the workshop meetings At all three companies, the workshop meetings held during the first year were audio recorded by the workshop facilitator on a small digital recorder. The facilitator would ask the participants for recording consent at the beginning of the meetings. The participants were informed that the recordings would only be used for research purposes and would not be made available to their company, and that the data would only be used in research articles or presentations in an anonymized form. The participants were also informed that their recording consent could be withdrawn at any time and were given a document containing detailed information about their consent (see appendix). The participants gave the facilitators consent to begin to record all of the 82 meetings. Two meetings were not recorded due to a malfunctioning or missing recorder, and a number of recordings were abbreviated due to operator error (e.g., forgetting to turn on the recorder again after a break) or a participants’ request. Only a few audio recordings of the second-year workshops were collected, due to the pharmaceutical company deciding to end the intervention after the first year and also to research group members rarely attending the secondyear workshops at the plastics packaging company. In one workshop meeting, the participants asked the facilitator to turn off the recorder during the meeting. On this occasion, the team’s line manager was not able to be present at the meeting, but the meeting was conducted as planned anyway as the process facilitator did not find out about the line manager’s absence before the start of the meeting. During the meeting, the participants told the facilitator that the line manager sometimes acted with hostility towards employees who voiced problems which had led the employees to moderate their criticisms at the earlier workshop meetings. In order for the participants to feel able to discuss the problems related to the line manager more freely, the audio recorder was turned off until after the topic of discussion had shifted away from the manager. The situation just described highlights two aspects of the setting that might lead employees to withhold voice: one concerns the well-known fact that study participants react to the presence of a researcher and to their utterances being recorded (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2002; Speer & Hutchby, 2003). In such situations, the participants might moderate their language, or, as described above, avoid exercising voice, out of fear that their utterances will entail negative consequences if the contents of the recording should become known to their line manager or other members of the organization. In practice, it does not seem possible to avoid participant reactivity unless one is actually collecting data without the participants’ knowledge – clearly an untenable strategy. The other aspect is that employees are apparently likely to describe the current states of affairs differently in formal voice arrangements depending on whether the line manager is present or not, at least when they are worried about negative reactions from their line manager. This potential reaction is unsurprising, considering that the risk of sanctions when using voice has been described as a key concern for employees (e.g., Morrison, 2011). It is important to point out that from a CA perspective, this influence that line managers’ presence may have on discussions involving voice does not constitute a source of bias which could reduce the validity of the data. According to Sacks (1963), social life is not just reflected in language, but locally 83 produced through language (see also Garfinkel, 1991). Thus, our attention should be turned to how the line managers’ presence might influence the way employees produce social life through their use of language in DGVA settings. While the specific situation presented above regarding the recording does not feature in the dissertation’s analyses, it was considered in the analytical process in relation to the more general theme of how line managers shape discussions in DGVAs, the result of which is presented in chapter 8. As mentioned further above, the use of audio recordings was originally championed by Sacks as a method for gathering data that could be utilized to parse out the “rules, techniques, procedures, methods,[and] maxims” that may help explain how the participants would recurrently recognize and produce order in interactions (Sacks, 1984, p. 26). However, audio recordings should not be seen as an unproblematic technique for capturing interactions, as they only preserve only the verbal modality of the interaction while omitting a number of aspects which are used by the interlocutors on an ongoing basis for accomplishing actions through interaction, such as gaze, gestures, and bodily stance (Hazel, Mortensen, & Rasmussen, 2014). The use of these elements during discourse interaction has received increased attention in recent years as their key role in achieving and maintaining intersubjectivity has been recognized (Goodwin, 2000; Hazel et al., 2014; Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011). While the availability of video data would have been useful for the analyses, our use of an audio recorder was easier and quicker given that the data were initially meant to be used in the PIPPI process evaluation. Neither the funding for the dissertation nor the choice of using CA had been settled at the time of the data collection. Furthermore, it can be argued that video recording might have been considered more obtrusive by the participants than audio recording audio alone and thus could have led to more participant reactivity. How to approach the data – a matter of methodological criteria Overall, being part of the setting for the intervention meant that we were able to gather a nearly comprehensive set of audio recordings from the workshop meetings due to our dedicated presence. Otherwise, without direct involvement, attempts to collect a sufficient amount of recordings from other settings would likely encounter problems negotiating access to the data, 84 given the many different groups involved and the potentially sensitive subject matter that is typically featured in DGVAs. Moreover, the degree of familiarity and background knowledge would likely have been less from a data collection from a setting with less researcher involvement, which could negatively impact interpretations of, for example, the participants’ use of technical terms or references to past events. Finally, since organizations might not hold DGVAs frequently, or hold them at convenient times, the ease of access and logistical advantages provided by associating with a large project such as the PIPPI project can be seen as preferable to attempting to collect a new data corpus. Still, the data used in this dissertation stand out in comparison to the types of data used in most other CA studies because (1) I personally participated as a process facilitator in some of the workshop meetings, meaning that I have contributed to some of the discussions that I will analyze, and (2) the data were collected in relation to an intervention research project, rather than “naturally occurring” DGVAs that are arranged and conducted by the organizations entirely on their own initiative (Silverman, 2001). The potential implications of these features for the analyses are addressed below in light of the methodological criteria that are typically employed in EM/CA research, including which steps should be taken to ensure that the conclusions drawn on the basis of the data can contribute to our general understanding of how initiatives are constructed in DGVAs. My role in the empirical settings As a research assistant in the PIPPI project, I visited both the pharmaceuticals and plasticspackaging companies on a number of occasions between December 2012 and December 2015. During these visits, I (informally) observed the employees’ work, participated in meetings related to the intervention project, held presentations about the project for various management and steering groups, and interviewed a large number of participating employees, managers, and HR and work environment professionals for the process evaluation data collection. In addition, I acted as a process facilitator or as an observer for a number of workshops held during the project, a task I shared with another research assistant and an external psychologist who had been in charge of developing the workshop meeting format (see table 3). I did not visit the third company, which was the duty of the other research assistant in the project. My focus during the many visits was on my assignments as a research assistant rather than on acting as an 85 ethnographer. Nevertheless, being associated with the research project helped me to develop an insight into the terms used by the participants, their core job tasks, the working conditions which they felt were problematic, and the employees’ history in the organizations. Having an understanding of the field setting can serve as a resource when analyzing interactions within it (Whittle et al., 2015). Knowledge of the institutional or organizational context allows for a wider variety of observations, which can then be further explored in the data (Laurier, 2014). The necessity for the analyst to have particular insight in relation to the situation under study has especially been emphasized within EM, where it has been claimed that the analyst must be highly knowledgeable about how interactions are organized in the setting (e.g., Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992). Because of my familiarity with the pharmaceutical and plasticspackaging settings, I chose to focus on workshop meetings in these two settings. Table 2 presents some overall characteristics of the two settings, and further contextual information is presented in the four analytical chapters where relevant. Pharmaceuticals company Plastics-packaging company Size of company Large; participants came from one of multiple national sites Medium; participants came from the only Danish-based site Main work tasks for participating employees (intervention groups only) Production of pharmaceutical agents; preparing equipment or initial substances for the production; maintaining the production equipment Production of plastic packaging; maintaining the production equipment Approximate number of employees who participated in workshop meetings 75 in 11 different groups, eight of which shared the same two team leaders 39 in 7 different groups, with five groups sharing one team leader, and two groups sharing another Table 2. Some overall characteristics of the two companies in which the workshop meetings under study took place. 86 It is important to stress that within CA research, a researcher’s familiarity with the empirical setting is not a resource which allows the analysis to be based on the researcher’s intuition. The credibility of CA studies depends on whether the interpretation of the presented examples is grounded in the data, for example by utilizing the next-turn proof procedure. Relatedly, ten Have (2002b) describes that ethnomethodological research tends to avoid “reflexive” discussions displaying the researcher’s subjective influence on the analysis, which are commonplace in some areas of qualitative social research, going so far as to label these as expressions of “subjectivistic heroism” (paragraph 53). Ten Have argues that both CA researchers and other researchers who employ qualitative methods are utterly dependent on their knowledge as members of the same culture as the interlocutors for forming hypotheses and making inferences (formally or informally), but what sets CA researchers apart is that they assess these hypotheses and inferences critically in their analytical work by applying the nextturn proof procedure. Turner relatedly expresses that within conversation analytic studies it is the analyst’s duty to “explicate the resources he shares with the participants in making sense of utterances in a stretch of talk” (1971, p. 177). In regard to my own participation in the setting, it is clearly the case that my presence, and that of other members of the research group acting as process facilitators or observers, have shaped the recorded interactions. But similar to the point made about the line manager’s presence, the relevant question from a CA perspective is how the interaction has been shaped by our presence and also what analytical measures should be taken to avoid inferences becoming misguided because they fail to appreciate the participants’ concern over our presence. In order to assess how the process facilitator might have impacted the interactions, it is important to consider their status in the setting. For one, the process facilitators had little specific knowledge about the issues discussed, such as problems with a given machine. In CA terms, it could be said that the facilitators held a low epistemic status and thus were not in a position to judge the participants’ descriptions of the current states of affairs. The facilitators also knew little about the local circumstances that could contribute to shaping the chances of successfully implementing initiatives. As a result, decisions about which initiatives to implement were based on the participants’ assessments of which initiatives were feasible or not. Furthermore, the process facilitators were instructed to use the participants’ own terms, such as when presenting gist formulations of the preceding discussion. The process facilitator’s decision 87 authority in the setting mainly related to managing the time spent on the different parts of the agenda during the workshop meetings. A number of situations were identified during the analytical process (described below) where the facilitators’ actions shaped the interaction in specific ways. During the analysis, I sought to characterize what was specific to these situations, so that I could draw on these characteristics as sensitizing concepts: A definitive concept refers precisely to what is common to a class of objects, by the aid of a clear definition in terms of attributes or fixed bench marks [...] A sensitizing concept lacks such specification of attributes or bench marks and consequently it does not enable the user to move directly to the instance and its relevant content. Instead, it gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances. Whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts merely suggest directions along which to look. (Blumer, 1954, p. 7) In the present dissertation analyses, the intention was to not emphasize situations where the facilitator was influential to the interaction but rather to avoid assigning too much importance to these situations. For example, I noticed various examples of the participants seemingly “playing along” with the facilitator’s agenda, as indicated by them chuckling at the facilitator’s suggestions, delaying their responses, and only providing minimally affiliative responses, suggesting that they were not personally invested in supporting the facilitator’s intention. In these cases, contributing to a positive atmosphere in the meeting might have been a more important concern for the participants than whether effective initiatives were arrived at, meaning that the relevance of the situation as an analytical case was uncertain. Being aware of these interactional features led me to focus the analysis on parts of the interaction where it mainly involved the employees and their line manager, or situations where the process facilitators’ actions were of a kind that would likely be performed by any process facilitator, researcher or not, in a similar setting. As the analytical discussion is presented below along with transcriptions of stretches of the recorded interactions, readers can judge for themselves whether they believe this intention was successfully executed. This feature of CAbased studies increases their transparency relative to interview-based studies (likely the most widely used method for qualitative data collection), which typically do not report the 94 collection studies is potentially problematic because such categorizations might not capture differences in the participants’ concerns across the collected situations (Lynch, 2000). Within single-case CA studies, ”the resources of past work on a range of phenomena and organizational domains in talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the analytic explication of a single fragment of talk” (Schegloff, 1987, p. 101; italics as per the original). According to Schegloff, single-case CA studies reflect how interactants must continuously make sense of the interaction (i.e., solve the “why this now” problem) using the various interpretative resources available to them (see also Watson, 1997). This dissertation takes a single-case approach to studying DGVA interactions. Its focus is not to contribute to the conversation analytic literature through theory building, but to contribute to the voice literature through the use of CA as a method. The focus of the analytical work is therefore not on specific interactional practices, but on how these practices together shape the constructed initiatives. The single-case approach gives considerable latitude to the researcher in regard to selecting and building a case for presentation. The analytical process typically involves reviewing the data, selecting various sequences for in-depth analysis, developing ideas and hypotheses, discussing the data with other researchers, writing tentative analyses, and re-analyzing previous cases, for example. However, although this process is rarely described in CA studies, an account is given below of how I approached the process. One overall matter is what constitutes a “case.” Single-case CA studies rarely make clear whether the data presented in the excerpts constitute the case, or if the case also includes nonprovided parts of the discourse that came before or after the excerpt. However, it is typical for single-case CA studies to present information about the context of transcript excerpts that is relevant to understanding the interaction. Furthermore, as intersubjective understandings established at a previous time in the interaction might shape later interactions, the analyst should, in principle, always examine what came before and after the targeted exchanges. I therefore chose to perform my analyses on relatively long excerpts and only shorten these excerpts prior to publication after taking into account how much of the interaction could be showed to readers without violating the length restrictions of the publication outlet. 95 Transcription in conversation analytic studies This leads to the question of what constitutes data for single-case CA studies. In their published form, CA analyses are presented with transcript excerpts. Outside of CA studies, many qualitative researchers see the transcription process as methodologically unproblematic, and sometimes the viewpoint can be observed that transcriptions are data, rather than the original audio (or video) sources being the data (Davidson, 2009). However, transcribing is a selective process in which choices are made about how to represent the data to the reader (Duranti, 2007; ten Have, 2002a). In other words, transcriptions are inherently translations, and new aspects of the data can be revealed for even very detailed transcriptions, (Jefferson, 2010; Mondada, 2007; Rapley, 2007). As a result, the transcription process involves various compromises, such as weighing whether to include more detail in order to provide a fuller picture of the contents of the recording or to reduce the complexity of the transcription in order to save time and potentially ease comprehension for readers unfamiliar with CA (ten Have, 1990). As a strategy for managing these compromises, it is typical to produce various types of transcripts with some being working transcripts used in the analytical phase of the project and others being edited transcripts written out for a specific purpose (Mondada, 2007). For this project, I consider the audio recordings to be my data, with the transcription serving as a practical aid for managing the data, supporting the analytical work, and exemplifying findings for the reader (Rapley, 2007). As a large amount of data was available for the analyses compared to other research projects which study interactional data19, it has been necessary to carefully consider my approach to the transcription process, rather than simply to transcribe all of the available data. Potter and Hepburn (2005) estimate that even transcribers who are skilled at the Jeffersonian transcription style commonly employed in CA would often need more than 20 hours of transcription per hour of audio, with Rapley estimating 32 hours of transcription per hour of audio (Rapley, 2007). Since the data for the present studies are from multiparty conversations, the process of identifying what is being said by whom when several people are talking at the same time takes much longer, rendering a full transcription all but impossible within the timeframe of the PhD project. Furthermore, if one considers the recordings to be one’s data rather than the transcription, it is more relevant to transcribe selectively in relation to the specific analytical or presentational purpose that the transcription is to fulfill (Peräkylä, 2004). 19 10–15 hours of audio recordings seems to be a more common range (e.g., S. B. Nielsen, 2007; Telenius, 2016). 96 In order to make economical use of my time, I first conducted rough transcriptions which did not contain every word, but which indicated most speakers’ turns (vocal continuers, such as “mhmm,” were not transcribed at this point, for example). The transcriptions focused on relevant parts of the recordings, as the workshop recordings also contained various segments which were not likely to be relevant for the analysis, such as breaks, practical information given by the process facilitator at every meeting, recaps of previous workshops, and discussions of the participants’ suggestions for improving the format of the workshop meetings in the FUs. The rough transcriptions were supplemented in the analytical phase with more detailed transcriptions of selected stretches of interaction (Rapley, 2007). Since the use of notation symbols in the four articles of the dissertation is similar, I have chosen to provide one summary (see appendix). Developing analytical ideas In describing his approach to studying stretches of transcribed interaction, Sacks stated that: [w]hen we start out with a piece of data, the question of what we are going to end up with, what kind of findings it will give, should not be a consideration. We sit down with a piece of data, make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go (Sacks, 1984, p. 27). Others have made the similar point that one should engage in “unmotivated looking” through one’s data (Psathas, 1995, p. 45), since approaching one’s data with a clear hypothesis in mind is likely to affect one’s decisions on which situations to analyze and the sense one makes of them. Taking Sacks’ and Psathas’ approach implies that what is reported by the analyst will typically be inspired by observations which are stumbled upon at various points during the analysis of a number of cases, only to be developed in later analyses. In my case, the time spent transcribing the many hours of audio recordings brought a number of interesting facets and details to my attention concerning what was captured in the data and which situations might be worth looking more closely at in order to explore the use of voice. Thus, on the one hand, the analyses were developed on the basis of a relatively open approach to 97 the data, similar to the one prescribed by Sacks, while on the other, I did not fully engage in “unmotivated looking” since my ideas focused on the topic of employee voice20. As previously mentioned, descriptions of how single-case CA studies are developed are sparse in the literature, especially in relation to the matter of why a particular extract is selected for presentation, and, if the presented extract is considered an illustrative example of a broader analysis, how the broader underlying analysis was conducted. This lack led me to draw inspiration from constructionist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006). In line with Charmaz’ recommendations, I recorded a number of research memos corresponding to the various observations I had made and which I hoped to be able to develop into fully formed analyses21. The memos were not only for keeping track of empirical observations, but were also used for conjecturing about how the different segments of the data might supplement or contradict each other and how the findings relate to the extant literature. The memos thereby provided a means for analytical reflections and exploration (Charmaz, 2006). Writing and revising memos can thereby facilitate the building of an analytical understanding of how a phenomenon is organized throughout ones data through an abductive dialogue between empirical findings and the literature. Conducting the analyses Early in my analytical process, I pursued a general overview of how initiatives were typically constructed in the workshop meetings. I knew from previous work that somewhere between 5 and 8 initiatives were typically developed by the participants and formally agreed upon by the participants in APWs (Wåhlin-Jacobsen et al., 2016). The number of initiatives developed in the FUWs were fewer and more varying, as initiatives could only be developed in the FUWs after all of the existing initiatives had been reviewed, and the time allotted to this part of the meeting agenda varied substantially. The number and scope of initiatives developed in the workshop meetings seemed to depend on the characteristics of the problems and proposed initiatives that were discussed by the 20 Similar to my approach, a number of “applied” or “critical” conversation analytic approaches have proliferated in recent years in studies which have applied conversation analytic methods and analytical concepts with a clear focus on a certain phenomenon selected by the analyst a priori (Antaki, 2011; Kasper & Wagner, 2014; Talmy, 2009). 21 A similar process of analyzing intuitively interesting cases early in the analytical process and more systematically selected cases later is also described by ten Have (2007). 98 employees. For example, discussions of problems or initiatives which had been previously discussed by the participants often went on for quite some time due to difficulties in reaching a consensus about how to characterize the problem – and did not always result in a viable initiative. These difficulties may also be the reason why the employees had not been able to find a satisfactory solution in their previous discussions. It was clear from an early stage that the discussion in which initiatives were constructed were only “vaguely orderly” (Jefferson, 1988, p. 419) and thus did not follow a common trajectory. Instead, the discussions seemed to vary in terms of:  whether the focus of the discussion was on defining the problem or defining the solution  how much the participants were in agreement about how to characterize a problem or what could be done about it (similar to Bolander and Sandberg’s finding; 2013)  whether the problems and solutions had seemingly already been discussed on previous occasions (sometimes repeatedly) or whether they were being identified within the workshop for the first time  whether initiatives in relation to a topic were desired by only a lesser portion of the employees or by most or all of them  whether a problem and its considered solutions were technical or more social in nature  whether it fell within the formal decision authority of the participants to make the ultimate decision about implementing an initiative and sometimes and whether they could implement it themselves. Implementations beyond the participants’ authority were sometimes treated as candidates for further processing through some preexisting organizational means, such as a joint consultation committee or a lean manufacturing suggestion scheme. Thus, it was not possible to categorize the discussions as an initial analytical step in any reliable manner. Instead, when reviewing the data, I would identify various sequences which seemed potentially interesting in relation to my overall research question, for example because of how the sequences featured the participants’ orientating towards some part of the process of constructing initiatives in the workshop meetings as challenging or problematic. 99 The present analytical process followed the conversation analytic tenet of focusing on informal logic, which can be seen in the production and organization of the recorded interactions that constitute one’s corpus of data (Jayyusi, 1984, p. 2). Focusing on one extract at a time, I developed hypotheses about how intersubjective understanding was coordinated on a turn-byturn basis, assessing these hypotheses through the next-turn proof procedure (Sacks et al., 1974, pp. 728–729). In the process, different analytical concepts from CA (as presented in chapter 3) were applied, leading to different aspects of the interaction standing out. In the analytical process, I approached the data on the premise that it reflects both researchbased intervention and DGVA aspects to varying degrees, with either one or both of these aspects shaping the participants’ concerns at different times. This involved using the abovedescribed sensitizing concepts to identify situations where the research aspect of the meeting workshops was especially salient. For example, the DGVA setup involved various specific conceptual tools, such as describing the scope of employees’ influence on their working conditions as represented by an “action radius” (see chapter 6). Identifying situations where this concept played a role was important for the analysis featured in chapter 6, in addition to the technique being used to sort out situations where this research aspect was particularly salient from the other analyses (see chapters 5, 7, and 8). Inspired by the scheme presented by ten Have (1990), the later stages of my analytical process can be said to resemble a string of back-and-forth movements between (1) listening to and retranscribing sections of the audio recordings that seemed of particular interest to emerging research facets, (2) analyzing these sections, (3) noting my reflections in research memos, (4) consulting the voice and CA literatures to further develop my understanding of how the selected interactions could be handled, and (5) looking for similar situations within my data corpus which could potentially reveal additional aspects of my overall phenomenon of interest when analyzed. Throughout this process, the overall research question was used as a sensitizing device which focused my attention on certain aspects of the data, rather than others. Because the audio recordings were so rich, many interesting social and interactional phenomena could be observed, however only some of these were relevant for the theme of the dissertation. When conducting CA studies, whether taking a very open approach to one’s data, or a more theoretically guided one as I did, the definition of one’s targeted phenomena will be the result of the analysis, rather than its starting point (ten Have, 2007). Thus, once I felt confident that (1) my data were sufficiently rich in relation to a topic to be able to develop my initial ideas into a 100 more systematic analysis, and (2) that such an analysis would present a relevant contribution to the voice literature, I once again reviewed the preliminary transcriptions in order to find stretches of data which could add to the analysis. Realizing that the roughness of the transcription could lead me to overlook potentially relevant excerpts, I made a point of revisiting sections of the audio recordings where I had been in doubt about what the interaction was about. The described approach is in line with Silverman’s suggestion (2013) of letting one’s research process be guided by intensively analyzing parts of the data material in order to focus or develop the research question, after which an extensive analysis is done of other relevant parts of the data material, looking for cases that show new nuances in the phenomenon under study. Through this process, a number of relevant ideas were developed, among which the ideas the ideas represented in articles one, three and four (chapters 5, 7, and 8) were developed into full research articles. Specifically, the idea for the first article came as a result of noticing how many workshop meetings involved discussions of work shoes, how these discussions were often long, and how constructing mitigating initiatives appeared to be relatively difficult for the participants. The idea for article three arose out of a number of observations that the employees would sometimes hesitate to assume responsibility for implementing initiatives, and that their hesitation was often verbally accounted for in terms which suggested that assuming responsibility for the initiative could lead to undesired identity ascriptions. The fourth article was based on a number of observations of the way in which the participating line managers would engage in discussions of proposed initiatives. Especially in situations where the line managers took a critical stance towards a proposed suggestion, they could be seen to spontaneously account for this stance and engage in various other practices that suggested that their challenging of the employees’ proposal was considered delicate. The original analysis for the second article was developed by Esben Nedergård Olsen for his Master’s thesis and subsequently developed into its current form in collaboration with myself and the third author, Johan Simonsen Abildgaard22. The second article differs from the other articles in its relatively loose application CA concepts and principles in what might elsewhere be described as a microdiscursive analysis (e.g., Larsson & Lundholm, 2010). In the preceding, I hope to have made clear that the present analytical process involved a number of choices and compromises. While it has been my aim to present analyses which are 22 The dataset used by Esben Nedergård Olsen for his initial analysis was smaller than the one used for the remaining articles, as it is stated in chapter 6. 101 coherent, nuanced, and relevant, only a small selection of the empirical material can be provided. For example, the four articles in this dissertation mainly feature “what Gail Jefferson in a data session once called some ‘virtuoso moments’, episodes that strike the observer as being carried out in a particularly felicitous manner” (ten Have, 2007, p. 38), as they illustrate points developed within the overall analysis in an economical and captivating way. These cases should, however, not be thought of as unique, since the underlying mechanisms can be seen to be at work throughout the data corpus. However, a substantial proportion of the analyzed data extracts do not serve as clear examples, for example because the language is less clear to those unfamiliar with the setting, because other phenomena in the extract might capture the attention of the reader instead of the one of interest, or because the point can only be illustrated by presenting an interaction sequence that is prohibitively long. It should also be kept in mind that the four articles presented in the following chapter are not only products of the analytical process I have outlined above, but were also written specifically for four different outlets. The articles target different discussions and draw upon different theories and analytical concepts. The articles have also been influenced by the comments and reviews that I and my co-writers received at presentations and from journals. These factors contribute to giving the four articles somewhat distinctive characters. The combined contributions of the four articles will be discussed in chapter 9. 102 5. Article one: Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches? Socioepistemics and the construction of “voiceable” problems and solutions Abstract In workplace voice activities, employees are invited to raise problems and suggest improvements to the management. While the voice process has been characterized as a transfer of information, this understanding neglects how the credibility of information and speakers’ rights to claim knowledge about it are subjects of continuous negotiations in actual interactions. We analyse voice activity interactions in an industrial setting in relation to the topic of work shoes, showing how problem and solution formulations which project different actions to be taken after the activity are negotiated. This process, which we call “problem-” and “solution work”, is shaped by the participants’ orientations to epistemic status, i.e. their differential rights to claim knowledge of various subjects in the discussions. Employees’ low epistemic status in relation to various relevant problem and solution aspects constitutes an important but overlooked barrier to achieving improved working conditions through the voice activities. Introduction In recent years, a shift has occurred in how employees participate in and influence decisionmaking processes in the workplace: while representational union-based forms of participation used to be the norm in many countries, an increasing number of organizations have implemented regular activities in which employees are invited to voice problems related to work or suggestions for changing existing work practices directly to the managers (Busck et al., 2010). In the EU, for example, the number of employees frequently involved in improvements of the work organisation or work processes has increased was 50% in 2015 (Akkerman et al., 2015). These activities are often inspired by practices adopted from the field of human resource management (Heery, 2015) and involve meetings or talks among employees and their managers (Freeman, 2007; Kersley et al., 2005). In relation to this shift, a topical shift has also occurred: where issues such as pay, work hours or recruitment practices were previously central to participation, many current employee voice activities typically focus on aspects of local, daily 103 work, including health and safety issues (Addison, 2005; Busck et al., 2010; Harley, 2014; Levie & Sandberg, 1991; Nielsen et al., 2010). Academic discussions of how these shifts have influenced the employees’ possibilities for influencing their workplace have tended to focus on how information is exchanged within the activity (Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998; Levie & Sandberg, 1991). For example, one model suggests categorizing voice activities on the basis of whether employees are merely informed of changes, are able to communicate with managers about changes, are consulted, or are allowed to co-determine or control decisions (Marchington & Wilkinson, 2005). It is claimed that increasing employees’ access to information is empowering by leaving the employees in a “better position to make or influence decisions to maintain or improve performance” (Appelbaum et al., 1999; see also Harley, 1999; Marshall & Stohl, 1993), and similarly voice is sometimes described as “discretionary provision of information intended to improve organizational functioning to someone inside an organization with the perceived authority to act” (Detert & Burris, 2007), implying that information is a resource for decision-making that can be transmitted from managers to employees and vice versa (Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998). However, this understanding of information can be contested on the grounds that information in itself does not carry meaning, but that meaning must be inferred (Axley, 1984). The social processes by which such inferences are made or sought managed are in no way simple: it has been shown that what counts as information in relation to organizational decision-making is not given a priori, but often the subject of negotiation within the interaction, for example in relation to what constitutes a problem or a relevant solution (Boden, 1994; Cooren, 2007; SamraFredericks, 2010). Furthermore, organization members are held accountable for their sociomoral rights to hold and present information, and violations can entail sanctions. This perspective on how invocations of “knowledge” are organized in interaction has been labelled socio-epistemics (Heritage, 2013b; Stivers et al., 2011). When applying a socio-epistemic lens, we come to focus on how participants in employee voice activities engage in and thereby shape voice activities as a practical feat, rather than how static features of the activities or the organization that hosts it shapes its outcomes. Specifically, formal voice activities can be seen as sites of social decision-making where a process takes place which reduces the range of potentially “voiceable” problems and solutions into a subset which is eventually formulated and passed on to managers in the organization. 110 the concrete floor of the production area as related to the footwear problem, mentioning the employees’ long work hours as an additional circumstance which we can infer must increase the employees’ strain. We can see the employees’ proposals of candidate formulations about what causes the problem as belonging to an activity directed towards achieving consensus which can be called “problem work” (Francis, 1995; Samra-Fredericks, 2005). Within the very next lines, a related type of work is undertaken which we label “solution work”: after a pause, Max self-selects and proposes that the employees could receive new insoles more often (l. 24-25); the proposal is sequentially related to Oliver and Teddy’s problem work, yet it does not favour any one of the proposed problem formulations. Rather, it seems oriented towards coordinating agreement about what would constitute a solution for the participants. The work of coordinating agreement about one or more solutions becomes necessary due to the fact that problems and solutions do not correspond one to one: for each candidate problem formulation, a number of different actions might exist that would count for the participants as a solution. Not all proposals should be seen as doing solution work: here, the downgraded epistemic status of Max’s proposal marked by his use of terms such as “maybe” and “a little more often” suggests that he orients towards the proposal as being part of an extended sequence of discussing candidate solutions, rather than a common proposal projecting merely acceptance or rejection. The remainder of the excerpt demonstrates how a lack of consensus around one problem formulation does not inhibit the participants’ solution work. Oliver’s next turn is abbreviated, but the “well” preface suggests upcoming disaffiliation with Max’s proposed solution. Oliver can also be heard as referencing his earlier problem formulation focusing on the quality of the current shoes (“I bloody do not believe those shoes”), and potentially prefacing a suggestion to source new shoes (“I mean you can get some shoes”󰇜. Teddy then takes the floor, disaffiliating with Oliver by suggesting that sourcing new shoes might not be viable (ll. 28-29), presenting new insoles as an alternative solution (l. 31), to which both Oliver and Noah answer “yes”. However, Oliver’s rhetorically phrased question (ll. 35-36) suggests that he finds keeping the current shoes an inferior solution to getting new shoes and thus that his “yes” merely indicated alignment rather than affiliation with Teddy. Teddy offers an assessment that changing shoes would be cheaper than recurrently changing insoles. Although it was not clear on what basis Teddy described it as potentially unviable to source new shoes in lines 28-29, his reference to concerns of cost in line 37 suggests that his claim about the viability of sourcing new shoes was 111 based on expectations about how much money the company would be willing to spend on a solution. It should be noted that various aspects of the work environment might be considered relevant in the participants’ problem work and still be exempt from their solution work. Here, the hard flooring is mentioned in the problem work, but changing the flooring for something less hard is not entertained by the participants as a candidate solution in the excerpt (or later), and the absence of such a proposal is not marked verbally. The absence suggests that the participants hold somewhat shared expectations about which solutions are likely to be unviable - changing the flooring is a very costly initiative compared to buying new shoes or insoles. As an additional point, the multiple overlaps indicates a rather fluid way of organizing the conversational floor (Morgenthaler, 1990) where the employees often self-select to answer Amelia’s requests and questions at a given time. Such shared access to the floor is characteristic of participative decision-making interactions (Baraldi, 2013; Yeung, 2004a). Epistemic authority in relation to problem and solution work The next excerpt follows shortly after the first. Here, we turn to how the participants’ differential rights to claim knowledge in relation to different epistemic domains, i.e. their different areas of epistemic authority, shapes the process of proposing and negotiating candidate problem and solution formulations. The employees are discussing how footwear problems might influence the well-being of the employees in a wider sense when the employees’ manager, Finn, presents an assessment: Excerpt 2 112 Finn takes the floor (“I just want to say”) to make an assessment about the price of the work shoes currently sourced by the company as being “not cheap”. Finn’s assessment can be seen as a defence of the work shoes currently offered to the employees, thereby countering the candidate problem formulation from excerpt 1 that the quality of the shoes is inadequate and that the company is motivated by keeping costs low. Thus, Finn could be said to address the normativity implied in the employees’ problem and solution work. Oliver and Noah indicate agreement with Finn’s assessment in overlap (ll. 6-7), thereby distancing themselves from such a normative position, while Arthur recycles Finn’s “not cheap shoes” description into shoes from the “cheap end”, which can be seen as a mitigated disaffiliation with Finn’s assessment. In his next turn, Finn describes the company as having “gone up in quality several times”, thereby further defending the company’s actions. Indeed, in line 13, Finn states explicitly that the shoes have been “selected”, implying that the employees’ perspective has been considered in decisions over which work shoes to buy. As a middle manager, and one with a long history in the organization at that, Finn holds privileged knowledge about the price of the work shoes bought by the company compared to those offered previously, thereby lending Finn epistemic authority on the matter. This authority is marked through a strong epistemic stance in the upgrade to his first assessment (“certainly”; l. 5) and in the direct and minimal way his other announcements are presented (ll. 9-10 and 13) (Heritage & Raymond, 2005). Amelia aligns with Finn, however her next turn is cut short by Max (l. 17), who repeats his proposal to change soles more often, to which Finn affiliates. By neither presuming nor precluding that the shoe quality is problematic, Max’s proposal sidesteps the moral criticism of the company that could be inferred from the employees’ negative descriptions of the current shoes. 113 Challenging epistemic authority The next excerpt is taken from workshop sessions in the pharmaceutical company and illustrates how arguments which draw on the participants’ epistemic authority can be challenged through arguments which explicitly or implicitly call into question the moral status of the other part. In this workshop, the employees had also complained of various problems related to their work shoes, specifically problems that had arisen after a managerial decision that employees could only wear certain models of safety shoes from one specific supplier. The employees’ health and safety representative, Beth, is discussing an argument that has been presented outside of the workshop by various line and middle managers that only employees from the present department complain about their work shoes, despite all departments supposedly having the same selection to choose from. Excerpt 3 In the excerpt, we see Beth self-categorize as a health and safety representative (HSR), mentioning an obligation tied to this role that she cannot ignore “those shoe problems” (Jayyusi, 1984). She next reports that the problem “also takes up attention in many of the other teams”, thereby contradicting the management’s claim and arguing that the problem is independently corroborated (Edwards & Potter, 1992). Beth next reports that she would like management to acknowledge the employees’ problem formulation regarding the shoes, claiming indifference towards the management’s argument based on her own experiences with (and thus direct epistemic access to) employees showing her their feet (ll. 12, 15). Beth’s experience is corroborated by a paraphrased report from the “the foot lady”, seemingly a professional who employees at the worksite can consult about foot problems, but whose position or organizational affiliation is not accounted for in the recordings. Still, the “foot lady” can be heard as an expert whose epistemic authority is invoked by Beth to support the employees’ problem formulation blaming the shoes. Next, Beth repeats her wish that the management acknowledge the employees’ complaints, to which Tim, the employees’ manager, aligns (l. 24) before starting a disaffiliating turn in overlap with Beth (l. 26). Here, he references the managements’ argument by describing it as “thoughtprovoking” and “interesting” that the problems are only found in the present department, when the rules have been implemented “all over the joint”. The management’s argument (as presented here by Tim) implies a logic stating that if the work shoes provided by the company were 115 problematic in themselves, employees in other departments would also complain. The lack of such complaints (according to Tim) is used to question the employees’ problem formulation. In spite of Tim’s disaffiliation with Beth’s previous turn, Beth expresses strong alignment in overlap with Tim, suggesting that she knows and accepts Tim’s argument as relevant. In contrast, Daniel and subsequently Katie disaffiliate with Tim’s claim and thus his questioning stance towards the shoe problems, with Daniel accounting for his disaffiliation through a reference to conversations with other employees outside of the workplace. On the basis of this counter-claim, he poses what can be heard as a rhetorical question (“where’s the filter then?”), implying that somebody is holding back information about the footwear problems of employees outside the department. This claim is next upgraded by Daniel to accusations of lying “up there”, referencing non-specifically the managers that claim that the problem only exists in the present department. Thus, Daniel draws upon his epistemic authority over what colleagues from other departments say in situations where there are no managers present to question the management’s argument. The excerpt thus demonstrates how basing problem formulations on claims for which one holds epistemic authority can be considered a kind of rhetorical strategy. It can be suggested that this strategy is likely to be especially relevant when one does not hold sufficient decision authority to ameliorate the formulated problem, as it is the case for the employees in this study since the management controls the range of shoes that employees can choose between. However, even problem formulations which focus on areas where employees hold epistemic authority can be questioned through argumentation which does not directly question their epistemic authority, but instead the validity of their inferences. While the employees in the pharmaceutical company did not reach a decision about how to address the shoe problem in their first two workshop meetings, their manager, Tim, described at a later meeting that an agreement had been made with the shoe supplier to provide new and lighter work shoes which the employees could try out for a period of time. Excerpt 4 falls after this “solution” has been described and begins with a process facilitator, Seth, asking the employees about their reasons for problematizing the shoes. The excerpt demonstrates the employees’ awareness of how their epistemic authority constitutes an important rhetorical resource in their problem and solution work; however, both the employees and the facilitator 116 also display an understanding that claims which draw upon one’s epistemic authority may be seen by others as motivated by stake or interest, and thus potentially untrustworthy. Excerpt 4 117 First, Seth raises the question of whether the aspects related to the shoes or to the management’s handling of the shoe problem were seen as most “red” by the employees. A prompt for alignment (“you follow me”) leads to alignment markers from both Daniel and Katie. In Seth’s next turn he asks if the employees’ complaints were “in reality” motivated “just as much” by aspects of the decision-making process. The question can be heard as addressing the possibility that the employees’ might have overemphasized the shoes’ negative aspects in an domain where they held epistemic authority (their bodily sensations) in order to influence decisions in a domain where they had little epistemic authority (the new shoe regulations and the various concerns these addressed). Affiliating from the employees here could thus be taken as admitting dishonesty. Here, Emily overlaps with “well”, a typical disaffiliation preface (Heritage, 2015), while Daniel responds more flatly with a “no”, providing Katie’s foot problems as an account 118 for why the employees’ physical problems were central to their complaint. Over the next lines, Katie then reports having tried many models of shoes. Seth then proposes formulating Katie’s lack of “proper” shoes as a “proper physical red piece”, a formulation which Katie and Daniel affiliates with. This formulation can be heard as ratifying Katie and Daniels’ responses as support for the veracity of their physical problems, further indicating the relevance of Seth’s previous question as addressing potential dishonesty on the employees’ part. Seth completes his turn by proposing that what Katie has been through is tiresome in itself, to which Katie repeats the argument that many shoes have been tried. The statement “I’ve done a lot certainly” can be seen as defending her choice to problematize the shoes by directing attention to her own effort in finding a solution. Thus, the employees can be seen as striving to reaffirm their previous complaints about the shoes while not acknowledging Seth’s suggestion that their raising the problem was motivated by frustration with the management’s decision. However, the next part of the excerpt sees a number of the previous arguments being presented again by the employees. Daniel describes it as frustrating that nothing has been done about the footwear problems, suggesting that the department manager has tried to stop the employees’ critique of the work shoes. After this, the employee Emily describes her problems with the footwear as being of a physical nature, and this pattern of Katie and Emily emphasizing especially the physical aspects of the problem and Daniel raising the managerial aspects is found throughout the excerpt. When Daniel again invokes non-physical aspects of the problem formulation (the requirement that the employees wear safety shoes when no accidents are claimed to have occurred, ll. 48-51 and 53-55), Emily aligns with Daniel before stating that “we can’t change that” and starts to laugh. Katie laughs at the same time, suggesting affiliation, while Daniel also affiliates with Emily before making the upshot formulation that the employees should focus on getting different “safety footwear”. Both Katie and Emily affiliate with Daniel. Thus, the non-viability of other solutions than those which focus specifically on sourcing new shoes is seemingly invoked to end the negotiation of Daniels’ problem formulation on the one side and that of Katie and Emily on the other. 119 Conclusion So far, little research has explored how employees participating in voice activities reach decisions about which working conditions to attempt to change and how. In this article, we have explored this process as one characterised by problem and solution work, work which is shaped by the participants’ orientations to the epistemic order in interaction. Our analysis offers various contributions to how participatory decision-making can be understood in the workplace and beyond. First, we have shown how problems and suggestions are actively constructed in voice interactions. This is in contrast to how much of the literature on voice tends to take the content of voice as set and instead focus on “transmission” problems such as whether this content is actually voiced or how it is received by its targets (Axley, 1984; Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998). Even in relation to a seemingly mundane topic such as work shoes, examples were provided both of how a number of competing candidate problem and solution formulations were presented and negotiated by the participants. Second, socioepistemics were shown to play a key role in this negotiation process. This was seen in how patterns of epistemic authority among employees, managers and outside experts (such as “the shoe lady”) in relation to different aspects of work shoes contributed to supporting or questioning the facticity of various problem formulations and thus the relevance of their corresponding candidate solutions. In addition, the participants drew upon various argumentative practices rooted in epistemics, such as the management’s claim to know that the problem only occurred in one department, or the employees’ claim that the problem also existed elsewhere, but that the complaints were not passed on. While relevant and sufficient information has often been named as a prerequisite for employees to effectively engage in voice (Appelbaum et al., 1999; Harley, 1999; Marshall & Stohl, 1993), the excerpts provided here suggest that an adequate epistemic status is also required; specifically, a status which is recognised by those the information is presented to. Third and more generally, a number of studies have focused on how access to participation in decision-making is limited to those in power, both within the workplace (Hardy & LeibaO’Sullivan, 1998; Heery, 2015) and in other settings (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Farkas, 2013). In comparison, the present study demonstrates how the employees’ chances of influencing their working conditions might be limited at a very minute level through the “micro-political” process 126 understandings of the current situation project certain solutions as adequate, meaning that discussions of ‘what is going on here’ also hold implications for ‘what should we do next.’ What is characteristic of collective sensemaking processes relative to individual sensemaking is that meaning is coordinated among the participants which allows them to subsequently act as a collective (Boyce, 1995). This coordination of meaning does not imply that all participants must agree (J. R. Taylor & Robichaud, 2004). Rather, the point is that meaning becomes socially enacted, in both senses of the term: the enacted meaning is regarded as being ‘in effect’ (similar to how laws are enacted), but it is also played out in the actions that follow (similar to enacting a play). In Weick’s terms, the participants ‘implant that which they later discover and call “knowledge” ’ or ‘understanding of their environment’ (Weick, 1977, p. 267). Empirically, the process of collective sensemaking can be observed in how organization members negotiate accounts about the organization in their interaction with each other (Antaki, 1994; Maitlis, 2005). Accounts are ‘discursive constructions of reality’ (Maitlis, 2005, p. 21) which can be used to render a situation meaningful and actionable for the recipients. Accounts are structured around cues extracted from the organizational environment which are imbued with meaning by the interlocutors. The cues could stem from a number of sources, such as narratives of past management decisions, numbers on a spreadsheet, or operational occurrences (e.g. unexpected breakdowns of production machinery), which may influence many facets of employee behaviour. Accounts of the same situation may differ among individuals, depending on the information and arguments informing them. These features allow accounts to be presented strategically, for example, to point towards a certain future action, according to how the situation at hand is framed. However, there are also contingencies which must be met for accounts to influence collective decision making: accounts must be produced so as to be understandable and convincing to the listeners in the setting, which involves utilizing information that is familiar or at least taken as credible by the listeners (Garfinkel, 1967b; Watson & Goulet, 1998). Others might choose to challenge the account, for example, through offering competing accounts or modifying the account through their own formulations (Yeung, 2004b), whereby the accounts can become enrolled in agendas which their original authors did not intend (Maitlis, 2005). Collective sensemaking provides a relevant framework for understanding the link between POLI and job control for three reasons: first, collective sensemaking is especially prominent in situations where interlocutors orient to a changing situation (Weick et al., 2005). The way that 127 decision making in POLIs differs from the normal chain of command potentially constitutes such a change for the participants. Second, the situation that POLIs set up is not just new, but also ambiguous: POLIs contain an inherent unpredictability for the participants as the fate of the employees’ suggestions often rests with non-present organization members, such as members of management, who have the requisite authority to approve or disapprove the suggestions resulting from the decision-making process. Since the participants can only assume how others will react to their suggestions, their decisions are likely to reflect their ongoing assessments about the extent of their control. As a consequence, employees would not necessarily be expected to enact their job control the same way throughout POLI activities. Collective sensemaking theory provides us with a framework for investigating these changing enactments. Method The qualitative data in this article was drawn from a POLI conducted among industrial operators working for a Danish pharmaceutical company which produces goods for a highly regulated global market. Generally, industrial operators23 are considered to have a low degree of control over the job demands imposed on them (Karasek & Theorell, 1990), with working conditions characterized by high-paced, standardized, and repetitive tasks, which have been found to relate to negative health effects (Van der Doef & Maes, 1999). The aim of the present POLI was to improve the work environment of industrial operators by implementing a system for continuous participatory improvement, which was hypothesized to help the operators identify especially strenuous work tasks and develop realistic solutions for decreasing job demands or increasing job resources in relation to these (Gupta et al., 2015). Among other elements, the intervention featured a series of action-planning workshops (APWs) in which groups of 6 to 10 operator participants discussed potential solutions to problematic working conditions that the participants had identified at a previous workshop. The participants were mostly unskilled, but with a high degree of experience for the job. Since the workshop groups consisted of participants who were members of the same work team or shift, they could discuss shared tasks and experiences. A total of 11 APWs were conducted with different employees appearing in each APW. 23 For the remainder of the paper, the term “operator’ is used when discussing the specific employees who are represented in our data, while “employee’ is used to refer to employees in POLIs in general. 128 All APWs were audio recorded, yielding more than 28 hours of interactions, which were subsequently transcribed. Transcripts of all of the workshop recordings were then read to get an overview of the content. The transcript material was supplemented by additional data on nonverbal aspects of the group discussions gathered from the field notes of workshop observers. In order to investigate the connection between job control and participation, we searched for sequences of interaction where employees attempted to exercise control over decisions regarding their job tasks. Since the workshop programme was designed with the aim of facilitating the creation of action plans, we decided to let the emergence of the action plans guide our focus. Thus collective sensemaking processes (Boyce, 1995) leading to action plans became our unit of analysis. We therefore identified where the theme of each action plan was mentioned for the first time, tracking the emergence of the action plan through to its finalization. Afterwards, a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was conducted of the collective sensemaking processes. This analysis showed that the topic of job control was often present, either explicitly or implicitly, in the discussions about the feasibility of specific action plans. This informed our choice to investigate accounts related to job control as part of action planning sequences as a collective sensemaking process. Finally, repeated readings of the selected transcript sequences were conducted with a focus on how the participants’ control-related accounts specifically came to inform decision making within each workshop. Thus, our aim was not to evaluate the adequacy or veracity of the accounts, but to understand the circumstances of their production and their impact. On this basis, three sequences from three different APWs were selected for presentation in this paper based on how these sequences illustrated various relevant aspects of how the accounts were negotiated. The sequences are representative of the ambivalence and, on some occasions, the shifts in dominant accounts and interpretations that occurred in the workshop meetings. The sequences are presented in a narrative style containing both background information and condensed descriptions of relevant events in the workshop (similar to what has been called a realist tale; Van Maanen, 2011) as well as transcribed excerpts from the workshop recordings along with the analysis of these excerpts. 129 Sequence number 1 2 3 Operator participants (cited) 8 (Ronny, Frank, Cooper, Jill) 9 (Jesse, Jack, Jimmy, Huey) 4 (Bob, Tony, Roy) Line manager Paul (Laura also present) Laura Laura Observers Two research assistants Research assistant, middle manager Research assistant Number of agreedupon action plans 2 5 6 Table 5. Analyzed intervention action planning workshops for chapter 6. In the transcript excerpts presented in this article, all names of participants have been changed and all quotes translated from Danish to English. In the translation process, we aimed to preserve the structure of the participants’ utterances in order to show the improvised nature of the interaction. The transcript excerpts presented in this article employ a modified version of the Gail Jefferson transcription system (see appendix). The workshops In the POLI workshops, discussions were guided by either an experienced consultant or a member of the research group who acted as a process facilitator. Furthermore, the operators’ line managers were also present in order to provide relevant information or participate in parts of the discussions which fell within their managerial discretion. At the beginning of the APWs, the participants were told that ‘the purpose of the workshops is to give the participants an opportunity to address problematic working conditions.’ The facilitator presented the group with a chart outlining the issues that had been brought up in a previous work environment screening workshop and encouraged the participants to find areas of improvement. If the group agreed to work on a given issue, the facilitator would ask the participants questions about the issue in order to bring forth a detailed understanding of what the 130 participants believed to be the cause and how the problem could be mitigated. The participants often took different positions, which led to discussions moderated by the facilitator. Once the participants had developed a more or less shared understanding, the facilitator instructed the team to begin formulating an action plan by writing down the names of those responsible and the titles of the tasks to be performed on a small action plan template. The participants were told that they were they were to implement the action plans after the workshop, either by themselves or with the assistance of their line managers or other relevant organization members. The action plans therefore had to relate to something within their influence, the scope of which was referred to as their ‘action radius’ by the facilitator. The participants were also told to monitor progress on the action plans systematically and visually following Kaizen principles from lean management (Imai, 1986), a management system already in use at the company. Analysis Sequence 1 - Stuck within the radius After briefly introducing the purpose with the workshop to the participants, the facilitator of this workshop asked the operators how they felt about working on the challenge of conducting action plans later in the workshop. This led to objections from the operators about why it would be futile for them to engage in changing their working conditions. This first excerpt shows how the action radius was used as a form of conceptual tool in the discussions which offered different ways of making sense of the operators’ job control. Here, the action radius concept is presented by the facilitator as a seeming attempt to counter an emerging account developed by various operators in concert: Ronny: =...but there are some of those things ((i.e. identified work environment problems)) that we are not in charge of at all (.) and no matter what we think and do, we can’t change them Facilitator: That’s a good point, that there is something that’s beyond your= Ronny: =Completely beyond our, eh, Paul ((the team leader)) isn’t either= Frank: =No, even Paul isn’t qualified to do it Ronny: ((the department manager)) isn’t even, I mean, it’s beyond their= 131 Facilitator: =Action radius, we call it here (.) I kind of see it like= Ronny: =Well, it’s government agencies and so on, who= Facilitator: =I kind of see it like, how long are your arms, which knobs can you turn, there’s something that is beyond your reach= Ronny: =Yes= Facilitator: =That’s a good point (.) on the other hand you think ‘I wonder if there isn’t always something that can be done’ (.) I mean, I wonder if there’s something even though the overall lines are laid down elsewhere, I wonder if there is something within the action radius that can be done anyway (.) in any case, that’s what we can look into Here, two accounts proliferate in the alternating statements made by the operators on the one side and the facilitator on the other side. The operators’ account, presented here by Ronny and Frank, expresses that some of the work environment problems pointed out by the operators in the previous workshop are outside of their control and even outside the control of their line and department managers. Specifically, Ronny mentions that it is ‘government agencies’ that really control these matters, thereby providing an explanation for why the problems cannot be influenced by the operators themselves. From our supplementary data, we know that both Danish and non-Danish government agencies imposed various types of regulation on the production process, and that the requirements imposed by this regulation placed various demands on the operators in relation to which equipment could be used, how closely the production process should be monitored, and how deviations from the production guidelines should be handled. The agencies’ influence on the work setting seems to be well-known by the other participants and does not entail requests for elaboration from Ronny. The facilitator picks up on Ronny’s statement that some problems are outside of their control, and uses it as an opportunity to present the action radius. A few turns later in the discussion, the facilitator poses what seems like a rhetorical question suggesting that the operators’ action radius allows at least some actions to be taken in regard to the problems, even though the root cause of the problem might not be addressed. He also suggests that this question be explored 132 further. The implication of forwarding the action radius concept this way is that participants could still benefit from exploring initiatives which they do not consider optimal. An interesting contradiction can be noted regarding how the action radius frames the operators’ job control: through the formulation ‘within reach’, the facilitator describes the operators’ action radius with a spatial metaphor. We are seldom in doubt about whether something is physically within our reach. However, the facilitator’s invitation to further explore the opportunities within the operators’ action radius suggests that the operators might not be aware of, or have critically assessed, their options. The contradiction illustrates how different accounts frame the operators’ job control differently. A later account in the same workshop exemplifies how such accounts can be negotiated. The account was given by an operator after further protests, about which the facilitator remarked that the operators seemed to be thinking ‘what’s the point?’ in regard to attempting to change the work environment: Cooper: It’s not about that, “what’s the point,” because I= Jill: =No, we know that already= Cooper: =Because I, well I could very well go take on something with ((an operator not present)), let’s say the buckets; I was in the first workshop regarding what was made in ((an in-house ergonomics project)); what you first run into is that if you change the bucket size, then it won’t fit the ((emptying tables)) anymore Facilitator: Mm Cooper: The next thing is that there’s not space in the ((production management system)) to take in that many buckets, and we don’t have the freezing capacity for them. This means if you take the buckets, then when you start working on it, you run into all these challenges, so what you originally thought, “oh the buckets, that’ll be easy,” no, it must also be certified suppliers and the like, so suddenly= Facilitator: =Yes= Cooper: =From one thinking, “well, that’s a 15-minute job,” it is the kind of thing which no one can manage anymore 133 In this excerpt, Cooper (backed by team leader Jill) first denied that the operators were simply assuming a sceptical stance towards the intervention, producing instead an account of how he experienced a range of problems in a previous project that tried to address one of the subjects the operators had identified as problematic. The account was elaborated by bringing up the limits of the production management system, regulatory constraints, and freezing capacity. Changes to the emptying tables would require lengthy new validation procedures in order to ensure that the quality of the pharmaceutical product would not be harmed. Increasing freezing capacity would also be highly challenging, as changes to the freezing rooms would cause dust and dirt to enter the production process. The reconstruction required for such changes could only take place if production were halted, entailing large profit losses. Both operators and line managers described such complications repeatedly during the workshops. At a general level, Cooper’s account positioned himself as ultimately powerless in the face of a problem that had at first seemed actionable and delimited, thereby running counter to the facilitator’s account about the possibility of there being ‘knobs to turn.’ The negotiation persisted between variations of the facilitator’s account of there being possible initiatives within the operators’ action radius and the operators’ account of not being able to affect their own problems. Several times throughout the workshop, the operators voiced dissatisfaction over having identified work environment problems primarily beyond their action radius. Following this, the team leader urged the operators to go after ‘low-hanging fruits.’ This referred to action plans that could be implemented through the means already available to the operators, such as arranging for the department manager to visit the production site to talk through various problems the operators were facing. Two action plans were eventually agreed upon among the operators. However, these action plans did not address the problems that were most important to the operators. The workshop ended with the operators expressing their scepticism over the intervention design, arguing that they had not been sufficiently briefed about the fact that they would be held responsible for conducting the subsequent changes. They would have preferred to have been instructed in identifying more actionable problems to begin with. Thus, discussing topics considered by the operators to be beyond their action radius seemed to lead to an accentuation of the operators’ account of having low job control in relation to the identified problems. As the operators’ action radius was mainly discussed in the context of having little or no influence, it came to symbolize the narrow limits of the operators’ control rather than the ‘knobs within reach’ that the facilitator initially suggested the operators look for. 134 Sequence 2 - Expanding the radius In another APW, the participating operators discussed having problems getting in touch with maintenance staff during machine malfunctioning, especially during night shifts. The operators rarely knew what to do during the malfunctioning, which led to them calling staff from other departments in search of help or to improvising their own repairs. The operators seemed jaded about their chances of alleviating this problem since previous complaints about it to management had not resolved the matter. For example, one operator stated: ‘I can note ((the problem)) (.) and I have called attention to ((it)) (.) because attention has been called to this many times (.) you can say that my action radius is no wider’. Another operator stated that the management would neglect the issue if there was no immediate financial gain, a recurrent account presented by operators in relation to persisting work environment problems. In contrast to the operators’ accounts, line manager Laura described the intervention as providing a new situation: ‘Please, could I persuade you to, all those (.) limitations you’re now imposing because you’ve earlier been told “no” or something, that those, those we can just put aside, and then we start anew, then we go back, if you find it important that we have maintenance on a night roster, then that’s the kind of idea we will go with’ The negotiation between these two overall accounts continued, with various operators protesting and arguing that it could not reasonably be the responsibility of the operators to solve it, while Laura urged the operators to give it another try. One operator suggested simply shutting off the malfunctioning machines for the remainder of the night shift, something that would bring the production to a halt and effectively call the attention of management. However, over the course of the discussion, the operators’ account developed into framing the situation as ‘frustrating’ and ‘a damn shame,’ as their operations were often described as a ‘bottleneck’ step in a production situation where the company could not meet product demand – and thus that any production stop would directly cause lost sales. Seeing as how the management was already characterized as being very concerned with keeping costs down, their refusal to implement a night rostering system for maintenance staff which could reduce costly machine-related breakdowns, was depicted by the operators’ account as irrational. 135 The facilitator acknowledged that the operators were making a strong point, since the problem affected both the well-being of the operators (due to the stress of dealing with malfunctioning machines) and production efficiency. Laura sided with the facilitator, describing that she felt that the production terms for the department had changed: Laura: ...Back then, when we got a “no,” perhaps we had gaps in our eh plan, meaning it maybe didn’t matter that much if we had malfunctioning machinery, we could easily reach our performance goals Jesse: Are you thinking= Laura: We are under pressure, eh, we are under pressure already this year Jesse: Mm= Laura: We will surely be under pressure next year, and the year after that I don’t even think that we will have all the optimizations in place in our department to reach ((the production goal)), and then every (.) gap will come to matter for us The operators then proposed that maintenance technicians should be available to the operators all hours of the day. Finding only affirmative arguments for performing the organizational change, the operators started to discuss what the actual action plan should look like. Line manager Laura then proposed that the group could strengthen their argument by making their own economic assessment of the costs and potential gains associated with the proposal before presenting it at the department meeting, stating ‘the better prepared we are, the easier it is to get our way so to speak.’ After some discussion the group pursued Laura’s overall plan. Facilitator: ...so one task on this action plan could be “talk to James” ((head of department)) Laura: “Get data” and, and Huey: Yes I was just about to say, for example in a quarter, how many calls for maintenance have there been, how many hours is this about Facilitator: Yes 142 was introduced. The action radius concept calls attention to the distinction between what is and what is not within one’s control, a distinction that, when introduced into the intervention discussion, may facilitate collective decision making by providing a constructive metaphor for focusing on maximizing their efficacy within their means. However, use of the concept could also lead to potentially problematic consequences in cases where the participants promote relevant but unfeasible courses of action over others; for example, the facilitators’ invitation to look for feasible but sub-optimal solutions within the POLI might take focus away from more fundamental challenges to the organizations’ work environment problems. Such tensions suggest the relevance of engaging in close evaluations of the tools and concepts employed in participatory interventions (Nielsen, Abildgaard, & Daniels, 2014). Seeing job control as socially enacted suggests a need to reconsider previous explanations of how POLIs can increase the participants’ job control. Mikkelsen and colleagues (2000, p. 157) suggest that POLI participants engage in ‘active learning’ by identifying and solving problems, which increases their capacity to influence their working conditions – and thus increases their control. In a similar vein, Nielsen (2013) proposed that POLI participants are likely to engage in increased job crafting, whereby they modify their demanding work conditions to better suit their resources, or vice versa. However, it can be argued that these outcomes are not triggered just by taking part in a POLIs, but that participants would also have to have had the kind of background experience that makes one capable of changing one’s circumstances (Bandura, 1986). Negative experiences, such as those mentioned by Cooper in sequence 1, might deter employees from engaging in POLIs in the future (Harlos, 2001; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). Furthermore, individuals do not construct or enact their job control in a vacuum; rather, if new practices for how to change or craft one’s work environment emerge as a result of the POLI, such practices are likely to spread among the employees and reflect more or less shared ways of constructing and enacting understandings of the situation (Boyce, 1995). Revisiting the job control concept As mentioned, the POLI literature has tended to rely on questionnaires to assess ‘perceived’ job control at the level of the individual employee (cf. Egan et al., 2007; Hätinen et al., 2007; Karasek & Theorell, 1990), a perspective which is in tune with how the psychology-inspired literature has described employee’s wish to participate in organizational decision making as a 143 general human need for feeling in control (Bandura, 1986). In comparison, conceptualizing job control as an aspect of working life that is negotiated and enacted by employees accommodates a number of shortcomings with the dominant conceptualization in the POLI literature. First, as mentioned previously, perceived job control comprises both formal and informal aspects (Karasek & Theorell, 1990), but it is unclear how either of the two aspects contribute to employees’ questionnaire responses and how responses are affected by the differences in how employees might assess each of the aspects when responding. In contrast, a collective sensemaking approach allows direct analysis of how formal and informal aspects of job control are taken up by the participants in their interactions and how the two aspects shape the participants’ decisions. Second is how dominant conceptions of job control in the POLI literature suggest that employees hold an overall ‘generalized’ view of their job control. Instead, our analysis demonstrates that employees experience different degrees of control in relation to different aspects of their working conditions, and that change in control in some areas is more relevant than others, depending on the circumstances. In addition, the analysis presented here suggests that within actual participatory processes, the way job control is enacted is subject to ongoing negotiations, a phenomenon which is overlooked if by research approaches which assume that employees hold some overall level of job control which covers most of their work tasks and which is relatively stable. Third, measurements of job control based on individuals’ perceptions of job control tell us little about the enacted job control and how it increases or decreases; instead, the concept is blackboxed as a product of individual cognitive processes. In comparison, a collective sensemaking approach focuses specifically on how social processes influence the way employees express and enact their job control. For example, though the employees across the three teams initially presented accounts which implied no or low job control, both the second and third sequences demonstrated how for example the introduction of differing accounts with a strategic perspective from the team leader affected the participants’ enacted job control in the sense that agreements were made to pursue improvements to the work environment. This was the case even though the participants in the three sequences perform the same work tasks and have the same line managers. 144 There are several potential limitations in our study. One concerns that we have not been able to account for what happens during the period following the POLI activities. For example, the changes that participants decided to pursue may have been turned down elsewhere in the organization, which could have led to diminished job control. On the other hand, the number and scope of the decisions made by the participants during the intervention indicates the potential long-term changes that could be incurred through a POLI. A follow up study that tracked the action plans after the POLI could have enriched the study. Another limitation is that we have not been able to show how changes in the way participants enact their job control might be reflected in other types of data, such as questionnaire responses. Such investigations pose a number of methodological difficulties, for example, due to differences in whether job control is viewed as an overall concept (as it is typically assumed in the POLI literature) or specific to the problem under discussion, as our analysis suggests. Furthermore, since previous studies of how POLIs affect job control usually measure job control sometime after the intervention activities, the participants’ responses could reflect events that occurred during the interim period. Conclusion While a link between participation and job control has often been claimed in the literature, this link is not clearly supported empirically, and its theoretical aspects have not been explored in depth. In this article, we argued that the link can be understood through a collective sensemaking lens, and we demonstrated this through an empirical examination of three sequences of group interactions in a manufacturing context. Seeing POLIs as sites of sensemaking may help researchers address the undertheorized relationship of how the participants’ decision making in POLIs is influenced by and influences the way they view their job control. We argue that it could be beneficial to investigate POLIs as contextualized social activities whose success in effecting job control depends on how employees make sense of their organizational environment. Methodologically, studying accounts allows us to see how job control is negotiated among POLI participants on a turn-by-turn basis, rather than relying on self-reports of perceived job control after the POLI. A benefit of this approach is that it sheds light on how both formal and informal aspects of job control shape employees’ accounts, and how job control can be enacted as either a stable aspect of the job or as a dynamic property of a situation. In addition, the study responds to 145 the calls for more qualitative research on participatory interventions (Egan et al., 2007) and investigations into specific intervention components (Nielsen et al., 2010) by showing how intervention-specific conceptual tools such as ‘action radius’ may influence the participants’ decision-making process. 146 7. Article three: The terms of “becoming empowered”: How ascriptions and negotiations of employee identities shape the outcomes of workplace voice activities Abstract While empowerment practices have been the subject of considerable debate, little attention has been paid to how employees shape the outcomes of these practices through their active participation. This study presents membership categorization analysis as an approach to studying identities and identification as interactional phenomena. Through analyses of interactions in workplace voice activities, this study shows how developing initiatives to improve the local organization of work is complicated by the fact that supporting initiatives as an employee can lead to undesired identity ascriptions from other participants, especially in relation to employees’ organizational identification or disidentification. Thus, the appeal of voice activities for participating employees depends on how the terms of “becoming empowered” are negotiated in practice. Introduction Empowerment practices (Conger & Kanungo, 1988), such as employee voice and participation in organizational decision-making (Busck et al., 2010), self-managing work teams (Kuipers & Witte, 2005) and total quality management (Quist, Skålén, & Clegg, 2007), are highly common in modern organizations. However, there has been considerable debate over the effects of these practices for organizations and employees. From a mainstream perspective, involving employees in workplace decision-making is thought to be beneficial for both the organization, in terms of improved performance, innovation, and quality, and for the employees, in terms of increased self-efficacy, work motivation, and organizational identification (Crowley, Payne, & Kennedy, 2013; Ertürk, 2010; Humborstad, 2013). In contrast, critical theorists have pointed out that that since empowerment practices are typically controlled by the management, employees rarely find themselves sufficiently empowered to implement suggestions on their own without the managers’ support (Boje & Rosile, 2001; Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998; Wilkinson, 1998), and that empowerment practices might replace more comprehensive efforts to 147 democratize the workplace (Johnstone & Ackers, 2015; H. Taylor, 2001). Furthermore, the use of empowerment practices to promote organizational identification has been regarded as an attempt to regulate employees’ identities, due to how this identification implies disciplining one’s work effort and avoiding criticism of the management (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Appelbaum et al., 1999; Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998). As a result, empowerment practices might ultimately shift the balance within the employment relationship to the employers’ advantage (Thomas & Davies, 2011). The debate between mainstream and critical empowerment perspectives has been said to be locked in a “dualistic either–or opposition” (Boje & Rosile, 2001, p. 91; see also Humborstad, 2013). However, only limited attention has been paid to how employees shape the outcomes of empowerment practices through their active participation (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Greasley et al., 2005; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). This is surprising since empowerment practices cannot function without employees’ cooperation. Since most employees are “neither class-conscious revolutionaries nor passive docile automatons” (Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994, p. 9), the way they engage in empowerment practices is likely to reflect the perceived benefits, costs and risks for the employees in the situation, rather than the optimism or skepticism espoused by the dominant empowerment perspectives outlined above (Crowley et al., 2013; Johnson, 1994; Pohler & Luchak, 2014). For empowerment practices which contain elements of voice, an important outcome is the concrete initiatives for changing the organization of work which are developed, initiatives which employees shape by choosing which initiatives to suggest and support. If employees do not make such suggestions or are not willing to put in the effort to see them through, it seems doubtful that the benefits of empowerment practices mentioned above will materialize. One area within the empowerment literature where employees have arguably been viewed as especially “passive” and “docile” is in how the employees’ identities are typically either seen as shaped by participating in empowerment practices (within the mainstream perspective) or as a result of managerial identity control (within the critical perspective). However, identities and identifications are also a subject of continuous negotiation in interactions (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998; Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007), and the way identities are negotiated can shape the organizational outcomes of the interaction (Coupland & Brown, 2012; Larsson & Lundholm, 2013; Whittle et al., 2015). One important social threat that not just employees, but people in general work to manage is that of avoiding undesired identity ascriptions. Such 148 ascriptions are made relevant by the actions one takes, motivating us to account for our actions (Jayyusi, 1984) or simply avoid actions which could give “the wrong impression” (when possible). In relation to empowerment practices which involve elements of employee voice, identity ascriptions are likely to be made on the basis of the character of the initiatives which employees openly support. Since managerial approval is typically needed in order to implement suggestions from empowerment activities, employees might increase their chances of attaining improvements to their working conditions by prioritizing initiatives which are likely to be supported by the management, by presenting these to the management in a persuasive manner, and by indicating a willingness to go beyond their formal obligations in order to help the organization (Dutton & Ashford, 1993). When an employee displays such efforts to accommodate the management, the action can be seen as an indication of organizational identification. Among the reasons why employees might wish to avoid such identity ascriptions is the risk of social sanctions from other employees who take a more oppositional stance towards the management, for example because they feel that the problem should be addressed by the management itself. The present study thus aims to further the overall debate surrounding the empowering or disempowering potential of empowerment practices by exploring how the participants’ attempts to avoid undesired identity ascriptions shape voice activities and their outcomes in the form of initiatives to change the organization of work. In contrast to how identities and identifications are typically understood in the literature, this study presents membership categorization analysis as a novel approach to studying identification (and identities in general) as discursive phenomena negotiated in interaction, an approach that has so far received limited attention in organization studies. An in-depth analysis is presented of audio-recorded interactions from employee voice activities, demonstrating how organizational identification or disidentification is ascribed to the employees based on their actions as well as the strategies that employees use to resist such ascriptions. These ascriptions might be resisted even if it means passing on an opportunity to implement a suggested initiative. However, under certain conditions, voice activities were found to enable the negotiation of strategies for how employees can avoid undesired identity consequences when attempting to influence their working conditions. The study thereby suggests that whether empowerment practices constitute an attractive arrangement for the employees depends on how such trade-offs are managed. In addition, various insights are presented in relation to discussions of identity work in workplace conversations. 149 Empowerment practices and identity Empowerment is typically understood as the process of bestowing power to the employees, in many cases for a certain purpose (Humborstad, 2013). Within the mainstream empowerment literature, however, the focus has typically been on the employees’ subjective experience of feeling empowered, i.e. feeling able to go beyond their normal obligations in order to take actions that are of value for the organization (Appelbaum et al., 1999). For example, Conger and Kanungo define empowerment as a “process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal techniques of providing efficacy information” (1988, p. 474). As a subjective state, empowerment is claimed to decrease the alienation employees feel working in Taylorized and bureaucratic workplaces (Wilkinson, 1998), instead increasing employees’ experience of organizational identification (Ertürk, 2010); that is, they perceive themselves as “psychologically intertwined with the fate of the group” (Ashforth & Mael, 1989, p. 21). Thereby, the organization’s values, norms, and interests become incorporated in the employees’ self-concept, leading them to feel intrinsically motivated to contribute to the collective (van Knippenberg & Sleebos, 2006). This process is said to expand the shared interests between the employees and managers within the organization, thereby promoting what has been called a unitarist frame of reference for the employment relationship (Fox, 1966). The mainstream perspectives’ understanding of empowerment as a subjective state is rooted in an understanding of power as power to or mastery (Humborstad, 2013). Besides the employees’ motivation and individual capabilities (such as their skills or knowledge), this understanding of power emphasizes aspects such as formal rights and access to information and decision-making settings (Hardy & LeibaO’Sullivan, 1998), aspects which however have been claimed to only change very little within empowerment practices (Humborstad, 2013; Wilkinson, 1998). Within the critical management studies literature, it has been claimed that formal voice activities and other types of empowerment practices can be thought of as managerial techniques which promote a certain form of managerial control over employees, that of identity regulation, while deemphasizing more traditional disciplinary means of control (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Barker & Tompkins, 1994; Knights & Willmott, 1989). Identity regulation occurs when the management proffers identity constructions comprising a high level of identification with the goals championed by the management, such as increased productivity and profitability (Fleming 150 & Spicer, 2003; Knights & McCabe, 2000). When such identity constructions are internalized by the employees, it may lead to employees disciplining their own work effort and take on additional tasks as a form of “unobtrusive control” (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985; Whittle, 2005) whereby empowerment practices become disempowering (Boje & Rosile, 2001). Thus, the dominant conception of power within the critical perspective is that of power over others, including ideological power which is used by managers to shape employees’ understanding of the world. Ideological power, it is argued, is rarely resisted by the employees because of the risk of being labelled a “Neanderthal” or “dinosaur” who won’t accept progress (Appelbaum et al., 1999) or the difficulties in formulating alternative understandings to those of the management (Hardy & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998). While the interests of employees and managers are seen as at least partly opposing within the critical empowerment perspective, corresponding to a pluralist frame of reference in Fox’s framework mentioned above, identity regulation can be seen as an attempt by the management to deliberately blur the lines between their interests and those of the employees, thereby pre-empting conflict. The emphasis on internalization of identification within both the mainstream and critical empowerment perspectives suggest that employees hold one relatively stable self-concept or identity construction, which is however still susceptible to influence from the organization and the management. However, some have argued that employees are not simply hailed into identities, but rather are actively engaged in taking certain subject positions while avoiding others (Thomas & Davies, 2011); for example, the presence of attempts at identity regulation does not imply that such regulation is successful, since the proffered identities can be resisted through acts which indicate disidentification with the organization and the management, such as loafing, ironicizing, or engaging in svejkism (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Costas & Fleming, 2009; Fleming & Spicer, 2003; Thomas & Davies, 2011). Such disidentifying acts might even be designed specifically to avoid detection or mitigation by the management (Ezzamel, Willmott, & Worthington, 2001), and they are key strategies for displaying identification with the employee group (Elsbach & Bhattacharya, 2001). Furthermore, it is common for employees to experience tensions between their collective identifications relating to the organization, employee collective, or profession, for example (Kuhn & Nelson, 2002; Pepper & Larson, 2006; Whittle, 2005). Therefore, employees will often seek to strike a balance between identifying with the employee group and with the goals of the organization, depending on the demands of the situation (Bisel, Ford, & Keyton, 2007). 151 Thus, the ongoing negotiations and struggles over employees’ identification with the organization, the employee group, or other collectives is likely to be a key concern for employees in relation to empowerment practices (Thomas & Davies, 2011). Furthermore, the above studies suggest the relevance of developing a more dynamic understanding of identity and identification that is sensitive to how these identifications are negotiated on an ongoing basis within activities related to empowerment practices. In the following, I will first present an interactional perspective on organizational identification which will subsequently be applied in an analysis of how employees negotiate their engagement in employee voice activities. Identity as an interactional phenomenon Within interactions, studies have shown how identification talk is “varied from moment to moment depending on the participants’ interactional goals” (Wetherell, Stiven, & Potter, 1987, p. 64), with the rhetorical context playing an important role for how people express their attitudes and identifications. A key framework for studying identity and identification as an interactional phenomenon is that of Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) (Sacks, 1992), whose central idea is that “for a person to ‘have an identity’ – whether he or she is the person speaking, being spoken to, or being spoken about – is to be cast into a category with associated characteristics or features” (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998, p. 3, their italics). Thus, being ascribed to a certain membership category in interaction means that various rights, obligations, actions, and other predicates associated with that category are also ascribed to the category incumbent. A classic example of Sacks’s demonstrating how categories and predicates work in practice is an utterance from a book of children’s stories: “The baby cried, the mommy picked it up” (1992). Most would likely infer that the baby is picked up by the mommy because it cries (rather than the events being causally unrelated), and furthermore, that the “mommy” is in fact the mother of the child. As members of a culture, we share expectations about how mothers are to act, meaning that more is understood than is explicitly expressed. As exemplified by the mother’s action being accounted for by the baby’s crying, examining category attributions in interactions can also shed light on the moral implications interpreted by the (Jayyusi, 1984). 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Sharp rise in intonation Table 9: a list of notation symbols used in the four articles Throughout the transcriptions, commas are used as punctuation marks which help the reader understand how speakers’ turns are structured. Although this goes against how punctuation marks are typically avoided in Jeffersonian transcriptions, the commas are used here as an aide for the reader because the transcriptions generally reflect the word sequence and lexical choices of the speakers in Danish as closely as possible without losing overall comprehensibility in English, meaning that some utterances might be difficult to understand for readers who are unfamiliar with typical sentence structures or common phrases in spoken Danish.  259 Co-author declarations 260 261 262 263 Participant information about audio recordings on the WWW – an implementation and evaluation 29. Gergana Koleva European Policy Instruments Beyond Networks and Structure: The Innovative Medicines Initiative 30. 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An Analysis of the Perception of and Reaction to Reviewers in Fine-Dining 20. Martin Jarmatz Organizing for Pricing 21. Niels Joachim Christfort Gormsen Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing 22. Diego Zunino Socio-Cognitive Perspectives in Business Venturing 23. Benjamin Asmussen Networks and Faces between Copenhagen and Canton, 1730-1840 24. Dalia Bagdziunaite Brains at Brand Touchpoints A Consumer Neuroscience Study of Information Processing of Brand Advertisements and the Store Environment in Compulsive Buying 25. Erol Kazan Towards a Disruptive Digital Platform Model 26. Andreas Bang Nielsen Essays on Foreign Exchange and Credit Risk 27. Anne Krebs Accountable, Operable Knowledge Toward Value Representations of Individual Knowledge in Accounting 28. Matilde Fogh Kirkegaard A firmand demand-side perspective on behavioral strategy for value creation: Insights from the hearing aid industry 29. Agnieszka Nowinska SHIPS AND RELATION-SHIPS Tie formation in the sector of shipping intermediaries in shipping 30. Stine Evald Bentsen The Comprehension of English Texts by Native Speakers of English and Japanese, Chinese and Russian Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca. An Empirical Study. 31. Stine Louise Daetz Essays on Financial Frictions in Lending Markets 32. Christian Skov Jensen Essays on Asset Pricing 33. Anders Kryger Aligning future employee action and corporate strategy in a resourcescarce environment 34. Maitane Elorriaga-Rubio The behavioral foundations of strategic decision-making: A contextual perspective 35. Roddy Walker Leadership Development as Organisational Rehabilitation: Shaping Middle-Managers as Double Agents 36. Jinsun Bae Producing Garments for Global Markets Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Myanmar’s export garment industry 2011–2015 37. Queralt Prat-i-Pubill Axiological knowledge in a knowledge driven world. Considerations for organizations. 38. Pia Mølgaard Essays on Corporate Loans and Credit Risk 39. Marzia Aricò Service Design as a Transformative Force: Introduction and Adoption in an Organizational Context 40. Christian Dyrlund WåhlinJacobsen Constructing change initiatives in workplace voice activities Studies from a social interaction perspective TITLER I ATV PH.D.-SERIEN 1992 1. Niels Kornum Servicesamkørsel – organisation, økonomi og planlægningsmetode 1995 2. Verner Worm Nordiske virksomheder i Kina Kulturspecifi kke interaktionsrelationer ved nordiske virksomhedsetableringer i Kina 1999 3. Mogens Bjerre Key Account Management of Complex Strategic Relationships An Empirical Study of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry 2000 4. Lotte Darsø Innovation in the Making Interaction Research with heterogeneous Groups of Knowledge Workers creating new Knowledge and new Leads 2001 5. Peter Hobolt Jensen Managing Strategic Design Identities The case of the Lego Developer Network 2002 6. Peter Lohmann The Deleuzian Other of Organizational Change – Moving Perspectives of the Human 7. Anne Marie Jess Hansen To lead from a distance: The dynamic interplay between strategy and strategizing – A case study of the strategic management process 2003 8. Lotte Henriksen Videndeling – om organisatoriske og ledelsesmæssige udfordringer ved videndeling i praksis 9. Niels Christian Nickelsen Arrangements of Knowing: Coordinating Procedures Tools and Bodies in Industrial Production – a case study of the collective making of new products 2005 10. Carsten Ørts Hansen Konstruktion af ledelsesteknologier og effektivitet TITLER I DBA PH.D.-SERIEN 2007 1. Peter Kastrup-Misir Endeavoring to Understand Market Orientation – and the concomitant co-mutation of the researched, the re searcher, the research itself and the truth 2009 1. Torkild Leo Thellefsen Fundamental Signs and Signifi cance effects A Semeiotic outline of Fundamental Signs, Signifi cance-effects, Knowledge Profi ling and their use in Knowledge Organization and Branding 2. Daniel Ronzani When Bits Learn to Walk Don’t Make Them Trip. Technological Innovation and the Role of Regulation by Law in Information Systems Research: the Case of Radio Frequency Identifi cation (RFID) 2010 1. Alexander Carnera Magten over livet og livet som magt Studier i den biopolitiske ambivalens