Abstracts of the two presentations
Rachel Robinson, Open University
‘Professional conversations’ in Postgraduate Medical (Teacher) Education
This talk examines conversations as sites of institutional and professional talk. Based on my doctoral research on a teacher education programme for hospital consultants, I analyse examples of my own use of ‘highly designed turns’ (Heritage, 1997) as a way of reflecting on my social and pedagogic intentions and the degree to which these are realised in the professional conversations. I draw on discourse analysis to examine the possible different expectations and discourse backgrounds of the participants, looking at the conversations in terms of face-work, power and politeness, in relation to the participants’ negotiation of professional identities.
Gerlinde Mautner, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Managerial Discourse in Higher Education
Universities all over the world are currently facing stringent economic constraints, rising pressures for efficiency and growing accountability to external constituents. The answer is typically thought to lie in adopting a more managerial approach, embracing organisational practices and value systems originally associated with the corporate sector. The aim of this talk is to explore the discourses that go along with these trends – the language of academic entrepreneurialism, faculty management, university branding and the student-as-consumer model. It will also be shown how the discursive shift affecting academia is not an isolated phenomenon, but ties in with a more general move towards marketisation in other lifeworlds, including the public sector, religion, and indeed the personal sphere. In addition, the talk will address methodological issues that an investigation of a social “megatrend” invariably raises. How can attention to linguistic detail be combined with a grasp of the broader picture? Can a critical research agenda be reconciled with the need to avoid bias? Putting such questions up for debate, the talk also hopes to consider how discourse analysts should deal with the perennial tension between rigour and relevance.