Abstract
One of the definitions of discourse foregrounds the idea that discourse is an actual instance of a communicative action performed by means of language (Blommaert, 2005; Johnstone, 2008). Focusing on organizational discourse, previous publications have explored how such communicative actions are carried out at work (Drew and Heritage, 1992; Gunnarsson et al., 1997; Heritage and Clayman, 2010; Sarangi and Roberts, 1999), highlighting specific institutional discourse (e.g. Heritage and Maynard, 2006; Morris and Chenail, 1995; Peräkylä et al., 2008) and the meaning of deficiency (Candlin and Crichton, 2011) in diverse institutional and professional settings.
The theme of the book, Trust and Discourse: Organizational Perspectives, which further explores how trust and distrust are constructed in discursive communicative actions, materialized during the 3rd Discourse in Organizations International Workshop held in Antwerp and Corsendonk in September 2011. In Chapter 1, the editors define trust as a relational, tacit term that becomes active and visible in times of instability through various social and discursive practices. In other words, they emphasize that trust is not something that people have, but rather something that they do (Hepburn and Wiggins, 2007) when they interact with one another at work. Accordingly, the following chapters set out to investigate the significance of doing trust within an organization.
The chapters of the book can be described in terms of four domains: (1) a historical perspective on trust, (2) trust in education, (3) trust in the written media and (4) trust in the world of business. The historical perspective is presented in Chapters 9 and 10. In Chapter 9, Marina Dossena demonstrates how writers of business letters and non-literary prose in the 19th century construced trust by using vocabulary and modality. In Chapter 10, the final chapter of the book, Hiromasa Tanaka and Takanori Kawamata explore how the Japanese public’s trust in the government was dramatically affected by a nuclear disaster that occurred in Tokai village in 1999 – 12 years prior to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Chapters 3, 4 and 7 probe the construction of trust in diverse educational settings. In Chapter 3, Christopher Elsey, Lynn Monrouxe and Andrew Grant examine the construction of trust in video-recorded bedside teaching encounters among physicians, medical students and patients. In Chapter 4, Helen Oughton explores trust and distrust in adult basic education in the United Kingdom. In Chapter 7, Martijn Wackers, Bas Andeweg and Jaap de Jong investigate the role of self-disparaging humor during educational presentations in the construction of the speaker’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the audience.
The third domain comprises the written media. In Chapter 5, Ellen Van Praet, Bram Vertommen, Tom Van Hout and Astrid Vandendaele examine how foreign correspondents cover key events in Belgian politics. In Chapter 8, Martina Temmerman explores the discursive tools employed by a Belgian Dutch-language women’s magazine for the purpose of communicating trust to its readers.
Two chapters can be included in the domain of the world of business. In Chapter 2, Ewa Kuśmierczyk examines the co-construction of trust and distrust in interactive job interviews in New Zealand. In Chapter 6, Heather Jackson presents a case study that shows how a medium-sized Australian enterprise implemented a trust strategy with the aim of increasing productivity and improving interdepartmental communication.
In order to explore trust in different spoken and written practices, the following methods of analysis are employed: micro-level linguistic and text analyses, linguistic- and discourse-oriented ethnography, a corpus-based analysis, a multimodal action analysis, an experimental design and content analysis. The data collected consist of 19th-century business letters and non-literary prose, documents, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews, field notes, and video and audio recordings of institutional interaction.
Before evaluating the contribution of the book, I find it necessary to mention a previous edited collection of studies in applied linguistics (Candlin and Crichton, 2013) that examined the discursive construction of trust across diverse social and professional domains such as health and social care, education, finance, law, business, science and technology from the perspectives of linguistics, sociology, psychology, medicine, education, finance and communication.
The present collection of studies, which constitutes the focus of this review, further expands the geo-historical and methodological horizons of its predecessor by offering a historical perspective on the central issue (i.e. the construction of trust in institutional discourse), and by employing a variety of methods of analysis including a multimodal action analysis, corpus analysis and an experimental design. However, this collection is less organized than the book mentioned above. That said, its chapters conjure up additional, interesting research aims that may be of interest to the readers of Discourse & Communication. I will provide three examples of such aims.
First, in view of the centrality of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in institutional settings and the development of diverse communication technologies, it is regrettable that the book does not present research pertaining to this domain. It is imperative that future studies examine how trust and/or distrust are co-constructed digitally in CMC in the absence of coherence-inducing para-linguistic features such as body language and intonation (Kupferberg, 2013). The construction of trust in CMC is especially intriguing in multicultural and multilingual settings.
Second, following the interesting experimental studies on the influence of self-disparaging humor on trust building in educational face-to-face communication (Chapter 7), one could further explore the use of humor in qualitative and mixed-methods studies in institutional face-to-face communication and/or CMC (e.g. in medicine and therapy).
Finally, the use of managerial strategies to build trust in a company (Chapter 6) could be explored in order to highlight the discursive construction of the affinity between leadership and trust (Bass and Avolio, 1994).
To conclude, this collection of studies explores how trust and/or distrust are co-constructed in organizational discursive practices. The chapters suggest further research aims (outlined above) that researchers can pursue in multicultural organizational face-to-face communication, telephone communication and CMC.