What’s the Boss Doing? Everyday Communication of High-level Personnel

The following analysis explores the nature of everyday activities of people in economic leadership positions. It inquires as to the institutions and people they are in contact with, and the way they communicate with them. First, I will present existing studies in this field and the ethnographic procedure of this study. I will then describe the communicative activities of high-level personnel and their communication networks based on observations. These are then linked to their communicative tasks and types of interaction. Finally, I will discuss some characteristics of the communicative style

Doctors’ questions as displays of understanding

Based on German data from history-taking in doctor-patient interaction, the paper shows that the three basic syntactic types of questions (questions fronted by a question-word (w-questions), verb-first (V1) questions, and declarative questions) provide different opportunities for displaying understanding in medical interaction. Each syntactic questionformat is predominantly used in a different stage of topical sequences in history taking: w-questions presuppose less knowledge and are thus used to open up topical sequences; declarative questions are used to check already achieved understandings and to close topical sequences. Still, the expected scope of answers to yes/no-questions and to declarative questions is less restricted than previously thought. The paper focuses in detail on the doctors’ use of formulations as declarative questions, which are designed to make patients elaborate on already established topics, giving more details or accounting for a confirmation. Formulations often involve a shift to psychological aspects of the illness. Although patients confirm doctors’ empathetic formulations, they, however, regularly do not align with this shift, returning to the description of symptoms and to biomedical accounts instead. The study shows how displays of understanding are responded to not only in terms of correctness, but also (and more importantly) in terms of their relevance for further action

Führung im Gespräch. Am Beispiel von Eingreifen zur grundsätzlichen Voraussetzungsklärung

Dieser Beitrag behandelt aufwändige Formen von Voraussetzungssicherung im Gespräch, bei denen ein Beteiligter die vorausgehende oder laufende Äußerung eines anderen Beteiligten zum Anlass nimmt, um einzugreifen und in einer expandierten Form aus Sprechersicht für die gegenwärtige Interaktion grundlegende Voraussetzungen zu klären. Charakteristisch für die Auffälligkeit des Vorgangs ist, dass das Eingreifen die Aktivitätsprogression im Gespräch suspendiert, bis die für das weitere gemeinsame Handeln notwendig erscheinenden Voraussetzungen geklärt und akzeptiert sind