On the participatory agency of texts : using institutional forms in performance appraisal interviews
Abstract
rawing on studies of the performative effects and agency of texts in organizations, the paper investigates how the agency of texts figures through their participatory status in interaction. The empirical data for the study consist of video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in a Finnish public organization in which the interaction relies heavily on an appraisal form. The data are analyzed through a sequential analysis that draws on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnographic knowledge. The analysis shows that the human participants orient to three different acts that are inscribed in the textual document: 1) presenting demands for the participants; 2) offering topics for the discussion as well as perspectives from which those topics should be discussed; and 3) suggesting conventional ways of progressing in the interaction. Furthermore, the material and the semiotic facets of textual documents are shown to be systematically related in that specific orientations to the material aspect of the paper form entail specific orientations to the semiotic content. The study sheds light on the subtle ways through which the distributed, albeit dissymmetric, agency of human and non-human participants is constructed, and on how texts are treated as more or less authoritative in face-to-face interaction.
Main Authors
Format
Articles
Research article
Published
2021
Series
Subjects
Publication in research information system
Publisher
Mouton De Gruyter
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-202010056072Use this for linking
Review status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1860-7330
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2019-0121
Language
English
Published in
Text and Talk
Citation
- Lehtinen, E., & Pälli, P. (2021). On the participatory agency of texts : using institutional forms in performance appraisal interviews. Text and Talk, 41(1), 47-69. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2019-0121
Additional information about funding
Funding Source: The Finnish Work Environment Fund
Award identifier / Grant number: 111071
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