Coordinating actions in and across interactional spaces in technology-mediated business meetings

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation investigates how participants in technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings coordinate their actions sequentially, temporally and multimodally. Drawing on authentic video-recorded data from an international company and taking conversation analysis as the theoretical and methodological starting point, the study explores the use of verbal and embodied resources in co-constructing and reconfiguring the frames and (pre)conditions of interaction, i.e. the interactional space(s). Distant meetings are presented as joint accomplishments in which one’s presence and participation are constantly negotiated on a turn-by-turn basis. The thesis consists of four research articles and this overview. Article I investigates the beginnings of distant meetings, showing a stepwise progression of openings in two stages: 1) entering the meeting space and negotiating one’s co-presence and 2) establishing shared focus on the meeting proper. Article II examines moments of interactional trouble with a special focus on the local participants’ displays of alignment and affiliation, revealing their preference for transforming the interactional spaces and engaging in community building over making explicit attempts to solve the problem. Article III focuses on the closings of meetings, showing how the fine-grained organization of social actions during crucial moments in the overall closing trajectory has consequences for the ways interactional spaces are reconfigured. Article IV is a case analysis of a video-mediated meeting in which a more enhanced collaborative system is used and shows how, in that particular setting, embodied noticings can occasion the recovery of interactional spaces. It complements the research by highlighting the importance of understanding how different multimodal resources can engender new affordances. This dissertation shows that in organizing the ongoing interaction, the participants of distant meetings make use of various verbal and bodily-visual practices that require a skilful use of the social, material, and linguistic resources that come to play at specific moments in time and space. The research sheds new light on the challenges and affordances of technology-mediated environments and how they are made locally and interactionally relevant.