Co-constructing good relations through troubles talk in diverse teams

Abstract

This article investigates the in-situ relations that interlocutors co-construct during troubles talk in a working team, with a focus on talk centred around negative issues or experiences that speakers do not blame or attribute to others present. Research in various fields has pointed to the important role that troubles talk plays in the construction of positive social relations, but more detailed pragmatic insights are still needed to understand exactly how these positive social relations are brought about in interaction. To address this, we draw on 25 h of recorded and transcribed team meeting data from an MBA team, collected over a 9-month period. Troubles talk stands out throughout from other types of talk in this dataset, as relations were continuously constructed as equal, close, safe, and featuring positive affect. We examine the interactional strategies that team members used to construct these positive relations in troubles talk and highlight a number of these strategies, including joint story-telling, participatory floor-management, humour, and shared transgressions. Reciprocal self-disclosures were found to be central to constructing positive relations and were used by team members even when troubles were not shared. With this we add further empirical insights to the area of interpersonal pragmatics concerned with fostering good relationships and establish descriptors on how such relations can be characterised and investigated.