Uptake of Discourse Research in Interprofessional Settings: Reporting from Medical Consultancy

Abstract

In the last two decades there has been a growing volume of discourse-based research in a wide range of professional settings. These studies differ considerably in terms of their choice of analytic frameworks and data sites, but also with regard to the professed/implied inter-relationship of the researchers with the potential consumers of soch research. One particular issue which concerns us in this paper has to do with how discourse-based findings are fed back to practitioner professionals and the extent to which the feedback received from the latter can set the agenda for further discourse analytic work. For the purposes of illustration, we draw upon our earlier consultancy work with the Royal College of General Practitioners. One of the main findings we have reported in the context of these medical gatekeeping encounters concerns the co-existence of different modes of talk. Borrowing from sociological literature on occupational and organizational communication, we have been able to offer an analytic distinction between three modes of talk-professional, institutional and personal experience-which are inter-actionally grounded, while allowing for slippages across these modes. Our focus of analysis here is to see how this analytic distinction is taken up by the practitioner professionals and the extent to which they (do not) use our discourse analytic finding as a heuristic for dealing with practical and policy issues. Based on our interactions with the practitioners (and the subjects of our study) and working within a model of collaborative 'action-oriented' research paradigm, we return to the discourse data in order to further refine the analytic distinctions suggested earlier, bearing in mind issues of generalizability and transparency.