Deontic Rights Research Articles

Multimodal methods for managing deontic rights in interdisciplinary trials

This paper focuses on interdisciplinary trials as a multiparty and multiactivity setting in which different professions are needed for students with mobility disabilities to try out robot-assisted gait training. Through an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to multimodal interaction analysis, we investigate how a research team collaborates with the employees at a sports high school to get students who are wheelchair users to walk. The paper provides an analysis of the professionals’ employment of multimodal resources for managing deontic rights when organizing interdisciplinary trials. It examines how the professionals initiate and negotiate their own and others’ actions necessary for preparing the student for walking. Based on video recordings, the paper focuses on the professionals’ deontic claims concerning co-participants’ actions and analyzes their temporal and spatial contingencies. Building on prior research on deontics, this paper contributes to our understanding of the interactive accomplishment of deontic authority and its sensitivity to contextual features.

How parents with aphasia deal with children’s resistance to requests

ABSTRACT Negotiating bedtime or table manners with children can be challenging, probably even more so for parents with aphasia. This study aims to explore how parents with aphasia deal with children’s resistance to requests in everyday interactions. It examines the interactional practices of parents with aphasia and their consequences for deontic authority (the right to direct another person’s future action). Using conversation analysis, I conducted a collection-based study of request sequences in 10 hours of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia). Two different types of child resistance following a parental request were analysed: passive resistance (indicated by the child’s inaction) and active resistance (indicated by the child’s attempt to bargain or give an account for not doing the requested action). It is shown that all three parents with aphasia respond to passive resistance with pursuits, such as ‘hey’ and other prompts. However, while the two parents with greater linguistic resources deal with active resistance by seeking compliance with counterarguments and by cautiously upgrading their deontic rights, such fine-tuning is not present when the parent with more limited linguistic resources deals with his child’s resistance. This parent uses intrusive physical practices, gestures, increased volume and repetition. This analysis offers insights into practices that appear to affect the ability of these parents with aphasia to negotiate with their children and thus engage in parenting and participate in family life. In order to be able to offer support when engaging with children as desired by parents with aphasia, it is important to gain further insights into how aphasia can affect the organisation of everyday family life.

Epistemic and Deontic Authority in Parent–Teacher Conference: Referring to the Expert as a Discursive Practice to (Jointly) Undermine the Teacher’s Expertise

This article investigates the interactional constitution of a phenomenon recurrently reported by teachers who complain about a loss of authority, a systematic delegitimization of their role. Adopting a conversation analysis informed approach to a single-case study from a corpus of parent–teacher conferences, we illustrate how challenging the teachers’ expertise is accomplished by participants as an outcome of some identifiable communicative practices. Particularly, we analyze the practices of “quoting” and “referring to the expert” as interactional resources differently exploited by participants: While parents challenge the teachers’ epistemic authority and lay the foundation for claiming the right to decide what do to with their son in the classroom, teachers contribute to this epistemic positioning and cede their expert knowledge-based deontic rights, that is, the right to decide the best practices to adopt in the classroom. In the discussion, we advance that the participants’ interactive competence in navigating the complex epistemic landscape of the encounter profoundly impacts on the local definition of reciprocal epistemic and deontic rights and responsibilities. Indications for teachers’ education are provided in the conclusion.

When a request turn is segmented: Managing the deontic authority via early compliance

By drawing on service encounter data in Japanese, this paper analyzes a previously undocumented request action initiated by a service provider to a client as a necessary step to provide the service. The service provider and their client, both exercising respective deontic rights, collaboratively construct a request turn in particular ways. In this case, due to the Japanese SOV word order, the service provider takes advantage of segmenting their request turn to allow the recipient clients to begin compliance, who thereby acquiesce to the service provider’s deontic authority at the earliest point. By bringing the request turn to completion after the client’s compliance while reflexively showing their deontic and beneficiary stances in the turn final component, the service provider displays commitment to balancing out their relative deontic status to the client.

The negotiation of epistemic and deontic rights in child-adult interactions in colloquial Jakartan Indonesian

Discourse markers can function to mark epistemic and deontic modality. This study aims to explore how children and adults apply the discourse marker deh to signal their epistemic and deontic rights. Previous studies only dealt with how the deontic aspect of deh is used in determining future actions. There is no discussion on how the speakers use epistemic and deontic rights in interactions even though both are interrelated. Furthermore, the previous studies only dealt with adults' language. The present study explores how epistemic and deontic rights are marked by children and adults with deh by conducting a discourse analysis. The data were obtained from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). Speakers' neglect of information offered to them reveals that they instead make decisions based on the knowledge they get from their experiences. With this knowledge, the speakers make the message they deliver when they direct others' future actions. Deh reveals speakers' expectations that others will take an action based on the speakers' requests. While children still produce indirect arguments or even, they do not make any arguments, in some cases, adults directly provide arguments to support the claims of adults' deontic rights. Adults tend to talk about hypothetical events in the future in defending their ideas. It never happens in the case of children. The speakers of deh position themselves as the ones with higher epistemic and deontic rights. When the speakers manage future actions and the others do not agree with them, they do not insist that the recipients do what they ask. They realize that the recipients also have the right to decide. Ignoring others’ rights will harm their social relationships.

Challenges of client participation in the co-development of social and health care services: Imbalances of control over action and the management of the interactional agenda

Client participation is not only about deciding on one's own treatment, but it may also be conceived more generally as the right of the client to influence the planning and development of social and health care services. In this paper, we examine participants' rights to control and influence action in workshops in which social and health care professionals and clients co-develop the social and health care services provided by their municipality. Drawing on conversation analysis as a method, we investigate the interwovenness of the participants' rights to control interaction in the encounter (proximal deontic rights) and their right to decide about those future actions that can have concrete health consequences for them (distal deontic rights). Maintaining that it is the clients' distal deontic rights that underlie the motivation and legitimacy for their participation in the co-development workshops, we ask about the extent to which the clients' distal deontic rights are underpinned and constrained by who has the proximal deontic rights in the situation. The data set involves both face-to-face and online workshops. Our analysis shows that, in the face-to-face workshops, the agenda management by professionals involved control over both proximal and distal action. In the online workshops, the professionals seemed to have technical difficulties that momentarily disrupted the fluency of interaction. Despite these problems, which in principle might have given the clients more space to participate, this did not seem to happen. In contrast, the clients had great difficulties managing the interactional agenda, losing control over both proximal and distal action. Promoting ethical and more balanced client participation in the co-development processes in the future necessitates heightened awareness of the nuanced practices of interaction by which power imbalances are realized.

A study of emotion management and identity construction in Chinese medical treatment discussions

Based on a medical corpus, this study attempts to capture how doctors manage their emotions and construct their professional identity in treatment discussions. Using the Emotion Model and the Model of Epistemics and Deontics Gradient, I find that (1) when their professional expertise is questioned or doubted, doctors highlight their epistemic rights and displays negative emotions; (2) when their professional role is negated, doctors give the deontic rights to their patients and discharge negative emotions; and (3) when their professional ethics is challenged, doctors project their professional morality, reinforce their deontic rights and give vent to negative emotions. This study, by integrating the Confucian System of Moral Virtues (see) with Emotion Model, establishes a theoretical framework for examining the association between emotion management and identity construction in Chinese medical discourse.

Reported speech in problem telling

Like many institutional interactions, parent–teacher conferences are impregnated with a socially sanctioned distribution of epistemic and deontic rights. However, who has the right to know, to assess and to make decisions is less an overarching structural dimension than an interactional local accomplishment. This paper reports data from a research project on parent–teacher conferences that investigated the interactional constitution of a phenomenon increasingly reported by teachers: loss of authority, the systematic delegitimisation of their role. Adopting a conversation-analysis informed approach to a single case study concerning a nine-year-old child, I describe a specific resource – reported speech in problem telling – displayed by the mother during the dialogic phase of the second conference of the school year. We illustrate how, through this conversational resource, the mother accomplishes epistemic and moral work. After making information from her territory of knowledge more relevant than information provided by the teachers, she (1) provides incontestable evidential bases to her ‘problem trajectory’, (2) makes it prevail over the teacher’s ‘no-problem’ trajectory and (3) undermines the teacher’s epistemic authority by vicariously blaming her work. In the discussion, we suggest that the mother’s interactive competence in doing epistemic and moral work can explain why she succeeds in shaping the teacher’s professional conduct. In making the case for microanalysis-based teacher training, in the conclusion we discuss some applied implications of the study.

‘Who decided this?’: Negotiating epistemic and deontic authority in systemic family therapy training

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.

Joint planning in conversations with a person with aphasia

This study explores practices employed by a person with aphasia (PWA) and his wife to organize joint planning sequences and negotiate deontic rights (a participants' entitlement to initiate planning sequences and the entitlement to accept or reject a plan). We analyze two different conversations between a man with aphasia and his wife and their adult daughter. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), we identify practices that further the PWA's participation in the interaction while planning afternoon activities together with his wife. The PWA contributes to the planning talk by initiating and modifying planning sequences. The spouse supports his participation by aligning with his initiated actions and inviting him to collaborate in planning talk she initiates. Deontic authority is shared between the conversation partners and the PWA's agency is facilitated even during disagreement. The analysis offers insight into practices that allow a PWA to use his limited communicative resources to contribute competently to planning talk.

Co-leiderschap in vergaderingen

Abstract Co-leadership in meetings: A multimodal discourse analytical study In the last decade, leadership has been increasingly studied from a discursive perspective and attention has been drawn to how this process of influencing others towards achieving organizationally relevant goals, takes place in real life. Yet, not many studies have looked at (1) the way in which co-leadership constellations are negotiated in interaction, and (2) how this process takes place by means of verbal as well as non-verbal resources. In this paper, we integrate a multimodal perspective into our discourse analytical approach and analyze the co-leadership practices taking place during a scouting group meeting. In our analyses, we draw on the concepts of proximal and distal deontic status and stance to investigate these leadership processes in interaction, while also drawing attention to the role of epistemics in relation to how these deontic rights are enacted. From these analyses, we conclude that (1) in this co-leadership constellation, deontic rights are neatly divided, sometimes also in relation to the participants’ epistemic statuses; and (2) in spite of some ostensive challenges to the exertion of proximal and distal deontic claims, only claims that are congruent with the speakers’ statuses turn out to be influential in the interaction.

Collaborative decision-making in return-to-work negotiations

This study addresses the ways in which shared decision-making in multi-party return-to-work (RTW) negotiations is constructed as a collaborative practice. The research data are video-recorded Finnish RTW negotiations (n = 14), in which the physician, employer and employee make highly sensitive decisions concerning the employee's return to work after a long sick leave. We show how the participants used turn design, gazes and gestures as resources in both treating their co-participants as eligible to participate in decision-making and claiming the deontic rights for themselves. We also present a deviant case in which a negotiator included only one participant in the decision-making in their initial proposal, which was treated as accountable by the co-participants.

Caller resistance to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation in emergency calls for cardiac arrest.

A key objective of an emergency call for cardiac arrest is to recruit a bystander to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) until the ambulance arrives. Emergency medical services worldwide work towards increasing the rate of bystander-CPR, and existing research has identified a number of physical barriers to the provision of bystander-CPR. Yet, little is known about the specific ways in which emergency callers resist recruitment to perform basic first-aid, sometimes in the absence of any physical obstacle. This study investigated 65 emergency calls for cardiac arrest received in Australia in 2014 and 2015, in which the callers initially resisted CPR. We used conversation analysis to examine callers' practices to resist recruitment and call-takers' practices to counter this resistance. We found that callers who resisted CPR typically provided an account. When callers accounted for their resistance on deontic grounds, they expressed that CPR was not a possible course of action (e.g. "I can't do it"). When callers provided an epistemic account, their justification was based on their knowledge or opinion (e.g. "I think it's too late"). Our findings suggest that epistemic resistance can be a barrier to bystander-CPR. We identified two practices used by call-takers to address caller resistance based on epistemics. Providing more context on the purpose of CPR (e.g. "this is to help him in the meantime") seemed effective in persuading callers to perform CPR. By contrast, aligning with the caller's epistemic and deontic rights (e.g. "it's up to you") did not seem effective in persuading callers.

Syntactic Forms and Their Sequential Features in Advice-Giving in Mandarin Conversation

Advice-giving in Mandarin conversation is conducted through various syntactic forms. In this article, we explore several syntactic forms the speakers usually employ when doing advice-giving. An initial examination showed a difference in the distribution of advice-giving made through these practices. They are sequentially-specific syntactic forms of advice-giving and they are sensitive to the sequential environment. Further exploration on this distributional pattern suggested that the advice forms speakers selected display their evaluation of the sequential environment or interactional situation and it is closely related to the speaker’s orientation to deontic rights to give advice on a particular sequential position.

A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership

This article makes a case for investigating leadership from a micro-interactional perspective which integrates discursive, sequential and multimodal analytical layers. It thus builds on existing discursive leadership research by demonstrating that leadership is not achieved only through talk, but by means of a complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources. Focusing on video-recordings of authentic meetings, I investigate the interactional interplay between the superior, the meeting chair and the other participants by means of a deontic perspective. Drawing on the status–stance distinction and teasing out how proximal and distal deontic rights are enacted and how these relate to leader and follower identities when conceptualized from a social constructionist perspective, I demonstrate that leadership is an essentially collaborative accomplishment in which all participants play a crucial role. Finally, I argue that this can only be uncovered fully when attention is paid to the variety of means – verbal as well as non-verbal – that interlocutors have at their disposal when attempting to influence each other towards achieving organizationally relevant goals.

Challenging the interprofessional epistemic boundaries: The practices of informing in nurse-physician interaction

Interprofessional management of knowledge in health care settings appears to be particularly vital for the ways in which information circulates, medical decisions are taken, and nursing practices are implemented. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian Intensive Care Unit, this article investigates how the nurses orient to and concurrently challenge the nurse-physician epistemic boundaries by the different ways through which they perform “informing”, and make it work as a diagnostic-relevant activity. Adopting an ethnographic-nurtured discursive approach to a dataset of video-recorded morning briefings, we analyze the nurses' informing contributions in terms of sequential position, turn-taking and turn design. We identify five practices of informing and show how they display different degrees of agency and differently impact on the team's “infectious diseases diagnostic reasoning”. This article contributes to nurse-physician interaction studies by showing how the epistemic imbalance at play is interactionally accomplished by participants one interaction at a time. Particularly, the analysis demonstrates that the nurses actively contribute to the teamwork by a skillful management of knowledge that precedes the exercise of the physicians' epistemic and deontic rights implied in diagnosing and planning. Our findings illustrate how the nurses: a) exert their interactional agency without crossing the institutionally sanctioned epistemic and deontic boundaries to which they are observably oriented to; b) cautiously challenge the epistemic imbalance at play in nurse-physician interaction and c) actively contribute in setting the premises of the team's collective decisions. Conclusion and practical implications are proposed.

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches? Deontics and epistemics in discussions of health and well-being in participatory workplace settings

In participatory activities in the workplace, employees are invited to raise problems and suggest improvements to the management. Although it is widely acknowledged that employees rarely control decisions in these settings, little is known about the interactional resources that employees and managers draw upon when negotiating consensus about which initiatives to pursue in the future. We analyse interactions from participatory meetings in an industrial setting in relation to the topic of work shoes, showing how the participants orient to both their relative deontic rights (e.g. who can suggest and decide on initiatives) and epistemic rights (e.g. who can define a situation as problematic and assert what can be done about it). The analysis suggests that besides their low deontic status, employees’ fragile epistemic status constitutes an important but overlooked challenge to achieving improved working conditions through the participatory activities.

Setting the group agenda: negotiating deontic rights through directives in a task-based, oral, L2, group assessment

ABSTRACT The use of group-based, task-oriented, peer interaction formats in classroom and public L2 speaking tests has grown in recent years. However, these assessments have received comparatively little attention when compared to other formats such as the oral proficiency interview (OPI). In order to better understand the local exigencies of this group-based, peer interaction format, the current paper, using a Conversation Analytic (CA) methodology, explores the mechanisms through which consequences are brought about in such highly task-oriented, collaborative discourse. In doing so, I report on examinees’ use of directives to shape the emerging interactional agenda and so negotiate deontic rights relative to their co-participants. There is a focus, in particular, on the turn design and sequential placement of these directives and, from this, it is shown how different linguistic formats correlate to a propensity for recipients to either endorse (that is, enact) or circumvent (ignore, challenge) the interactional agenda imposed by said directive. Finally, this paper discusses some of the implications these findings have in terms of learner and assessor training.

Assessing a (gifted) child in parent-teacher conference

AbstractDelivering and acknowledging assessments are the most recurrent institutional activities occurring in parent-teacher conference. This paper reports data from a mother-teacher conference concerning a gifted child. We show how participants’ practices to accomplish and receive assessment in the report-assessment phase of the event: (a) display their relative epistemic and deontic rights, (b) are oriented to participants’ institutional relevant identities, and (c) project or even enact different and quite opposite assessment trajectories. We contend that struggles in assessing the child display participants’ different stances: teachers’ ‘normalizing’ and ‘group oriented’ trajectory vs. the mother’s orientation toward ‘doctorability’ and pressure for individualized treatment. Although typically occurring between routine-case oriented institutions vs. idiosyncratic-case oriented clients, such a struggle displays also the ‘paradoxical injunctions’ that frame teachers’ everyday work: adopting a ‘group-oriented’ perspective while at the same time being accountable for an individualized approach.

Social deontics: A nano‐level approach to human power play

AbstractThe notion of “deontic rights”—the capacity of an individual to determine action—is described as a tool to analyze human power plays in the turn‐by‐turn unfolding of social interaction. Drawing on various bodies of literature, the paper portrays the organization of the adjacency‐pair sequence as the key locus of negotiation over deontic rights. How such negotiations happen in practice is also considered. Two deontic patterns instantiating themselves in sequential relations—deontic congruence and deontic incongruence—are discussed. Negotiations of deontic rights are suggested to take place specifically in and through three different forms of deontic incongruence, each of which involves a subtle mismatch between the claims of deontic rights of the first speaker and the recipient's treatment of these claims. These implicit power plays easily escape the eye and are therefore difficult to reflect upon and counteract by the participants themselves, which makes a thorough understanding of these mechanisms important.