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published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

No description available.

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This study examines political accountability within the context of ministerial accountability towards the Scottish parliamentary committees. A review of the existing literature on accountability identified striking discrepancies between different disciplinary perspectives. In particular, political science research (e.g. Mayer, 1999) focuses on describing the structural mechanisms available for constraining the behaviour of those being made accountable. This literature includes research on ministerial accountability (e.g. Flinders, 1991), although largely focusing on accountability towards the parliamentary Chamber rather than the committees. By contrast, the psychological literature does not focus on accountability, but rather on developing a classification of accounts (e.g. Scott and Lyman, 1968) doing the kind of work that is examined in political science under ‘accountability’ (i.e. providing excuses and justifications to explain problematic behaviours), and testing these accounts using experimental designs (e.g. Weiner et al., 1987). However, given its focus on classification and experimental designs, the psychological literature on accounts treats language as reified and abstract. A third (discourse and conversation analytic) research tradition uses recordings of real-life verbal interactions to examine the turn-by-turn unfolding of interactions (e.g. Atkinson and Drew, 1979), but few studies focus on accountability, and none specifically investigate political accountability. My study is the first to bridge the gap between these three disciplinary perspectives by examining the practice of political accountability through the turn-by-turn unfolding of interactions between ministers and members of Scottish parliamentary committees. The thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of democracy in action by providing an insight into the practical ways in which accountability is accomplished within this specific real-life setting. The corpus of data was compiled from 27 hours of video recordings of interactions between ministers and members of four Scottish parliamentary committees. I analysed the data using conversation analysis (CA). Use of CA led me to identify indirectness as a pervading characteristic of the ways in which challenges are formulated and attended to in the interactions between committee members and ministers, as well as a number of ways in which committee members and ministers attended to matters of stake and interest in relation to such challenges. In addition, CA has allowed an insight into the limits of accountability by showing how ministers can avoid answering particular questions. These findings stand in stark contrast to the political science literature, which emphasises the adversarial nature of interactions within parliamentary settings and the availability of mechanisms for holding ministers to account (e.g. parliamentary committees) without investigating the way in which these mechanisms are used in practice. Furthermore, these findings contribute to the psychological literature on accounts by investigating their use within a real-life setting, and to the discourse and conversation analytic literature by showing the way in which well-known conversational devices (e.g. footing) are adapted to suit the specific context of parliamentary committee meetings with ministers.

Everyone has conversations. They affect our mind set, challenging our current knowledge and encouraging us to see differently and perhaps respond more broadly. Conversations create change in how we do our work; they impact how we relate to each other, how we may teach each other, how we interact with each other and how we decide to lead others. To ignore the impact conversations can have on us as individuals is overlooking not only the existence of others, but how others exist. Conversations, and the messages that are within them, play an integral part with how we view ourselves and define our own identity as well as how we place ourselves in our community. Stories, whether written or oral, carry a significant amount of history and an even more overwhelming piece of power. With the ability to hold an audience captive, they possess a uniqueness to transfer information that can be the cornerstone to creating new policies and programs and can consequently prompt a new leadership that intersects community and individual. Embedded within these stories are those conversations that have the capability to provoke the reader or listener toward new mental and emotional shifts; creating a greater awareness from where one first began. By use of an autoethnographical approach, I place myself in the position of an informant insider and an analyst outsider (Russell, 1999, p. 14) and lead the reader through the journey of interpreting storytelling as a scholarly practice. Incorporating a journey of self, I integrate a cultural method (Russell, 1999) while guiding the reader through timeless conversations.

Cette thèse consiste en une étude ethnographique au sein d’une organisation de la fonction publique du Canada, qui a pour but de décrire le processus mis en œuvre par une équipe de travail pour construire du sens et s’organiser. L’objectif principal est de répondre à la question suivante : Au sein des organisations gouvernementales où le changement est continu, comment les équipes de travail s’organisent-elles? Le cadre théorique élaboré dans cette thèse met l’accent principalement sur la théorie du sensemaking de Karl E. Weick, ainsi que sur le modèle discursif de l’organisation introduit par James R. Taylor, et inclut les travaux plus récents de chercheurs qui défendent l’approche constitutive de la communication organisationnelle. L’auteure propose un modèle théorique de l’organizing qui intègre les travaux de Weick et ceux de Taylor afin de décrire comment l’organisation se construit dans les réunions, dans les textes et dans les interactions.

Cette thèse consiste en une étude ethnographique au sein d’une organisation de la fonction publique du Canada, qui a pour but de décrire le processus mis en œuvre par une équipe de travail pour construire du sens et s’organiser. L’objectif principal est de répondre à la question suivante : Au sein des organisations gouvernementales où le changement est continu, comment les équipes de travail s’organisent-elles? Le cadre théorique élaboré dans cette thèse met l’accent principalement sur la théorie du sensemaking de Karl E. Weick, ainsi que sur le modèle discursif de l’organisation introduit par James R. Taylor, et inclut les travaux plus récents de chercheurs qui défendent l’approche constitutive de la communication organisationnelle. L’auteure propose un modèle théorique de l’organizing qui intègre les travaux de Weick et ceux de Taylor afin de décrire comment l’organisation se construit dans les réunions, dans les textes et dans les interactions.

Doktorsavhandling--Göteborgs universitet, 2002. / Résumé en anglais. Bibliogr. p. 301-317.