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BONA FIDE GROUPS
A Discourse Perspective
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–SANTA BARBARA
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
In a special issue of Communication Studies (1990), we voiced concern that communication researchers were studying small groups as if they were separate from their social and temporal contexts. Challenging the research community to move beyond container models of group communication, we advocated that scholars should develop constructs and methods to enable an understanding of the multilevel and interpretive processes of groups. All groups, we argued, influence and are influenced by the environments in which they are embedded.
For almost 20 years, small group researchers have heeded this challenge and scholars have published a great deal of work that focuses on groups in context. The bona fide group perspective, first articulated in 1990 (Putnam & Stohl, 1990), has influenced this new direction and particularly in the ways that communication scholars approach the study of groups (see Frey, 1994, 2003; Poole and Hollingshead, 2005).
At its most basic level, this perspective sets forth a set of theoretical concepts that enable researchers to treat all groups as part of social systems linked to their contexts and past histories, shaped by fluid boundaries, and capable of influencing their environments. This approach, then, is not merely a descriptor of a certain type of group (as the term is sometimes used) or the equivalent of studying a group in its natural environment (as it has been posited), nor is it designed to distinguish among the populations from which groups are created (students, employees, strangers, or volunteers). Rather, its central purpose is to focus on the dynamic interplay among fundamental characteristics of group process that are often overlooked in the extant literature. These features highlight the diverse ways that groups form their identities through negotiating and socially constructing their boundaries, relationships, and contexts. The bona fide perspective advances the study of generative mechanisms of dynamic group process that are central to all groups, regardless of their formation, task, or composition.
Selecting methods that can capture these generative mechanisms is particularly challenging. One method, discourse analysis, provides the flexibility needed to analyze these features of groups. This chapter, then, illustrates the ways in which discourse methods are particularly appropriate for examining the interface between boundary permeability and interdependence with context, the two major features of the bona fide perspective. Using discourse methods is only one way to examine bona fide groups and we selected it because this approach provides a powerful lens for capturing both the characteristics and processes of groups in context. In doing so, however, we recognize that not all discourse studies of groups embrace a bona fide perspective and clearly not all studies that examine bona fide groups employ discourse methods.
Specifically, research that embraces a bona fide approach crosses a wide array of group settings (field, online, laboratory), group tasks (conflict management to decision making to social support), functions (creative performance, public deliberation, information dissemination), and methods. Some of the methodologies that scholars use to study groups in context include: ethnography (Kramer, 2002, 2005), in-depth interviewing (Mills & Walker, 2008), case study (Barge & Keyton, 1994), participation observation (Lammers & Krikorian, 1997), and experimental design (May & Stohl, 2009). Analytical approaches that examine features of the bona fide perspective also vary widely, including thematic and content analysis (Alexander, Peterson, & Hollingshead, 2003; Kramer, 2005), rhetorical approaches (Howell, Brock, & Hauser, 2003; Lesch, 1994), narrative analysis (SunWolf & Leets, 2004), and statistical assessment (Berteotti & Seibold, 1994). Even though these methods provide insights about the bona fide perspective, some are better than others in capturing the socially constructed boundaries, relationships, and context of groups.
This chapter proceeds in four sections. First, we briefly review the characteristics of the bona fide perspective, the different orientations that scholars bring to this work, and the methodological challenges in using this approach. Second, we define discourse analysis, describe key elements of it, explain different schools or approaches to discourse analysis, and then show how these features could be used to study groups at their boundaries. Third, we set forth steps for doing discourse analysis, illustrate their uses in studies with the bona fide perspective, and then we provide an extensive exemplar of a project, based on Jane Baker's (2009) dissertation, one that incorporates discourse analysis and a bona fide lens to study network groups. Finally, we conclude through examining ethical issues, providing an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of discourse analysis, and offering recommendations to meet the challenges of using the bona fide lens.
Characteristics, Tenets, and Challenges of the
Bona Fide Perspective
As noted above, prior to the 1990s, most communication studies focused on the internal dynamics of groups without regard to how intragroup processes influence and are influenced by the contexts in which they are embedded. Group boundaries were taken for granted and viewed as static and unchangeable. The bona fide approach seeks to examine how group processes and outcomes (e.g., decision making, socialization, task completion, information processing, and conflict management) shape and are shaped by two interdependent dimensions, permeable boundaries and interdependence with immediate context.
Tenets and characteristics
We argue that the dynamic interplay between internal and external environments constitutes the essence of a group. The first tenet of the bona fide perspective is that the ways in which groups create identities and negotiate their boundaries comprise the central mechanisms that define and constitute the nature of “groupness.”
Permeable boundaries
The first dimension, permeable boundaries, challenges the often unstated but critical assumption that groups have fixed locations, maintain static borders, and exist apart from their contexts. The bona fide perspective explicitly recognizes that boundaries are neither arbitrarily predetermined nor permanent; nor are they defined primarily by group tasks, goals, or the presence of members. Rather, boundaries are socially constructed through the interactive and recursive linkages among these characteristics: (a) multiple memberships and the enacting of member roles; (b) representative roles; (c) fluctuating memberships and affiliations; and (d) group identity that draws on collective history and shared relationships.
Following this premise, the second tenet of this perspective is that the dynamic interactions among these four characteristics live out members’ histories; shape group identity; create, reproduce, or sever connections with internal and external environments; and reflexively define the nature of a group. Boundary construction, then, is an important group process that needs to be recognized and explored. This approach also posits a strong association between the ways that groups manage multiple and overlapping memberships and the maintenance of identity.
Interdependence with immediate context
The second dimension highlights the embeddedness of a group in its physical, task, cultural, political, historical, and social environment. The extent of a group's interdependence with its immediate context is not predetermined but rather socially constructed through the ways that groups interact in multiple environments. Thus, the bona fide perspective highlights the interconnections between communication processes and the ongoing social construction of boundaries linked to the immediate context. Interdependence is reciprocally negotiated through the following characteristics: (a) both intragroup and intergroup communication; (b) coordinated actions within and across groups; (c) negotiation of jurisdiction and autonomy; and (d) collaborative sense-making activities, including the development of frames to interpret intergroup relationships. The concatenation of these four characteristics leads to the third tenet of the bona fide perspective: contextual interdependence is multidimensional and waxes and wanes throughout a group's history, shaping group life through the mediation of identity, autonomy, and connectedness.
Interdependence with immediate context shows how a group's internal processes, such as productivity, efficacy, and task accomplishment, are mutual dependent on external factors. For example, rather than seeing task dimensions, such as complexity, urgency, and accountability as static structural variables, we treat these features as socially constructed activities enacted at various points in time. Some groups actively define what they do and set their own priorities and criteria for decision making, whereas others have powerful external dependencies. Strong as well as weak external linkages may create communicative dilemmas for groups as they struggle to represent relevant stakeholder positions.
Within this perspective neither internal nor external relations are privileged. From the very conceptualization of what a group is to the methods used to study it, the bona fide perspective requires researchers to explore the production and reproduction of boundaries, the enactment of personal and collective identities, and the appropriation of historical and social context. This leads to the final tenet of the perspective: group permeability and interdependence with context are articulated, interdependent, and interwoven processes that create, sustain, and dissolve group life.
The many faces of the bona fide group perspective
The bona fide group perspective has generated a great deal of attention in the theoretical literature (e.g., Frey, 2003; Poole & Hollingshead, 2005) as well as in the empirical realm (e.g., Krikorian & Kiyomiya, 2003; SunWolf & Leets, 2004). We identify five distinct approaches that scholars employ in studying groups from a bona fide lens. These approaches have a direct relationship to the methods that researchers use and the ways that they incorporate the dimensions and characteristics of this perspective.
In the first approach, researchers employ the term bona fide as a type of group. Bona fide is an adjective or a marker that describes a category of groups, different from, for example, autonomous or experimentally created groups. For example, Galanes (2003) frames her investigation as “an exploratory study of bona fide group leaders” and Frey's award-winning text Groups in Context is subtitled Studies of Bona Fide Groups.The label of bona fide group would suggest that some groups have permeable boundaries and interdependence with context while others do not. Our argument, in turn, is that all groups enact these two dimensions.
In the second approach, scholars treat the bona fide perspective as a catalogue in which the characteristics form a checklist of variables that a study illustrates (Mills & Walker, 2009). These analyses describe or index how a particular group exemplifies the key characteristics of the bona fide perspective rather than exploring the dynamic processes that shape a group's trajectory. Researchers rely on excerpts from interviews (Oetzel & Robbins, 2003), components of models (Keyton & Stallworth, 2003), and checklists (Sherblom, 2003) to demonstrate the presence of bona fide group features.
In the third approach, researchers treat the perspective as a rationale or a framework to justify a particular type of study. Here the perspective provides a justification for selecting a project (see e.g., Frey, 1994; SunWolf & Seibold, 1998). Scholars often present the two central dimensions of the bona fide theory at the beginning and end of the articles, but the actual analyses of group process focus on other constructs. In this way the perspective becomes a research justification rather than an examination of ways that groups relate to their contexts.
The fourth approach casts the perspective as a nascent group theory in need of extension (e.g., Lammers & Krikorian, 1997; Stohl & Holmes, 1992; Waldeck, Shepard, Teitelbaum, Farrar, & Seibold, 2002). Scholars extend the perspective through creating new ways to enrich current dimensions and features of groups. Lammers and Krikorian (1997), for example, derived an expanded set of bona fide concepts, such as temporal control and contextual measures of degree centrality from a detailed set of observational records of surgical teams. These articles illustrate that the value of the bona fide perspective lies in the development of new features that embrace the dynamic interplay of boundary construction and interaction with context.
The final approach casts the bona fide perspective as an enacted process that focuses on how groups negotiate internal and external boundaries and socially construct their identities (Alexander, Peterson, & Hollingshead, 2003; Kramer, 2002, 2005; Stohl, 2007; Tracy & Standrefer, 2003). In these studies, scholars examine the ways that ongoing group processes create, maintain, and transform group identities based on the interplay of bona fide characteristics. The fundamental question that drives these studies is how do group members maintain their sense of groupness while negotiating their internal and external existence across time and space? This final approach fully embodies the tenets of the bona fide group theory and employs methods and processes designed to capture how boundaries and context reverberate with one another.
Methodological challenges in using the bona fide perspective
If a researcher chooses to embrace a bona fide perspective, such an investigation gives rise to four challenges that have direct bearing on research methods. First, utilizing a bona fide lens requires studying group processes in ways that capture both the internal and external communication. Specifically, researchers need to attend to a complex and dynamic network of intra- and intergroup communication simultaneously. Thus, defining the scope of relevant actors, identifying germane groups, and locating relevant contextual material are iterative processes in which a researcher moves back and forth interrogating group interactions and larger contextual sites. A second and related challenge is to identify and examine the multiple levels in which relevant interactions takes place. Groups are nested within other groups and the points of connection (i.e., the nexus) are often blurred and in flux. Research methods must be able to capture some aspects of these points of connection.
A third challenge relates to the study of boundaries; that is, it is important that researchers examine group boundaries as socially constructed features that members negotiate. Even if they construct a tightly bound group, members at some point determine how permeable or impermeable their boundaries will be. Since individual members may draw these lines differently, symbolic notions of membership infuse boundary constructions and the ways that members enact their roles. The research method must capture these symbolic boundary activities as they emerge within group interaction. A final challenge lies in the multifaceted, unfixed, and emergent nature of group identity that the bona fide perspective sets forth. As the pivotal feature of this theory, research designs and methods need to focus on the ways that groups work out their identities through negotiating their boundaries and roles within an interdependent context.
Using Discourse Methods to Meet the Challenges
As we noted in the epilogue to Frey's (2003) book, discourse methods are particularly suited to meeting these challenges (Stohl & Putnam, 2003). First, discourse analysis captures the process-orientation of negotiating boundaries within the group and in the larger intergroup context. Process refers to the ongoing features of group development and the dynamic interactions that constitute a group's context. Discourse centers on the “negotiation of meaning as it unfolds through the complex interplay of both socially and historically produced texts” (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004, p. 22). In other words, discourse methods enable the researcher to oscillate between, within, and among groups and to track mutual influences across time and space. A related reason for using discourse analysis is to tap into the nexus or the nested intergroup relationships. Through a focus on texts that are drawn on and enacted in multiple arenas (e.g., intragroup, intergroup, organizational, and societal), discourse methods cross local and global levels.
Finally, discourse is a recursive process in which language both constructs and reflects back on the group process. Specifically, discourse brings “certain phenomena [in the social world] into being, including objects of knowledge, categories of social subjects, forms of self, social relationships, and conceptual frameworks” and these constructions reflect back on the intragroup process (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004, p. 154). In effect, this method draws on and takes account of past interactions, historical practices, and social factors that exist beyond the words and actions under observation. In the enacted approach to bona fide groups, discourse analysis can capture liminality or those moments of flux in which a group exists in a state of suspended development as members shape, redefine, and make sense of boundary transitions (Stohl & Putnam, 2003). To show how this method can meet the challenges of studying groups with a bona fide lens, we present an overview of discourse analysis, apply this method to the extant literature, and articulate steps for using this method. Then we provide an extended example of how to analyze contradictions and dialectical tensions as a discourse method to study groups from the bona fide perspective.
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis focuses on the language, messages, texts, and symbols of interactions. It centers particularly on the forms and patterns of language use that surface in naturally occurring talk and written texts, such as documents, policies, and media publications. Discourse analysts are typically interpretive and view discourse practices as key features in the construction of social reality. Importantly, discourse analysis is not just a method or a set of techniques; rather, it assumes that words and texts both constitute and reflect back on structures and actions. High-quality discourse analysis stays close to the text and relies on language use to analyze concepts and group processes. Researchers select particular features of language under study and embrace a protocol for doing discourse analysis (e.g., speech acts, conversational analysis, or critical discourse analysis; see Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). Scholars aim to discover patterns in the discourse use, ones that yield insights through tying them back to the group or the larger context in which groups are embedded.
As a basis for definition, discourse analysis is distinct from content or interactional analysis (Meyers & Seibold, this volume). Specifically, researchers who code transcripts of group interactions typically employ a priori category systems that center on message functions and characteristics. The process of coding breaks messages into units based on operationally defined categories while discourse analysis maps or charts types and interrelationships among discursive patterns, texts, and social contexts. In content analyses, overall frequency or number of occurrences of particular units drives functional and interpretive claims while in discourse analysis patterns emerge from what the language does and how meanings and patterns extend across time and space. The significance of an utterance is not rooted in its quantitative assessment but rather what language accomplishes in relationship to other locally-and/or globally-established texts. While the two approaches are closely related, we contend that discourse analysis is particularly suited to the bona fide group perspective because it functions recursively to link language to texts, taps into both local and global levels, and captures nested interactions that cross contexts. Moreover, the centrality of meaning in discourse analysis parallels a key characteristic of the bona fide perspective, that is, how members make sense of their boundaries and their intergroup relationships. In effect, discourse analysis is a valuable method for examining how the dimensions and characteristics of the bona fide perspective are enacted and interpreted in an environmental context.
Units of discourse analysis
Discourse analysis typically draws on key units of language: codes, linguistic structures, language-in-action, text, context or intertexts, and meanings (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). Codes refer to the ways that discourse names, labels, or frames issues. For example, using the word “crisis” or “emergency” when calling for a decision, frames the situation differently than labeling it a “recurring problem.” Thus, the choice of words influences how group members enact their processes and make sense of their deliberations.
Linguistic structure centers on the order, syntax, and sequence of language patterns, typically ones that evolve and change over time. Language patterns are ways to examine recurring use of discourse features. For instance, a study of the sequencing of messages in a town hall meeting focuses on the recurring question– answer patterns and how they relate to group deliberations (Tracy & Standerfer, 2003). Researchers also draw on other features of language, such as turn taking, topic shifts, qualifiers, and conversational repairs to examine how discourse enacts or accomplishes social processes. For example, Adkins and Brashers (1995) examined the role of disclaimers and powerless speech in computer-mediated groups. They observed that the use of words that function as qualifiers (such as usually, sometimes, for the most part, etc.) in conjunction with tag questions (i.e., statements that end with questions) reduce the credibility and persuasiveness of a group member's message.
In a similar vein, language is rooted in actions through the ways that words produce performances (e.g., speech acts), provide accounts and set forth explanations for current and past decisions, and negotiate rights and obligations. Specifically, conversational performances within and between cross-disciplinary teams demonstrate how members construct their identities in unique ways and balance tensions between groups and organizational departments (Donnellon, 1996). Examining the action features of language, like the use of directives from external agents, addresses the challenge to connect internal and external group process. Directives are speech acts that convey requests, instructions, orders, or commands (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). To illustrate, Jones (1992) compared gender differences in the frequency, targets, and types of directives given within a group and to a group. Finding no gender differences, she discovered that the use of solidarity expressions (e.g., our team, we, together) softened the face-threatening potential of giving directives within and to a group.
In discourse analysis, the notion of a text has two meanings. Specifically, a text refers to the type of data that a researcher uses, for example, transcripts, documents, reports, and a text also signifies the accumulation of social interactions. When studying group processes, texts may include, material artifacts such as the minutes of past meetings, a tape recording of a particular decision-making session, the transcripts of interviews with group members, and the performance evaluation of a group by an external evaluator. These texts serve as records of past conversations that become assimilated and inscribed in collective forms, for example, organizational and group practices constitute texts, even when they are not in written form (Taylor, 1993). Texts, then, are also discourse units that exist in a reflexive relationship with ongoing interactions; that is, records and memories of past interactions both enable and constrain ongoing language use.
In the bona fide perspective, texts might consist of disagreements among members from past interactions, policies and practices that govern group jurisdiction; role episodes outside of the group; and/or the context features that members draw on to negotiate their group's identity. As a specific example, Tracy and Standerfer (2003) examined group interactions in a video-recorded, media-aired school board meeting. Their analysis of discourse units revealed that coalitions among members from past meetings, ways that nominations for new members were handled in the past, and the subtle challenges that one member made in the meetings were linked to the larger public audience and to future school board elections. Interactions in the present drew from discourse patterns in the past and became a resource for current deliberations that in turn shaped future interactions. Of particular note, the ways that texts crossed time and space provided an intriguing arena for examining contradictions and inconsistencies between what group members said and what they did over time.
Research on texts often focuses on macro- as well as micro-analyses, including the social and economic circumstances and the larger environments in which groups are embedded. For example, Hardy, Lawrence, and Nelson (1998) examined the discourse of a volunteer group called Community Partners, comprised of representatives of 13 different organizations that provided services (such as counseling, training, education, placement, etc.) for the unemployed. The group met monthly for over a year prior to engaging in a collaboration workshop. Their analysis centered on the discourse patterns that linked the context, the social and economic factors, and members’ respective organizations (e.g., leveling the playing field, not fighting for the pie, and forming a partnership) that led the group members to move beyond simply sharing information to enact a shared identity. Discourse signaled which macro-level context features were salient and how members appropriated these features in their group deliberations prior to, during, and after the collaboration.
From a discourse approach, context also consists of the layering of texts, known as intertextuality. Intertexuality is defined as “a link in a chain of texts, reacting to, drawing in and transforming other texts” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 262). Thus, a critical move that discourse analysts make is to draw on texts in the larger context to make inferences about language use, the significance of ongoing patterns, and the meanings of group interactions. To illustrate, the information-sharing process within the collaboration group in the Hardy et al. (1998) study drew on discourses from the 13 member organizations as well as the regulatory or legal environment in which this group worked. This layering or chaining together of texts across different arenas drew on intertextuality. Discourse researchers often sample across arenas (e.g., conducting a discourse analysis of legal texts or one on organizational documents) as ways of interpreting group member discussions about eligibility of clients. The linking together of texts from different arenas often provides a basis for making sense of group interactions. Of central importance in the bona fide perspective is how concepts such as interdependence with context and multiple memberships are enacted through texts that link internal and external discourses. Analyses that draw on these chains of texts, then, are particularly appropriate for examining the interface of multiple and nested intergroup processes.
Finally, most approaches to discourse analysis focus on meanings or how recurring patterns of language provide insights about interpreting a phenomenon under study. Meanings stem from the relationships among discourse use, texts, and contexts and are linked to insights about group process. Scholars who analyze particular symbolic forms, such as metaphors, narratives, rituals, and contradictions, also examine how meaning emanates through the interplay of discourse patterns, such as oppositional tensions or story plots. For example, Lesch's (1994) study of rituals in a consciousness-sharing group illustrated how story-telling episodes preserved the group's identity despite fluctuations in membership and inevitable change.
Types of discourse analysis
Four types of discourse analysis are common in the group literature: conversational analysis, pragmatics, rhetorical analysis, and critical-postmodern studies (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Woodilla, 1998). Conversational analysis uses both verbal and vocal overtones, such as pauses, interruptions, topic shifts, and turn taking to analyze group interactions. Donnellon's (1996) study of the dimensions of team talk examines power differences among team members through analyzing the use of interruptions, repetition of questions, formal address, and topic changes. In a similar way, O'Donnell (1990) employs conversational analysis to examine how management exerted differential status over labor in quality of work life meetings. These studies track specific and detailed linguistic sequences that enact group differences.
Another type of discourse analysis, pragmatics, focuses on how language signals actions, for example, making a request, providing an account, giving a promise, stating an apology, or offering an excuse are activities that use language to enact these respective practices. For instance, the use of words, such as pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, can enact social distance or closeness among group members and reveal indicators of team identification through using such terms as “we” and “our” (Donnellon, 1996).
A third type of discourse analysis draws from rhetoric and focuses on argumentation, persuasion, and symbol use. Researchers center their analyses on broad-based language patterns, such as arguments, metaphors in language use, or group narratives. Bormann's (1996) symbolic convergence theory adopts a rhetorical approach to examine stories, visions, and fantasies in group interactions. Studies that investigate argument patterns in groups employ elements from rhetorical analysis and link them to argument quality, decision making, and influence processes (Seibold & Lemus, 2005; Seibold, Lemus, & Kang, 2010).
The fourth approach, critical and postmodern perspectives, examines how language exerts control or emancipates groups. Researchers study how groups are enabled or constrained in working out their identities in a social context. Analysts often focus on multiple and conflicting patterns of discourse that reveal how meanings are negotiated in ways that enable or constrain groups. For example, Barker (1993, 1999) showed how the discourse of discipline in a team enacted a form of control that was the opposite of its self-organizing mission. In a company that implemented a program of self-managed teams, he demonstrated how word choice, syntax, and language patterns in the Delta group pressured team members to conform to their own rules. Ironically, this member-imposed pressure (i.e., concertive control) constrained the group and undermined the vision of this self-organizing team.
In postmodern analyses, meanings emanate from what is present as well as absent in a text, in the ways that ambiguities open space for multiple discourses, and how discourse functions ironically to inscribe what it seeks to suppress (Mumby, 2004). Discourse units such as paradox, dialectical tensions, ambiguity, and irony are particularly useful in these analyses. Moreover, these approaches can capture the liminality of group processes, that is, the moments of transition in which a group exists in a suspended state or the ways that members enact their representative roles as simultaneously present and absent in a group's deliberations (Mumby & Stohl, 1991).
Thus, the study of discourse in groups varies from examining language-in-use to studying general and enduring systems of talk that are situated in historical and social practices (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). Moreover, a study might examine talk and text in local interactions, such as conversational analysis and pragmatics, and relate these to historically situated texts, evident in rhetorical and critical analyses. For example, Geist and Chandler (1984) employ a pragmatic approach to investigate how members of a hospital executive group shared accounts about implementing group and organizational changes. Their focus on language use, however, was also tied to the discourse of role status embedded in group and organizational relationships. As suggested above, a scholar may combine several approaches to discourse analysis, even though his or her study centers primarily on one type. Deciding which type of analysis to use is mostly a matter of research questions, nature of the data itself, and personal preferences. Choices of theoretical frames, ways to connect to the intellectual community, and research strategy are important in selecting an approach for discourse analysis (Prichard, Jones, & Stablein, 2004).
Doing Discourse Analysis within the Bona Fide Perspective
Although a number of studies that use the bona fide perspective employ qualitative methods, only a few incorporate discourse analysis per se (Alexander et al., 2003; Barge & Keyton, 1994; Meier, 2003; Stohl, 2007; Parrish-Sprowl, 2006; Tracy & Standerfer, 2003). Discourse analysis requires selecting particular language features, engaging in systematic analysis of patterns, and linking these patterns to texts and contexts. Other qualitative approaches, such as thematic coding (Kramer, 2002, 2005), case studies with illustrative comments (Houston, 2003), and communication activity analyses (Krikorian & Kiyomiya, 2003) provide insights about the role that communication plays in studying groups in context, but discourse analysis focuses on particular language units.
Data selection and research questions
To conduct discourse analysis, researchers need to select the data, the research problem or question, and the particular features of language to analyze. Clearly, an array of textbooks offers guidance in conducting these tasks (Phillips & Hardy, 2002; Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000; Wood & Kroger, 2000). For selecting data, textbooks typically favor naturally occurring talk; hence, transcripts of group interactions, either face-to-face or electronic ones, are certainly starting points to examine permeable boundaries and interdependence with context.
To capture the intergroup context, however, researchers may want to conduct interviews (Kramer, 2002), obtain blogs, on-discussions, bulletin boards, or news-groups (Alexander et al., 2003; Krikorian & Kiyomiya, 2003), develop transcripts of video conferences (Meier, 2003) and media reports (Houston, 2003) or examine documents, such as training manuals (Mills & Walker, 2009), and field notes from participant observations (Kramer, 2005). Collecting data from multiple sources within and outside the group seems pivotal for examining the internal and external features of groups in context. Data that provides rich descriptors, for example, stories or reports about team coordination, incidents that reveal negotiations of jurisdiction and autonomy, and tales of enacting representative roles or multiple memberships provide excellent fodder for analyzing the concepts central to the bona fide group perspective.
The selection of data, however, is closely intertwined with the research goals and objectives that guide a particular project. Typically, we recommend selecting research questions from an interplay of the phenomena under study, the extant literature, and the overall aim of a project. For example, Barge and Keyton (1994) drew from verbatim transcripts of a City Council meeting, media accounts of the council's actions, and past reports of Council deliberations. Using a critical approach, their questions centered on the interrelationships between the Council and its immediate context, particularly regarding the role of power, coalition formation, and social influence. Moving away from the extant literature, they discovered that social influence in the bona fide perspective operated more as power issues rooted in previous decisions rather than as social influence attempts in the group's interactions. Specifically, they selected framing and reframing as discourse methods to examine the strategies that decision makers employed in defining issues and shaping the Council's identity.
In effect, interesting questions often arise from combining concepts with the bona fide group approach, understanding the extant literature, and teasing out puzzles that arise from the group experience. A “puzzle” is what seems peculiar, unpredictable, or contradictory in the situation. Interesting questions often challenge what participants or scholars hold to be true.
Discourse units and data analysis
Selecting which discourse units to analyze is often the most tedious step in the process. These choices come from moving back and forth through the data, with an eye to the research problem and the concepts under investigation. Knowledge of the context, the participants, and the larger picture of the group are crucial in selecting language units, tracking them, and linking them to social and organizational texts. For example, with the bona fide lens, researchers might target codes such as the use of pronouns, nouns, and identity markers that refer to external roles (Stohl, 2007), problem framing, such as how members name and label issues and then foreground them for the group (Barge & Keyton, 1994), or language structures such as sequences of questions and answers that expose hidden agendas and residues of past conversations (Tracy & Standerfer, 2003).
The research puzzle also draws the analyst to particular language units. For example, in a study of how groups resisted a new team system, Parrish-Sprowl (2006) was puzzled by the pervasiveness of such phrases as “management has tried these things before” and “the union is an obstructionist that creates suspicion.” Working from a social/historical context, he discovered that a “discourse of failure” emanated from the texts of past change programs, oppositional rhetoric between labor-management, and weak links to a highly competitive market. These patterns helped him analyze how the labor groups enacted fixed boundaries and loose interdependence with context in ways that explained institutional resistance.
To make interpretations from the data, we recommend a systematic analysis of the discourse units through mapping, plotting, or counting them. This charting of exact phrases, words, and descriptors allows patterns to arise from the data. Patterns can also incorporate linguistic features of context, time, or development markers, provide links to texts and context features, and tap into the overall group process. Some analysts use such computer programs as ATLAS or NVivo to track units, their interrelationships, and patterns. These programs consolidate and plot different words, sort the patterns, and provide a way to index them. Although they are useful sorting techniques, they do not provide interpretations of the data or test research claims (Phillips & Hardy, 2002).
Making interpretations requires organizing discourse patterns in meaningful ways; moving back and forth between the patterns and the data, making potential claims, and testing out inferences about them. Some analysts rely on repetition of units, juxtaposition of patterns in the text, content of the interaction, and interrelationships among texts (intertextuality) to make claims from the data. We view this step as a very messy process that requires considerable tolerance for ambiguity combined with a desire to tease out subtleties and insights in the data.
To illustrate how discourse analysts make claims, we use the example of Cynthia's (Stohl, 2007) study of an executive business retreat that focused on the succession of a company president. Her analysis was part of a larger project in which several researchers examined the transcripts of three days of meetings from a Canadian Broadcast Corporation's documentary film about Sam Steinberg's search for a successor. From a bona fide perspective, the first step was to understand the history of the group and the context in which the group was operating. Methodologically, this step enabled Cynthia to link specific features of the group discourse to other local, global, and institutional texts, that is, intertextuality. Virtually all the articles she reviewed (scholarly and popular press) as well as several case studies of the corporation made explicit reference to the Steinberg family's prominence as a highly successful Jewish-Canadian family. In the documentary neither the narrator nor any of the group members explicitly stated that the family was Jewish; however, the group interactions embodied the religious/ethnic identity in shared experiences, stories, rituals, and language use.
With this background knowledge, Cynthia began her analysis by focusing on the references to the organization's Jewish family heritage embedded in the discourse. Connecting her analysis of language-use patterns (e.g., pronouns, references to external context) with group members’ representative roles, she drew interpretations about an individual's position as both an outsider and an insider, and the potential that this role offered for opening group boundaries within the organization's context and tightening interdependence to an external market. She read through the text repeatedly and tracked words that referred to external texts (e.g., Jewish heritage, Friday night dinners, and family relationships) as patterns that revealed the status of group members during the succession meetings. Then, she drew on her background and knowledge of Jewish customs to interpret these references as both organizational and Jewish-insider and outsider symbols.
This analysis raises a critical and often unacknowledged point about using discourse analysis to make social claims (Cunliffe, 2003). Reflexivity refers to the role of the researcher in selecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data. It advocates that an investigator needs to inform readers about his or her stance in a study. Thus, discourse scholars make no claims about objectivity, even though they argue for systematic, patterned, and detailed analyses of texts. Specifically, Cynthia, in her study of the executive business retreat, describes her own background and how it influences her selection of discourse methods and interpretations. Importantly, someone unfamiliar with the Jewish context of this group might miss the subtle references and the insider/outsider nature of group membership.
Thus, we see that doing discourse analysis with a bona fide group lens requires drawing data from a wide array of sources, particularly inside and outside the group. We urge scholars to select and map discourse units through moving back and forth among key concepts, puzzles, and knowledge of the extant literature. These patterns, when intertwined with relevant texts in the larger context, yield an understanding of group identity rooted in a bona fide perspective.
In the next section, we provide an extended exemplar of a project that adopted a bona fide perspective and discourse analysis to examine diversity groups in an organization. Through discussing the goal of her project, data collection, and data analysis, Jane examined how these groups negotiated their boundaries and identities in ways that both enabled and constrained their overall missions.
A study of employee diversity networks
Jane's (Baker, 2009) research focused on employee network groups as units aimed at creating awareness of organizational diversity and addressing issues of gender, race, disability, or sexual orientation in the workplace. Her overall research question was: how do members construct group boundaries in ways that enable and constrain their diversity goals? She selected groups as the primary unit of analysis because the diversity networks functioned as distinct units with executive committees and officers enacting tasks for their units. Thus, her study examined how each group communicated with its officers and its own members, with other network groups, and with corporate departments such as the Diversity Office. It also addressed how each group negotiated its identity and visibility within the company.
She studied two network groups, a Black and an Hispanic one, at a large international oil corporation called “Summit.” The group members were employees who were part of multiple groups and connected with the diversity and human resources departments. She got access to the groups through an human resources officer, who was an acquaintance and knew the Vice-President of Diversity. Rather than beginning with a particular discourse approach, she developed initial research questions based on the bona fide group characteristics. In this way, Jane held group boundaries and interdependence together simultaneously without placing one as figure and the other as ground.
Then, Jane read over the texts multiple times and finally selected dialectical analysis as a discourse approach for the research. As a type of postmodern approach, dialectical analysis focuses on the ways that discourse signals the struggle to hold oppositional tensions together. In particular, it centers on how group members embrace the “both–and” of bipolar pairs. For example, when group members indicated a push–pull between wanting exclusive membership in one diversity group and preferring to belong to multiple groups, they expressed a contradiction or inconsistency between opposites that potentially negated each other. Dialectical analysis focuses on how participants see the opposites as interdependent, feel the tensions from the push–pull between them, struggle to hold them together, and make choices or take actions that manage these tensions in explicit or implicit ways. Deciding to do a dialectical analysis was not an easy one for Jane and she explored a wide array of options, including studying narratives and group rituals. But after multiple readings of the interview texts, field notes, and organizational documents, she was struck by the tensions that the groups faced in achieving their goals and crafting their unique organizational identities; hence, a dialectical analysis seemed isomorphic with the data and the group-related problems. In selecting this approach, she embraced a postmodern discourse stance to probe the puzzle of why these groups seemed to have problems achieving the fullness of their potential.
Data collection
Her main data consisted of 30 semi-structured interviews: 14 with members of each group and two with corporate diversity officers. She contacted the officers of the networks and asked them for names of members to interview. The interviews with diversity officers revealed the nexus between the groups and the relationship of the groups to the organizational context. Interviews captured how members made sense of their groups’ identities, negotiated boundaries that defined their groups, and described the ways that groups embraced corporate values and vision. They also revealed the insights of the active and less active members.
In addition, she collected web documents and took field notes at several network events, including executive board meetings and two diversity conferences. She used the field notes of the executive board meetings to reveal tensions within the groups, namely, attracting versus losing members, focusing on group versus individual success, and prioritizing the network versus individual members’ jobs. For example, she analyzed comments, such as “I have always looked at it [the network group] not like a volunteer opportunity, but as an extension of what I do.” and “ … anytime I need some time to … do something that's related to the network, if it doesn't contradict my job or put me behind …, then the staff here is more than willing to let [me] do it.” These different quotations revealed the tensions among the members between either treating the network group as part of an employee's job or pitching in only when it would not interfere with day to day work.
Data analysis
To analyze the data, Jane took the comments from the interviews and put them into spreadsheets that represented the eight characteristics of the bona fide perspective. These charts basically plotted themes related to different organizational areas or targets (e.g., individual ties to the networks, intragroup communication with members, interactions with other network groups, and relationships with management). For example, if an officer discussed difficulties in retaining members, Jane positioned this theme under the characteristic of fluctuating group membership. This process revealed a number of contradictions and mixed messages. For example, members expressed pride in the autonomy of their networks, yet some of them felt that upper management policed them. They experienced uncertainty about their networks’ positions in the company, yet they considered Summit to be supportive and rewarding of diversity groups. Networks boasted hundreds of organizational members, yet officers often felt a lack of employee involvement.
Discourse units and research findings
These contradictions pointed to the use of dialectics as a discourse unit. A contradiction referred to the enactment of seemingly antithetical group practices and dialectics centered on the struggle to embrace both of these bipolar pairs (Putnam, 1986; Tracy, 2004). Thus, Jane treated both poles in the contradictions as essential for social practices, examined how the groups experienced tensions, and focused on how members made choices in handling the tensions between the poles. To identify the contradictions, Jane selected words and key phrases that revealed oppositional stances in a group's practices, tensions in constructing its boundaries, and external dilemmas that arose in the intergroup context (Johnson & Long, 2002). For example, members used phrases like “including versus excluding outsiders,” “participation in one versus multiple networks,” and “similarities versus distinctions among the groups.”
After Jane grouped these polar opposites into her charts, she created a tree that outlined overarching contradictions and alignment of opposite pairs. This practice produced a theme by examining how the network members struggled to connect the poles and multiple related tensions. Thus, she used the contradictions to make inferences about overarching and recurring tensions that the groups faced (e.g., autonomy versus control and tightly versus loosely coupled network groups). This step led to a list of major dialectical tensions involved in negotiating group boundaries, ones related to the characteristics of bona fide groups.
To illustrate, members experienced tensions in hosting both narrow and broad-based activities, in focusing on both single and multiple network memberships, and in advancing the group as a whole while promoting the careers of individual members. These tensions aligned with fluctuating and multiple memberships in that employees often belonged to more than one network group and groups planned programs that appealed to their own members as well as to employees outside their groups. Even though broad-based activities drew a large number of participants, active members often saw them as less relevant to their group's needs. Moreover, since employees could belong to more than one network group, membership often fluctuated, a pattern that resulted in a less stable base of members. In effect, by examining the choices made to manage these dialectical tensions, Jane related them to the characteristics of stable but permeable boundaries.
After this initial stage of coding, Jane then classified the dialectical themes into targets: (1) intragroup, (2) individual-group, (3) group-organization, and (4) intergroup. She remained close to the discourse to make this classification by relying on descriptions of internal communication among members or relationships to the other network groups. She also identified two major types of intergroup tensions: (1) between network groups; and (2) between the group and the executive leadership of Summit. At the intergroup level, tensions often emerged through embracing both cooperation and competition between the networks, such as working together on key events while competing for the evaluation of premier group in the Diversity Office's performance appraisal. At the group-organizational level, tensions typically emerged because of struggles between organizational policies and a group's need for actions.
Overall, this type of analysis employed the constant comparison method, commonly used in grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Constant comparison relied on systematic comparison of similarities and differences between the themes. Hence, sets of dialectical tensions and themes were compared within targets (e.g., intergroup) and across targets (e.g., individual-group with intragroup). These comparisons yielded concepts based on core themes that operated at higher levels of abstraction above the unit of a discourse phrase and that integrated the dimensions and characteristics of bona fide groups to ways that group members managed the tensions. This step paralleled Strauss and Corbin's (1990) analytical approach of action–interaction strategies, that is, how a particular phenomenon was handled or carried out and the consequences of these actions.
To arrive at this final step, Jane drew from the theoretical work on dialectics to determine how members negotiated the push–pulls of competing tensions. She employed approaches from classic dialectical theory and compared interactions with actions to determine how the groups managed their tensions (Poole & Putnam, 2007; Seo, Putnam, & Bartunek, 2004; Tracy, 2004). For example, source splitting occurred when some members handled these tensions by favoring one pole while others selected the opposite one. Specifically, the officers and active members of the groups often felt controlled by the Diversity Office while the less active members believed that Summit empowered the groups. Thus, the groups managed the autonomy and control dialectic through source splitting among their members. Analyzing how dialectical tensions were managed aided in deciphering relationships among them and drawing conclusions about group boundaries and the intergroup context. In particular, Jane discovered a form of concertive control that operated at the intergroup rather than the group or the organizational levels (Barker, 1993). This type of control, in conjunction with highly permeable boundaries and loose interdependence with organizational context, resulted in silencing the groups from becoming advocates for radical change in corporate diversity practices.
Jane's journey through this project led to some important findings. Her use of multiple data sources and the comparison of the two groups allowed her to develop an understanding of how the interplay between contradictions and dialectical tensions influenced the construction of group boundaries and identities, as espoused in the bona fide group theory. Creating one spreadsheet for each bona fide characteristic allowed her to align dialectical tensions with a specific target for within and between group relationships. Since the same set of tensions could cross multiple characteristics, she experienced a challenge in deciding which dialectical tensions were most relevant to interdependence with context or permeable boundaries, but she relied on the definitions and explanations of the bona fide group characteristics to govern these choices.
In effect, this example demonstrated how a researcher could use discourse analysis to hold both dimensions, stable but permeable boundaries and interdependence with context, together in one project. A critical feature in her study was linking the dialectical tensions with particular targets, such as individual-group, intragroup, intergroup, and group-company relationships. In Jane's study, the interrelationships of dialectical tensions and bona fide characteristics illustrated a system of intergroup concertive control that both enabled and constrained the networks. Moreover, the powerful control system was completely outside the awareness of group members.
Concluding Recommendations
Discourse analysis, then, focuses on the features of language, messages, texts, and symbols. It is particularly appropriate for capturing interactive processes, negotiation of meaning, and local–global features of group life. Scholars interested in conducting discourse analysis in groups might consult Phillips and Hardy (2002) and Wood and Kroeger (2000) as primers for doing this type of research. As such, it provides an effective method for examining boundary negotiations, identity formation, and interdependence with context – key features of the bona fide perspective. Of particular note, discourse analysis is a very inductive process, even though researchers often cast their findings in deductive ways. Hence, teasing out puzzles through sticking close to the data requires ordering discourse units in ways that reveal patterns and promote discoveries.
This process, in turn, raises ethical issues, ones that create challenges for discourse analysts. Specifically, since discourse researchers use examples from written and oral texts to substantiate their claims, they need permission to make verbatim excerpts public. Hence, informed consent statements should contain clauses that indicate how discourse excerpts might be used. In a related way, researchers need to preserve anonymity and confidentiality of participants; hence, they should mask the identity of speakers when they use long verbatim quotes or they should edit and abbreviate quotes to disguise a participant's identity. Another ethical concern for discourse analysts relates to sticking close to the data and making inferences linked directly to the analysis. Researchers should rely on language patterns to make claims and should avoid speculating about a participant's unconscious internal motives. These ethical concerns, while generic for all researchers, pose particular problems in discourse analysis.
Ethical concerns in discourse research relate to the strengths and limitations of this method, ones rooted in the multilevel interpretive moves that characterize this method. As previously noted, discourse analysis is particularly effective at capturing the developmental and contextual features of groups. It is sensitive to a process orientation and the role of sensemaking in negotiating boundaries and identity formation. Through an emphasis on the role of language in different context arenas, it bridges local interactions with global texts and takes account of past practices. These strengths, however, should be balanced with significant challenges in using this method.
In particular, the method requires written or oral texts that are drawn from naturally occurring talk, interviews, media reports, video conferences, blogs, online discussions, or documents. Collecting these texts is one of the first challenges in doing this work. It is also labor intensive and requires detailed attention to word by word and sentence by sentence analysis; hence, it demands discipline and a zeal for finding patterns in a maze of data. This mass of data can overwhelm a researcher and stifle progress in data analysis. Thus, analysts need tolerance for ambiguity in plotting themes, selecting discourse units, and developing a systematic way to lay out the data. Above all, researchers need to be guided by a generic problem that might lead to a specific puzzle that arises from rather than being imposed on the data. In effect, discourse analysis offers a number of strengths that are conducive to studying bona fide groups, but researchers need to embrace the challenges and realize that qualitative studies necessitate time-consuming, systematic analyses.
Based on these strengths and limitations, several issues emerge as appropriate and inappropriate for doing discourse analysis, especially with the bona fide perspective. First, discourse analysis should be rigorous, systematic, and tightly interfaced with texts and layering of texts in the group environment. Most importantly, researchers need to ask what are the language patterns doing and how do they relate to negotiating a group's identity and boundaries? Specifically, discourse analysis works best if researchers draw together language and action. For example, how do references about intergroup interactions parallel reported and observed practices? How do these discourse patterns relate to the negotiation of a group's identity for its members and within its environmental context?
Second, discourse, as with any method, works most effectively when scholars have an interesting problem or a dilemma. Without an interesting puzzle, analysts often become lost in the micro-details of doing the analysis. For Jane's study, the interesting puzzle came through aligning dialectical tensions with the bona fide characteristics. Before Jane began her analysis, she wondered why the group members were so satisfied with their network experiences but felt that diversity issues at Summit had not changed much in the past decade. In trying to discover how these groups functioned, why members were so pleased with them, and why they were relatively ineffective in altering company diversity practices, she discovered a system of very permeable boundaries amid intergroup concertive control. Thus, the groups concentrated their energies on keeping each other in check rather than focusing on management practices and changing the patterns for promoting minorities. The initial puzzle guided her quest, but prior to the study, she could not identify or understand the dialectical tensions, how they worked, and how they produced concertive control.
Third, we recommend that analysts make interpretations that stick close to their data. The source and type of data provide clues as to the inferences that researchers can legitimately make. Researchers should avoid making inferences that are too global if no data are available to substantiate a particular claim. For example, Jane's reliance on the dialectical tensions that arose from her data led to the finding of concertive control through layering sets of tensions in relation to multiple targets and characteristics of the bona fide perspective. If she had employed a priori categories of types of dialectics used in previous research, she would not have discovered how group tensions functioned at the intergroup and organizational levels. Importantly, she drew on a generic category system for dialectical tensions and this practice to extends knowledge about dialectical theory. Hence, in discourse studies, the traditional notion of generalizability becomes transferability, that is, how might the claims from one setting generate concepts that would transfer to another setting. In Jane's study, the types of dialectics linked to bona fide characteristics, the management of these tensions, and the notion of intergroup concertive control sets forth concepts that might transfer to other research settings.
Finally, discourse analysis is not the same as a case study. Hence, analysts need to highlight language patterns, not the details of a case, the context, or the sequence of events. Language use should be examined through a particular approach, otherwise the patterns become lost in a play by play description of events. These recommendations provide direction for conducting discourse analysis, especially for studying groups in context. Hopefully, this chapter shows that integrating a bona fide perspective with discourse analyses will enhance our understanding of collective behavior in new and exciting ways.
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