A Discursive Approach to Skillful Activity

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O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

A Discursive Approach to Skillful Activity

J. Kevin Barge1 & Martin Little2

1 Department of Communication, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX 77843

2 Kensington Consultation Centre Foundation, London, UK

We propose a discursive approach for exploring how practitioners intelligently respond

and create a sense of coherence in their linguistic practice. A discursive approach to

skillful activity is able to account for the role of meaning making in conversation,

address how communication constructs the context in which skillful activity originates,and recognize the co-created flavor of skillful practice. We offer an account of skillful

linguistic performance that turns on practitioners acting with sensibility by paying close

attention to the reflexive relationships among: (a) moral–aesthetic commitments;

(b) conversational abilities in the form of utterances, methods, and techniques; (c)

practical reasoning and the process of invention; and (d) context. We conclude by

exploring the implications of a discursive approach for meaning making, identity con-

struction, and managing the tensions emerging from different traditions or communities

of practice.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00332.x

Our purpose in this article is to explore how studies of practitioners—managers,

therapists, health care providers, negotiators, and consultants—might better account

for the ways they use communication to skillfully respond to living situations and to

sustain coherence in their practice. Skillful response and establishing a sense of

coherence within practice is important because it facilitates a feeling of continuity

within and between conversational episodes that enhances practitioners’ abilities to

coordinate their activity with others and to create mutual learning. Living situations

are not frozen or mechanically structured; rather, they exemplify the ‘‘living, embod-ied, reciprocal spontaneity that constitutes social interaction’’ (Shotter & Lannamann,

2002, p. 580). This means our social worlds are continually undergoing construction

and revision due to the reflexive relationships among communication, meaning,

action, and context as embodied persons engage each other within the flow of

conversational activity.

In a linguistic landscape where the rules for meaning and action are continually

evolving and being negotiated, how do practitioners coordinate their conversational

Corresponding author: J. Kevin Barge; e-mail: [email protected]

Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

Communication Theory 18 (2008) 505–534 ª 2008 International Communication Association 505

COMMUNICATION

THEORY



activity with others in a skillful and coherent fashion? The traditional response to this

question has been rooted in a psychological approach toward skillful activity that

views skillful practice as rule-governed interaction that depends on practitioners

using hierarchically ordered rule-based knowledge, typically in the form of cognitive

scripts or plans, to sequence their conversational activity. Skillful activity ‘‘is under-

stood to be an intentional process of applying the appropriate rule to a relatively

given context in order to reach a pre-selected goal’’ whereby ‘‘action is seen to be.

governed by the interaction of personal and contextual variables’’ (Holman, 2000,

p. 959). Skillful coordination of conversation relies on participants sharing similar

interpretations of situations as well as the attendant rules for sequencing action.

Contextual variation can be managed by practitioners assembling existing scripts

and plans to create pliable communicative behavior to meet the unique demands

posed by differing contexts.

A psychological approach toward skillful practice has generated a large body of valuable knowledge, methods, and techniques for practitioners to use (see Daly &

Vangelisti, 2003, and Street, 2003, as examples). It gains its cultural currency by

connecting to common sense beliefs that individual characteristics such as knowl-

edge, motivation, and personality traits influence the way we compose, interpret, and

respond to communication (Craig, 1999). At the same time, critical concerns regard-

ing the way a psychological approach analyzes the communicative practice of skillful

activity have been raised that question whether it is well suited for the ambiguous,

unclear, and contradictory flavor of contemporary professional life (Holman, 2000;

Sanders, 2003).

We offer an alternative conceptualization of skillful activity from a discursiveperspective. Rather than explain skillful communicative behavior as a result of in-

dividuals possessing behavioral or cognitive skills, we offer an account of skillful

conversational performance that turns on practitioners acting with sensibility.

Sensibility is a moral–aesthetic framework regarding the commitments one makes

toward issues of human agency and power within a tradition or community of practice

that provides one way of explaining how practitioners act skillfully and coherently

within a constantly emerging linguistic terrain. The notion of sensibility shifts our

focus away from the rule-following aspects of conversational practice to the situated

sense making and decision making that practitioners experience as they work with

others in ways that preserve their agency and facilitate joint action. We do not wish to

debate whether a psychological or discursive approach is superior as each has different

strengths and weaknesses and one may be more appropriate given particular research

questions and foci. What we do hope to illustrate, however, is how a discursive

approach may open up new opportunities for inquiry in the study of skillful activity.

Comparing psychological and discursive approaches to skillful activity

One way to understand the contribution of a discursive approach toward skillful

activity is to compare it with a psychological approach. Making such comparisons

Discursive Approach J. K. Barge & M. Little

506 Communication Theory 18 (2008) 505–534 ª 2008 International Communication Association



can be potentially misleading as they may present a unitary conception that glosses

over key differences among theorists within a particular approach as well as overlook

common threads that connect alternative approaches. Nevertheless, we would sug-

gest a discursive approach has a language of its own with an associated grammar of

practice that focuses our attention on particular activities, phenomena, and forms of

explanation and not on others. We articulate these differences by making three key

comparisons: (a) interaction versus meaning making; (b) stable versus dynamic

contexts; and (c) individual versus reflexive agency.

Interaction versus meaning making

A psychological approach toward skillful activity backgrounds the way individuals

make sense of the unfolding conversation by constructing meaning. Communication

skills are typically referenced by the function they serve or the context in which they

exist as opposed to the way they construct and manage meaning during conversa-tion. For example, the emphasis on communication function is represented by the

work of communication scholars who have highlighted the importance of skilled

activity in performing a variety of important functions during conversation, such as

persuasion (Wilson, 2002), providing emotional support (Burleson, 2003), and

managing impressions (Metts & Grohskopf, 2003). The accent placed on context

is exemplified by communication scholars who equate communication skill with the

performance of appropriate and effective behavior in specific contexts, such as small

groups (Gouran, 2003), romantic relationships (Dindia & Timmerman, 2003), par-

ent–child relationships (Hart, Newell, & Olson, 2003), and intercultural settings

(Hajek & Giles, 2003). The focus is on identifying what people must do, in the formof verbal and nonverbal messages, in order to produce a result and the psychological

mechanisms that influence their performance.

A discursive approach focuses on the importance of meaning making. Discursive

approaches generally view language as constitutive, constructing the ideas, objects,

subjectivities, and meanings that populate our social worlds (Alvesson & Karreman,

2000; Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Viewing communication as constitutive highlights

that the way we use communication creates meaning and makes our lives ‘‘meaning-

full.’’ Pearce and Pearce (2004) observe:

Communication is not a neutral vehicle by which an external reality iscommunicated about, and by which factors of psychology, social structure,

cultural norms, and the like are transmitted or are influential. The

communication process: (a) exerts a role in personal identities and self-

concepts experienced by persons; (b) shapes the range of permissible and

impermissible relationships between persons, and so produces a structure; and

(c) represents the process through which cultural values, beliefs, and the like are

formulated and lived. (p. 42)

The utterances we make in conversation reflect how we have made meaning about

the situation and simultaneously contribute to the joint construction of meaning

J. K. Barge & M. Little Discursive Approach




within situations. The emphasis on exploring the reflexive connections among lan-

guage, language use, and meaning makes it possible to explore the ongoing social

construction of skillful activity within unfolding situations.

This is not to say that psychological approaches to skill do not view utterances as

creating meaning because the selection of a particular conversational move or strat-

egy is a reflection of the way the individual has made sense of the situation and also

serves as an invitation for others to make sense of it in a similar way. However,

psychological approaches generally ignore the larger sociohistorical context in which

the skills originated, and do not consider how the skills they identify are made

‘‘meaning-full’’ by larger cultural and historical discourses and patterns. Moreover,

they assume that the performance of the skill is tied to a single function—the pursuit

of the specified goal or the management of a single context. As a result, they do not

directly focus on how utterances are used to construct meaning and to make sense by

creating moral orders to guide conversation (Holman, 2000).For our purposes, two distinctions regarding discourse are important. First, the

term discourse may be used to refer to talk-in-interaction as well as persisting modes

of thought (see Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Gee, 1999).

The former is typically referred to as little ‘‘d’’ discourse, which references the study

of talk in social practices and emphasizes sociality. Little ‘‘d’’ discourse focuses on the

flow of utterances and responses during conversation and what gets created through

the patterning of communicative activity. For example, the patterning of conversa-

tional utterances between a therapist and client during a session reflects little ‘‘d’’

discourse. The latter definition—persisting modes of thought—has been referred to

as big ‘‘D’’ Discourse, which is viewed as more general and enduring systems of thought where ‘‘power/knowledge relations are established in culturally standardized

Discourses, formed by constellations of talk, ideas, logics, and assumptions that

constitute objects and subjectivities’’ (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004, p. 8). For example,

the particular therapeutic tradition a family therapist works within, such as solution-

focused, brief, narrative, or conversational therapy, may be viewed as a big ‘‘D’’ Dis-

course as the therapeutic tradition reflects a system of ideas, thoughts, and principles

that partially informs a therapist’s subjectivity. Discourse and discourse can be

assumed to be in a reflexive relationship with each other as Discourses may serve as

interpretive resources for practitioners to draw on during conversation to guide and

structure their discourse, and discourse can sustain, modify, or elaborate Discourses.

Stable versus dynamic contexts

A psychological approach presumes context is well defined and stable, which allows

theorists to approach conversational activity as rule governed. Similar to Wittgenstein’s

(1953) notion of a fixed language game, normative rules that facilitate individuals

sequencing their communicative behavior within particular contexts can be identi-

fied. Spitzberg (2003) suggests that most studies of communication skills treat con-

text as a variable that can be manipulated to explore how contextual variation

necessitates differing kinds of skillful behavior. Spitzberg identifies five commonly





used meanings for the term context : (a) culture, (b) time, (c) relationship type,

(d) physical or social situation, and (e) interaction function.

Though theorists and researchers may use different variables to operationalize

context, they share a belief that context is stable, unchanging, and shared by the

participants throughout an interaction. For example, practice models of leadership

based on a situational approach assume that the relationship type affects the kind of

conversational performance required by leaders. When a leader–follower relation-

ship is characterized by group members who lack maturity, it is important for leaders

to adopt a more directive style throughout the conversation, whereas a leader–

follower relationship with mature followers permits the use of a more participative

style (Hersey & Blanchard, 1977). Practitioners are positioned as ‘‘readers’’ of sit-

uations who need to make accurate judgments of the situation and, in light of those

judgments, adequately perform those actions deemed appropriate and effective given

the shared context among participants.A discursive approach views context as an emergent property of conversation

that is continually constructed during interaction as people articulate their experi-

ence and respond to each other in different ways. When we recognize the constitutive

power of language and acknowledge the co-construction of conversational activity,

context evolves and changes over the life of a conversational episode. Texts and

context are in a dynamic relationship because what we say at earlier points in

a conversation subsequently becomes ‘‘con-text’’ as it informs what we have to

respond to at a later point in the conversation (Bateson, 1972).

Contexts cannot be taken as given during practice; rather, they are being con-

stantly negotiated by practitioners in conversation with others. One of the chief tasksfor a practitioner, therefore, becomes working with others to create a working def-

inition of a situation (Pearce, 1994). This means that practitioners are ‘‘authors’’ of

a situation, not ‘‘readers,’’ who co-create a linguistic landscape of enabling con-

straints that facilitate action and coordinates their activity with others (Shotter,

1993). The dynamic process of contextual construction is challenging because it is

not only dynamic, constantly evolving depending on who is involved in the conver-

sation, but is also a contested activity as interlocutors may wish to frame and

construct the situation in divergent ways in order to pursue differing aims and

purposes. The emerging, negotiated, and contested flavor of contextual construction

means that many times contexts may be ambiguous or ill defined due to the unique

qualities of the participants or they may be poorly structured as participants have

conflicting notions of what the context is.

Individual versus reflexive agency

Psychological approaches emphasize the role of individual agency in the production of

skillful conversation. When we assume that context is stable and shared, we are led to

believe that well-trained and highly skilled individuals can learn how to manipulate

and control situations if they master the rules that govern interaction. Such individuals

are like chess grandmasters who know the rules of the game and play the game so well





that they can anticipate how others will respond to their moves and can make moves

early on in the game to set up later moves that will allow them to win. The result is that

a psychological approach attributes the production of skillful practice to individual

agency, the capacity of individuals for speaking or acting in ways that allow them to

control situations in order to accomplish desired results. The underlying belief is that

individuals who are highly skilled are primarily responsible for affecting change in

a human system such as a relationship, group, or organization.

From a discursive point of view, agency is not located either in the individual as

psychological approaches are prone to assume or in the social structures that com-

prise the context in which communication occurs. Rather, an individual’s sense of

agency, his or her capacity for action, is shaped by the context’s affordances and

constraints that the individual had a hand in articulating with others. Linguistic

performance and contextual construction are dynamically interrelated:

Language has a magical property: When we speak or write we craft what wehave to say to fit the situation or context in which we are communicating. But,

at the same time, how we speak or write creates that very situation or context.

It seems, then, that we fit our language to a situation or context that our

language, in turn, helped to create in the first place. (Gee, 1999, p. 11)

This means that individuals need to recognize that their sense of agency is created

from within the co-created flow of linguistic activity that organizes action and

context. Fairhurst (2007) calls this reflexive agency whereby ‘‘actors are knowledge-

able agents, who reflexively monitor the ongoing character of social life as they

continuously orient to and position themselves vis-a-vis specific norms, rules, andprocedures and values with others’’ (p. 14).

Sanders (2003)affirms the importance of reflexive agency by observing thatlanguage

social interaction ‘‘tends to avoid attributing agency to individuals but rather conceptu-

alizes what transpires and results in interactions as being coconstructed, or jointly pro-

duced’’ (p. 224). He views skillful practice as an interactional accomplishment, one that

is co-constructed with others during conversation. The notion that skillful performance

is a joint activity brought off by persons in conversation suggests that people do not

control situations through their individual performance. Rather, their action is conse-

quential as what they say and how they act can influence conversation and increase or

decrease the likelihood that certain desired results can be produced (Sanders, 2003;

Sigman,1995). Individuals can make a move to guide a conversation one way or another,

but this move may be rejected or accepted by an Other. This requires individuals desiring

to actin skillful waysto be reflective about how their utterances respond to what has been

said previously and to anticipate the response that will be invited by their utterance.

Meaning making, conversational coherence, and heedful performance

Regardless of the profession or discipline, practitioners are always trying to coordi-

nate their linguistic activity with others. The centrality of meaning and meaning





making within a discursive approach suggests that skillful activity is reflected by the

ability to engage with others in language and meaning making from within the flow

of conversational activity that allows participants to find their way to go on together

in conversation and to move forward in relation to task. Shotter (2000) suggests the

ability to construct intelligible conversation that allows individuals to move forward

depends on speaking in ways that are followable: ‘‘We must both be able to ‘follow’

others in our talk entwined activities, and also, act and speak in ways that they also

can ‘follow’’’ (p. 120). Practitioners can create a sense of connectedness that sustains

meaning making and progresses their task by following the preceding dance of

utterances within conversation and acting in ways that allow Others to follow their

utterances.

Skillful practice therefore becomes associated with the creation of conversational

coherence in talk and practice. Conversational coherence within one’s talk and

practice is normally conceptualized as ‘‘the sense in which a discourse may be saidto ‘hang together’; the relevance of its successive utterances both to those that pre-

cede them and to the global concerns of the discourse as a whole’’ (McLaughlin,

1984, p. 270). Conversational coherence is concerned with explaining how persons

maintain the continuity of conversation and build the meaningfulness of discourse

through processes such as topic maintenance and elaboration (Cornelius & Boos,

2003; Dijkstra, Bourgeois, Allen, & Burgio, 2004). Conversational coherence is con-

nected to the process of meaning making as to act coherently in conversation means

we are able to pick up and elaborate the meaning of previous conversational utter-

ances and fragments. This line of thinking parallels Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of

meaning as use. When we say that a word, sentence, or utterance is meaningful, thismeans that we know how to go on coherently in the conversation and coordinate our

utterances with an Other.

The other we address in conversation, however, is not limited to the people we

engage in conversation; it also includes the jointly constructed conversation that

emerges among people. The jointly constructed conversation among persons

becomes a real presence exerting influence on how people make sense of and decide

to act within the conversation. In their discussion of conversational poetics, Katz and

Shotter (2004) observe: ‘‘When people act in this mutually responsive fashion, with

each person’s actions partially ‘shaped’ by the other’s responsive reactions, some-

thing very special happens: They find themselves in an essentially demanding ethical

situation’’ (pp. 74–75). The conversational moment calls forth particular ways of

responding that may or may not reflect the individual participant’s aims, wishes, and

desires. To respond skillfully from within conversational activity, speakers must not

only voice their response to the other persons within the conversation but also to the

ethical demands of the situation that they have jointly created in a conversational

moment.

This view of coherence does not diminish the importance of persons sometimes

needing to purposefully perform contradictory, ambiguous, or confusing utterances

as a means to jar people out of complacency or heighten their awareness of





important issues. What is important, however, is that speakers anticipate potential

ambiguities and contradictions in their conversational practice and construct utter-

ances that enable others to respond in ways that sustain coordination. In his discus-

sion of skilled activity, Holman (2000) observes that people may need to ‘‘persuade

others that their actions are understandable and legitimate’’ (p. 964). The issue is

whether the performance of a purposefully contradictory or confusing utterance

allows people to extend sensibly the conversation and whether it facilitates meaning

making. A context needs to be created that legitimates the use of a seemingly jarring

move but does not freeze meaning making or create a position of being stuck in the

conversation, not knowing what to do next.

One implication of this view toward conversational coherence is that a skillful

response to a situation is associated with the elaboration of meanings and actions as

practitioners and participants progress through a task. We concur with Gergen,

Gergen, and Barrett (2004) who contend: ‘‘The meaning-making process is renderedrobust by virtue of distinctive voices’’ (p. 47). They argue that the robustness of

the meaning-making process is enhanced by introducing a productive difference in

the conversation that affirms what has previously occurred and initiates the potential

for new meaning making. Barge (2004) refers to this affirmative process as creating

‘‘a difference that connects’’ whereby utterances must simultaneously connect with

what has previously transpired and gesture to new possibilities for meaning making.

If too little difference is introduced, the utterances do not add any important dif-

ference in the conversation as they simply duplicate what has been uttered previ-

ously. In contrast, if the difference is too large and does not connect, persons may feel

their contribution has been negated and become defensive. ‘‘Entries that sustain orextend the potentials of a preceding utterance may be viewed as productive; utter-

ances that curtail or negate what has preceded are destructive. They essentially impede

the process of constructing a mutually viable reality’’ (Gergen et al., 2004, p. 47).

An utterance that responds to the uniqueness of living situations and furthers

meaning making reflects a style of connecting with others that is heedful, not habit-

ual. Weick and Roberts (1993) suggest that the practice of heedful interrelating

involves paying close attention to fitting one’s utterances with the utterances of

the Other and to the demands of the jointly created situation. Heedful performance

is distinct from habitual performance.

In habitual performance, each performance is a replica of its predecessor,

whereas in heedful performance, each action is modified by its predecessor

(Ryle, 1949: 42). In heedful performance the agent is still learning.

Furthermore, heedful performance is the outcome of training and experience

that weave together thinking, feeling, and willing. Habitual performance is the

outcome of drill and repetition. (p. 362)

Heedful performance suggests that practitioners adapt their responses according

to the uniqueness of the emerging situation. Moreover, the process of heedful inter-

relating not only sustains meaning making but also fosters learning. Practitioners





may learn through intension as they deepen their understanding of practice as they

engage subtle variations when performing the ‘‘same’’ task over time. They may also

learn through extension as they learn to adapt their practice to radically different

situations, people, and events.

Sensibility

If coherence building through heedful interrelating allows practitioners to act more

skillfully, how can practitioners position themselves during interaction to facilitate

heedful interrelating with Others? We suggest that practitioners need to draw on the

various Discourses provided by the tradition or community of practice in which they

participate to invent responses that respond to contingent circumstances. A coherent

and intelligent response to a situation derives from the reflexive use of the resources

and wisdom of a tradition or community of practice. We offer the notion of actingwith sensibility as one way to account for this process.

To be a practitioner means that one identifies with a particular tradition or

community of practice that makes certain assumptions about what values are to

be emphasized and what constitutes good practice. By a tradition of practice, we mean

persons who ascribe to a particular way of working and who make certain value

commitments toward practice. For example, several traditions of therapeutic prac-

tice exist, including narrative (Payne, 2000) and solution-focused therapy (White,

1995, 1997), each of which is associated with a distinctive set of methods and

techniques and that make certain value commitments about what constitutes good

therapeutic practice. The term community of practice is typically reserved for ‘‘groupsof people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who

deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’’

(Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, p. 4). Ongoing organizational work groups,

for example, would constitute a community of practice. Communities of practice

articulate methods and techniques that are associated with a particular task domain

such as bill processing or research and development, and they articulate standards for

what counts as excellent practice.

From a discursive point of view, practice is always situated, which means people

have to make judgments about what to do from within the emerging flow of con-

versation. Even in those professions such as nursing where we generally might expect

practice to be highly scripted and fixed given that particular medical techniques must

be performed in a specific manner if they are to be effective, actors still must make

situated judgments regarding what to do given the uniqueness of the situation

(Flaming, 2001). Although situations are unique, contingent, and emergent, it is

not as if the moment-by-moment choices people make to help construct their lines

of action come from nowhere. An individual’s work is informed, in part, by the

Discourses that inform a tradition or community of practice—the important values,

commitments, methods, techniques, and rules for meaning and action—to which

they belong. Individuals act from and into the Discourses of practice that have





already been developed by themselves and others within a particular tradition or

community and respond to living situations by discerning how the resources and

wisdom constituting a Discourse can be mobilized in light of present circumstances.

The important issue is how practitioners reappropriate the tradition’s or the

community’s Discourse for use in the present that allows them to heedfully interre-

late. We suggest that sensibility is a useful concept for explaining how persons

maintain some stability in the way they choose to act within situations while allowing

for the possibility of variation, elaboration, and evolution in their practice. Sensi-

bility is derived from the Latin sensibilitatem, which refers to a mode of feeling,

thinking, and meaning. We are drawn to the notion of sensibility because it inte-

grates emotion, deliberation, and sense making within the flow of conversation,

phenomena that have tended to be treated as unique and distinct, lacking intersec-

tion. We define sensibility as the living unity between a set of moral–aesthetic

commitments toward human agency and conversational abilities within a traditionor community of practice.

To act with sensibility means that practitioners work in ways that sustain the

living unity between moral–aesthetic commitments embedded in Discourse and the

linguistic abilities they exhibit in their discourse within conversational episodes. The

notion of sensibility allows us to give attention to three important features of prac-

tice: (a) the moral–aesthetic dimensions of practice; (b) the integration of moral–

aesthetic commitments, conversational performance, and context; and (c) situated

judgment and insight. Each of these features merits elaboration.

Sensibility foregrounds moral–aesthetic features of practiceThe notion of sensibility attunes us directly to issues of morality, what people ought

to do, and aesthetics, how beautifully people accomplish their activity. Big ‘‘D’’

Discourses carry with them a set of moral obligations, permissions, and prohibitions

regarding how people are to connect with others. At the same time, Discourses also

have an aesthetic element to them in terms of what counts as beautiful practice. For

example, in organizational studies, the aesthetic of scientific management Dis-

courses, with their emphasis on unity, order, and purity, has not only been reflected

in the creation of simple hierarchical structures for management but also in business

architecture as evidenced by the work of the modernist architect Le Corbusier

(Guillen, 1997). Similarly, Discourses about healing that emphasize the body suggest

that beautiful practice by caregivers is associated with embodied engagement where

the entire self is used to comprehend and make meaning of the world as opposed to

responding in ways that only honor cognitive rational responses (Ray, 2006).

Lang, Little, and Cronen (1990) observe that practice simultaneously involves

working within the domains of aesthetics (how one acts in moral and aesthetic ways),

production (how one accomplishes a task), and explanation (what accounts are

needed to legitimize one’s practice). Fragmenting experience into the domains of

aesthetics, production, or explanation without exploring their interconnections

neglects the integrated complexity of human experience. The moral–aesthetic





elements of practice cannot be divorced from task performance because the way we

accomplish work necessarily involves committing to particular value hierarchies and

assumptions regarding how agency and power are to be managed among members of

a human system. Traditions and communities of practice not only highlight how one

accomplishes a given activity, they also provide a means for discerning what moral–

aesthetic qualities are to be valued during engagement with others. As MacIntyre

(1984) observes: ‘‘A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules

as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority

of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them’’

(p. 190). One’s ability to act in ways that are judged moral and aesthetic requires

engaging the principles of one’s tradition or community of practice and acting in

ways that are aligned with those principles.

A good example of how moral–aesthetic commitments are embedded within

Discourses–discourses can be seen in the practice of neutrality within mediation.Mediator neutrality, the ability to be fair and not to impose one’s perceptions, values,

or judgments on the disputants, is a core value that informs Discourses constituting

mediation. Mediators are expected to evidence the Discourse of neutrality in their

discourse with disputants during mediation sessions. Take the following two

excerpts from mediations involving a landlord–tenant rental dispute drawn from

Heisterkamp (2006, pp. 307, 311).

Example #1

1 M: And Monica, are we in agreement then that uh

2 the rent when you started on the premises uh

3 was from the first through the thirtieth

4 D: No that is not in agreement, it was the third .

Example #2

1 M: He [a judge] will look at the case.

2 D: He’s not going to waste his time in this.

3 And why should I?

4 M: Well he won’t consider it a waste of time.

5 D: [Unintelligible response.]

6 M: He takes this very, very seriously 7 and you can be sure that he will give it his best.

In both examples, the mediator (M) acts in ways that reflect the moral–aesthetic

commitment to neutrality. In Example #1, the mediator uses the pronominal ‘‘we’’

(line 1) speaking as a representative of the collective as opposed to offering the medi-

ator’s personal viewpoint. As Heisterkamp (2006) points out, the disputant (D)

appears to accept that the mediator has spoken for the collective as the use of ‘‘that’’

(line 4) does not attach her disagreement to either the mediator or the other disputant,

thus affirming the performance of neutrality. In Example #2, the mediator preserves

neutrality by invoking the perspective of a judge if the dispute is not settled. In this





example, the defendant perceives the plaintiff’s view as a ‘‘waste of time’’ (line 4) so the

mediator reiterates the judge will take it seriously (‘‘takes this very, very seriously,’’ line

6) and ‘‘will give it his best’’ (line 7). By shifting to the judge’s perspective, the mediator

can highlight the issue for the defendant but maintains neutrality by emphasizing how

someone outside the dispute will approach it. The degree to which a mediator acts with

sensibility depends on his or her ability to connect the moral–aesthetic commitment of

neutrality that constitutes mediation Discourse to its lived performance when working

to achieve a settlement between disputants.

Sensibility emphasizes creating a living unity among moral–aesthetic commitments,

conversational utterances, and context

When practitioners act with sensibility, they adapt the wisdom of a tradition or

a community of practice to the emerging situation. This adaptation occurs through

the process of invention. Rhetorical scholars have traditionally defined invention asa process of using argument to come upon or find new things. More recently,

invention has been reconceptualized as a social process that positions a speaker as

a bricoleur, ‘‘a person who acts by making do or improvising with the limited

materials that are available in a particular situation’’ who becomes ‘‘a language

‘tinkerer’ pasting together bits of linguistic material . to meet the demands of

the situation’’ (Jasinski, 2001, p. 329). From a rhetorical perspective, a social

approach to invention emphasizes the importance of orchestrating ‘‘the resources

or rhetorical traditions into coherent artistic representations of community life in

contingent circumstances’’ (Murphy, 1997, p. 74). By articulating a coherent account

of community life, the speaker can connect with the cultural grammar of the com-munity and move the community in a particular direction.

A social approach to invention helps us explain how the resources of a tradition

or community of practice are rearticulated to meet shifting conversational contin-

gencies. Duck (2002) observes that most approaches to conversational practice

ignore the role that history plays in constructing conversational coherence. A social

approach to invention recognizes the importance of a tradition or community of

practice’s history. First, it recognizes that practitioners exist within an evolving

tradition or community of practice and that the wisdom from the past, as reflected

by its Discourses, is a resource to be used in the present. Second, invention directs

our attention to the historicity of the conversational moment, such as the broader

social and cultural contexts of our conversations, the relational history among speak-

ers, and the history of the conversation as it unfolds in the present situation (Duck,

2002). Practitioners must orchestrate these various elements—a tradition or a com-

munity of practice’s history, the cultural and relational histories, and the history of

the conversation—into a coherent unity within their conversation if they are to

respond intelligently to the unique particulars of the situation.

The task for a practitioner is to maintain a productive tension among one’s

moral–aesthetic commitments, utterances, and context. Emphasizing one relation-

ship, such as the moral–aesthetic and utterance, at the expense of another, such as the





utterance and context, creates challenges for acting with sensibility. Take the follow-

ing excerpt drawn from narrative therapy, an approach that is committed to help

clients create stories of their experience that are rich enough to enable them to move

into the future. A number of practices have evolved in narrative therapy to help

clients enrich how they tell their stories. In the following example, the therapist uses

a practice known as ‘‘externalizing through naming’’ where the ‘‘problem’’ a client

experiences is restoried as an external entity that is having an effect on the client as

opposed to something that is internal to the client or intrinsic.

Example #3

1 Robert:. uh . I still think a person, um. who feels good about himself

2 sometimes can overcome his problems.

3 Therapist: Well, it takes feeling really good about yourself to escape

4 immobilization. Immobilization is a powerful thing. And as you know, for

5 example, you haven’t let immobilization turn you into an agoraphobic.

how’d

6 you manage that?

7 Robert: I just don’t think I . I never had a fear of going outside.

8 Therapist: Yeah, but immobilization can reduce someone to that. You’ve just

9 pointed that out. And you’re quite right. So how have you been able to not let

10 immobilization turn you into an agoraphobic? I’m really curious about that.

11 Robert: I don’t know. I think I like people . I don’t know . I don’t have an

12 answer. I think that when I was younger, I might. I don’t know. I had a period of

13 not going to school, maybe, maybe, a fear of not doing well. But I don’t think .

14 Therapist: No, no, no.

15 Robert: Being successful at school.

16 Therapist: That’s different. So what I’m curious about is . I think you’re quite

17 right when you said a moment ago that, um, you have to have enough self-esteem,

18 you know to not let immobilization turn you into an agoraphobic. So what is it

19 about yourself that you’re able to notice? Let me ask it this way .

20 Robert: Yeah, yeah, I’m not going to answer it.

21 Therapist: What do you think it tells me about you? When I see you haven’t let

22 immobilization turn you into an agoraphobic. What do you think that tells me

23 about you?

(Payne, 2004, pp. 63–64, originally from Zimmerman and Dickerson, 1993)

The Discourse of narrative therapy authorizes the therapist to use externalizing and he

subsequently names the client’s problem as ‘‘immobilization.’’ Although the Discourse

of narrative therapy and the discourse of externalizing align, the therapist’s utterances

do not connect with the emerging conversation as the client becomes confused over the

direction the session is going (lines 7, 11–13) and ultimately resists the therapist’s

intervention (line 20). The therapist, despite the growing resistance of the client, con-

tinues to press on with the use of externalizing even after the client’s resistance is clearly

evident (lines 21–23) perhaps because this technique worked well in the past. We could

say the therapist is engaging in habitual performance that negates the contribution of





the client and frustrates the ability of the therapist and client to engage in mutual

learning. The therapist fails to invent a response that manages the opportunities and

constraints afforded by the Discourse of narrative practice and the context.

In contrast, when a living unity among the moral–aesthetic commitments, con-

versational utterances, and context is created, a performance that is characterized by

heedful interrelating and affirmative meaning making occurs. Compare the follow-

ing example with the immediately preceding one.

Example #4

1 Boscolo: How is the communication with your daughters?

2 Mother: Well lately there is no communication.

3 Boscolo: Between you and them or between them?

4 Mother: Well, mainly between us and the children.

5 Boscolo: How is the communication between them? How do they communicate?

6 Mother: Well, these two, they communicate okay, but Diane and Lisa fight a

7 great deal.

8 Boscolo: And how about Dori?

9 Mother: Oh, they have their little sisterly fights, but it’s nothing that serious. I

10 think it’s normal.

11 Boscolo: But would you say that the girls communicate between better than you

12 communicate with your husband?

13 Mother: Oh, definitely.

14 Boscolo: Who communicates better with the daughters, you or your husband?

15 Mother: I don’t think . I can’t communicate because they won’t communicate

16 and he doesn’t talk to them, so I would say, if anything I try, I try to get through

17 to them.

(Boscolo, Cecchin, Hoffman, & Penn, 1987, pp. 113–114)

In this example, Luigi Boscolo, the therapist, is one of the originators of Milan

systemic family therapy. Grounded in the work of Bateson (1972), Milan systemic

family therapy contends that to understand how a human system operates in the way

it does and how it may change over time, it becomes important to focus on the

pattern that connects members of a human system through their reciprocal feedback

to each other. The moral–aesthetic commitment of creating connections within a

family’s system of meaning and action has generated a number of practices, includ-

ing circular questioning that uses a Socratic method of inquiry to elicit from the

family statements of differences about the relationships, and to introduce statements

of difference back into the family. Unlike Example #3, the conversation affirms the

contributions made by the mother as the questions Boscolo asks connect with and

build on the mother’s previous response. A pattern of heedful relating is created as

each question is modified by the preceding answer and each question introduces

a new difference into the conversation. Boscolo is able to maintain a living unity

between the Discourse (the moral–aesthetic commitment of making connection) of





systemic therapy, his situated discourse (the use of circular questions) in the session,

and the context in a way that the therapist in Example #3 could not.

Sensibility highlights situated judgment and insight

Acting with sensibility has a phronetic quality that focuses our attention on the

contingent, vague, and indeterminate aspects of human life. Aristotle distinguishes

phronesis from techne saying: ‘‘Techne then is the kind of knowledge possessed by an

expert maker; it gives him a clear conception of the why and wherefore, the how and

with what of the making process and enables him, through the capacity to offer

a rational account of it, to preside over his activity with secure mastery’’ (Dunne,

1997, p. 9). The notion of techne resonates well with the notion of highly structured

and scripted methods where the expert maker, in this instance a practitioner, has

a clear idea of the problem to be solved and knows how to preside over it. In contrast,

phronesis is ‘‘the kind of practical reasoning engaged in by an excellent practitionerlodged in a community of practitioners who through experiential learning and for

the sake of good practice continually lives out and improves practice’’ (Benner, 2000,

p. 9).

Phronesis is a form of practical reasoning that involves reflexivity between prin-

ciples and particulars. Unlike techne, where practical moral universals are applied to

cases, with phronesis, practical moral universals are viewed as indeterminate, and

where the interaction between practical–moral universals and the particulars of a case

enrich one another, ‘‘there is a negotiation between the case and the principle that

allows both to gain in clarity’’ (Jasinski, 2001, p. 463). Although practitioners may

orient themselves within emerging situations by employing a set of moral–aestheticcommitments reflected in Discourses, their practice is never a straightforward appli-

cation of rules to determine what they should do. Rather, as Burnham (1992) points

out, practitioners continuously tack back and forth between the approach they use to

orient themselves toward actions and the specific tools they use.

Phronesis also involves perceiving and interpreting the whole system. Dunne

(1997) uses the term phronetic insight to capture the process of perception in prac-

tical situations. Noel (1999) citing Reeve (1992) says: ‘‘‘He [the phronimos] has the

practical perception needed to determine what type of circumstances he is in and

what type of action he is actually doing’ (p. 97). This practical perception must

include, by the necessity of everyday life, the recognition of the multiple types of

things that we have to consider within a situation’’ (p. 280). Dunne points out that

phronesis involves ‘‘acts of insights into particulars, and we need to focus on them at

the point of their emergence, at the moment of their novelty, prior to their assim-

ilation in the habitual pattern of experience’’ (p. 295). What this suggests is that

phronetic insight entails recognizing the novelty of the situation, and viewing it

systemically—seeing the multiplicity of particulars that characterize it and how they

are connected.

A good example of the way phronesis connects Discourse, discourse, and context

can be found in an example drawn from systemic management practice. Systemic





management is an approach that draws from systems and social constructionist

theory and emphasizes the moral–aesthetic commitment of affirmation (Barge,

2007). The commitment to affirmation entails that managers should value the expe-

riences, contributions, and perspectives of the people they work with. Consider the

following account from a systemically trained manager whose senior-level manager

had decided to take a position in another department within the organization but

wanted to stay on until the turmoil with the present department was sorted.

How can I tell this man that his generous offer is not going to be helpful without

negatively connoting him and further disempowering him through what was

left of his stay?. I found that this format of questioning rescued him from the

potential chaos of overwhelming information and enabled him to make

decisions and act. The following are some of the questions I asked: Who would

miss you most if you left? What differences will there be after you leave? Who

would be the least/most likely to gain from your staying? Which people in yournew team are most/least likely to be upset if you delay arriving?

The manager began to see more clearly his position in the organization and with

it the responsibilities he needed to exercise (i.e., I should not create extra

anxiety for those who live and work in the unit by being unable to fix a leaving

date). He began to consider future possibilities as opposed to present

restrictions (how can I leave with the unit in such turmoil). He began to see that

the unit turmoil was to some extent mirrored by his own position and that

future uncertainty (even if it was his leaving) was likely to create more stability

than the present confusion. (Barge, 2004, p. 120)

The particulars of the situation included a unit in turmoil, a fragile and stressed

senior-level manager, and a lower-level manager who decided it was important to

broach this issue. The manager reasoned that a strategy of telling the senior-level

manager would not be helpful because it would negatively connote his decision and

disempower him, which goes against the moral–aesthetic commitment of affirma-

tion. As a result, he decided to ask questions that prompted the senior-level manager

to work through the consequences of his decision. The act of asking questions does

not directly challenge the senior-level manager’s perspective; instead, it preserves his

sense of agency by placing him in a reflective position to determine whether this is

the best decision possible for him and his fellow employees. The manager engaged in

practical reasoning that connected the principle of affirmation to the particulars of

the situation—a manager and unit in turmoil—and created a response in the form of

series of questions that simultaneously met the demands of the Discourse and

context.

‘‘Holding one’s tools lightly’’ and deconstruction

A key challenge for practitioners as they act with sensibility is how to integrate

diverse tools, in the form of methods or techniques, within their practice that come

from differing traditions or communities of practice. Such integration can be





challenging because the form of a method or technique carries with it a type of

agency that is separate from the practitioner and its performance. If we think of

methods or techniques as texts that exist within Discourses and are associated with

strong stories concerning their use, then methods and techniques have agency.

Campbell (2006) contends that ‘‘textual agency is linked to audiences and begins

with the signals that guide the process of ‘uptake’ for readers or listeners enabling

them to understand how a symbolic act is framed’’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 7). For

example, one of the authors of this article conducted a training session on conflict

management with a top management team of a city government. Though the author

adopted a social constructionist commitment to working with the team that empha-

sized recognizing the way language creates our social worlds, he introduced a per-

sonality test during the session that measured the conflict management style of each

team member. The use of this personality test triggered a discussion among team

members on how each team member ‘‘possessed’’ a ‘‘given’’ style that was stable andunchanging instead of a discussion that explored how different forms of communi-

cative practice create and sustain conflict. The textual agency of psychological tests

signals to people that they should focus on the individual personality characteristics

that inform a person’s conflict management style and that the performance of these

styles will not vary according to context. The textual agency associated with psycho-

logical tests, with its strong emphasis on the individual and decontextualized prac-

tice, overwhelmed the author’s attempt to reframe it and use it as a springboard for

discussion regarding the way communication creates and sustains conflict.

Although it may be tempting for practitioners to limit their repertoire of methods

and techniques to only those that originate within a specific tradition or community of practice, such a choice neglects the richness of resources from other traditions and

communities that can enliven, elaborate, and enlarge one’s practice. The challenge is to

integrate differing methods and techniques in ways that connect with one’s tradition

or community of practice as well as the emerging conversation. When we view practi-

tioners as bricoleurs who creatively weave together differing resources and improvise

their responses to situations, the question becomes what practices allow them to

engage in such creative weaving and improvisation. As a starting point, we would

suggest that the practices of ‘‘holding one’s tools lightly’’ and deconstruction may

provide practitioners two important resources to engage in bricolage.

First, practitioners may need to ‘‘hold their tools lightly’’ as they work (Lowe,

2005; Smith 2004). Weick (1993) observes that individuals derive their identity, in

part, through the tools they pick up and use in their practice. The challenge is to find

ways to pick up and use tools in ways that sustain and elaborate their identity as

a practitioner. In some situations, this is a relatively simple process as practitioners

may borrow and use tools from traditions and communities of practice that share

a family resemblance. We use the term ‘‘family resemblance’’ in a Wittgensteinian

(1953) fashion to refer to those traditions and communities of practice that share

similar epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments but simulta-

neously may be distinguished by the kinds of tools that they have developed for use.





As a case in point, there is a large body of work focusing on patient–provider

relationships within health and medical contexts. The practice of relationship-

centered care emphasizes entering into the lifeworld of the patient, understanding

the patient’s experience, and treating the patient as a person. Within relationship-

centered care, there are many different practice models, including the biopsychoso-

cial (Frankel, Quill, & McDaniel, 2003), mindful practice (Epstein, 2003a, 2003b),

and social poetics (Katz & Shotter, 1996). Although each shares a commitment to the

importance of creating a context where patients can fully express their desires and

concerns, mindful practice and social poetic models make a commitment to the

importance of reflective practice in a way that biopsychosocial models typically do

not.

Nevertheless, when tools originate in traditions or communities of practice that

share a family resemblance, it is relatively easy to find ways to employ them that

connect with one’s practice and the emerging situation. For example, a commontechnique associated with the biopsychosocial model is for doctors (D) to ask about

a patient’s (P) family and social context in order to establish rapport. Consider the

following example:

Example #5

1 P: ((knock at door)) Come in.

2 D: Hi Mister Jones.

3 P: Hi.

4 D: ((walks in and close door)) I’m Doctor Smith. It’s very nice to meet you.

5 P: How y’doing?

6 D: How are ya? I understand you had a grand tour of the Downtown Clinic

7 before you got here. ((doctor laughs))

8 P: Unfortunately I should’ve asked the shuttle driver exactly where I wanted to

9 go and there was a lady standin, waitin for the shuttle and I said I wanna go to the

10 E building but she said take the A shuttle, well that gave me the grand tour n’

11 finally I got off.

12 D: ((doctor laughs))

13 P: And a, the lady said well, you need to take, de bus driver said you should be

14 on the B. So then I had to wait twenty minutes to get the B cuz I was her about, oh

15 ten after nine. It jus’, what can I say. First time I been here.16 D: If nothing else it was exciting.

17 P: Hey, I got to see the McDonald house and all that.

18 D: Oh did ye?

(adapted from Manning & Ray, 2002, pp. 456–457)

In line 6, the doctor inquires into the way that the patient got to the clinic and in lines

12 and 16 expresses empathy with the patient’s experience on the shuttle. The

expression of pleasantry is intended to create rapport between the doctor and the

patient. There are many other moves that a doctor can make besides inquiring into

the patient’s family and social context to establish rapport and build the relationship.





For example, there are techniques and methods such as being curious and paying

attention to striking moments that can be drawn from mindful practice and social

poetic models that could be woven into the fabric of the conversation given their

shared moral–aesthetic commitment to relationship-centered care. This shared com-

mitment makes it relatively easy for practitioners operating from a biopsychosocial

approach to make situated judgments about when and where techniques and meth-

ods from mindful practice and social poetic models can be integrated to respond

appropriately to the uniqueness of the situation.

Practitioners may also find methods and techniques from radically different tradi-

tions or communities of practice useful. However, large differences in epistemological,

ontological, and axiological assumptions may inhibit the wholesale picking up of tools

and using them ‘‘as is’’ in ways that fit the situation. Burnham (1992) argues that it is

not necessary to jettison, wholesale, techniques that come from different traditions or

communities of practice. Rather, he suggests that practitioners deconstruct techniquesinto their component parts, which allows the practitioner to distinguish those parts that

are coherent with one’s practice and those that are not. The use of deconstruction

moves the practitioner from an ‘‘either–or’’ logic where certain methods and techni-

ques are determined a priori as being coherent with a particular tradition or commu-

nity of practice to a ‘‘both–and’’ position where the critical issue becomes how

practitioners can deconstruct methods and techniques from differing traditions and

communities of practices and connect them with their practice in coherent ways.

Yeung’s (1998) study of consultative management within Hong Kong banks is

instructive in this regard. According to Yeung, Chinese managers practice a kind of

didactic leadership where they are viewed as experts by subordinates and directivesare readily accepted. In a system that values hierarchical forms of leadership, how can

consultative practice with its emphasis on employee participation fit within hierar-

chical leadership practice? Yeung’s analysis suggests that these competing values—

hierarchical versus egalitarian relationships—are managed by supervisors tightly

regulating the participation of their subordinates. Consider the following example:

Example #6

1 Supervisor: Look! How about this? Is it a good idea? We’ll get Carson to act as

2 a back-up. Do you think it’ll work or not?

3 Staff 1: He’ll spend less time working in the front office?4 Staff 2: Well, perhaps it [the office] hasn’t been renovated yet. Once it’s been

5 renovated, whoever is manning the counter outside and serving a queue can buzz

6 a light [to get extra help]. Otherwise it won’t do if those people come to the

7 counter and you refuse them service.

8 Supervisor: Why not simply do this then, if you think it’s urgent. Naturally you

9 don’t do what’s not urgent. If those things are urgent, then it’s better to give them

10 to Carson.

11 Staff 1: That is to say: You people do immediately what you can do.

12 Supervisor: Because for the time being, Carson is still new. If . I’m afraid that





13 he may get confused sometimes and the chance for making mistakes will be

14 greater. But if we give him internal jobs like checking bills, it may be better for

15 him. That way, it wouldn’t matter that much even if [something did go wrong], as

16 it’s something internal.

17 Staff 1: It’d be better if you let me make the arrangements because.

(reasons omitted).

18 Supervisor: Ok then, OK.

(Yeung, 1998, pp. 93–95)

The supervisor regulates the participation of the staff by introducing the episode with

a bipolar question (line 2, Do you think it’ll [Carson as a backup] work or not?),

which tightly frames the topic to be discussed. The supervisor then continues to

regulate the participation of the subordinates by incorporating the subordinate’s

suggestion into another proposal (lines 8–10) and then returning to her initial pro-

posal that Carson be a backup (lines 11–15). The staff members have a voice but the

decision-making process is clearly in the hands of the supervisor. The supervisorhas created a both–and position where she incorporates elements of consultative

decision-making process within a hierarchical expertise-based practice.

Discussion

Our purpose has been to explore one way that studies of practice might better

account for the way practitioners intelligently respond to evolving situations while

sustaining coherence in their linguistic activity. A discursive approach offers a prom-

ising alternative because it accounts for how the wisdom and resources constitutinga tradition or community of practice can be appropriated and used within living

conversations. We suggest that the concept of sensibility is useful for understanding

how practitioners respond intelligently to situations and maintain coherence within

and between conversational episodes. We propose exploring how practitioners act

with sensibility is best approached by examining the interrelationships among (a)

moral–aesthetic commitments; (b) conversational abilities in the form of utterances,

methods, and techniques; (c) practical reasoning and the process of invention; and

(d) context.

A discursive approach to skillful activity highlights several opportunities for

future theorizing and research. First, sensibility provides a useful framework forexploring how one of the most central ideas that inform our understanding of

communication, the co-construction of meaning, is a situated and dynamic activity.

Sensibility foregrounds the importance of meaning making from within the flow of

human conduct and provides a more processual, interaction-based approach that

highlights the role of situated action in constituting skillful practice. It provides

a method for inquiring directly into the communicative enactment of skillful activity

within situated conversational moments that unfold dynamically over time. Sensi-

bility differs from other approaches to skillful activity as it directly addresses the





micro–macro duality regarding the reflexive relationship between patterns of local-

ized talk and larger social, organizational, or cultural structures.

A central issue within communication theory has been how to address the con-

nection between the microdetail of daily communication and more macroelements

such as institutional structures (see Giddens, 1984, as an example). A growing

number of communication theorists see the micro and the macro coming together

in the act of communicating. For example, Taylor and his associates within the

Montreal School argue that communication occurs in the intersection of conversa-

tion and text (i.e., Taylor, 1999; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Conversation refers to

interaction through talk and gestures, which is associated with the unique details of

the situation, including time, place, the particular people involved, and the task at

hand. Text refers to the linguistic scaffolding that exists apart from and transcends

the local conversation and circulates among members of a human system. Texts rely

on typifications or conventional meaning assignments, which allows them to beiterated in different situations. Taylor (1999) suggests that a text’s iterability makes

its transcendence possible because it has a ‘‘capacity to lead an existence independent

of the transactional matrix where it was conversationally produced—its iterabili-

ty .No matter how often you play Hamlet it is still the same old play about a gloomy

Dane’’ (pp. 29–30). The challenge for communication theorists is to develop analyses

that reflect situated reflexive descriptions of human activity that capture the ways

texts are translated into local conversational contexts and used as well as the way that

conversations turn back and influence texts.

Most approaches to skillful activity neglect the way texts can inform conversa-

tions and also do not give attention to how conversational performance can influ-ence the maintenance and elaboration of texts. To be sure, many psychological

approaches pay close attention to the importance of context as they recognize that

skills assessment depends on clearly specifying the context in terms of its content

(affective, cognitive, behavioral) as well as the specific culture, relationship, situation,

or function of interest (Spitzberg, 2003). A set of microbehaviors or behavioral

dimensions can be identified that serve as markers to indicate whether the skill is

evidenced in practice once the context has been determined. However, asserting that

a person’s conversational utterances are contextually appropriate is quite different

than saying a person draws on a repertoire of texts during conversation to create

contextually appropriate utterances. The former treats context as a static frame that

guides people’s assessments of the appropriateness of communicative behavior,

whereas the latter recognizes that conversational flow is dynamic, characterized by

shifts in the situation, which requires the adaptation and translation of the resources

that texts provide into the present conversational moment.

One contribution that sensibility makes to the study of skillful activity is its

ability to create situated and dynamic analyses that address directly the intersection

of the micro and the macro due to its emphasis on D/discourse. Working with

sensibility gives theorists and researchers the opportunity to create highly situated

descriptions of skillful activity by exploring the reflexive relationships between





Discourses and discourses. By focusing on issues related to practical reasoning and

invention, we can explore how skillful activity mobilizes Discourses as resources for

action in discourse. Theorists and researchers can develop empirical analyses that

represent the variety of skillful activity within practice as they create accounts of how

Discourses are appropriated and translated in differing ways to local circumstances

to invent responses to unfolding situations. Moreover, we can begin to see, over time,

how discourse creates, sustains, and elaborates Discourses that inform an individu-

al’s practice.

The framework of moral–aesthetic commitments, conversation, and situation

also gives researchers the opportunity to track the temporal dynamic patterns of

skillful activity. The dominant models for assessing skillful activity diminish the

temporal flow of conversation by creating judgments of whether skill is being dem-

onstrated based on the frequency of behavior, whether particular types of behavior

are present or absent from the conversation, or whether observers rate the individ-ual’s global behavior as competent using an a prior set of evaluative dimensions

(Spitzberg, 2003; see also Guerrero & Jones, 2005, as an example). From a discursive

perspective, however, skillful activity needs to take into account the temporal flavor

of skillful action and the continually unfolding context. A discursive approach

suggests that it is not only important to ask ‘‘what’’ moves people make during

conversational episodes and ‘‘how often’’ but also ‘‘when’’ they are making them.

As Sanders (2003) observes, the meaning of any act depends on its location within

the unfolding chain of utterances, which spotlights the importance of timing and

sequence in the production of skillful activity.

Rather than focus on the aggregated performance of discrete individual acts,sensibility focuses our attention on how conversational utterances connect with each

other and unfold over time, which moves us to make judgments as to whether the

placement of particular utterances within the conversational pattern are skillfully

performed. Similar to jazz improvisation, an individual’s ability to engage in skillful

activity can be assessed by determining the degree to which conversational moves

simultaneously follow what has transpired previously and enable others to follow

and facilitate forward movement in the meaning-making process. This suggests that

future research needs to pay close attention to the way individuals create and sustain

coherence within conversation. A great deal of work has been done on understanding

how coherence is created through such devices as aligning moves, rhetorical devices,

adjacency pairs, and connective triggers (see Cunliffe, 2001; Poole & Doelger, 1986;

Stacey, 2001), and future studies of skillful performance need to place greater empha-

sis on how coherence devices are used to manage and create generative differences in

meaning making. Moreover, given that language not only creates text but also

context, it is also important for future research to explore how practice facilitates

individuals creating a sense of coherence between text and context. Language works

at several levels simultaneously, such as communicating an utterance as well as

creating context (Branham & Peace, 1985). Our analyses of skillful activity need to

better account for how text and context mutually influence each other and jointly





unfold over time as well as how language is used to establish a moral order or to

frame situations in order to position one’s conversational behavior as legitimate

(Holman, 2000; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996).

Second, the notion of sensibility focuses our attention on skillful activity as

a reflexive moral practice that emphasizes values as the basis for judging the quality

of practice both at an individual and at a relational or systemic level. An often

overlooked element of skillful practice is its ethical and moral basis (Wilson & Sabee,

2003). This is surprising as Pratt, Rockmann, and Kaufman (2006) observe that

practitioner’s professional identity is often defined by what he or she does which

means that the practitioner’s professional identity, in terms of the values he or she

identifies within particular traditions or communities of practice, are interwoven

with the practice. Whitehead and McNiff (2006) contend that persons are motivated

to adapt and elaborate their practice when they experience a disconnection between

the values informing their practice and the way they are lived out in their patterns of communication with others. Simply, they experience a disruption in their profes-

sional identity, which triggers an exploration into ways they may improve their

practice. They suggest that values can be used as living standards of judgment that

allow practitioners to make judgments about the quality of their practice:

Criteria and standards of judgement are different things. Criteria take the form

of words and phrases that are used as markers of performance.. Such criteria,

however say little about the quality of practice, that is, what is good about the

practice.. Making judgments about the quality of practice means making

value judgements, in terms of what you find valuable in the practice. Value

judgements then become standards of judgement. You judge things in terms of

what you think is good. (p. 71)

The idea of standards of judgment being rooted in values represents an important

shift in the way that skillful activity is assessed; it cannot be reduced to the absence or

presence of a behavior using tick boxes or the degree of intensity using scales; it has

to be judged in part according to the way it reflects, contradicts, or elaborates the

values that inform an individual’s practice.

The idea of value-based practice resonates with our articulation of the impor-

tance of moral–aesthetic commitments as they reflect the kinds of values that inform

how practitioners work with people and what they consider to be beautiful, good,

and elegant practice. This suggests that research into skillful activity should employ

an individual level of analysis and pay close attention to self-reflexivity. The current

literature on skillful activity certainly highlights the importance of self-awareness,

reflection, and metacognition on the production of skillful activity. However, the

notion of sensibility foregrounds an awareness of one’s moral–aesthetic commitments

or values as they relate to the performance of skillful activity. Practice becomes seen

as ‘‘thoughtful. engagement, and not simply the execution of skills’’ (Whitehead &

McNiff, 2006, p. 83).





This is not to say that skillful activity is solely an individual process that depends

on practitioners remaining true to their moral–aesthetic commitments at all costs.

The notion of sensibility decenters skillful activity as an individual process and

emphasizes its systemic qualities. Skillful activity is embedded in the living, relation-

ally responsive activity that occurs between people and it emphasizes embodied

relational ways of being that integrate modes of feeling, thinking, and doing. What

also becomes important in the study of skilled activity is how practitioners connect

to and coordinate action from within the flow of activity with others. Creating and

sustaining skillful practice can be challenging as individuals enter situations with

different sets of understandings, rules for meaning and action, and moral orders that

guide their patterns of living, which makes the co-construction of skilled practice

a negotiated and contested process. The task therefore for practitioners is to create

jointly with the people with whom they are working collective moral orders in such

a way as to facilitate patterns of coordination that generate affirmative meaningmaking.

Studies of skillful practice must also emphasize relational reflexivity, an under-

standing of how we create ourselves and others in conversation as well as the overall

shape of the relationship by using systemic or relational levels of analysis. A systemic

or relational analytical focus centers on assessing the fit of a practitioner’s utterances

within an emerging system jointly created by practitioners and those individuals with

whom they work. One way to characterize the way a practitioner’s actions fit with the

emerging system is provided by Harris’s (1979) model of communication compe-

tence. She talks about the notion of minimal competence as being outside the system,

one cannot find a way to perceive the human system as a whole, and is thereforeunable to predict what effect his or her action will have on the system. Satisfactory

competence occurs when an individual is able to make sense of the unfolding logic of

the human system. This is similar to Pearce’s (2007) notion of game playing where

one chooses to fit within the emerging system and practice within it. Optimal

competence occurs when the person has a strong grasp of the unfolding system

and can choose whether to fit in or change the game. In Pearce’s (2007) terms,

satisfactory competence is about game playing, when the rules of the game are

relatively stable and fixed. Optimal competence, in contrast, is about game mastery

where one is able to ‘‘name the game’’ and invoke different ways of relating and

connecting. From our perspective, skillful activity would be associated with patterns

of coordination that reflect satisfactory and optimal levels of competence.

Third, the notion of sensibility provides a workable framework for practitioners

to reflect on their practice and construct their own living practical theories. The

notion of sensibility not only provides a framework for academic scholars to theorize

and analyze skillful practice but also provides a framework for practitioners to

develop their own practical theories of practice. One of the fundamental questions

for practitioners is: ‘‘How do I improve my practice?’’ In order to answer this

question, McNiff and Whitehead (2006) suggest that practitioners need:





to investigate and evaluate their work. They ask, ‘‘What am I doing? What do I

need to improve? How do I improve it?’’ Their accounts of practice show how

they are trying to improve their own learning, and influence the learning of

others. These accounts come to stand as their own practical theories of practice,

from which others can learn if they wish. (p. 7)

Practitioners’ stories of their practice become their own living practical theories that

help them to make sense of their own professional lives and to determine what kinds

of practices fit with their professional lives (McNiff, 2007). The framework provided

by sensibility provides one possible model for practitioners to engage in self-study

action research where they can reflect on the moral-aesthetic commitments that

inform their practice, the various conversational techniques and methods that they

use, the contexts in which they show their practice, and how the aforementioned

elements cohere with each other. McNiff and Whitehead’s (McNiff, Lomax, &

Whitehead, 2003; McNiff & Whitehead, 2006) ongoing program of research suggeststhat we need to find a way to give value to practitioners’ knowledge and to develop

models that allow practitioners to engage in self-study action research.

The use of the sensibility framework for helping practitioners develop their

practice suggests an opportunity for expanding our conceptions of practical theory.

Within the communication discipline, the idea of practical theory has gained a strong

foothold over the past few years and is often associated with either Craig’s (1999;

Craig & Tracy, 1995) grounded practical theory or Cronen’s (1995, 2001) notion

of practical theory. For Craig, practical theory involves a normative reconstruction of

practice, whereas Cronen views practical theory as a set of tools, in the form of

concepts and models, for furthering inquiry. For example, Tracy and Mueller

(2001) used grounded practical theory to reconstruct the normative practice of

school board meetings. Drawing on Cronen, Pearce and Pearce (2000) demonstrated

how the tools associated with coordinated management of meaning theory have

evolved over the years as the theory has been applied in different settings. If we

begin to think about developing living practical theories of communicative practice,

Craig’s approach is challenged to consider the role of first-person practical theory in

his account, whereas Cronen is faced with addressing how values may be used to

create living standards to evaluate the quality of practice and its development and

progression.Giving attention to the dynamic interrelationships among moral–aesthetic com-

mitments, conversational abilities, practical reasoning, and context enables practi-

tioners to act with sensibility. Living situations can only be managed by processes

that themselves are living, and acting with sensibility facilitates practitioners’ ability

to respond to the unique circumstances of living situations. As communication

theorists and researchers, adopting a discursive approach to skillful practice rooted

in sensibility facilitates our ability to engage with the connections among the situated

and temporal elements involved with the co-construction of meaning and provides

a position from which to evaluate the quality of reflexive moral practice.





Acknowledgments

Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the National

Communication Association, Miami, 2003, and Chicago, 2007. We thank Joel

Iverson, Jennifer Monahan, John Murphy, John Sloop, Chris Oliver, and BarnettPearce for their feedback, comments, and encouragement while this article was being

prepared.

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Ein diskursiver Ansatz kundigen Handelns

J. Kevin Barge

Texas A & M University

Martin Little

Kensington Consultation Centre Foundation

Für die Erforschung, wie Praktiker intelligent reagieren und einen Sinn von

Kohärenz in der linguistischen Praxis kreieren, schlagen wir einen diskursivenAnsatz vor. Ein diskursiver Ansatz kundigen Handelns macht es möglich, die Rolle

von Bedeutungsfindung in Gesprächen zu erklären, außerdem anzusprechen, wie

Kommunikation den Kontext bestimmt aus dem kundiges Handeln hervorgeht und

gleichzeitig die fachkundige Praxis berücksichtigt. Wir bieten eine Darstellung von

kundigem linguistischen Verhalten, welches sensibel agierende Praktiker betrifft,

wenn sie ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf die reflexiven Beziehungen lenken zwischen:

(a) moral-ästhetische Verpflichtungen; (b) dialogorientierte Fähigkeiten in Form

von Äußerungen, Methoden und Techniken; (c) praktische Argumentation und den

Prozess der Erfindung; und (d) Kontext. Wir schließen, indem wir die

Implikationen eines diskursiven Ansatzes für die Bedeutungskonstruktion,

Identitätskonstruktion und dem Umgang mit Spannungen, die aus verschiedenen

Traditionen oder Praxisgemeinschaften entstehen, untersuchen.



Un Enfoque Discursivo de la Actividad Habilidosa

J. Kevin Barge


Martin Little


Resumen

Proponemos un enfoque discursivo para explorar cómo los profesionales

responden inteligentemente y crean un sentido de coherencia en su práctica

lingüística. Una aproximación discursiva de la actividad habilidosa es capaz de

explicar el rol de la construcción de sentido en la conversación, de explicar cómo

la comunicación construye el contexto donde la actividad habilidosa se origina, y

reconoce el sabor co-creado de la práctica habilidosa. Ofrecemos una explicación

del desempeño lingüístico habilidoso que genera interés por parte de los

profesionales para actuar con sensibilidad prestando atención a las relaciones

reflexivas entre: (a) los compromisos morales-estéticos; (b) las habilidades

conversacionales en la forma de palabras, métodos, y técnicas; (c) el razonamiento

práctico y el proceso de invención; y (d) el contexto. Concluimos con una

exploración de las implicaciones del enfoque discursivo sobre la construcción de

sentido, la construcción de la identidad, y el manejo de las tensiones que emergen

de tradiciones diferentes ó de comunidades de práctica.



从话语角度理解技巧性活动

J. Kevin Barge

德州农机大学

Martin Little


我们提出一种话语方法来探讨实践者在语言实践中怎样在智力上应对

并创造一种连贯感。有关技巧性活动的话语方法能解释意思制造在交

谈中的角色；沟通如何创建技巧性活动的产生背景；还能使人认识到

技巧性实践的共同创造之情味。通过密切关注 (a) 伦理-审美承诺、(b)

在言论、方法、技术等形式中的交谈能力、(c)

实际推理和创新过程；和(d)

背景之间的反刍性关系，我们得以阐述敏感实践者的技巧性语言表现

。最后我们探讨了话语方法对意义制造、身份构建、以及不同传统或

不同社区间的紧张关系之管理的涵义。



기술적행위에 대한 추론적인 접근 J. Kevin Barge


Martin Little


요약 우리는 전문기술 실무자들이 그들의 언어 실행에 있어 어떻게 일관성의

감각에 지적으로 반응하고 이를 창조하는지를 연구하기 위하여 추론적인

접근을 제시하였다. 기술적행위에 대한 추론적접근은 대화에서의

의미생산의 역할을 설명할 수 있으며, 어떻게 커뮤니케이션이 기술적행위가

탄생하는 문맥을 형성하는지를 설명하며, 기술적실행의 상호 창조적인

분위기를 인식한다.우리는 재귀관계를 정밀하게 주목하는것에 의해

전문기술자들이 민감성을 가지고 행위할 수 있도록 하는 기술적 언어적

실행을 설명하고자 한바, 이들 재귀관계들은 1) 도덕적-심미적 위임들; 2)

발언, 방법, 그리고 기술들의 형태로서의 대화적 능력들; 3) 실제적인 논리와

창조과정들; 그리고 4)문맥이다. 우리는 의미형성, 동일성 형성, 그리고

실습에 있어 다른 전통들과 커뮤니티들로부터 유발되는 긴장을 관리하기

위하여 추론적 접근의 함의를 연구하였다.

Documents

A Discursive Approach to Skillful Activity