My Reflections on Chapters 6-10 of Rapley: Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis.

In reading chapters 6-10 of Rapely, specifically through reading chapter 6, I realized I don't feel comfortable with this overwhelming emphasis on "naturally-occurring" talks. What is bothering me in this regard is that as a discourse researcher, when I enter the field and as I am recommended to focus on emerging patterns in naturally-occurring talk, how could I make sure that the talk is happening on he track that might sort of provide answers to my research question. For instance, for my data analysis project in this course, I am planning to attend a meeting of a group of entrepreneurs in Knoxville to observe and to record their interactions. I am not still clear, what I am going to look for in these interactions and even for example, if I want to investigate entrepreneurial identity, how can I make sure that the interactions and discourses that happen in that specific meeting, guide me towards seeing patterns in terms of entrepreneurial identity. However, I assume that I should go to this meeting with my broad research question in hand but I am not sure if that specific conversation will be helpful to me or not. This is very different with interview sessions when I can purposefully prime interviewees to talk about the topic of importance to me.
    In chapter 7 where Rapely talks about exploring conversations with documents, I am a bit confused. I can see how documents like letters to shareholders have been previously used in management & organization research but the majority of this work  has been conducted via content analysis in which I assume the sequence and various turns of talk is not really important. So, I am still thinking of how documents can be used in conversation analysis in my field of study.
In chapter 10, where Rapley talks about the validity of this type of research, I am not easily justified that taking the several steps recommended by Rapley, will justify the audience that my interpretations are credible and plausible and that they are not just my interpretations in the way I want and prefer to see the world and project it to others.

My reflections on Hutchby & Wooffitt (2008), & Wiggins, et al. (2001)

The first thing that attracted my attention, especially because my mind has been primed on conversation analysis is that there are lots of repeated letters in the names of the authors of the reading of this week, for instance, Wooffitt, Jefferson, Wiggins:). Though this observation doesn't mean anything, It was entertaining to me.

After going through the first three chapters of Hutchby & Wooffitt (2008) about conversation analysis and also, Wiggins, et al. (2001) paper on cognitive and behavioral aspect of individuals' eating behaviors, I found a few commonalities between prescriptions of Hutchby & Wooffitt and the way Wiggins had conducted his research.

CA is the study of talk or a systematic analysis of talk produced in everyday situations of human interactions. This has been captured in Wiggin's study of family conversations at dinner table. As Wiggins has elaborated in his paper, he has based his analysis on  transcribed tape recordings of these naturally-occurring conversations to discover how family members understand and respond to each others turns at talk as is the case when participants (including mum & her daughter) discuss the unfinished plate of food of the daughter. 

As Wiggins argues not only the semantic implications of these talks-in -interactions count but also the activities being negotiated in the talk are also of importance, like the consensus the daughter tries to get to with her mum on the uneatability of the food in her plate as the reason why she hasn't finished the food up. 

 In general, the basic tenet of all CAs is that n the realm of a conversation,  individuals manage to uncover and interpret each others' intentions and intended meanings as the sequences of participants talk unfolds whic attract out attention to why conversations should be captured in naturally- occurring contexts. 

I also heard about a study conducted by an organization scholar in which she'he has captured the emerging patterns in the naturally-occurring conversations between a cloth shop seller and his/her customers which shows how the study of conversations can open its place in management and organization studies.  

My reflections on Chapters 1-5 of Rapley and Luff (2012) paper

The first five chapters of Replay's book was an easy read for me and actually answered to several of my questions about conducting qualitative research.
These include:
 - The book recommends researchers to taking field notes during recruitment of participants to be able to use these notes in the final research report.

- It was really interesting to me that the book says interview questions can be changed over the life-cycle of the project. I remember while I was conducting the interviews for my qualitative research, I was always concerned about asking the same questions from all the interviewees. May be my training in quantitative research has conditioned my mind to get used to consistency of methods, questions, etc.
- I also realized that when qualitative researchers talk about taking notes, these notes could include initial stages prior to recording, interview, etc. during the process and after it.
-  I also learnt that it's good to do some field work in the research site prior to starting any kind of recording, because that helps the researcher to get familiar with the research site and avoid any issues that might come up during the main recording.
- When author talks about transcript, it was interesting for me to know that as a qualitative researcher, I should consider transcripts as the secondary data source and always try to re-engage with my recording. I always thought that when transcripts are developed, there's no need to go back to the original recordings while apparently, this is not the case.
- Taking about  Luff & Heath paper, I became interested to know about the research in management that has sort of used video recording. To my surprise my search in Google Scholar didn't yield any management or entrepreneurship research in which data collection has been conducted through video recording. Even if that is not case, I think the number of management & entrepreneurship research will be very few which sets the ground to use this rich data collection method in this stream of research.



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My Reflections on chapters 4-6 of Philips and Jorgensen and Rex (2010)

Basically Chapter 4 of the book talks about discursive Psychology (DP). My understanding of DP is that in DP, our ways of understanding and categorizing the world are not universal, but historically and socially specific and contingent and that individuals are not consistent in their talks and they might contradict themselves in terms of what they say. In fact, these consistencies and inconsistencies are used as rhetorical strategies in situated language use (I am not sure what the last sentence mean? So, is the representation of these consistencies and inconsistencies helping researchers in finding specific patterns?)

The other thing that I understood from reading this chapter is that epistemologically  DP is categorized  in the group of social constructionism that argues that attitudes, social groups and identities are social constructs. These social constructs are the outcomes of social interactions among people in their everyday lives. 

Also, DP sees subjective psychological realities as constituted through discourse, defined as situated language use or language use in everyday texts and talk. Discourse is said to construct our “lived reality”.DP sees people as both producers and as products of discourses.

If I want to take a position, I should confess that I am not a big fan of DP when it argues that what people say does not necessarily represent what they mean and what they think of in their minds. I think, except those instances where there's possibility of "social Desirability", in other circumstances, what people say could be representative of the things that are going on in their minds.  

Chapter 5 talks about the similarities and differences among the three approaches that have been previously discussed in chapters 1-3. Reading this chapter helped to sort of make more sense of the topics that I had read in other chapters. But still there are lots of ambiguities for me about the topics covered in this book. For instance, I am not yet sure about what inter-textuality and inter-discursivity mean. 

After all, multi -perspectival research, discussed in this chapter, reminds me of mixed method research. 

Chapter 6 discusses critical social constructionist research. The first thought that crossed my mind after reading a couple of pages of this chapter was why authors of the book decided to discuss social constructionist research as the final chapter. Honestly, I have no idea about it. However, after reading through the chapter, I forgot about this and sort of overwhelmed my mind with the content of the chapter.  

Reading about "hegemony" in this chapter, reminded me of the hegemony of venture capitalists on entrepreneurs who are in need of financial resources.  

Another issue that crossed my mind was that social constructionists argue that taken-for-grantedness  delimits the field of possibilities for thinking and acting. So, in resource-dependence theory (which is a well-grounded theory in strategic management),  firm's dependence on specific resources that are under the control of an entity in the society, creates power for that entity. So, if the mentioned firm wants to reduce the extent of power and influence of the resource controller, it should look for other ways to get access to those resources or look for ways that makes it independent of those resources. This resource dependence logic makes a very good sense. Whoever controls the valuable resources, is entitled to exert power and influence. How does critical research want and can represent this reality in another way?

  One deconstructive argument could be that the power and influence of those who control resources would be meaningless if nobody needs their resources. So, this is a two-way mutual dependence and influence. 

Although I am not familiar with literacy literature, I enjoyed reading Rex (2010) paper. What I liked about the paper is the flow of the topics which attracts the attention of the reader to go on and on. I think, this is a good example of literature review.