A short sentence at work can stop a plan. A driver says a bus cannot go out. A foreman says the moved trees need more watching. A supervisor says wait. A coordinating teacher says the request will be reviewed, and does not yet say when. Each of these sentences is addressed to a decision, either one that someone above has to make or one that a schedule has already made, and each can be heard in two ways at least: as a refusal that costs time, or as information that the decision lacks. This study asks how a set of scenes written for comparison hears such talk, and where it puts the time that someone spends waiting for the answer.
The scenes are GAEKJU's. Among GAEKJU's kinds of talk are two it calls, in its English, "Looking up" and "Holding out". The first gathers talk aimed at those higher up: reports, grumbling about orders, a promise to review. The second gathers talk that holds a line against a plan: "not yet", "I can't", "wait". This study reads the eleven synthetic scenes of these two kinds whose evidence holds no digit. They are invented scenes, and GAEKJU says so: in its words, synthetic scenes are written for comparison and are not testimony from the trades they are set in. The study therefore draws no fact from them about power plants, schools, ports, banks, research institutes, arboretums, bus depots, insurance, webcomics, building or home repair. It reads how the scenes frame a decision.
The argument and the contribution
The argument has three parts. The first concerns the readings. Each scene offers three readings of what happened and leans to one of them. In every one of the eleven, one reading takes the side of the schedule, the form or the one above: silence means consent, the promise to review is a sufficient answer, the refusal disrupts the service, the shortest schedule is best. No scene leans to that reading. Yet the scenes do not simply take the speaker's side either. Ten of the eleven lean to a third reading, one that says what would have to be checked, which time would have to be promised or whose authority would have to be clear before either side could be believed.
The second part concerns what the words are heard to say. The scenes hear "not yet" and "wait" as a question about a time that a record did not hold. A booking sheet that has no slot for a recheck, a results table that keeps only clear results, a plan that dropped one floor's inspection, an event date set without the trees' recovery: in each, the speaker's refusal is read as the first sign that the record is short of time.
The third part concerns the wait itself. When a decision is held open, someone waits: the next crew, the teachers, the policyholder, the next customer, the visitors. The scenes' proposals divide that waiting and the work of explaining it among people and times, and refuse in most cases to leave it with one person.
The contribution follows from the third part. The research on voice and silence read here frames its question between the one who speaks and the one higher up who hears or does not. The scenes keep a third figure in view, the one who waits while the decision is open, and they treat that wait as a cost to be shared rather than as the price of either speaking or staying silent. That figure is this study's contribution to the conversation, offered as a reading of how eleven written scenes are built and not as a finding about any workplace.
The debate
The oldest frame here is Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970). Hirschman distinguishes two ways of reacting to deterioration and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organisations: exit, to quit or switch, and voice, to agitate and exert influence for change from within. The book questions the efficiency of a mechanism that relies wholly on exit, holds that exit often undercuts voice, and sees loyalty as what slows exit and lets voice play its part. The scenes read here are almost all scenes of voice in Hirschman's sense. Nobody quits. A driver, a technician and a creator say they cannot do the next thing, a foreman says not yet, and all of them stay. One scene does carry the shadow of exit: a series may halt instead of being renegotiated. This study reads that halt as the place where the scenes come nearest to Hirschman's other option; the reading is this study's own.
A second strand asks why people do not speak. Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin, An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence: Issues that Employees Don't Communicate Upward and Why (2003), interviewed employees and found that most had been concerned about an issue without raising it to a supervisor, and that the reason given most often was the fear of being viewed or labelled negatively and so damaging valued relationships. The scenes read here are not scenes of silence. Their speakers do speak. But every scene includes a reading that would give the speaker such a label, and the question this study takes from the work is how the scenes treat that label once the words are out.
Van Dyne, Ang and Botero, Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs (2003), separate silence and voice into distinct constructs, each with its own motives, and propose that silence is more ambiguous than voice, that observers are more likely to misread the motives for silence, and that such misreadings carry more incongruent consequences. The work's propositions concern employees' silence. One scene read here turns the matter round: the silence is above, an answer that has not come, and one of the scene's readings takes that silence as consent. The work fits that scene only partly, and this study says so where the scene is read.
Morrison, Employee Voice and Silence (2014), gives the definition this study uses for the first kind of talk. Upward voice is the voluntary communication of suggestions, concerns, information about problems or work-related opinions to someone in a higher position; silence is withholding such input, which deprives the organisation of potentially useful information. The review gathers what affects whether employees speak up or stay silent and what follows from each. GAEKJU's "Looking up" scenes fit the definition closely. Its "Holding out" scenes fit less well, because a driver speaking to a dispatcher, or a technician to the person assigning the jobs, is speaking across a schedule more than up a line.
Edmondson, Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams (2003), studied teams learning a new surgical technology, whose members coordinate in uncertain, fast-paced situations, and found that the most effective leaders communicated a motivating rationale for change and minimised concerns about power and status differences to promote speaking up in the service of learning. The work puts the weight on the one who hears. The scenes read here give the hearer a line of talk too, and what that line does is one of the things this study reads.
Faraj and Xiao, Coordination in Fast-Response Organizations (2006), set the design view of coordination, rules and structures meeting the demands of the environment, beside a view grounded in practice. In a trauma centre they distinguish expertise coordination, which relies on protocols and shared knowledge, from dialogic coordination, which includes epistemic contestation, joint sensemaking, cross-boundary intervention and protocol breaking, and which answers novel events under time pressure. Such dialogic practices, they note, are highly contested because of epistemic differences, reputation stakes and the possible apportioning of blame. Several scenes read here hold a moment that this study reads as contestation against a plan already made, and the work's note that such practices are contested gives a name to the reading that the scenes set beside the speaker.
Two works treat time. Orlikowski and Yates, It's About Time: Temporal Structuring in Organizations (2002), propose that through everyday action people produce and reproduce temporal structures, which in turn shape the rhythm and form of their practices. Perlow, The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time (1999), followed software engineers who felt they had too much to do and not enough time, found that constant interruptions, a crisis mentality and a reward system based on individual heroics sustained that feeling, and found that changing how the group used its time raised its collective productivity. The first work lets a booking sheet or a results table be read as a temporal structure people made and can remake. The second sets the individual hero beside the shared use of time, a contrast this study carries to the scenes' proposals.
The last work concerns authority. Klein, Ziegert, Knight and Xiao, Dynamic Delegation: Shared, Hierarchical, and Deindividualized Leadership in Extreme Action Teams (2006), found in emergency medical teams a system in which senior leaders rapidly and repeatedly hand the active leadership role to more junior leaders and take it back, and suggest that such units achieve swift coordination by melding hierarchical, role-based structures with processes that add flexibility. Two scenes read here turn on the question of who may decide while the answer from above has not come, or who may change an order of work. The work offers a picture of that authority as something handed down and taken back.
Between these strands lies the debate this study enters. The voice and silence research asks what makes people speak to those above them and what follows. The research on coordination and time asks how work holds together under the pressure of schedules that people themselves have made. The scenes read here sit where the two meet: a voice that is mostly about time, addressed to a schedule as much as to a person.