Some words at work are judged before anyone hears what they say. A sharp sentence is heard as an attack, and the question becomes who was hurt. A short word from a trade, a code or an abbreviation or a nickname, is heard either as efficient or as a wall, and the question becomes who is left outside it. In both cases the surface of the talk takes the place of its content. This study asks how a set of scenes written for comparison hears such words, and where it puts what the words point at.
The scenes are GAEKJU's. Among GAEKJU's seven kinds of talk are two it calls, in its English, "Rough talk" and "Their own code". The first gathers hard words: a head nurse saying the order is tangled, a shift leader saying a blank cannot be passed on, a manager raising their voice at a pharmacy counter, a night foreman sighing roughly at a stopped machine. The second gathers the short words of a trade or a group: a grade called by a code, an abbreviation in a patent consultation, a nickname for a stoppage, a word for the rush at the end of a month, an evaluator's "it's ambiguous". This study reads the ten 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 any trade. It reads how the scenes frame the words.
The argument and the contribution
The argument has four parts, and the first two run in parallel.
The first part concerns hard words. Each rough scene offers three readings, and two of them take the hard word itself as their subject: it can raise anxiety, it is a signal, it brings checking forward, it makes the next doubt harder to voice. One reading looks past the word to something else: a gap in who may set the order, a blank on a checklist, blanks in a paper handover, a checking procedure. Three of the four scenes lean to that reading. Three of the four judgments say outright that the words did not aim at a person. The one scene that leans to a reading about the word itself, a raised voice at a pharmacy counter, still places the decisive thing elsewhere, in the channel through which a colleague can disagree.
The second part concerns short words. Five of the six code scenes offer a reading that one code, one word, one sheet or one cell is enough: the same code needs the same information, the two words mean the same stop, the abbreviation catches the core, the official sheet makes nicknames useless, one item must be chosen at once. None of the six leans to such a reading. Two readings dismiss the short word as habit or as ignorance, and none leans to those either. The scenes lean instead to readings in which no one short form holds everything and something beside it holds the rest: a note on an animal's legs beside a grade, a builders' wait beside a hold, an inventor's drawing beside an abbreviation, a new nickname beside an official sheet, a sentence of hesitation beside a cell, a word for the month-end rush beside a calendar of returns.
The third part sets the two kinds side by side. Both kinds of scene offer readings that call the words a signal. The rough scenes offer two such readings and lean to neither. The code scenes offer two and lean to both. The scenes are willing to treat a short word as information in its own right. They hear a hard word as pointing at something, but they do not credit its hardness as the information.
The fourth part concerns the proposals. None of the ten asks anyone to soften a tone, lower a voice, drop a code or standardise a term. Nine name a time, four give an authority or an option, and seven set two things together or side by side. The scenes answer a problem that presents itself as one of surface with arrangements of time, place and authority.
The contribution follows from the third and fourth parts. Two bodies of research meet in these scenes without quite touching. One treats hard words at work as incivility, with targets, instigators and costs. The other treats the short words of a trade as the language of an occupation, a source of misunderstanding between groups and of knowledge within them. The scenes take something from each: from the first, the question of the target; from the second, the view that a short word carries what a formal category drops. They keep a position neither holds alone. The surface of talk is read as a pointer, the pointer is followed to a thing, and the remedy is time and a place where two accounts can be seen together. That position is this study's contribution, offered as a reading of how ten written scenes are built and not as a finding about any workplace.
The debate
The first strand concerns hard words. Andersson and Pearson, Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace (1999), introduce the concept of workplace incivility and explain how it can spiral into increasingly intense aggressive behaviour. They examine what happens at the key points of such a spiral, the point where it starts and the point where it tips, and they describe factors that can make a spiral occur and escalate and the secondary spirals that can follow. The scenes read here hold hard words without a spiral. In each rough scene the second speaker answers the hard word by taking up the next piece of work. This study reads that answer as the place where the scenes write the start of a spiral and then decline to let it turn; the reading is this study's own, and the scenes leave open what a second exchange would bring.
Cortina, Magley, Williams and Langhout, Incivility in the Workplace: Incidence and Impact (2001), examine the incidence, targets, instigators and impact of incivility, which they illustrate with disrespect, condescension and degradation. They find that a large share of the employees surveyed reported some experience of it, that some of the most powerful individuals instigated uncivil acts, and that uncivil experiences were associated with negative effects on job satisfaction, job withdrawal and career salience and with greater psychological distress. The word that carries across to the scenes is "target". Three of the four rough judgments say what the words aimed at, and in each it is not a person: the confusion of an order, an unchecked item, a range that cannot be known. This study reads that as the scenes stretching the word beyond what the survey examined; the work's own note says nothing of targets that are not people.
A second strand concerns the short words of occupations. Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (1996), followed field technicians who repair photocopiers, and examined how they talk about their work and how that talk is instrumental in their success. Diagnosis happens through a narrative process, the creation of a coherent description of the troubled machine; stories circulating among technicians are the principal means by which they stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behaviour; and the work holds elements not contained in the official definition of the job yet vital to its success. One scene read here gives that outside a history: a crew's nicknames for stoppages are written onto an official sheet, and the crew soon has a new nickname for a stoppage the sheet does not hold.
Bechky, Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor (2003), traced misunderstandings between engineers, technicians and assemblers to their work contexts. The difficulties of sharing knowledge were rooted in differences in their language, in where their practice took place and in how they conceived of the product. When problems arose, solutions that invoked the differences in work contexts and created common ground between the communities could transform the understandings of others. The scene of a construction meeting read here has two words for one day, a hold and a wait, and its judgment declines to match the words. This study reads that refusal as close to Bechky's account, in which solutions that invoke the difference in work contexts are the way through; that the account also argues against settling on one word is this study's extension, not the work's claim.
Two works treat the objects that stand between such groups. Star and Griesemer, Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 (1989), hold that scientific work needs many viewpoints and also needs cooperation, and that the two pull against each other. They name two activities as central to translating between viewpoints, the standardisation of methods and the development of boundary objects, which are adaptable to different viewpoints yet robust enough to keep their identity across them, and they distinguish four types, among them standardised forms. Carlile, A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development (2002), describes knowledge as localised, embedded and invested within a function, so that work across functions meets problematic boundaries, and describes the use of a boundary object as a means of representing, learning about and transforming knowledge at a given boundary. Several code scenes end with something shared between two people who speak differently: a drawing, a calendar, a table with a note beside it, which this study reads through both works. Where the fit is loose, as it is for a calendar carried from one firm to another, the study says so.
Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999), treat classification as the scaffolding of information infrastructures. They emphasise the role of invisibility in how classification orders human interaction, ask how categories are made and kept invisible and how people can change that invisibility when they need to, and hold that each standard and category valorises some point of view and silences another. Most of the code scenes turn on a formal category: a grade, a legal scope, an official sheet, a cell in a classification table. In each, someone speaks for what the category leaves out. The work gives this study its sharpest question for the code scenes: whose point of view does the short form keep, and whose does it silence?
The last strand concerns attribution. Cramton, The Mutual Knowledge Problem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration (2001), proposes from a study of dispersed teams that failures of mutual knowledge among dispersed collaborators include unevenly distributed information, difficulty conveying the salience of information and difficulty interpreting the meaning of silence. Cramton suggests that unrecognised differences in collaborators' situations, contexts and constraints can make it more likely that a difficulty is put down to a person's disposition rather than to the situation, and discusses implications for collaborators who share a place as well. Weber and Camerer, Cultural Conflict and Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach (2003), let laboratory firms develop a culture and then merged two of them; performance fell, subjects overestimated the performance of the merged firm, and they blamed the fall on members of the other firm rather than on the situation the conflicting cultures created. Both works describe a turn from situation to person. Several scenes read here make the opposite turn. A quality manager says the pattern of returns must be shown to come from the calendar and not from the people. This study reads that sentence, and the judgments that say the rough words did not aim at a person, as the scenes taking the side of situational attribution, a reading that goes beyond both works.