Language in Business, Language at Work by Erika Darics & Veronika Koller

Author:Erika Darics & Veronika Koller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PALGRAVE

Figure 9.3 Conflict stages

situation, but if left unaddressed they are bound to resurface as token conflicts over trivial matters or lead to what consultant Theresa Gale (2012) calls a ‘communication triangle’, where someone takes the conflict they have with, say, a colleague to a third person instead of trying to resolve it with the colleague.

If the speech event in which a conflict arises features an institutionally powerful participant such as a team leader, that person can also impose a decision to nip the conflict in the bud. This is what speaker C does in the following excerpt (adapted from Holmes, 2006, pp. 57–58), where she blocks a suggestion that she disagrees with:

Example 9.1

A: looks like there’s been actually a request for screendumps . I know it-C: no screendumps

A: was outside of the scope but people will be pretty worried about it

B: we-

C: no screendumps

D: ((sarcastic)) thank you {C’s name}

B: we know we know you didn’t want them and we um er [we’ve]

C: [that does not] meet the criteria

Note how, in this example, the team members phrase the suggestion in an impersonal way to begin with (‘there’s been … a request’), acknowledge C’s preferences (‘we know you didn’t want them’) and become hesitant when met with her unmitigated refusal (‘and we um er’) (for more analysis see Section 7A).

If a conflict is allowed to play out, it is negotiated and can be resolved, even when arising out of strong, i.e. unmitigated, disagreement, as in the extract below (adapted from Choi and Schnurr, 2014, p. 12), where team members discuss what kind of figures to include in a research paper:

Example 9.2

A: where you have two dimensions and [the plot]

B: [it doesn’t] make any sense.

C: that makes sense

A: well it’s shown in the data

D: yeah I can do that

C: no the scatter plot makes . makes sense.

B: the scatter plot’s ok it’s the circle that doesn’t make sense.

C: no the circle does make sense too

B: no it doesn’t

C: yes it does

D: ((laughs softly))

B: you can write an infinite number of circles there’s ninety- five percent inside it and five percent outside

C: but anyway we can leave the circle out it doesn’t matter

B: yeah you can show the plot if you want

However, conflicts are not always resolved so easily and a negotiation can escalate into an argument or even a verbal fight. These are likely to lead to a situation where conflicts get ‘entrenched’, no one ‘budges’ and participants are ‘stuck’ or ‘reach a dead end’. (Not only war metaphors, movement metaphors, too, abound in talk about conflict.) The immediate reaction is usually to shift the topic or to disengage. In the following extract (adapted from Koester, 2006, pp. 131–132), the managing director (A) of a printing business and the office manager (B) start out discussing a problem with a customer’s order, but end up in a conflict with each other, from which B disengages:

Example 9.3

A: can I just discuss with you about this da:mn label . where do you think we ought to go

B: uhm .

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