Integrating conversation analysis and issue framing to illuminate collaborative decision-making activities

Abstract

A shift from top-down, hierarchical decision-making toward collaborative, consensus-oriented decision-making is taking place across many settings, leading to meetings in which diverse participants seek to reach agreement on issues of significance. This article proposes a new approach to analyzing such meetings that integrates conversation analysis (CA) and issue framing (IF). While CA and IF have both been applied to collaborative decision-making, each approach, on its own, suffers from significant limitations. Combined, they allow negotiation talk in meetings to be examined holistically, integrating a consideration of both process and content. New relationships among interactional sequences and framing processes are revealed, leading to the discovery of patterns across the decision-making activity as a whole. These patterns, in turn, can be situated in the context of the institutions within which the negotiations take place. This novel integrative approach is illuminated through application to a 162-turn decision-making activity.