2134/37688
Elizabeth Stokoe
Elizabeth
Stokoe
Rein Sikveland
Rein
Sikveland
The backstage work negotiators do when communicating with persons in crisis
Loughborough University
2019
Suicide
Crisis
Negotiation
Conversation analysis
Communication training
Live supervision
Linguistics
Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified
Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified
2019-05-02 10:09:39
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/The_backstage_work_negotiators_do_when_communicating_with_persons_in_crisis/9476579
When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to
prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator’s role is to talk directly to the
person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working ‘behind the scenes’, supports the ongoing
negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio-recorded British negotiations, we uncover the backstage
work of secondary negotiators. We use conversation analysis to identify the sequential
position, linguistic form and action of the secondary negotiator’s interventions on (i) the
delivery (e.g., ‘sound angry’) and (ii) next actions (e.g., ‘say please’, ‘try asking them to
move’) of the primary negotiator, and how the primary incorporates them into the
negotiation. Our analysis shows that, while some suggestions were effective, others disrupted
the flow of the negotiation as well as the alignment between primary negotiator and person in
crisis. The paper augments current sociolinguistic understandings of the high-stakes language
activity of crisis negotiation and highlights the importance of attending to linguistic features
of interaction when training negotiators to work better as a team.