Criticising someone’s conduct is a disaffiliative action that can attract recipient objections, particularly in the form of defensive detailing by which the recipient volunteers extenuating
circumstances that undermine the criticism. In Therapeutic Community (TC) meetings for
clients with drug addiction, support staff regularly criticise clients’ behaviours that violate therapeutic principles or norms of conduct. This study examines cases where, rather than criticising a client’s behaviour directly, TC staff members do so indirectly through an anecdote: a case illustrating the inappropriateness of the type of conduct of which the client’s behaviour is an instantiation. TC staff members design the anecdote to convey a principle or norm of conduct which the client has putatively violated, and they systematically pursue endorsement of that principle by the client. By constructing the anecdote as an exemplary case, distanced from the individual client’s personal experience, TC staff members make it an empirically unverifiable, elf-evident, and therefore hard to challenge, llustration of a norm.
Funding
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme
(Marie Curie Actions) of the European’s Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-
2013) under REA grant agreement no 626893.
History
Published in
Discourse Studies: an interdisciplinary journal for the study of text and talk
Volume
18
Issue
6
Pages
695 - 715
Citation
PINO, M., 2016. Delivering criticism through anecdotes in interaction. Discourse Studies, 18 (6), pp. 695-715.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2016-04-26
Publication date
2016-10-06
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Discourse studies and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445616668069