“Contraversations” Constructing Conflicts
研究通过分析一场社区会议中的叙事，揭示了“对抗性对话”如何通过语言构建对立、阻碍合作，对理解组织冲突和利益相关者关系管理有参考价值。
Businesses and societies face increasingly complex problems. Collaborative relationships are needed to leverage the differences among participants and to balance stakeholder concerns. The article takes a discursive, constructionist approach in exploring the relations of five factions involved in resolving a town-gown conflict. The case data are narratives collected during a pivotal community-wide meeting in which the town-gown factions participated. The findings underscore the characteristics and roles of language in constructing and organizing meanings. In particular, the focal data reveal the influence of “contraversation”—that is, dialectical and dialogical conversation particularly and publicly directed against one faction, in constructing antagonisms and thwarting collaboration. The focal findings added insight into the demographic and historical characteristics of the factions, the socially embedded understandings, and the role of conversations in developing discursive resources that create collective identities and translate them into integrating rather than disintegrating intergroup performance in facing problematic concerns.