Transcendental and Material Silence: A Multimodal Study on Silence in Team Meetings
研究了欧洲一家金融组织十次团队会议中的沉默现象，发现沉默可分为超越性和物质性两种类型，并通过三种机制重新构建意义，对管理学和多模态研究有贡献。
Silence in management and organization studies has been predominantly understood as something negative. However, recent examples have highlighted silence as a positive element in learning and organizing. We contribute to prior literature on positive silence and multimodality by arguing silence can operate as a semiotic mode that mobilizes resources for meaning-making. Ten team meetings in a financial organization in Europe were investigated. Visual ethnography was mobilized to gather data through interviews, observations, and photographs. Our analysis identified two types of silence—transcendental and material—that both function through three mechanisms to resemiotize meaning. A framework is presented to situate silence in relation to verbal and visual modes. Three contributions are made to studies on silence and multimodality: extended conceptualizations of silence, silence as a semiotic mode in itself, and methodological pathways for studying silence. In addition, practical implications for team meetings and silence in the workplace are discussed.