Communication as an Interpretive Approach

Interpretive approaches to the study of communication and conflict center on the role of language and symbols in shaping the meaning of disputes. Unlike the variable and the process approaches, the interpretive per­spective introduces history and context as key factors that shape discourse, framing and issue development, narratives and symbolic forms, and negotiated orders.

Discourse Analysis. Discourse studies treat conflict management as a particular type of conversation rather than as information exchange or strategic acts (Glenn & Susskind, 2010). Research focuses on how talk works in negotiation interactions, specifically verbal immediacy, language intensity, account giv­ing, conversational analysis, and supportive statements and arguments. Verbal immediacy refers to how individuals use tacit behaviors to convey closeness or distance from the other party. Use of first-person pronouns such as “you” or “our,” short utterances, and simple sentences indicated closeness and informal­ity, while employing third-party pronouns, long utterances, and excessive numbers of verbs conveyed distance (Donohue, 1991; Donohue, Weider-Hatfield, et al., 1985). In a similar way, employing intense language, such as rude comments, excessive interruptions, and deceptive statements, strained negotiator relationships and escalated conflicts (Donohue & Diez, 1985; Donohue, Weider-Hatfield, et al., 1985).

Interpretive studies also employed conver­sational analysis to investigate how disputants assigned blame in conflict situations (Manusov, Cody, Donohue, & Zappa, 1994). While giving accounts allowed disputants to vent and voice critical issues, patterns of aggregating account sequences spiraled into negative evaluations and thus fostered conflict escalation. Drawing from conversation analysis, researchers have examined the discursive production of bargain­ing sequences, especially how counterproposals signal defer, demur, and deter in responding to the other party (e.g., Maynard, 2010).

Framing and Issue Development. Framing and issue development centers on how dispu­tants discursively define their conflict situa­tion (DeWulf et al., 2009). Drawing from an interactional view of framing, scholars focus on how language use shapes sensemaking and how parties enact their understandings of issues and conflict situations. Thus, it exam­ines how disputants interpret issues over time to show how bargainers reframe or reevaluate the scope of their problems. Conflict framing focuses on how disputants enact a process that transforms the very nature of a conflict as parties acquire new understandings about their situation (Felstiner, Abel, & Sarat, 1980— 1981; Putnam, 1994).

Communication studies reveal that issue development occurs through reframing agenda items and shifting levels of abstraction while discussing issues (Drake & Donohue, 1996; Putnam, 2004b; Putnam & Holmer, 1992). At the beginning of a conflict, disputants define issues through their dominant frames or world­views. Then they search for common framing to bridge their differences and convergence on a problem definition. Reaching convergence on issue framing is directly related to obtaining agreements on substantive issues in a conflict (Drake & Donohue, 1996). Discussions that shift levels of abstraction from literal to sym­bolic or from an individual fault to a system problem introduce options for reframing a conflict (Putnam, 2004b, 2010a).

Symbolic Forms: Narratives and Metaphors. Communication scholars also analyzed the symbolic use of discourse through examin­ing conflict narratives and metaphors; that is, researchers deciphered how language func­tioned symbolically to create norms and social meanings. For example, a narrative analysis of teacher-administrator negotiations revealed that the opposing teams bonded with each other through chaining out vivid stories of outsiders who impeded prior negotiations (Putnam et al., 1991). Narrative analyses of social conflicts, such as labor strikes, exem­plified how communities and publics played important roles in conflict performances (Fuoss, 1995) and how employees shifted from being warriors in heroic battles to vic­tims and martyrs in reacting to management’s control and material power (Cloud, 2005).

Narrative analyses also made signifi­cant contributions to the debates on media­tor neutrality. Traditional problem-solving approaches cast mediators as neutral third parties who intervened on behalf of both sides. An analysis of disputants’ stories, however, revealed that the most coherent and complete narratives often shaped the final agreements, thus calling into question the notion of media­tor neutrality (Cobb, 1993, 1994; Cobb & Rifkin, 1991). Discourse studies confirmed these findings by showing how mediators steered disputants to particular outcomes, set up particular frames for agreements, and dismissed some suggestions as illegitimate (Dingwall & Greatbatch, 1991; Greatbatch & Dingwall, 1994). Thus, analyses of story development in mediation indicated that third parties were sometimes implicitly biased in their interactions.

Another interpretive approach centers on conflict metaphors. Metaphors expressed through disputants’ language reveal motiva­tional, behavioral, and outcome expectations of a conflict (Beisecker, 1988). A metaphor is a way of seeing a thing as if it were something else. That is, metaphors link abstract concepts, such as a conflict, to concrete things, such as a war or a crusade. Even conflict management is a type of metaphor in which fundamental differences exist between the discourse of negotiation and that of litigation (Stutman & Putnam, 1994). First-order metaphors refer to overt behaviors or surface manifestation of a conflict, while second-order metaphors capture the deep-seated meanings that are out­side of a disputant’s awareness. To illustrate, the use of a drama metaphor among Disney employees during a major strike underscored surface-level economic issues, while references to the family metaphor signified the deep- seated or fundamental conflict about chang­ing relationships between management and employees (Smith & Eisenberg, 1987).

Surveys of the metaphors that organiza­tional members hold about conflict revealed three prototypes: (1) conflict as war/destruc- tion, (2) conflict as impotence/inequality, (3) and conflict as opportunity/resolution (Burrell, Buzzanell, & McMillan, 1992). A comparison of first- and second-order symbols indicated that women adopted metaphors of powerless­ness and incompetence in a bureaucratic con­text, but conflict target moderated this finding (Buzzanell & Burrell, 1997). Specifically, dis­putants employed war metaphors to depict coworker conflicts, opportunity metaphors for supervisor controversies, and impotence metaphors to represent conflicts with depart­ment members.

In descriptions of interpersonal conflicts, negative metaphors surfaced more frequently than did positive ones, and disputants com­pared their conflicts with animals, for exam­ple, “stubborn as a mule,” and with natural disasters, for example, “a storm, hurricane, undertow of water” more frequently than with war or violence (McCorkle & Mills, 1992).

Negotiated Orders. Other scholars, who embraced an interpretive perspective, exam­ined how social and moral orders evolved from the enactment of conflicts. In this work, communication constituted the microprocess of social interaction as well as the context and immediate settings that impinged on the conflict. Negotiated order referred to the ways in which communication shaped the social orders that enabled and constrained them. Scholars who examined negotiated orders employed a wide array of influences, including Strauss’s (1978) theory, social confrontations (Newell & Stutman, 1988), and moral orders (Pearce & Littlejohn, 1997).

For example, Donohue and Roberto (1993) employed Strauss’s theory of negotiated order to examine how relationship patterns became ordered within a hostage-taking context. They observed that disputants moved back and forth through cooperation and competition in relatively stable relational rhythms. In a conflict regarding organizational change, Geist and Hardesty (1992) studied the con­flicts that occurred during the implementation of mandatory state and federal regulations (Diagnosis-Related Groups) in two hospitals. Specifically, organizational members negoti­ated new ideologies and occupational role requirements through co-constructing mean­ings about their situation and through estab­lishing new social structures in the midst of their contested terrain.

In a similar way, interpersonal scholars adopted negotiated order approaches to inves­tigate social confrontations as communication episodes (Baxter, 1982). Social confrontations surfaced when one party signaled to another person that the first party had violated a social norm or expected behavior. This confronta­tion, in turn, triggered a conflict as parties attributed blame in the situation and interacted with each other to negotiate a new social order (Newell & Stutman, 1988).

Moreover, disputes about the proper course of action often involved value differences or conflicting moral orders (Pearce & Littlejohn, 1997). Moral orders were value-based assump­tions about right, wrong, goodness, and virtue that guided individual and social actions. In social conflicts, deep-rooted moral orders emerged as natural and legitimate until a clash occurred between different subcultures and fostered intense, escalating conflicts. Communication scholars have recommended ways to transcend moral disputes through suspending judgment, creating new categories, talking across differ­ences, and promoting dialogue.

In general, an interpretive approach sup­ports a constitutive relationship between com­munication and conflict; thus communication is not an input, moderator, or mediator of out­comes, it becomes the conflict itself. Unlike the process approach, however, communication evolves from language and symbols that code­velop the conflict within a historically and contextually based set of social relationships. Discourse approaches focus on question­answers, topic shifts, and turn taking that control conflict development. Narratives and metaphors shape conflicts through symboli­cally defining disputants’ roles, their public performances, and the underlying meanings of events. These meanings also form social orders through shaping ideologies, occupa­tional roles, and the moral fabric of disputes.