The Problematic Moment Approach

USING THE PROBLEMATIC MOMENT APPROACH TO ACCESS REPRESSED DISCOURSES AND EMOTIONS IN GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Paper presentation for 2000 ISPSO Symposium
James Cumming and Evangelina Holvino

ABSTRACT
A problematic moment is a moment, typically a moment of silence, experienced by a group that marks a disruption to a particular discourse of values, beliefs, assumptions, and affect being constructed by the group. The theory of problematic moments draws on the work of:

• Fairclough, who brought together language analysis and social theory by combining the social-theoretical approach of discourse with the text-and-interaction approach of linguistically oriented discourse analysis;
• Holvino, who has integrated theories of group dynamics from the Tavistock and National Training Laboratories (T-group) traditions; and
• Billig, a discursive psychologist, who has reformulated the idea of repression to show how it depends on the skills of language.

The Problematic Moment Approach helps access the unspoken and silenced discourses and emotions that conscious and unconscious power dynamics may repress in a group and an organization. The Approach was used to track the discourse of a two-day conference on issues of gender.

Three moments that occurred during the conference were identified as problematic. A videotape of those moments, which we will show in our presentation, was played back to conference organizers who identified dominant and repressed conference discourses.

Further analysis identified four unspoken norms operating during the conference. Each problematic moment helps show how the rhetorical device of replacement helped to repress the emotions that arose in conference participants when there was transgression of those norms.

USING THE PROBLEMATIC MOMENT APPROACH TO ACCESS REPRESSED DISCOURSES AND EMOTIONS IN GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Paper presentation for 2000 ISPSO Symposium
James Cumming and Evangelina Holvino

In fact, my whole outlook on social life is determined by this question. How can we recognize the shackles that traditions have laid upon us? For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them.
Boas

Introduction to the Problematic Moment Approach
A problematic moment is a moment, typically a moment of silence, experienced by a group that marks a disruption to a particular discourse of values, beliefs, assumptions, and affect being constructed by the group. Individual group members may not appreciate the significance of the moment as it happens.

However, at a later date a videotape of those moments can be played back that enables participants to reflect in tranquility on the meaning of the moments and to generate hypotheses about the nature of the values, beliefs, and assumptions being contested. At another level, it also allows participants to re-evaluate habitual responses, particularly emotional ones, that may be triggered at such key moments.

The value of the problematic moment approach is that it allows access to the unspoken and silenced discourses and emotions that conscious and unconscious power dynamics may repress in a group. In other words, the approach gives members of a group the opportunity to see what the dominant discourse may have accomplished by the repression of alternative discourses in an organization, perhaps seemingly through processes of "rational" dialogue. Organizational members also have the possibility of learning how some ways of thinking about; talking about; and accomplishing the organizational tasks get more attention than others.

Applying the Approach
The authors of this paper were asked by a Graduate School of Management (GSM) in the USA to use the Problematic Moment Approach to track the discourse of a two-day conference held in June 1999 for about one hundred people, most of them white, US American women. The aim of the conference, Gender at Work: Beyond white, western, middle-class, heterosexual professional women, was:

To structure a dialogue through which participants can surface and "unpack" assumptions about gender in organizations that implicitly or explicitly are based on the norm of white, western, middle class, heterosexual, professional women.

A team of three conference participants was briefed to note the time when problematic moments occurred in the conference. From this data, three moments that occurred during the two conference days were identified as problematic. The videotape of the conference was edited to produce a videotape just containing these particular moments.

The edited tape was played back to a meeting of members of the GSM who had participated in the conference for analysis and discussion. For the rest of this paper I will refer to this group of people as "the Group." As a result of their analysis, the Group identified concrete ways to ensure that repressed discourses, emotions, and identities are more present in future conferences.

The dominant and repressed discourses identified by the Group for each problematic moment are outlined in table form below. After that, a detailed analysis of one of those problematic moments done by the Group is presented. Then we present the theory of the Problematic Moment Approach, which has particular relevance to emotions in organizations, and use it to revisit the problematic moment analyzed in depth.

Overview of the dominant and repressed discourse in the conference Problematic Moment #1: A moment of complicity
This problematic moment occurred when the white female South African panelist had run out of her allotted presentation time. In the moment, she tries to negotiate with the leader of her panel, a colored South African, and the audience for extra time to show a slide. The audience supports her in opposition to the leader of the panel in gaining more time for her presentation. Possible dominant and repressed discourses at play here are outlined in the table.

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