Conclusion: Troubles talk as collaborative practice

In this section I have investigated the management of a number of domains within troubles talk and have queried how these contribute to rapport management and enhancement. We have seen that troubles, and with that face-threats, goals, and rights and obligations tend to be constructed as shared, leading to a less severe threat to the individual but also to a greater sense of common ground and shared fate amongst the team members. This is reflected in the interactional strategies employed in managing the different domains. With all of them it seems that during troubles talk team members are highly in-sync and adhere to a set of interactional ‘rules’. This fits well with the findings discussed in section 5.1-5.3 on the discursive domain that showed that topics tend to reflect shared experiences and are relevant and immediate to all team members and that topic introduction is collaborative in the sense that team members do not forcefully introduce topics but wait for others in the team to signal interest, or alternatively the speaker signals the importance the topic has for themselves in some way. We can further see the rapport enhancing orientation generally present in the team in troubles talk by the fact that these receive a 100% uptake.

In this section, I have discussed the construction, validation, exploration and escalation of the troubles and emphasised the way the participatory domain was managed. Further I have outlined other features of troubles talk including self-disclosures and explicit negative evaluations (illocutionary domain), laughter, and humour and swearing (stylistic domain). Within the participatory domain we have seen how the floor is shared amongst participants which leads to a level of equality in how troubles are constructed and defined. Troubles tend to be told as shared narratives (see section 5.4.1-5.4.3), which may also heighten the sense of

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sharedness in the team and might help to actively construct them as such. In addition, I have shown that troubles tend to be constructed to be escalating and sometimes even grossly exaggerating the topic they deal with, which again needs interlocutors’ agreement and collaboration in partially suspending rational judgement and instead to enjoy an episode of talk that emphasises togetherness in the face of a troubles, a shared outlook and lots and lots of laughter. With this, team members heighten their alignment as well as the sense of both equity and association in the team.

Within the illocutionary domain I have looked at two speech acts that were found to be particularly characteristic of the data set under study: Self-disclosures and complaints/negative assessments. The activity of troubles talk seems to have allowed team members to breach topics they otherwise are not able to bring up including personal topics. Self-disclosures carry a large potential face threat and as we have seen this was mitigated by team members reciprocating these self-disclosures. In doing so they not only mitigate a face threat but also repeatedly emphasise equal status amongst team members.

With regards to complaints we find again that team members synchronise their speech, in this case mostly by avoiding the attribution of blame. In addition, they seem to maintain the rapport enhancing function of troubles talk by disaffiliating from signs of actual anger and strongly worded or unspecific negative assessments.

Finally, within the stylistic domain we found a large amount of swearing to occur in troubles talk, as well as a lot of joint laughter and a humorous treatment of many of the troubles. Both swearing and laughter are used to release and share emotions with the team. Surprisingly, both tend to be adapted by the team, i.e. team members tend to join into both the laughter as well as the swearing. Swearing seems to constitute the (benign) breach of a sociopragmatic principle that team members subscribe to, which is not to swear in a workplace, but it seems that exactly the breaching of this principle is what enhances rapport in the team, as it decreases distance and increases intimacy. In addition, it functions as a solidarity marker with regards to other people’s troubles. Joint laughing enhances rapport; in addition, it mitigates threats to face, goals and rights and obligations and in this shows similarity to humour. Both also function to maintain a positive group mood and overall to hold troubles talk within a positive and to some extent also productive interactional activity. It should be noted that many of these features are not present to the same extent in other types of talk in the team. While there is a general sense of goodwill towards each other, the level of collaboration we have seen in the last sections is not always present.

So far we have mainly looked at how troubles talk is used to enhance rapport. While these collaborative aspects mostly outweigh the more competitive ones and troubles talk fundamentally seems to be a rapport enhancing interactional activity, there are nonetheless features of competitiveness and of more strained relationships that are negotiated during troubles talk. I will turn to these more competitive features in the following section.

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