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http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/japl.v9i2.25734

Journal of

Applied

Linguistics

and

Professional

Practice

Editorial

Morality in professional practice

 Jakob Cromdal and Michael Tolander 

Morality is such a common and intrinsic quality of everyday socialinteraction that it is usually invisible to us, like glasses that provide asharp sight of the area beyond although they themselves remain unseen.(Bergmann 1998: 280)

Tis special issue of the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice presents a collection of articles that explores moral work in professional

practice. In the broadest sense, the focus is on people ‘doing morality’ withregard to prior, and somehow problematic, events. Our goal is to illustratehow morality forms part and parcel of the work of professionals; how moralorders are drawn upon, and how they are reflexively shaped and accomplishedin and through real interactional events taking place in different institutionalencounters. For this reason, the studies in this special issue take an empiricallysound, practice-oriented approach to morality-in-interaction.

Over the years, human morality has become a locus of much scholarly

work involving a multitude of academic disciplines, theories, and method-ological approaches that have generated a bulk of knowledge far too great tobe reviewed here. Tree general features, however, stand out in this body ofacademic work.

First, research into morality is very rarely based on naturally occurringdata. With the exception of moral philosophy, where empirical data arelargely absent, studies of moral issues typically rely on interviews, tests, and

Contact author

Jakob Cromdal: Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University, 60174 Norrköping, Swedenemail: jakob.cromdal@liu.se

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other research instruments that measure morality retrospectively. Tus,such research procedures tend to overlook the situated, contingent natureof moral life. Second, most approaches treat human morality as something

residing within the individual – as a mental capacity of reasoning and making judgments on moral issues and as a character trait. By locating morality in theindividual’s mind, such studies neglect the ways in which social actors handlethemselves in practical settings. What is lost, then, is the social, contextuallyanchored, production of moral order. Tird, most empirical analyses take onboard preconceptualized notions of morality – typically originating in suchframeworks as Kantian duty-based ethics, Benthamian utilitarianism, orAristotelian virtue ethics. Tus, rather than examining what sense of moralityis being practiced and accomplished by lay or professional members in society,morality is reduced to a predetermined set of conventions and values – atheoretical construct.

Of course, the notion of morality as a set of more or less omnirelevant values stored ‘in the head’, as a feature of our mental inventory, is not exclusiveto psychologists or philosophers or any other scholarly group. It is very muchpart of our lay conceptions of the human personality, at least in Westerncultures. As Bergmann points out:

In everyday life morality refers to internal attitudes and processes.Conscience is seen as part of the ‘inner man’, and an ‘inner voice’ is tellingus that we have violated rules that we have internalized. Tus, philo-sophical perspectives that conceptualize moral judgment as running fromthe inside to the outside reproduce the commonsense notion of morality.(Bergmann 1998: 282)

Members are biased towards understanding behaviour in terms ofunderlying mental-dispositional structures. Te moral aspects of human

conduct are therefore seen as causally linked to individual character traitsand cognitive structures; social action provides members with materials forascribing character. Just how that ascription is accomplished by membersforms ‘the most salient feature of the “lived” morality of everyday life – itspractical character’ (Bergmann 1998: 281). What is needed, then, is a solidempirical approach to investigating the real-life practices through whichpeople relate to, engage in, and co-produce social and moral orders.

Te articles in this special issue offer just that: they examine how moralorders are identified, invoked, and acted on by members going about their

business within professional settings. For instance, issues of accountabilityand ascriptions of motive as well as justification are brought to the fore byElizabeth Stokoe  and Derek Edwards, who focus on complaints in neigh-bourhood disputes. Tey examine a community mediation session in which

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two couples complain about the children of their joint neighbour. Tesecomplaints draw on cultural notions of familial-parental duties. Specifically,they invoke ‘natural’ attributes of mothering and this ‘naturalness’ is oriented

to within a moral framework, such that any mother who is seen not to behaveaccording to the norms of their category can be judged as immoral. Stokoe andEdwards’s analysis thus demonstrates how members’ categorization practiceswork to assemble a version of the social and moral order in which mothers,not fathers, are accountable for maintaining good neighbour relations.

Another organizational setting that is rich in morally loaded discourse isfamily therapy. Te article by Karin Aronsson and Ann-Christin Cederborg  draws on video-recorded family therapy sessions, involving two teenage clientswho have been referred for treatment due to their putatively troublesomebehaviour. Aronsson’s analysis discusses various features of the talk – includingthe ways in which the client’s problem is presented, received, and accountedfor – within an ‘architecture of blame’ that entails members’ management ofaccountability.

Te article by Annice Barber  focuses on the negotiation of moral identitiesfor at-risk urban adolescents in a religious community youth organization.Specifically, Barber shows how teens and adult leaders jointly co-constructa framework for judging the morality of thoughts and actions through

imaginative collated narratives. Tis discursive practice involves comparingsome behaviour with an exemplar narrative, where Jesus is the protagonist(e.g. ‘What would Jesus do? ’), and Barber’s analysis demonstrates how suchmoral lessons, portrayed as finely tuned balancing acts, aim to socialize theyoung people into a Christian moral framework.

Te final two articles examine telephone calls to helplines dedicated tochildren and young people.  Jonathan Potter   and  Alexa Hepburn’s  studydraws on an archive of calls to the NSPCC (the UK National Society for thePrevention of Cruelty to Children). Te issue of morality is a pervasive one incalls to this helpline: what is or is not acceptable or normal, and what is legal orillegal, are central concerns of both callers and child protection officers. Potterand Hepburn’s analysis is concerned with child protection officers’ receipts ofand responses to reports of child abuse. In particular, they observe that childprotection officers typically withhold explicit expression of sympathy withthe victim or condemnation of the perpetrator – thus resisting engaging inwhat Stokoe and Edwards (this issue) have termed ‘mundane morality’. Potterand Hepburn discuss their findings in terms of the child protection officers’

focus on the practical tasks at hand: of establishing a clear sense of what hashappened so as to be able to offer help and guidance, but also of taking thereport seriously (and doing so in a manner that is recognizable for the caller)without prematurely buying into its factuality.

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Finally, in the article by Susan Danby  and Michael Emmison we learn howa young caller to the Australian Kids Helpline reported that she had forged amedical certificate and handed it in to her teacher. Te authors show how the

young caller determined what to report, how to report it, and how the moralwork of troubles talk is delicately managed by both caller and counselor. Whilethe caller’s account is partly about deception, the analysis shows how both partiesdelicately sidestep naming this action in such terms. One way of achieving thisis by making it a character puzzle. Te caller, from the very beginning of thecall, seeks to find out why she could have done this (‘ you see I don’t know whyit happened ’), and as the call unfolds the counselor follows this opening queryand engages, together with the caller, in a search for different possible motivesfor this action – other than deception. Danby and Emmison’s article thus showshow the caller can bring possibly morally damaging evidence to this telephoneservice and seek support without being held morally accountable for what shehas done.

Historically, the type of approach to morality that we are advocating in thisspecial issue may be found within ethnomethodology, conversation analysis,and discourse analysis. A classical example is Sacks’ (1972) study of how thepolice go about inferring ‘moral character’ and ‘probability of criminality’from persons’ appearance on the street, thereby legitimizing actions such as

questioning, search, and even arrest. Tis results in a type of moral game inwhich the criminals orient toward using appearances to avoid recognition,while the police try to see through such masking. For both parties, it wouldtherefore seem rational to develop a form of visual moral expertise.

Another early example is Wieder’s (1974) research at a halfway house. Hefocuses on the so called ‘convict code’ at the institution and shows, amongother things, that a simple question from a resident to the staff – e.g. ‘Wherecan I find that meeting where I can get an overnight pass?’ (160) – accom-plishes important moral work. Wieder argues that this question conveys tothe overhearing residents that the speaker is only going to the meeting tocollect a reward, not because he is interested in participating in the programoffered by the officials. Trough such utterances, Wieder argues, residentsdisplay their independence in relation to the institution and do so withoutexplicitly referring to the convict code. Moreover, the example also cautionsanalysts against the temptation of using the code as an explanatory variable;the code does not explain or predict residents’ behaviour, as one might belured into thinking, but rather exhibits moral norms in their making. Tus,

to understand the moral life at the halfway house, it makes little sense to tryto abstract or formulate the convict code – only to dissect it in its immediate,occasioned use.

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Tese early studies have been followed by many others, each tapping intodistinct institutional settings and each, more or less explicitly, focusing onmorality-in-interaction. In a legal setting, Drew (1992) shows that disputing

parties are oen acutely oriented toward managing the damaging moral impli-cations of contrasting versions of the same event. Tus, in sophisticated ways,participants routinely try to undermine alternative versions and bolster theirown. Tis might occasionally lead to endless series of blamings and blamereallocations, as shown in Ingrids’s (2014) study of child custody disputes.Harris (2001) also shows that there are good reasons, in this kind of moralwork, to establish various sorts of implicatures which the jury must work out.Whereas direct portrayals of events and personal characteristics run the riskof being seen as adversarial rhetoric, implicatures call upon juries to interpretthe evidence for themselves and to reach their own judicial conclusions. Temoral essence of trials – decision on guilt and innocence – can thus respect-fully be reserved for the correct party.

In a medical setting, Maynard (1996) shows that the delivery of bad news –e.g. the death of a loved one or negative diagnostic information – is a delicatemoral activity for physicians. Tus, through various forms of forecastingpractices – e.g. solemn demeanors, preannouncements, and stallings – theyoen try to deliver bad news in a morally responsible manner. Bergmann

(1992) shows that psychiatrists also oen proceed in careful, indirect wayswhen they explore the mental condition of their patients, hence producinga sort of ‘veiled morality’. Similarly, genetic counsellors oen adopt ‘an ethosof nondirectiveness’ which, rather than being a sign of moral indifference,provides them with a means of exploring whether clients can be trusted tomake autonomous decisions (Arribas-Ayllon and Sarangi 2014).

In a social-work setting, Sacks (1992) analyzes how a social worker and ahusband in marital troubles negotiate what ‘really’ happened in a domesticdispute with the wife. Sacks shows how different morally loaded category-implicative action descriptors – ‘smacked her’, ‘shoved her’, ‘moved her’ – wereused to characterize what the husband presumably had done to his wife. Tesocial worker would lean toward ‘smacking’, whereas the husband would insiston ‘moving’ the wife. Eventually, they would settle for the husband’s having‘shoved’ his wife. Similar attentiveness to the moral tenor of a story is alsodisplayed in a young man’s narratives of past violence (Andersson 2008).Tese narratives were structured so that the young man, a resident in forcedcare, managed to avoid being categorized as either victim or perpetrator.

Instead, he construed himself according to a heroic storyline in which he, asthe underdog, managed to handle adversaries much larger than his own size.As Wetherell and Edley (1999) point out, the creation of such a heroic positioncan be seen as a self-exalting strategy. Finally, Osvaldsson’s (2011) analysis of

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accounts of bullying on a virtual board for peer-counselling demonstrates howsocial and moral orders are invoked and acted on by members of an internetcommunity.

In a school  setting, Svahn and Evaldsson (2013) show how alternative moralstances are talked into being, and made sense of, in Aggression Replacementraining (AR) classroom sessions. As the children discuss the morally-charged topic of ‘fighting’, they artfully design their contributions in a way thatallows them both to comply with and simultaneously subvert the institutionalmoral standards. Moving away from hypothetical cases in AR sessions,Teobald and Danby (2012) examine how two boys account for a playgroundincident when confronted by a supervising teacher. Te analysis unpacks theelaborate interactional work involved in discussing the incident, showinghow the teacher’s version of proper moral playground conduct is eventuallyestablished. However, many school studies also show that children are highlycapable of creating their very own moral worlds, e.g. through teasing (Torne1993), gossip (Tolander 2003), or telling stories (Goodwin 1990).

Finally, morally loaded conversations have been analysed in emergencyservice settings. For instance, Whalen et al. (1988) focus on a single telephoneconversation between a caller and an emergency operator, which ends in thecaller’s stepmother dying. Te case in itself caused a moral uproar in the local

media in Dallas, USA, in early 1984, but the moral order can also be understoodfrom within the interaction between the parties. A central observation inthe study is that the dispute that develops between the caller and emergencyoperator is caused by the different expectations that the parties bring to the call.Te caller, expecting a swi service, insists on having an ambulance dispatchedimmediately, while the emergency operator, who is committed to the task ofrunning a service with limited resources, works at length to have the caller’sneed for help confirmed before initiating dispatch. Tis leads to a breakdownin conversational alignment and results in an off-task, hostile, morally loadedargument between the parties. wenty-six years later, a similar case occurredin Oslo, Norway, causing the same massive press coverage (Svennevig 2012).Tus, rather than working up ‘thick-enough descriptions’, which Cromdal etal. (2008) argue is essential for a timely dispatch of emergency rescue services,the participants in these emergency calls digress into deadly side-activities.

Naturally, moral discourse regularly appears in relation to a number ofother institutional settings (involving various professionals, clients, dilemmas,etc.) apart from those mentioned above, e.g. in clients’ problem descriptions

during therapeutic sessions (Kurri and Walhström 2007), in health visitors’atrocity stories (Dingwall 1977), in provocative news interviews (Clayman1992), in gossip at work or with friends (Bergmann 1993), in evaluativedialogues with conscientious objectors (Adelswärd 1998), in vocational

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guidance conversations (Mäkitalo 2006), in academic data sessions (Antakiet al. 2008), in editorial journalists’ accounting practices (ileagǎ  2010), in vocational rehabilitation encounters (Solberg 2011), in community groups for

the development of deprived inner-city areas (Patterson et al. 2011), in parents’stories of preschool choice (Karlsson et al.  2013), in assessment conferencesat detention homes (Aronsson and Osvaldsson 2013), in victims’ accounts ofpolice manners during catastrophic events (Cocking and Drury 2014), or inperformance-appraisal dialogues (Sandlund 2014).

Tese studies have all shed some light onto the moral wor(l)ds of institu-tions, and have yielded new repertoires of analytical concepts for future use.Te aim of this special issue is to contribute to and elaborate this growing bodyof work. Te articles included in the issue show how parties to institutionalencounters read into one another’s actions such matters as consciousness,intention, moral attitude, and character – and display their understandingsas part and parcel of participating in their interactions. For instance, whenengaging in agreements or disagreements, when questioning or accountingfor certain forms of behaviour, when praising, blaming, or otherwise assessingtheir own and one anothers’ actions, members invariably invoke and reflexivelyproduce moral orders. Paraphrasing Linell and Rommetveit (1998: 466), it isin and through dialogue that human beings constitute themselves as moral

agents. Tus, the line of inquiry advanced in this special issue does not seekthe bedrock truth about moral values. Rather, it reveals to us ‘values-in-use,beliefs-in-context, judgments-in-practical-settings etc.’ (Jayyusi 1991: 233)and other matters as they surface in local exchanges between persons doingthe work of some of society’s institutions.

About the authors

Jakob Cromdal is Professor in Educational Practice at the Department ofSocial and Welfare Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. His researchfocuses on talk and social interaction among children and youth in a varietyof mundane and institutional settings, including playgrounds, classrooms,detention homes, and calls to the emergency services. Address for correspon-dence: Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linkoping University, 60174Norrkoping, Sweden. Email: jakob.cromdal@liu.se

Michael Tolander is Associate Professor in Educational Practice at theDepartment of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University,Sweden. His main field of interest is research on school interaction, with aspecial focus on issues such as socialization and morality, democracy and

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participation, and assessment and evaluation. Address for correspondence:Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, 58183, Linköping, Sweden. Email: michael.tholander@liu.se

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