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Language Use During School Board Meetings

Understanding Controversies of and About Communication

University of Wisconsin-Parkside, castor{at}uwp.edu.

Governing boards serve an important policy-making function in for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental sectors. Boards may consist of members from diverse backgrounds whose only common tie is board membership, making them particularly susceptible to misunderstandings and miscommunication. This project examines a school board's discussion of a communication policy as a way of understanding the communication problems that the board had recently experienced. A relationally responsive social constructionist perspective is applied to analyze board members' talk during a meeting and how meanings of communication and the communication problem are discursively negotiated in the interactions of board members. The analysis describes differing contexts of accountability to which board members orient in their organizational communication practices; these contexts consist of the organizational and the political.

Key Words: meetings • social constructionism • school boards • metacommunication • problem formulation

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