Text, tid och handling i ett reglerat rum En diskursanalys av mediering i hybrid arbetslivskommunikation

Abstract

Calls have been raised for more research on the use of texts and other types of in real-life communication in real-life situations, which are often complex and hybrid. This study is based on data from a meeting at a hospital ward where a Key Account Manager from a pharmaceutical business informs staff about a medical product during their lunch hour. Mediated discourse analysis is applied to map the mediating trajectories of the texts used in the meeting and to reveal the role of people in this mediation. The analysis shows that the situation can be regarded as a mediation of a discourse concerning the marketing of medical products and of actual legal texts, stating that pharmaceutical businesses cannot offer doctors values such as expensive dinners. Besides a PowerPoint document, other material resources and practices such as a modest meal contribute to the situation. In the texts, a medical-scientific discourse, a commercial discourse and an administrative discourse are mixed. Doctors’ actions of prescribing the product are anticipated by the Key Account Manager’s actions of 1) constructing an ‘historical body’ of trust, 2) emphasizing certain textual messages at the same time and offering these texts in a durable material form. This manner of simultaneous and/or durable material forms is introduced as discursive layering. The study presents an empirical case of how ‘big discourses’ are mediated into local actions which, in turn, are targeted to affect future actions.