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Terminology: Online-First Articles

Imposing order on a creative chaos

The terminologist as communication manager in a multi-professional setting

ORCID logo | University of Gothenburg
ORCID logo | Uppsala University | Karlstad University
It is uncontested that terminologists leading multi-professional terminology projects need a thorough knowledge of the principles and standards of terminology work. However, the softer skills involved in the work have gained less attention. In this paper, we apply interaction analysis to a multi-professional expert meeting led by a terminologist and highlight the communicative and interpersonal work he carries out. Our results show how the terminologist allows for a certain “creative chaos” and makes the team “feel good”, while still keeping epistemic quality under permanent scrutiny and never losing focus on the task at hand. He does this through flexible agenda management — sticking to his meeting agenda, but not rigidly, and allowing for and taking note of useful contributions, even if they come in the wrong phase. He also upholds a sufficient degree of conceptual rigour, by holding back premature decisions but not unnecessarily correcting the other’s erroneous use of meta-terminology.
Keywords: workplace meetings, decision-making, Terminology, communicative skills, multi-professional meetings, terminological teamwork, epistemic work, professional skills
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The study of workplace meetings: A theoretical and empirical backdrop
  • 3.Data and method: Analysing video-recorded meetings
  • 4.Results: Analyses of agenda management, conceptual rigour and decision-making
    • 4.1Managing the agenda
    • 4.2Promoting terminological and conceptual rigour while managing face
    • 4.3Decision-making and epistemic gatekeeping
      • Encouraging knowledge-sharing through questioning facts and claiming insufficient epistemic access
      • Gradual manifestation of consensus through claiming and backing up
      • Decision — in two steps
      • Epistemic post-decision work: Casting doubt on the correctness of the decision
      • The terminologist as epistemic gatekeeper
  • 5.Discussion — imposing order on creative chaos
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 October 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/term.24016.byr
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