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This report was written by the organizers of the workshop "Accounting for Combat-Related Killings," which took place at the Goethe University Frankfurt in July 2014. Scholars from Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States,, Canada, and Germany came together to present and discuss case studies on the discourse practices involved in accounting for combat-related killings in different national and transnational contexts. Intending to reflect on the methodological skills needed to analyze newly available process data, the workshop brought together scholars using different methodological approaches (here mainly ethnomethodology and critical discourse analysis). In regard to the global trend towards increasing numbers of so called permanent, asymmetric, small, and permanent wars, the report turns to concepts, methods, and empirical findings that foster understandings of the difficulties war generates at social, cultural and political levels as well as the manner in which these predicaments are negotiated, denied, or deflected. The report summarizes the workshop by presenting the papers in a specific order, beginning with accounting in combat, followed by tribunals of accounting, and finally the sedimentation of accounting in cultural representations.
By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.