Tekstit viraston työssä : Tutkimus etuuspäätösten kielestä ja konteksteista

Texts in the work of a city department: A study of the language and context of benefit decisions This dissertation examines documents granting or denying the access to municipal services. The data consist of decisions on transport services made by the Social Services Department of the City of Helsinki. The circumstances surrounding official texts and their language and production are studied through textual analysis and interviews. The dissertation describes the textual features of the above decisions, and seeks to explain such features. Also explored are the topics and methods of genre studies, especially the relationship between text and context. Although the approach is linguistic, the dissertation also touches on research in social work and administrative decision making, and contributes to more general discussion on the language and duties of public administration. My key premise is that a text is more than a mere psycholinguistic phenomenon. Rather, a text is also a physical object and the result of certain production processes. This dissertation thus not only describes genre-specific features, but also sheds light on the work that generates the texts examined. Textual analysis and analyses of discursive practices are linked through an analysis of intertextuality: written decisions are compared with other application documents, such as expert statements and the applications themselves. The study shows that decisions are texts governed by strict rules and written with modest resources. Textwork is organised as hierarchical mass production. The officials who write decisions rely on standard phrases extracted from a computer system. This allows them to produce texts of uniform quality which have been approved by the department s legal experts. Using a computer system in text production does not, however, serve all the needs of the writers. This leads to many problems in the texts themselves. Intertextual analysis indicates that medical argumentation weighs most heavily in an application process, although a social appraisal should be carried out when deciding on applications for transport services. The texts reflect a hierarchy in which a physician ranks above the applicant, and the department s own expert physician ranks above the applicant s physician. My analysis also highlights good, but less obvious practices. The social workers and secretaries who write decisions must balance conflicting demands. They use delicate linguistic means to adjust the standard phrases to suit individual cases, and employ subtle strategies of politeness. The dissertation suggests that the customer contact staff who write official texts should be allowed to make better use of their professional competence. A more general concern is that legislation and new management strategies require more and more documentation. Yet, textwork is only rarely taken into account in the allocation of resources. Keywords: (Critical) text analysis, genre analysis, administration, social work, administrative language, texts, genres, context, intertextuality, discursive practices

Expert Identity in Development of Core-Task-Oriented Working Practices for Mastering Demanding Situations

The point of departure in this dissertation was the practical safety problem of unanticipated, unfamiliar events and unexpected changes in the environment, the demanding situations which the operators should take care of in the complex socio-technical systems. The aim of this thesis was to increase the understanding of demanding situations and of the resources for coping with these situations by presenting a new construct, a conceptual model called Expert Identity (ExId) as a way to open up new solutions to the problem of demanding situations and by testing the model in empirical studies on operator work. The premises of the Core-Task Analysis (CTA) framework were adopted as a starting point: core-task oriented working practices promote the system efficiency (incl. safety, productivity and well-being targets) and that should be supported. The negative effects of stress were summarised and the possible countermeasures related to the operators' personal resources such as experience, expertise, sense of control, conceptions of work and self etc. were considered. ExId was proposed as a way to bring emotional-energetic depth into the work analysis and to supplement CTA-based practical methods to discover development challenges and to contribute to the development of complex socio-technical systems. The potential of ExId to promote understanding of operator work was demonstrated in the context of the six empirical studies on operator work. Each of these studies had its own practical objectives within the corresponding quite broad focuses of the studies. The concluding research questions were: 1) Are the assumptions made in ExId on the basis of the different theories and previous studies supported by the empirical findings? 2) Does the ExId construct promote understanding of the operator work in empirical studies? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the ExId construct? The layers and the assumptions of the development of expert identity appeared to gain evidence. The new conceptual model worked as a part of an analysis of different kinds of data, as a part of different methods used for different purposes, in different work contexts. The results showed that the operators had problems in taking care of the core task resulting from the discrepancy between the demands and resources (either personal or external). The changes of work, the difficulties in reaching the real content of work in the organisation and the limits of the practical means of support had complicated the problem and limited the possibilities of the development actions within the case organisations. Personal resources seemed to be sensitive to the changes, adaptation is taking place, but not deeply or quickly enough. Furthermore, the results showed several characteristics of the studied contexts that complicated the operators' possibilities to grow into or with the demands and to develop practices, expertise and expert identity matching the core task. They were: discontinuation of the work demands, discrepancy between conceptions of work held in the other parts of organisation, visions and the reality faced by the operators, emphasis on the individual efforts and situational solutions. The potential of ExId to open up new paths to solving the problem of the demanding situations and its ability to enable studies on practices in the field was considered in the discussion. The results were interpreted as promising enough to encourage the conduction of further studies on ExId. This dissertation proposes especially contribution to supporting the workers in recognising the changing demands and their possibilities for growing with them when aiming to support human performance in complex socio-technical systems, both in designing the systems and solving the existing problems.