MODERATORS OF THE VOICE EFFECT
Although empirical evidence supporting the voice effect has been consistent, researchers have identified several potential exceptions. For instance, Cropanzano and Konovsky (1995) examined the effect of perceived outcome favorability on the relationship between voice and procedural fairness. Their results showed that although perceived voice was related to perceptions of fairness, the relationship was moderated by an individual's perceptions regarding the outcome. Specifically, voice produced perceptions of fairness only when the outcome was perceived as favorable.
Group conflict has also been found to moderate the voice effect (Peterson, 1999). For example, Peterson (1999) found that voice increased satisfaction only when group conflict was low. This led him to suggest that "extensive use of voice has limited advantages when people fundamentally disagree"
Whereas outcome favorability and group conflict are situational variables, researchers also have examined the possible moderating effects of individual differences on the effects of voice. For example, Brockner et al. (1998) hypothesized that an individual's self-esteem would influence the relationship between voice and participant reactions. The results of four field studies and a laboratory experiment supported this hypothesis. Specifically, they found that voice was more positively related to trust in the organization, work motivation, intent to remain with the organization, organizational identification, and satisfaction for individuals with high self-esteem.
A study by Hunton et al. (1998) examined the moderating effect of task meaningfulness on the voice effect. The results showed that the effect was strongest when task meaningfulness was high but was still present (albeit weaker) when task meaningfulness was low. The results of this study replicated those of Hunton and Price (19 333o145d 97), who also reported an interaction between voice and task meaningfulness on fairness.
In addition to discovering that task meaningfulness can moderate the impact of voice, Hunton et al. (1998) also found a nonlinear effect of voice on fairness. Specifically, increases in the opportunity to voice yielded diminishing returns with respect to procedural fairness. Put another way, the impact of voice on fairness decreases as the individual attains more voice. Furthermore, the authors later replicated this finding in three other countries, demonstrating that the effect is robust (Price et al., 2001).
Individuals' expectations of voice have also been found to moderate the voice-fairness relationship (van den Bos, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1996). When the opportunity to voice is expected, individuals exhibit the normal voice effect. However, if individuals do not expect to have voice and receive the opportunity, they view the situation as less fair than if they had not received the opportunity to voice at all (van den Bos et al., 1996).
Based on the findings discussed in this section, it is apparent that several factors moderate the effectiveness of voice in increasing fairness perceptions. Although many such factors have been identified and studied, one important individual characteristic that has been ignored is the value that an individual places on having voice.
VALUE OF VOICE
Two recent studies provide some empirical evidence suggesting that individuals vary in the value that they place on voice First, Hunton and Beeler (1997) and Brockner et al. (1998) found that individuals differ in the confidence they have in their ability to provide meaningful input when given the opportunity to voice. Second, Hunton and Beeler (1997) found that this confidence is positively related to an individual's desire to participate, thereby suggesting individual differences in desired participation. Although not equivalent, desired participation is conceptually similar to the value of voice construct proposed in the current research. In fact, the most significant difference is that desired participation is task specific, whereas we propose that value of voice is a more global construct.
Hence, as individuals differ in their desire to participate, they should also differ with respect to the value that they place on voice. If individuals place little value on voice, they should be less likely to consider its presence or absence when evaluating procedural fairness than if they highly value voice. Brockner et al. (1998) proposed a similar argument to explain why they believed self-esteem moderated the effect of voice on participant reactions (p. 395).1 Thus, those who place little value on the opportunity to voice should exhibit a weaker relationship between voice and fairness than those who highly value voice.
Vroom's (1964) theory of job satisfaction proposes a similar logic for the role of individual differences in the valence (or value) attached to a particular organizational feature (e.g., salary). Specifically, the model proposes that more valued rewards play a greater role in the formation of an individual's perceptions of job satisfaction than less valued rewards. For example, an employee's salary level will influence his or her job satisfaction if the employee places a high value on salary. Subsequent research has provided support for this model with respect to job satisfaction Applying similar logic to the current study leads us to expect that individuals who place low value on voice will be unlikely to exhibit the voice effect because voice is less meaningful to them. Conversely, those who value the opportunity to voice will exhibit the traditional voice effect.
Based on the preceding discussion, it is expected that greater levels of voice will correspond with greater perceptions of procedural fairness. However, the more an individual values voice, the stronger the voice-fairness relationship should be.
Hypothesis 1: Voice will be positively related to procedural fairness, such that higher levels of voice will correspond to higher levels of procedural fairness.
Hypothesis 2: Value of voice will moderate the voice-fairness relationship, such that there will be a positive relationship between voice and fairness only for those individuals who place a high value on voice.
Media and cultural studies have reached a stage where analysts are able to write tentative 'historiographies' of competing critical positions. These accounts generally have three things in common. They describe the opposing 'traditions' of the pre-war (1940) propaganda-agency view of media and the early post-war
Empiricist tradition; they attempt to forge descriptive, and sometimes uneasy, alliances between the newer Marxist, structuralist and cultural studies perspectives; and they virtually ignore the role of language. It is this third tendency or omission which is the concern of this paper, with particular reference to the radio medium. Language in media has been ignored in the historiography of media critical practice because there have been few studies of words-in-action in the different mediums. Recently, however, a new sub-discipline has emerged which offers the potential for new directions. This is discourse analysis, which rests on twin foundations of linguistics and sociology but also incorporates elements of semiotics.
This style of analysis has not had a great theoretical impact yet but its direction, that of detailed analysis of 'texts', seems likely to be the most fruitful 'next step'. Despite the work of Althusser and Lacan (both analytic textual innovators), this critical method does represent a 'next step'. Tony Bennet has succinctly stated the position as regards analytic practice: It is notIceable.. that a concern with what happens in between-with the structure and content of media messages-is an extremely poorly developed part of this tradition [the liberal-pluralist perspective] which lacks anything approaching an adequate theory or method for the analysis of signifying systems (Bennet in Gurevitch etal. 1982: 41)
Although this comment relates to a particular cultural orientation, its insight is generalizable across the competing traditions. Radio has gone unnoticed within this critical discontinuity. Since the fifties, usually seen as the period of the cultural demise of radio, media analyses have concentrated on visual systems, with the press running in a strong but definite second place. However, it is likely that radio's recognized cultural position and status will alter during the next few years, certainly in the developed, western world. There are two basic reasons for this.
The public didn't stop loving radio despite T.V. It just started liking it in a different way-and radio went to the beach, to the park, the patio and the automobile.... Radio has become a companion to the individual instead of remaining a focal point of all family entertainment. An intimacy has developed between radio and the individual. (J. Fred Macdonald 1980: 88)
It is a truism that modern urban societies contribute to personal alienation and breakdown of face-to-face communication. Radio, in the past, was seen as a potential force in the amelioration of that condition. Brecht, for example, developed a theory of radio as two-way communication:
The Radio must be transformed from a mechanism of distribution into one of communication The adio would be the most fantastic mechanism of communication imaginable in public life, a tremendous channel system. That is, it would be that if it realized the capacitv not only to broadcast, but also to receive, not only to make the listeners hear, but also to make them speak' not to isolate them, but to put them into contact with each other.
Recently, Higgins and Moss (1981, 1982), in recognition of the plurality and ubiquity of usage, have attempted detailed analyses of varieties of radio texts and have directed attention at a missing element in research: the place and function of voice and how it is used as mediator, control and activator of dialogue and interaction in talk and phone-in shows. This work opens up new possibilities for research because it re-focuses the critical gaze, sharply contrasting the language of the medium and of human conversations. Higgins and Moss's work questions the widely-held view that much in radio is banal and irrelevant to serious human concerns. Radio talk has a subtle and, at times, unpredictable complexity. The complexity arises from the nature of radio's dramatic reflextivity-the demands made upon members of the audience and on the medium itself by the range and variety of human voice. The variety of language and the tones, and tunes, of the human voice come into their own in meaning-making in this medium. The listener (and performer, especially in Open-Line and Talk formats) has to interpret nuance; must learn to read between the differing pitches of words; must be able to assess the meanings which may be attached to silence; and generally be able to explore with some confidence the possibilities of language in the construction of radio messages. Allowing for the absence of a face-to-face partner, the skills involved in radio talk are akin to those which we painfully learn in day-to-day conversations.
John Gumperz calls these skills 'verbal repertoire', where speakers continually select the appropriate code and interaction process for specific contexts. In radio conversations, for the regular audience attuned to familiar formats and host / performer manner, interaction is wholly in accord with these known (and learnt) selection procedures and filters.
The absence of a tangible audience or interactant obviously makes radio talk a very different process from ordinary conversation but in one important respect it makes dialogue easier (and the medium seems to have evolved styles or conventions which allow and encourage relaxed conversational work). Goffman (1972: 34) has argued that many conversational acts are intrinsically face-threatening:
When a person volunteers a statement or message ... he commits himself and those he addresses, and in a sense places everyone in jeopardy. By saying something, the speaker opens himself up to the possibility that the intended recipients will affront him by not listemng or will think him forward or offensive in what he has said.' I
The potential hazards of interaction necessitate what Goffman calls 'facework'- ways of mitigating possible threats to the 'faces' involved so that interaction may continue smoothly. Goffman's work indicates in a general way how conversational roles are established and modified-in-process but his examples are largely concerned with ritual exchanges and he rarely deals with more subtle factors which may be involved in any given, natural, speech situation. His recent work on radio speech illustrates this weakness very well for he uses 'texts' taken from published examples of howlers made by radio announcers and disc-jockeys (Goffman 1981). His analyses are playful and clever but they do not advance our understanding of radio conversations nor do they attempt to grapple with the complex business of how members of an audience use the medium to create both dialogue with a host/station and to create small moments of culture in the struggle to make meanings.
Radio dialogues are easier than face-to-face interaction for members of the audience, conversing with familiar hosts in recognizable formats, because the hosts are restricted in the range of speech strategies they can adopt. Radio hosts, in fact, are prisoners of the personae which they and their stations have manufactured. Horton and Wohl (1956) have argued that the persona of the host or star, while contrived in actuality, over time takes on imagined densities of reality. The host's radio existence 'is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life'. The 'personality' offers values such as 'sociability, easy affability, friendship, and close contact-briefly, all the values associated with free access to and easy participation in pleasant social interaction in primary groups .
However, radio services audiences in far more various ways than as intimate friend, and has created more styles than those connected only with persona-theory. Radio seems to have developed, therefore, into a reflection of shifting cultural and group interests; a presenter of both majority and minority commitments, and a channel for relaying to 'the audience-out-there' the varieties of sub-cultural urgencies and conditions of life. To some extent it has become, and still retains the potential for a powerful democratic tool in that the 'radio map' of a nation offers audiences the chance to both share and to contribute to culture.
Above all, what is produced is consciousness because the daily offerings of monotony in work and in entertainment are the basic 'givens', in disciplined industrial societies, which no-one ever thinks of changing. It is difficult to counteract these kinds of statements because, to argue forcibly with contrary polemic falls wide of the mark since linkages between media, corporate capital, governments and the various cultural establishments are demonstrable. What we can do, however, is to chart patiently and in increasing detail the successful attempts to make alternative voices heard. We have suggested elsewhere that certain radio formats, when used with conscious skill by members of the audience, can be 'made' to allow a range of attitudes and opinions. We extend that work later in this paper.
One criticism of work which concentrates upon the kinds and quality of media/radio messages is that 'leakage' in relation to alternative opinions being aired is of no real consequence because the consciousness industry is so massive that it can accommodate such aberrations; that, politically, the leakage is irrelevant.
Given space limitations, we are able to indicate only the broad configurations of radio-talk within the sub-genres of talk-back and 'access' radio but they seem to be generalizable categories in relation to a number of programmes offering different kinds of conversational opportunities. The crucial factor for interactants, be they host, caller or studio guest, is the extent to which combinations of discourse elements aid or inhibit text-realization.
Meaning is constantly shaped by the expressive conventions of the discourse. Words resonate, emitting potential significance for listeners. The way the language slants the presentation of content in this transcript makes an interesting study. In exchange (*) words denoting growth predominate: 'started', 'right from the start', 'first came', 'gone on', 'become', 'grow'. These connote the dynamic nature of the car industry's development, due to Dame Nancy's family's efforts and ingenuity. This is further highlighted by the 'then and now' contrasts: 'At that time there were a million and three quarters horses ... now there is one motor car to every two people because he started then'.... Similarly, in her next exchange ( * * ), the images relate to movement, size and intensity: 'tremendous', 'huge', 'great a change', 'short time'. In explaining the title of the book using the analogy of the speed and intensity of the 'tremendous dust storm', Dame Nancy is again able to emphasize the apt nature of such a title and to relate it to her family's pioneering spirit and business acumen.
Radio provides a forum for many voices, and produces a 'mesh' of many texts competing or complementary in theme and function. The host, as we have demonstrated, may act in tandem with the caller or interviewee to produce a joint text, strong or weak, weak in the case of the Erma Bombec exchange above; or he may act mainly as facilitator in the text productions of the other participant, as was the case in our first example; or he may actively obstruct the caller in the realization of her text, as example 2 illustrates. In all of these the ideational content of the discourse and the shape of the text is, to a considerable extent, dictated by the host's role play or interaction style, and his complicity (or lack of it) in the text-making process. As we mentioned earlier, the host's persona style or role is constructed and maintained by reason of its constant, familiar nature and because audience members respond to it in what become familiar, predictable ways. However, not all audience members are prepared to accept this. Individual members of the audience may adopt 'impromptu' roles of their own, quite outside the usual format, and thus provide interesting variants of the host-caller interaction pattern.
The complexity of radio talk
An examination of the language used in our transcripts highlights the fact that, cumulatively, consistent uses of particular language options may give expression to a particular world view. The two parties in the Nancy Buttfield exchange, for instance, construct a text by drawing on shared attitudes and ideological commitments.
Further, certain language options allow for an individual's distinctive presentation of self. In the transcript just analysed the female host's repeated use of certain word clusters, her interjections, incorporations and judgements suggest her personal involvement in the topic and her use of it for public expiation of personal guilt. The interesting point about this exchange is that, despite the strong text-making intent and reverberating rhetoric of the host, the text is not fully realized because the complicity factor is not uniformly established and there is no persona which might be used to help establish and then develop the conversation.
We have attempted to demonstrate that an important element in speech situations is negotiation for control. Our examples indicate that the host in the role of interviewer of studio guests and as a participant in phone-in conversations ultimately has the power. He is in control of the mechanics of the radio programme. It is he who admits the guest or caller to the air-waves, he begins the conversation, and he decides on the air-time the interviewee or caller will receive.
However, the host is clearly more in control in the studio interview situation where he or his producer has invited the guest, a known public figure, well in advance of the show. This being so, the host can prepare himself for the interview. This means that he can contain the discourse within predetermined boundaries and he can also structure his questions so as to elicit the kind of response he wants-in line with station policy and / or his own views.
In addition, the face-to-face situation of the interview which permits eye contact, the use of non-verbal cues to meaning such as gesture, facial expression and so on, make for a more intimate, more relaxed style of presentation where the host knows he is in control. In such situations, both participants are usually seasoned public performers; and while a certain show of deference may be necessary if the guest has significant status, there is less competition for control in the interview of this kind. What results from the listener's situation is an exchange which makes up in polish and assurance what it lacks in spontaneity-a consciously 'staged' performance where meaning-making can proceed with ease.
However, the host is in a very different situation with anonymous callers. Certainly, there is no need for a show of deference, since the person, as an unknown, has no status. But here the host, despite his ultimate authority, is in a situation of threat. He cannot anticipate the caller's subject, the reason for calling, commitment to the topic, emotional state and so on. As experienced performers, of course, most radio hosts are adept in detecting very early in the exchange the clues they require to manage the discourse, and indeed, in some cases, to manipulate their caller so as to make certain host-preferred meanings are 'created' for the audience. Speech situations are thus a potent means of imposing our version of the world on others as well as our view of ourselves and where we stand relative to others inthe social structure.
What we hope to have shown in this discussion is that radio talk in this particular genre is both more complex than is normally recognized and corresponds closely to the nature of conversations in everyday life. The latter point is seen in the close connection between 'facework' theory in life and the recognition and utilization of 'persona' in radio. But the other elements in our model are also significant in the overall production of meanings because they are part of the seamlessness inherent in spontaneous human interaction.
This kind of radio-talk is not mere squirrel chatter: the conversations exhibit more or less high levels of organization and have far less redundancy than face-to- face talk. We would argue that the basic reason for this is that participants have recognizable and specific intent in meaning-making. Callers, in general, make their 'texts' in full knowledge of their hosts' styles or personae; hosts usually determinedly maintain these personae, thus aiding interaction. Perhaps the most interesting observation is that the element which creates most impact in Life-talk (strong or weak language-style or rhetoric) does not necessarily do so in radio talk unless supported by the other aspects explained above.
The examples of radio-talk used in this paper are not offered as representative types but as varied examples of the complex range of conversations broadcast daily from different types of radio stations. There are two features which the dialogues have in common. One, they exhibit different kinds of intimacy; two, they function as either social cement (keeping together the day-to-day, taken-for-grantedness of life) or as attempts to develop personal coherence in the face of the unexpectedness of life (the Medical Treatment Bill, for example). These functions of media have long been recognized and they have been widely used for the dispersal of conventional political, social and cultural values. However, with the rapid increase in the numbers of radio stations (virtually radio sub-cultures in some countries), the possibilities for discussion of new, even subversive meanings, are increased. Given the apparent (intuitive?) recognition by members of audiences of the significant elements in radio talk and the confidence with which many people use them, there is room for optimism for a re-drawing of some of our culture maps within this particular mass medium.
365 - 'What is voice?'
To the extent that reviews are considered a canonizing genre for summarizing and codifying subfields of educational research, inclusion and censorship have become issues of concern in their framing and writing. The content of educational reviews is frequently taken to be symbolic of broader power relations. It is in the midst of a review's authorizing or legitimating function that debate over voice, identity, and representation, with para-texts of power, has emerged. In the latter twentieth century, voice, identity, and representation have been considered cognate terms presumed to bear some relationship to the construction of knowledge and the circulation of power. If reviews of educational research are a site on which power/knowledge forms, reforms, and plays out, then it is cogent to consider the relationships between such concepts and the production of a review as a bearer, not of Truth and Power, but of truth and power effects (Foucault, 1980).
The opening question, like reviews and this response, is understood here as an invitation to further questions. In addition to the question 'What is voice?', the paper will consider further and reformulated questions that nuance and complicate the opening interrogative, 'How do we include everybody's voice equally in the framing of reviews?' It arrives in particular at a practical consideration: 'How do we know who is speaking?' The complexities that emerge from disentangling some of the assumptions that underwrite dominant inscriptions of voice, identity, and representation owe their import to the historicization that is offered below. Because it is an impossible task to trace the variations that have inhabited such an array of concepts, this paper focuses primarily on voice and latterly on intersections of voice with identity and representation. The treatment of voice will be historical and hence skeptical. Voice is a concept often presumed to be a product of identity and representative of already recognizable group formations. By pushing the analytical envelope surrounding voice, how- ever, one does not arrive back at a notion of speaking out or of how well we hear and listen (the politics of sound), but at a re-view of the extent to which voice can be unproblematically conceptualized as a liberatory and empowering strategy in educational research.
A History of Voice
What is this thing called voice.'? Voice has not been universally understood as that which enabled silenced Others to speak. Voice and speaking out have not been the uncontested signifiers of inclusion and silence has not been simplistically the mark of the oppressed. Historically, very different significations have resided in the appeal to 'voice' as a political strategy, suggesting that systems of inclusion/exclusion do not lie in direct parallel with vocal expression and silence, respectively. ~
Three historical examples from the last three centuries bear out complexities in the mobilization of voice. They suggest the inherant dangers in making present-day arguments over power/knowledge in the review genre through appeal to voice as a symbol of inclusion of different identities.
I have little doubt about the seeming paradox that reviews contain silences, that they contain expressions, that they have a privileging effect in authorizing some discourses more so than others, that they are the bearer of truth and power effects, rather than of Truth and Power. I have little doubt that power inheres in the discourses through which reviews are written and that reviews act back on the circulation of power through the certification of some knowledges as more real than others. Where my doubts lie is in regard to deploying an unproblematized concept of voice to address the truth and power effects of reviews. ! would argue that voice and silence do not operate in antithesis and that appeals to 'voice' on the basis of fixed 'identity' do not 'represent' inclusion, but may in fact reinvoke the terms on which repression is given ground.
Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse...than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourse.
'Voice' is not just audible articulations alone, it is not simplistically representative of inclusion, and it is not unilaterally a function of homogeneous identities. One potential answer to the question 'How can we include everybody's voice equally in the framing of reviews?'--a question which unproblematically assumes the recognizability of the 'everybody' and the 'we'--is to consider what might be asked differently about voice. Posing the question 'What is voice?' as a response to the opening interrogative turns consideration to the what, rather than just the who, to the complexities, the multiplicities, and the divergence that give different meaning to voice, identity, and representation in the first place.
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