Intersubjective Understanding During Varied Performance of Routines: A Study of ICU Physician Hand Offs

Intersubjective Understanding During Varied Performance of Routines: A Study of ICU Physician Hand Offs

Curtis LeBaron (Organizational Leadership & Strategy, Brigham Young University)
Friday, February 6, 2015 / 1:30 PM
Educ 1205

Research on routine dynamics has examined when and how varied performance of routines leads to the long-term stability or variation of the routines themselves. However, there has been less attention to the real-time coordination challenge for participants engaged in varied performance. This is a qualitative study of physician handoffs in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a hospital. We use fine-grained performance data (video recordings of physicians doing handoffs) and interviews (with the same physicians) to explain how the handoff routine is highly varied yet remains understandable. We draw on theory about common ground to show how the physicians’ shared understanding about their routine (their established common ground) and their intersubjective understanding in the moment of enactment (their emerging common ground) enables participants to enact routines that are both necessarily varied and sufficiently understandable.

Curtis LeBaron (Associate Professor and Warren Jones Fellow of Organizational Leadership & Strategy, Brigham Young University) teaches MBA and executive education courses on leadership, international human resources, and qualitative research methods. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and chapters as well as two edited books: Studies in Language and Social Interaction (Erlbaum) and Embodied Interaction: Language and body in the material world (Cambridge University Press).

Sponsored by  the IHC’s LISO RFG  and the Dept. of Communication.
Website: http://www.liso.ucsb.edu/news