Better Conversations: A Morality Play in Twelve Tapes

Abstract

This article discusses and carries out discourse analysis on a set of learning materials about ‘better conversation’ produced for British Telecommunications and made available to the British public in 1997. It is argued that many of the norms and strategies presented as desirable in the materials derive from the discourse practices that are valorized in therapeutic and quasi-therapeutic settings, and reflect the liberal, individualist, consensual ideology associated with those settings. Although women are credited with superior communication skills, and it is asserted that they are more ‘comfortable’ than men with the recommended ways of talking, it is suggested here that the ways of talking in question tend to produce outcomes that reinforce rather than challenge the subordinate status of women.