Knowledge and Discourse Matters

16ON MATTERS OF CONTEXT

16.1 THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXTUAL PARTICULARS

“Contextual particulars such as setting or behavioural environment are important because they are perceived, experienced, attended to, understood, and so on.”

(Jonathan Potter, 1998b: 32: italics in original)

There is one feature of the notion of context that needs to be reiterated and made clear from the outset of this chapter. This has already been amply demonstrated in the previous discussions around trust, risk, and identity: that people invoke—script, construct, conjure, materialize, bring into being, whatever—contexts as live concerns in everyday talk and text in social interaction. So from this perspective while trust, risk, and identity can be explicitly expressed in descriptions and accounts for instance, they can also be displayed discursively as implicitly understood and constructed contexts. Recall the idea from Chapter 7 that tacit knowing is context driven with context understood as the actor’s interpretation and understanding of their environment and its contents as a consequence of unconscious and automatic abstraction of information from that environment. It is not the environment and its contents that is, in all cases, that which influences the actors’ actions but rather their interpretation of it— their sense-making. In the quotation from Jonathan Potter cited previously, he locates “setting or behavioral environment” as a subset of contextual particulars, with those particulars ...