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Down to the wire: The cultural clock of physicists and the discourse of consensus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2009

Elinor Ochs  and
Sally Jacoby
Elinor Ochs
Affiliation:
Department of TESL & Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1531, ochs@humnet ucla edu
Sally Jacoby
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3586, swj@hopper unh edu
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Abstract

This study examines how deadlines and time limits for conference talks organize the discourse of consensus among collaborating experimental and theoretical physicists in a university laboratory Six months of videotaped observations, including two cycles of conference talk preparation, indicate that, as the date of an upcoming conference nears, several things happen (a)Co-authoring physicists usually have not achieved agreement on all aspects of the findings (b)They nevertheless direct their energies to constructing a hybrid presentation rhetoric that satisfies the co-authors and fits the talk to the official conference talk time limit (c) In the process of working through matters of rhetoric – what to say, what to display visually, what to leave out, and in what order the information should be presented – the physicists construct a working consensus on matters of physics theory and experimental data explaining the properties and dynamics of the physical universe (Scientific discourse, consensus, temporal organization, rhetoric )

Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 479 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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