A Conversation-analytic Study Of People’s Mediating Utterances

Mediation is a non-adversarial, conciliatory means of conflict resolution with the help of a neutral facilitator to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. Mediation has developed and survived for thousands of years in China as a nation which greatly stresses importance of harmony. In China, mediation is not only necessary, but also feasible. Over the years, institutionalized mediation has become increasingly common in many areas of social conflict. Nowadays, our government advocates a harmonious society in which the system of "Big Mediation"(people’s mediation on a large scale) is being set up, which improves the importance of people’s mediation in China. Consequently, in this situation, there has been a proliferation of research into people’s mediating practice. However, there has been very limited work investigating the interaction that occurs within a people’s mediation session based on a micro-level discourse analysis. This dissertation presents an empirical study that examines the structure of people’s mediation session and how people’s mediators assume their facilitative role through interactive moves by employing a data-driven qualitative micro analytic approach, and primarily by using the tools of conversation analysis in the framework of institutional discourse. Data for the study are audio-recordings of eight naturally-occurring people’s mediation sessions, the observation and analysis of which leads to the reason why the mediation aided by people’s mediators frequently succeeds where negations between two disputants have failed.Besides pre-mediation in which people’s mediators go through court files and contact disputants on the phone, a people’s mediation session consists of four main stages:the introduction part wherein people’s mediators introduce themselves and state ground rules; the information-gathering stage, in which disputants give their side of stories one by one; the problem-solving stage, in which people’s mediators help both parties exchange ideas, find common ground and solicit a settlement solution; and the last conclusion stage, in which mediators assist disputants to finalize their agreement if there’s any. The study finds that, by examining three aspects of the organization:turn-taking system, participation status, and topic management, the people’s mediators control the structure of mediation and communication flow between the parties by determining the extent to which they speak directly to each other. They can control who speaks, allow or disallow interruptions, and encourage and regulate the amount of participation by both parties. The people’s mediators can interrupt and cut off discussion in order to focus it on grounds of settlement.The other important issue addressed in the dissertation is a taxonomy of strategies and techniques employed by people’s mediators in China. While there is literature concerning strategies and techniques, design and evaluation of specific striking mediation strategies in different stages remain far from adequate. There’s even none about those employed by people’s mediators in China. The patterns emerged as I observed and analyzed a large number of people’s mediation sessions and began to see regularities in the ways people’s mediators settled cases. Despite differences in the nature of their cases and the organization of each session, there are notable similarities in the strategies and techniques used by people’s mediators to settle cases. Therefore, the most striking strategies employed by people’s mediators in China in different stages are generalized and supported by substantial excerpts from naturally occurring mediation sessions.The study of how interactional moves utilized by people’s mediators in China not only provides an insight into how to better understand people’s mediating practice, but also serves as a guide for the training of potential people’s mediators, which will increase the effectiveness and quality of mediation. Additionally, since this is the first attempt to empirically analyze people’s mediation practice which falls under the category of embryonic forensic pragmatics, this study will shed some light on how to carry on more researches into this field.