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Business & Society
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"Contraversations" Constructing Conflicts

Lessons From a Town-Gown Controversy

Maria Aggestam

Lund University, Lund, Sweden

James Keenan

Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT

Businesses and societies face increasingly complex problems. Collaborative relationships are needed to leverage the differences among participants and to balance stakeholder concerns. The article takes a discursive, constructionist approach in exploring the relations of five factions involved in resolving a town-gown conflict. The case data are narratives collected during a pivotal community-wide meeting in which the town-gown factions participated. The findings underscore the characteristics and roles of language in constructing and organizing meanings. In particular, the focal data reveal the influence of "contraversation"—that is, dialectical and dialogical conversation particularly and publicly directed against one faction, in constructing antagonisms and thwarting collaboration. The focal findings added insight into the demographic and historical characteristics of the factions, the socially embedded understandings, and the role of conversations in developing discursive resources that create collective identities and translate them into integrating rather than disintegrating intergroup performance in facing problematic concerns.

Key Words: contraversation • conflict • language • embeddedness • social construction

Business & Society, Vol. 46, No. 4, 429-456 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0007650306296376
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