Language policy, tacit knowledge, and institutional learning: the case of the Swiss public service broadcaster SRG SSR

Abstract

Promoting public understanding is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR1 to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the IDée suisse project, we investigated whether and how SRG SSR, caught between public service demands and market forces, should and actually does fulfill such language policy requirements. Four research modules were combined: module A focused on language policy expectations; module B on media management's interpretation; module C on media production; and module D on media reflection in the newsrooms. Methodologically, ethnography of news was extended through grounded theory and transdisciplinary action research. Interviews with policy-makers and media managers were triangulated with in-depth analyses of text production processes and workplace conversations. The overall findings are whereas the managers are usually frustrated by the expectations of media policy-makers, some experienced journalists find emergent solutions to overcome the conflict between the public mandate and the market. This tacit knowledge can be identified and made explicit to the entire organization in systemic knowledge transformation, for example, through empirically grounded recommendations.

Keywords:

• ethnography of news
• progression analysis
• public service media
• language policing
• emergent practice
• tacit knowledge

Notes

SRG SSR stands for Schweizerische Radio- und Fernsehgesellschaft; Société suisse de radiodiffusion et télévision; Socièta svizzera di radio-televisione; Societad svizra da radio e televisiun.

The research project IDée suisse: Language policy, norms, and practice as exemplified by Swiss Radio and Television was funded from 2005 to 2007 by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It is part of the National Research Program 56, Language Diversity and Linguistic Competence in Switzerland, 2005–2010. The project name has been taken from the former name of the broadcasting company: SRG SSR IDée suisse. Outlines and reports of the program and its projects (in German, French, and Italian) can be found on http://www.nfp56.ch.

In multilingual countries such as Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, public understanding between the different language regions is of high relevance. Media, in general, and public service broadcasters, in particular, are expected to contribute to public understanding, In Switzerland, this mandate is challenging due to the co-existence of four national languages. The IDée suisse project aims at recommending how the mandate of PPU could be better implemented.

As soon as applied linguistics is considered dealing with ‘real-world’ issues, the concept of reality has to be defined for theoretical reasons. In addition, reality can play a crucial role in an application field itself too, as is the case for journalism with its widespread ideal of separating facts from fiction and opinions. In transdisciplinary projects of media linguistics, such practical concepts matter and must not be ignored. Approaching journalism and news writing with a purely constructivist concept of reality, as often practiced by communication studies and cultural studies, results in a deep epistemological gap between theory and practice in journalism. RST overcomes this conflict of paradigms and research frameworks as a ‘third way’ (Wright, 2011, p. 3), ‘acknowledging the independent existence of objective reality, but asserting the constructedness of human knowledge about the nature of that reality’ (p. 4). Thus, RST enables both researches and practitioners to conceive journalistic activities ‘as constructs – but as constructs formed in conjunction with realities external to them’ (p. 3). In RST view, journalists have to develop their practices toward as adequate as possible accounts of reality, and transdisciplinary projects such as IDée suisse can help them achieve this goal.

In distinguishing between the four epistemological perspectives of structure (the agents and non-human resources involved in PPU), dynamics (the practices through which PPU is realized), identity (the impacts toward which PPU is oriented), and evaluation (the valuation provoked by PPU), I am consistent with Wasserman, Clair, and Wilson (2009, pp. 367–378) and Wilson and Lowndes (2004) who proposed ‘multilevel integrated cognition’ (MIC) as a universal epistemology, a dynamic formalism for conceptualizing the human world. MIC combines four levels of conceptualizations of aspects of the world: the Static (structural properties such as being a living thing or a stone), the Dynamic (processes such as growth), the Evaluative (judgments, values, and feelings), and the Self/Identity (uniqueness within a frame of reference, such as one's creativity).