Making the Business of Death, Business-As-Usual: The Commerce-Care Dialectic in Funeral Planning

Abstract

This dissertation, grounded in relational dialectics theory 2.0 (RDT; Baxter, 2011), aims to illustrate what meanings emerge from the commerce-care dialectic when engaging in funeral planning. The contrapuntal analysis of interviews with funeral directors reveals that the discourse of commerce and the discourse of care are central to the meaning-making of the commerce-care dialectic when engaging in funeral planning. Also, the two discourses interpenetrate synchronically and diachronically. The diachronic interplay manifests in spiraling inversion and segmentation. The synchronic interplay is shown in negating and countering, ambiguating (a new form of synchronic interplay), and entertaining. Moreover, hybridization and aesthetic moment are identified for discursive transformative interplay. This dissertation contributes to RDT by aligning the discursive synchronic markers, including negating, countering, ambiguating (a new marker proposed), and entertaining, with four features of utterance chains. The alignment provides an additional guideline to help researchers identify discursive synchronic interplay. Additionally, the dissertation provides empirical evidence for Mumby’s (2005) theorizing regarding (a) the mutual constitution of control and resistance by identifying the hybridization of the discourse of commerce and the discourse of care as the double nature (i.e., commerce and care) of funeral services and (b) the control-resistance dialectic transformation as a routine social production of daily organizational life by proposing the discourse of mundanity, which is “a system of meaning in which the gravity of life and death is made to be experienced as ordinary and beautiful.” Moreover, the dissertation proposes a perspective of acknowledging human life, which is the complex interpenetration and constitutive process of the costed life and/or the sacred life, labeled as the commerce-care dialectic perspective, defined as "Humans make meanings of unresolvable life events or struggles, which have two core attributes of money and humanity, and transform those struggles into mundane aesthetic moments by enacting behaviors and actions." This commerce-care dialectic perspective requires further validation across other occupational interaction types to understand the concept’s degree of transferability. Lastly, the dissertation offers practical implications for facilitating future funeral planning for funeral professionals, clients, and governmental agencies.