Introduction

A fundamental premise of this article is that social structuring is accomplished through communicative procedures (Dervin and Clark, 1989, 1993; Dervin, 1993; Clark, 1995; Huesca, 1996). It would actually be more accurate to call these communicative procedurings because the fundamental idea is that communication is a process made up of many acts of communicating, both internal and external. This is what Sense-Making Methodology has assumed when it has required a focus on communication as behavior, on communication as communicatings. This meta-theoretic emphasis in Sense-Making has been referred to by a variety of terms -- communication-as-procedure, procedurings, communication as verb, verbings, communication as behavior, communicatings, and so on. For the purposes of this article I will refer to a communication-as-procedure perspective and analytic, and refer to specific behaviors as procedurings and sometimes as verbings. [1]

The use of a communication-as-procedure perspective is grounded in one of the meta-theoretic foundations of Sense-Making. As a perspective, it is informed particularly by Giddens' structuration theory and the theoretical work of Richard Carter. Giddens (1984) argues that it is routinized, reiterated human activities through which societal structures are enacted. Carter (1980, 1989, 1991), however, contends that collective behavior proceeds by and in step taking, and calls for inventive approaches to the study and design of step-taking behavior in seeking the well-being of humanity. For the purposes of this research, the term social structuring is used to imply that humans invent and maintain social structure, and are in a position to stop giving energy to one structuring, and to begin giving it to another.

Dervin and Clark (1993, 1989) and Dervin (1993, 1999) contend that social structuring is apparent in communicative procedures. Thus, any intentional change must attend to such procedures, both to discontinue no longer desired ones and to begin anew. Theorizing grounded in a communication-as-procedure perspective posits that attention to the invention and reinvention of communicative procedures opens a window onto the dynamic behaviors that create, maintain, reinvent, and discontinue social structurings. Of particular concern is the difficulty and promise of bringing to awareness communicative procedures that have become habitual and thus invisible. Dervin and Clark (1989) argue that ignorance of habitual communicative procedures is likely to sabotage efforts to change social structurings. Further, bringing habitual communicative procedures to awareness is defined as a necessary step in reinventing more situationally responsive structurings. Dervin and Clark emphasize, following Carter, that this potential for invention and reinvention is assumed to be inherently characteristic of human beings. In short, what humans structure they can potentially change but attention to communication-as-procedure is necessary to do so (although certainly not sufficient). It is this kind of attention that this article brings to bear on feminist group process.

Amid calls for more research into the communication phenomena of naturalistic or bona fide small groups (Meyers & Brasher, 1994; Stohl & Putnam, 1994; Frey, 1994), feminist small group process can be viewed as an example of one way humans have creatively responded to the need for invention in seeking new solutions to historically situated, chronically oppressive social structurings. The goal of the research discussed in this article was to reveal the communicative procedurings through which women in a small group were creating, maintaining, and transforming a feminist process. In line with the assumptions of Sense-Making, it was assumed that attention to the communicative procedures (i.e. the verbings or procedurings) would provide insight into how these women accomplished social structuring, and with what intended and unintended consequences.

This article proceeds in three main sections: (1) a review of the origins and emancipatory vision of the feminist small group; (2) a re-reading of this literature applying a communication-as-procedure analytic; and (3) an application of a communication-as-procedure perspective to a participant observation study of a naturalistic, bona fide woman's group. [2]

A Review of the Origins and Emancipatory Vision of the Feminist Small Group

In this section I focus, in turn, on the origins of the feminist consciousness raising group; and, then specifically on the emancipatory vision that impelled the group's invention.

The Origins of the Feminist Consciousness Raising Group

Most feminists trace feminist small group process back to the consciousness raising groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The phrase "consciousness raising group" has been widely used to refer to a set of loosely related small groups organized by particular women who were working at the grass root level in a particular historical time and place. Specifically, these "second wave" feminists were mostly white, middle class women in the United States who had been involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. These women felt the need to become conscious of ways they had been socialized that they saw as oppressive to themselves as women and supportive of an oppressive social system. They also felt the need to take action to change this situation. [3]

Through trial and error, feminist activists and organizers became keenly aware of the dynamics of small group process, and intentionally created practices to constrain some aspects they found oppressive. [4] They drew upon their own experiences as well as the practices of other "revolutionary" groups with which they were familiar, such as the "speak bitterness" meetings in Mao's China, and the "testifying" used in the civil rights movement. [5] By 1983 accumulated experience with consciousness raising groups had become standardized enough that the National Organization for Women could publish a manual entitled, NOW Guidelines for Feminist Consciousness Raising.

Morton (1985) described the "consciousness raising group" as a cluster of intentional practices which provides the process she calls "hearing into speech" (p. 127). She theorized:

Hearing into speech is something all humans could do, one of those essential dimensions of the full human experience long programmed out of our culture and our religious tradition. . . hearing in this sense can break through political and social structures and image a new system. (p. 128)

She suggested that this kind of liberation happens because women can hear things from one another that most men find it difficult to hear (p. 17). Her theorizing here had less to do with oppositional actions than with recovering a suppressed aspect of human potential.

In line with this argument, Jenkins and Kramer (1978) in their contemporaneous touchstone overview of communication research about the feminist consciousness raising group (i.e. CR group) asserted its unique process over and against any other type of small group process:

It could be argued that the dynamics of the CR [consciousness raising] group is a result of the cathartic nature of the groups rather than a reflection of distinctive female patterns of communication. However, the materials we have gathered led us to reject this interpretation. We feel that the CR groups deserve particular attention for the following reasons: The CR group does not fit into any of the traditional classifications of groups. It is not primarily an affinity group (rewards of friendship the only goal), an interest group, a therapy group, or a task group. The CR group is a group in which members believe that the group process decided upon has itself important implications for a social movement and for an entire culture. The members of the CR group -- all of whom had experiences in other groups -- believe that this interaction is unique. (pp. 81-82)

As the women's liberation movement matured, feminists moved beyond grass root groups into larger organizational contexts such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). In a 1992 article in Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem detailed the procedures for "revolutionary groups" so that younger feminists, who were experiencing isolation in their communities, could create feminist group process. Three other extensions of consciousness raising group process illustrate the point of the impact of this invention on the wider society. One is the movement of consciousness raising group process into the practices of social work, as exemplified in Butler and Wintram's (1991) landmark book, Feminist Groupwork. A second is the identification in a series of small group studies by Cragan and Wright (1995) of the consciousness raising process as a characteristic one which can be found occurring spontaneously in many groups, including quality circles and other types of task groups. Finally, all the many pedagogical group practices that follow from practitioners informed by Freire's conscientizing (1970) have been described as closely aligned with the processes of the feminist consciousness raising group.

For the purposes of this study, "consciousness raising group" is used to refer to a way some groups of women organized in response to a particular historical situation. The more abstract term, "feminist small group process," is not intended to include all possible group processes that are liberating to all women but is used to refer to a composite of small group communicative practices commonly agreed upon and used by workers aligned with various feminisms.

The Emancipatory Vision of the Feminist Consciousness Raising Group

Various theorists, feminist and otherwise, have been concerned with oppressive social structuring, particularly that which creates and maintains the oppression of women. Foucault's (1978) conceptualizations are particularly useful for thinking about oppression as both constraining and energizing. He argued for recognition of the presence of discourses within the current social structuring that silence some voices, thoughts, and experiences (p. 84), a multiplicity of points of resistance which are everywhere within a network of power relationships (p. 95) and, the "reverse" discourses which a dominant discourse forms (p. 101). When applied to women seeking emancipation from their positions in an oppressive patriarchal social structuring through participation in small groups, the picture begins to emerge of such groups as a societal location with the potential for activity both inside yet outside the privileges and suppression of the current social structuring.

Irigaray (1977, 1985) pointed to the existence of a female economy that endures unexpressed and unexplored because language is that of a male economy in which women are never more than objects. She called for women to begin struggling to hear, speak, know each other, make visible, and articulate this invisible female economy. This notion suggests that part of what is happening in feminist small group process may be that something akin to Irigaray's "female economy" is being provided a space in which to exist, and that it is through communicative procedurings that this happens.

Johnson (1989) argued that feminists only feed energy to the ever-dominant structures of patriarchy through oppositional activism, and calls instead for women to begin intentionally inventing and structuring a feminist vision of community in small collectivities apart from the dominant society. This notion of a feminist group that is not engaging energies in struggle with oppressive forces, but instead using them in creating new structuring caught my imagination. It led me to look for visioning, creating, and maintaining by feminists that went beyond or were not obscured by an over determining concern with the relations of power.

Informed by Foucault, Irigaray, and Johnson, I theorized that feminist small group process might be seen as an attempt to reinvent current social structuring to make room for more of human experiencing. What is suggested here is not that women would be looking for something transcendent of usual human experience, but instead might be looking for somewhere in their social structuring to be experiencing a suppressed part of being human.

Scholars and workers aligned with various feminisms have been concerned with three issues that have particular relevance when considering the emancipatory potential for women of feminist small group process: self, silencing, and finding voice. An understanding shared by many feminists is that women seem to derive much of their sense of self from connecting with others. [6] A related concern is that women are systematically silenced through patriarchal social structuring, and that a recovery of women's voices and perspectives is essential to correct this oppression. [7] Finally, many feminist workers and scholars have claimed that engaging in feminist small group process has the potential to discover and/or recover voice, thus enabling women to break silence with each other in the group. Having a voice and sense of self is then believed to empower women to engage and change social structuring outside the small group context. [8]

Morton (1985) described what happened to one woman in a consciousness raising group, the progenitor of much feminist small group process. In this instance a group of women sat silently listening to one woman's story. When she had completed her story, the woman's response to their behavior was this: "I have a strange feeling that you heard me before I started. You heard me to my own story" (p. 128). Morton went on to develop this insight:

I knew I had been experiencing something I had never experienced before. A complete reversal of the going logic in which someone speaks precisely so that more accurate hearing may take place. This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth hearing that takes place before the speaking -- a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech -- a new creation. The woman had been heard to her own speech. (p. 128).

Christ (1986) conveyed the yearning to "be heard into speech." She argued that women silenced through oppression seek to be heard into speech because "without articulation, the self perishes" (p. 6). Christ says of Morton's insight,

Her phrase captures the dynamic in which the presence of other women who have had similar experiences makes it possible for women to say things they have never said before, to think thoughts they would have suppressed. As Morton says, there is a hearing that occurs before speech and 'evokes new speech.' In consciousness raising new stories are born, and women who hear and tell their stories are inspired to create new life possibilities for all women (p. 7).

Within a feminist small group, these scholars and feminist workers believe, women will have the opportunity to discover and strengthen a sense of self, to recover their voices in a social structuring that does not disconnect them from their authentic selves nor continue to silence their voice and perspectives, and to use the group as a launching pad for activism in order to reinvent social structuring of their individual lives, their communities, and ultimately, their society.

If one accepts the idea that feminist small group process itself is creating a "free space" (Allen, 1970), one begins to wonder what might be in or comprise that space that is free of patriarchally oppressive social structuring. Feminist theologians have long extended their attention into that space, since essential to the structurings of religion and the implications of spirituality is the understanding (or belief) that there is something beyond what humans invent. [9]

Drawing upon mystical experiences in Eastern and Western religious traditions, Christ (1986) adds another dimension to the understanding of feminist groups when she argues that "mystical" experience which is outside of social structuring can serve as a source of power for women to challenge and change social structuring. She contends that powerful experiences of finitude or limitation in which social structures and structures of consciousness which have provided meaning in a person's life are called into question and recognized as less than absolute could give women the power to challenge patriarchal social structures and structures of consciousness which have defined them and kept them in subordinate positions (p. xiii-xiv).

The extension of feminist small group process to incorporate an experience of something beyond current social structuring allows for a further emancipatory thought -- the idea that part of reinvented social structuring in a small group might be allowing for participants to be more fully human. Underlying the notion of social structuring that privileges some voices while silencing others is the implication that there is a human being constrained to emphasize some parts of being and suppress others. The addition of the spiritual dimension may allow for even further emancipation, that of more fully realized human potential.

A Re-Reading of the Feminist Group Literature Applying a Communication-as-Procedure Analytic

In this section, I proceed in these steps: 1) First, I develop briefly what it means to apply a communication-as-procedure perspective as mandated by Sense-Making; 2) I then apply these meta-theoretic ideas to develop a communication-as-procedure analytic specific for use in understanding feminist group process; and 3) I test the analytic by applying it to the best available procedural account in the literature of small group process in feminist groups.

Sense-Making and Its Emphasis on Communication-as-Procedure

Sense-Making Methodology has been under development since the 1970s by Dervin and colleagues (Dervin, 1999). From its inception, it has been defined as an approach to studying and designing communication as practice, as communicating. In this emphasis Dervin and others have relied heavily on the theoretical work of Carter (1980, 1989, 1991), in particular on two core propositions from his work: that a fundamental characteristic of the human condition is discontinuity (in self, nature, events; between humans, times, spaces; and so on); and that understanding communication requires studying it as behaviors that serve to bridge the gaps which are an inherent characteristic of this discontinuity condition.

Building on these core ideas, Sense-Making as an approach consists of an elaborate meta-theory, methodological guidance, and a set of methods for both studying and designing communication as behavior. In this way, at a very abstract level, Sense-Making elides the division between researching communication and practicing communication, seeing both as consisting of communicatings, or procedurings. [10]

The communication-as-procedure distinction within Sense-Making has been more fully developed in several places (see Dervin and Clark 1993, 1989; Dervin 1993). However, no one has attempted to apply the perspective as comprehensively as I do here. In a formalized sense, I used Sense-Making as my methodological framework for two related tasks. For one of these, I drew upon Sense-Making's meta-theoretic emphasis on communication-as-procedure to develop an analytic specific to the feminist small group. What was of particular importance for this task was Sense-Making's emphasis on communication as making and unmaking sense as actors move through situations which are socially and structurally embedded. It is these communicatings that are conceptualized in Sense-Making as creating, maintaining, reifying, challenging, reinventing, resisting, and destroying structures. This conjoint emphasis on the individual actor and the embeddedness of the actor in the social/structural is fundamental to my deductive use of Sense-Making specific to my interest in understanding how the feminist small group works. In what follows below I use the resulting communication-as-procedure analytic as a deductive tool in two ways -- one is in doing a re-reading of the literature on feminist support groups; the second is in ordering and making sense out of my observations and interviews in a participant observation study.

My second use of Sense-Making was specifically in using its interviewing tool with which to interact with the women who participated in the group that was the focus of my study. There is, of course, a consonance between my two uses because the interviewing approach developed to implement Sense-Making in practice is based on the same fundamental ideas rooted in a communication-as-procedure meta-theory, ideas such as: humans change as they move through time-space; life-facing consists of a continuing series of sense-makings and sense-unmakings; an inherent aspect of life-facing is energy, both working against one's movement (as in constraint and imposed power) and for one's movement (as in reflection, support, resistance, and struggle).

Describing my uses of Sense-Making in these formalized ways may misrepresent what I actually did. My approaches were exploratory because no one had yet charted such a way. I was using Sense-Making with its emphasis on communication-as-procedure both intuitively and analytically, as metaphor and as method, deductively and inductively.

The review of the literature describing the origins of the feminist small groups reveals the intention to explicitly do something different than the individuals have done before to achieve a consequence of liberation for women. Feminists invented the consciousness raising group process to break through the ideologically bound rigidities of society. The vision was one of using intentional communicative processes in a group in order to emancipate individual women who would in turn attempt to make political changes for all women.

Feminists paid deliberate attention to practice and attempted to introduce new communicative procedures to act as a corrective to previous practices. Thus, a research tool was needed which could make the procedures apparent, both those that were intentional and those that were not intentional yet still had consequences. I am using the term analytic here, in keeping with Dervin (1999) in order to emphasize that what I proposed to develop was a tool which provided me with theoretic guidance for observing, analyzing, concluding, and so on. By using the term analytic, I am distinguishing a communication-as-procedure analytic from the kind of substantive theorizing which is usually reserved for the term theorizing or theory. My goal was to develop a guide for observing a group process systematically, but one which would leave substantive theorizing for later so that it could incorporate and be shaped by insights from the data in a more inductive fashion.

Viewing communication from a communication-as-procedure perspective particularly as developed in Dervin and Clark (1989, 1993) came in response to calls for ways to understand the human predicament in which historical means of communicating and coordinating action no longer seem effective. Just as the Women's Liberation Movement occurred at a time and place in response to a situation which had become unbearably rigidified and oppressive, so, too, this approach to the study of communicating is an attempt to addresses dynamic communication processes in ways which make more available to examination conscious and unconscious patterns and practices through which they are structured.

A communication-as-procedure perspective focuses on the hows of structuring through communicatings. Following Carter (1980, 1989, 1991), communicatings may include internal acts (e.g. modes of observing, categorizing, defining, labeling, summarizing) and external acts (e.g. modes of writing, hearing, talking, joining, gesturing). Each of these communicatings can be seen as a step or series of steps, formal or informal, habitualized or newly invented. Some of these steps repeat the past while others break with the past. These behaviors apply to relating to self (e.g. remembering, forgetting, making up one's mind, changing one's mind), and to others (e.g. loving, hating, deciding, disagreeing). They apply to relating to individuals when seen independently as well as when constrained or limited by or enjoined by a collectivity. All of these behaviors are driven by the only site that directly drives behavior -- individual human agency (which may be operating consciously or unconsciously).

In looking at communication in this way, it is important to conceptualize the procedurings as occurring in time-space as a series of step-takings which can be internal or external, overt or subtle. In observing any situation, some of these procedurings will be recurrent and routinized, others will not. The repeated use of routinized communicatings is conceptualized as stabilizing both messages and structural forms long enough in time-space for identificable patterns to be observable. But if all communicatings were routinized there could be no change or resistance or struggle.

Part of the impetus of taking on a communication-as-procedure perspective, as is the case with any Sense-Making study, is to incorporate time and space into research design and thus be able to look at both stability over time and change over time. Depending on the particular confluence of interests of the researcher, stability might be alternately conceptualized as repetition, rigidity, and habit while change might be alternately conceptualized as flexibility, innovation, or caprice. Since few human actions are innate, these communication procedures are conceptualized as invented at moments in time-space, often repeated, sometimes borrowed, and sometimes reinvented, challenged, or even transcended by other procedurings. Thus, a communication-as-procedure analytic makes it possible to observe both inventing and reinventing responses to situations because it directs attention to procedurings, seeing them as energizings used to shape the situation of an individual or a collectivity.

In the case of women suffering under the oppressive circumstances of a male-dominated society, the feminist position might be reframed into the language of this analytic. The bundle of procedurings that had been used to invent the role "woman" in our society had become rigidified and lost to consciousness. However, the individual humans who were identified and constrained by the procedurings of "woman" no longer experienced these rigidified procedurings as functional or acceptable. Thus, they sought to reinvent the bundle "woman" through a new set, which included those of the feminist group process.

Communicative procedurings, as observed by feminists, also involve the internal set of procedures referenced by the term "consciousness" in consciousness raising. Consciousness raising is conceptualized as bringing a woman to awareness of how the society's view of her has been inculcated into her thoughts and feelings and understandings, and helping her to become aware of how this has created an oppressive situation for her, prompting her to change within herself, as well as to act politically to change the world outside herself.

A Communication-as-Procedure Analytic Reconceptualizing Feminist Group Process

The primary methodological tool developed in Sense-Making for applying its meta-theoretic concepts to method is based on a central metaphor. The metaphor describes a person moving through time-space (implicit in the human condition), facing gaps (inherent in the discontinuity condition), and constructing bridges in order to continue on her way. Thus, Sense-Making identifies the step taker, the step taking of moving through moment to moment, the defining of the gap, the bridging of the gap, and the taking of the next step. This metaphor encapsulates what is posited as constituting the phenomenon of human sense-making. It is a highly abstract metaphor that does not imply that sense-making is linear, complete, logical, purposive, or of any particular kind. Rather, the metaphor refers to the idea that humans move through time-space and, thus, must bridge gaps in order to continue.

Implied in the Sense-Making metaphor is the idea of triangulation, which is at one and the same time a fusion of horizons, past, present, and future and a phenomenological focusing on moving that is situated, gap-bridging, and has consequence. This metaphor is represented in a tool that has become formalized as the Sense-Making Triangle (Dervin, 1999). The triangle consists of a situation, a bridge over a gap, and an outcome (a continuing on). It is this tool which I applied to my reading of the literature on feminist group process.

I applied the Sense-Making Triangle to feminist group process at three levels. The levels align with my reading of the progressive steps I had to take in order to move from the feminist group process literature as it exists to a study developed to look at process from a communication-as-procedure perspective. Figure 1 presents the communication-as-procedure analytic for analyzing feminist group process that I developed and applied in this study. Figure 1 consists of three levels -- feminist group process as ideal vision, feminist group process as meta-procedures, and feminist group process as procedurings. The meaning of these distinctions will be developed below. Taken together, the three levels form a conceptualization of feminist small group process as a praxis. By praxis I mean practices (i.e. procedurings) which are criticially grounded in feminist theorizings.

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Figure 1. A communication-as-procedure analytic for understanding the feminist group as praxis.

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Most of the feminist group process literature, as reviewed above, does not pay explicit attention to communication as behavior even though it sees the feminist small group as a new and different kind of intentional structure, complete with specific constraints on communication. When reconceptualized using a communication-as-procedure analytic, this foundational vision pictures the feminist small group as the bridge over the gap of the oppression of women in society. This gap comes out of the situation of how women are positioned in a male-dominated society. The consequence is the hoped for emancipation of some women in particular (those in the group) and all women generally. This is pictured in Figure 1 as Level 1, which conceptualizes the feminist group as an ideal vision -- a tool for emancipation. At this level, it is the feminist ideal of the group that serves as bridge over the gap of the oppression of women.

In fact, however, the literature on the consciousness raising group demonstrates that feminists have done far more than point to a vision for the feminist group. They have paid close attention to procedures at all levels. For example, the NOW Guidelines for Feminist Consciousness Raising (1983) were explicit in their careful assessment and replacement of procedures for feminist group process, many of which are communicative. These procedures were grounded in feminist theory and thus form a praxis, defined for this study as putting ideals into practice, or conversely, creating theoretically informed practice which is critically grounded.

These procedures for feminist groups as described in the literature do indeed point to potential communicatings but the way in which the literature talks of these procedures does not get down to the nitty-gritty of communicating as it occurs in the step-takings and complexities of moving in and through time-space. However, while it can not be said that this literature has theorized itself using a communication-as-procedure perspective, it has pointed in that direction with a holographic mix of attentions to process comprised primarily of feminist insights and mandates for group enactment which might best be called meta-procedures.

Thus, for example, instructions for feminist group process require that each woman be heard but usually only focus on a few specific hows for enacting this vision. Or, they will suggest that the leader be facilitating, but again without theorizing more than a handful of specific behaviors. Level 2 in Figure 1 shows feminist group process in terms of meta-procedures such as "going around the circle" or rotating leadership. These meta-procedures that realize the feminist vision can be seen as the bridge between the situation of women in society and the hoped-for-consequence of emancipation for women. The meta-procedures were enacted, of course, with many different specific procedurings in time-space but these have not been the focus of much attention in the literature. They are, however, what I am attempting to attend to by applying this analytic.

The many different procedurings, or communicatings, that make up the group process, which occur both inside participants and between participants is symbolically pictured in Level 3 of Figure 1 where the bridge now becomes feminist group process as procedurings. To stand in for the many procedurings involved, both formal and informal, Figure 1 shows three -- observing, reinventing, and enacting. Further, it shows them in the context of three different uses of the Sense-Making Triangle as a means of emphasizing the point that feminist group process necessarily involves myriad gap-bridgings.

Taken together, the three levels of Figure 1 -- feminist group as ideal vision, feminist group process as meta-procedures, and feminist group process as procedurings -- form a conceptualization of the feminist group process as a praxis from a communication-as-procedure perspective.

Testing the Communication-as-Procedure Analytic on Folb (1979)

In Cathcart and Samovar's (1979) small group communication reader, Edith Folb (1979), active in consciousness raising groups as participant, leader, and trainer, presented the consciousness raising group as an alternative small group structure, "a potent instrument of both personal and political change" (p. 183). Her essay discussed one possible process, describing it as representative based on her experience, focusing on categories characteristic of research into small group communication: structure, organization, and leadership. She detailed such "contracts" as committing to the group, avoiding confrontation, and confidentiality. She suggested the following considerations for group structure as: women only/men only; heterogeneity (within gender); exclusion of close friends; no alcohol, drugs, food or cigarettes; and number, size, time and place of consciousness raising group meetings. The consciousness raising group process was described as comprised of: format; "the stroke" (congratulating self); the option to pass; and selection, development and treatment of the consciousness raising topic.

Folb systematically presented communicative practices intentionally used by feminists to create and maintain the process of feminist consciousness raising groups. Because this piece is one of the most detailed and encompassing descriptions of consciousness raising group process in the communication literature, it is suitable for assessment using the nascent communication-as-procedure analytic. For the purposes of testing the utility of applying the communication-as-procedure analytic I presented in Figure 1, I used the analytic as a lens for interpreting Folb's emphasis on practices. Using the lenses of communicative proceduring I was developing, I viewed each of these communicative practices through the tripartite lens of feminist praxis that I presented above: the feminist group as ideal vision, as process meta-procedures, and as procedurings.

All of the communicative practices Folb reviewed in her chapter can be grouped into three ideals envisioning that the feminist group be: (1) egalitarian (all voices heard equally despite difference); (2) pluralistic (all voices equally valued despite difference); and (3) democratic (power invested in each voice and shared by all). Based on the Folb review, Figure 2 displays the feminist ideal, the group meta-procedures, and the specific procedurings which were believed to empower the feminist group to attain its ideals.

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Figure 2. The praxis of the feminist group displayed using the communication-as-procedure analytic presented in Figure 1.

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Figure 2 begins to reveal the social structuring of the feminist small group process through the lens of a communication-as-procedure analytic. This analysis revealed that feminists were very aware of the dynamics axiomatic to any small group. What we can also begin to see in each of the examples is that the praxis of the feminist group also attended to the crucial step of bringing hidden normative (but oppressive) habitual earlier communicative inventions to awareness, and then replacing them with newly invented communicative procedures that it was believed would, in the end, result in the consequence of emancipation of particular women, and, in turn, activate them to work politically for the emancipation of all women.

An Application of a Communication-as-Procedure Perspective
in a Participant Observation Study

The next step of the research design was to study a naturalistic, bona fide group of women who used feminist process in their small group. I used Sense-Making Methodology together with the ethnographic method of participant observation to collect data, then used a combination of established Sense-Making and inductively derived categories to code the Sense-Making triangulations. The transcriptions of Sense-Making interviews were analyzed using the communication-as-procedure analytic informed by notes and transcription from meetings.

Serendipitously, through a mutual friend, I located a group of women, aligned with feminist perspectives, who were just beginning to organize into a small group they referred to as, "the women's spirituality group." I began attending meetings with their consent as a participant observer (Bogdan & Biklen, 1982; Bogdewic, 1992; Crabtree and Miller, 1992; Jorgensen, 1989). I attended roughly twelve bi-weekly meetings for approximately six months.

The group consisted of eight women (besides myself) all of whom, it turned out, had been raised in religious Christian families (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and other Protestant denominations) and all of whom had struggled with their families' faith traditions. Their ages ranged from late 20s to mid 60s. At the time the group was studied, all were middle class, white, American women, although one had emigrated from Egypt as a child. All had had some college education. Four had children, three with young children at home.

All besides myself had recently been highly involved in starting up a new alternative church, and had been prompted to form the group when they became disillusioned and angry at some of the institutional politics involved. One of the members, Skip, was employed as a pastor at the church, a circumstance with significant ramifications for the proceduring in the group.

In order to collect my data, I attended all group meetings and activities over a six-month period. The women were aware of my status as a researcher, and allowed me to be in the group as observer as long as I participated in group discussion and activities. In order to contribute, but not be overly influential, I made a practice of not introducing topics or posing questions, answering after most had spoken, and adding comments about my life but not the group process itself, unless one of the other women asked me directly. Also, because one member was uncomfortable with being audio recorded, I took handwritten notes during group meetings, attempting to preserve what was said in the person's own words as much as possible. Immediately after each meeting, I tape recorded my own additional impressions, transcribing these later. For the last group meeting, the woman who had objected actually suggested I use an audio cassette recorder, which I did. The transcription of that meeting was used as a part of the Sense-Making interview, which followed about six months later.

In keeping with the ethnographic practice of using informants to clarify emerging impressions, I interviewed all eight participants in the group, including the two women who left mid-way through the six-month period. I used a variation of the Micro-Moment Time-Line interview (Dervin, 1983, 1989, 1992), asking each woman to do a Sense-Making triangulation on a series of focal questions on their experiences with spirituality and fitting in up to, and during the group meetings. When we began to talk about the group meetings, I asked them to comment on the transcription of a group meeting that I had sent previous to the interview. The interviews lasted about two hours, were audio taped, and later transcribed. The women chose the pseudonyms used in this study.

Based on the review and analysis of feminist small group process above, my guiding research questions for the analysis of my inductively derived materials were: (1) How does a small group, informed by a feminist consciousness of process, create and maintain itself in keeping with its vision through communicative procedure? (2) In particular, how is the feminist small group process egalitarian (all voices heard equally despite difference), pluralistic (all voices equally valued despite difference), and democratic (power invested in each voice and shared by all) and, (3) How do the communicative procedures of feminist small group process fail (falter, fall apart, come apart, lose integrity) to maintain its vision?

When the articulated process of the women's spirituality group was assessed in a similar way to the research described in Folb's chapter, I was unable to discern any systematic attention to praxis. Thus, the idea of theorized practice (i.e. praxis) that emerged from the Folb paper became suggestive of a direction rather directly applicable to the actual situation in the group I observed. Rather than articulating their intended procedures, the women's spirituality group did not spell theirs out. As with most naturalistic communication, communicative procedurings were more tacit than articulated. It became my goal to tease the proceduring out using the various tools of Sense-Making's meta-theory and methods and, in particular, its focus on communication-as-procedure.

In this context, then, a major template for coding the responses from the interviews with individual members of the group centered on what constituted the main proceduring for each Sense-Making triangulation. Thus, the central Sense-Making metaphor encapsulated in the Sense-Making Triangle of situation-bridge/gap-consequence was applied as a deductive analytic tool to identify instances of procedurings. In the following example (Figure 3), Crystal was focusing on a situation that was significant to her during a group meeting.

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Figure 3. Example of a portion of a Sense-Making interview response illustrating the application of the Sense-Making Triangle to instances of procedurings.

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Such instances were coded focusing on the situation, the main proceduring, and consequences that followed from this proceduring. These consequences were coded as proceduring consequence sequences drawing on previously developed category schemes for coding helps and hurts named in Sense-Making interviews (Dervin, 1983). It is important to emphasize here that consequence is not used in any causally predetermined sense. Rather the proceduring consequence chains are conceptualized contiguities in time. An example of such coding can be seen in Figure 4, using a template adapted from that presented in Figure 1.

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Figure 4. Applying the Sense-Making Triangle of situation-proceduring-consequence to coding the communicative procedurings and their outcomes as presented in a section of one interview.

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The communication-as-procedure analytic was also used to map the path each woman took that led her to join the women's spirituality group. In the in-depth Sense-Making interview, one focal question asked, "what was the last time before you joined the group that you did/didn't fit in to a spiritual or religious setting?" For most of the women in the group, the response had to do with participating in setting up the alternative church and being disappointed by that experience. This strongly influenced what they did and did not want collectively, providing overt evidence of how individual sense-making is proceduring the bridges between self and structures.

Material from the interviews provides clues to what kinds of process these women did and did not want for this group. These are summarized in Figure 5, which displays the procedurings explicitly desired and those rejected. An examination of the ideal procedurings shows that these women were not articulating procedures in quite so concrete a way as those in the Folb's study. However, they clearly were articulating their vision for principles to guide group structuring.

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Figure 5. The vision of the group's structuring displayed in terms of the ideal and rejected procedurings that emerged inductively from group member narratives.

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In terms of the communication-as-procedure perspective I am presenting here these ideal procedurings as articulated by these group participants anchor themselves more in terms of Levels 1 and 2 of Figure 1 in that they focus heavily on a feminist ideal and on a vision of meta-procedures to achieve that ideal. However, while the women participants consciously articulated their ideals for feminist praxis, for the most part these ideals were not articulated during group meetings but rather from Sense-Making interviewing triangulations about what had happened just before the women gathered as a group. The methodological lens of proceduring, thus, was what permitted me as researcher to attend to these verbs, and to see that they grouped into a coherent pattern.

A second set of procedurings drawn from the interviews with the group participants were those which the women referenced as procedurings actually used during the group processes. Having read the transcription of the audio recorded group meeting before their Sense-Making interview, participants took a step back and reflected upon themselves as participants. Here informants were not discussing what they wanted from the group, as they did for earlier Sense-Making focal questions. Rather, they were describing actual meetings and reflecting on what happened in these meetings.

Following standard Sense-Making guidelines, one proceduring was conceptualized as the bridge for each Sense-Making Triangle. These procedurings were drawn from all triangulations with all women in the Sense-Making interviews about experiences that happened during group meetings.

Intrapersonal, interpersonal and collective communicating behaviors comprise virtually all of these group process procedurings. This is striking when one considers that none of the Sense-Making interview questions asked directly or even indirectly about communication. Figure 6 organizes the procedurings which emerged into groupings derived from the situation defining strategies suggested in Dervin and Clark (1993, p. 115).

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Figure 6. The group process procedurings derived from informant narratives, arranged within situation defining strategies.

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Drawing on all the pieces above, the material selected for use in the analysis was a convergence of three sources of data -- the ideal procedurings participants named as they began forming the group, the process procedurings identified during group process, and the individual situations of each woman as she intersected with the women's spirituality group. These multiple sources of data were used to identify ways these women procedured their group -- how they went about creating, maintaining, and dysjuncturing group processes.

In the following passages, qualitative illustrations from the Sense-Making interview material are used to demonstrate the use of a communication-as-procedure perspective as an analytic tool. In each example, the inductively derived definition of each proceduring is followed by one or two key passages. Procedurings relating to creating, maintaining, and dysjuncturing are examined in turn.

Creating the Group Process

The procedurings relating to creating the group process are revealed in some of the more explicitly positive convergings of the procedures desiring, seeking, hoping, and enacting. The women created the group process through (1) developing friendships, (2) exploring with others, and (3) learning from others. Two group members, Crystal and Ruby, speak about becoming friends and developing bonds through their participation in this group. Ideal procedurings were evoked, such as accepting each other, feeling free to talk, and creating a place to belong.

Probably the bonds that I've made with the women in the group continues. Particularly, Ruby and I have gotten very close and I think it is the group that has brought us together. We are able to talk to each other about things that are important and significant to us that we might not be talking to other people about. It is significant to us because we have bonded this new friendship with each other, and I think we got to know each other through the spirituality group . . . . Just being able to talk to her about things that are happening in my life that I don't get to talk with anyone else about. (Crystal)

One thing that I have been thinking about is that Crystal and I have become much closer friends. I know that has nothing to do with spirituality necessarily, but I think a lot of that has to do with the opportunities that we have had to interact with each other in different ways than we ever have had before . . . . Even if I have known her a long time, it provided us with a new, more regular opportunity for us to hang out and talk about things that are important and gives you the opportunity to build some trust . . . It is nice to find a person who thinks a lot like you. (Ruby)

Maintaining the Group Process.

The women rarely spoke about how they were maintaining the group process in accordance with realizing their desires. However, disagreements between group members provided opportunities for women to articulate tacit communicative procedures. An instance of where a group member can be seen addressing issues related to the feminist vision of egalitarian ideals is displayed in the following example where Lydia was distressed by Crystal's reaction to the non-procedural way that she, Lydia, was speaking.

Crystal said something. I can't remember what she said, but I felt incredibly challenged by it and I said to her, "that is a really dangerous statement" and I could see this look come across her face. I could see that I had made this horrible mistake by saying what I said to her. It really limited her freedom from that point on because of how my statement impacted her. I felt really bad . . . because I limited her in what she was feeling and saying rather than allowing her to just be who she was. (Lydia)

Dysjuncturing the Group Process

Finally, an examination of how the group's processes fell apart -- how the group went about dysjuncturing. The proceduring "dysjuncturing" is used rather than other possibilities such as coming apart or disintegrating because it implies that the communicating process of the group came apart at a critical juncture. The prefix "dys-" is used because it suggests something problematic in the coming apart, something unintended and possibly negative.

One dominant dysjuncturing involved a conflict with realizing an ideal proceduring of the group when two group members chose to leave. Both women left the group because of significant differences between their vision for the group and that of those who remained (although each of these two left on her own volition, not as a bloc). As an example, Skip was the pastor of the church with which the group was loosely affiliated and with which many of the women were extremely angry. Skip said in her interview:

As the woman pastor of the church I felt a responsibility to meet with the women and at least begin to know them better, begin to understand who and what they were a little bit better. Give me an opportunity to interact with them. (Skip)

But after some meetings in which she had expressed a strong disinclination to explore what she considered "witchery," she said,

I chose to absent myself from the group. I think it helped the ladies because I am not sure they felt very comfortable with having me there anyway. That is my opinion. They were much more free to talk about what they wanted to without my presence. I know that. I think it helped because I didn't cause any more frustration, and if I had stayed in the group, once they had started that discussion, I'd have caused major frustration (Skip).

At no time did Skip procedurally announce this to the group. From the point of view of other group members, she simply stopped coming. Tellingly, during the meetings after she stopped coming, her name was never one of those mentioned as having been contacted or having contacted someone to say she could not come to a meeting. Several meetings later, I mentioned to Ruby that Skip had not come for awhile and she said, "she isn't one of us. She doesn't get it."

Wilma left because she felt that the group was getting off track from dealing with "ecclesiastical violence." Like Skip, however, she did not tell the group this, although she did disclose it to me in her Sense-Making interview. A frustration of mine as participant observer trying not to intervene in the group process in major ways was that I did not feel I could say to Wilma, "the discussions after you left got back on topic and were exactly about ecclesiastical violence the women had suffered!" I also could not say to the rest of the group, "Wilma is not coming because she thinks you are not interested in exploring ecclesiastical violence."

Having done Sense-Making interviews with both of the women who left I am able to reveal this dysjuncturing aspect of group process in a way rarely found in the literature. [11]

Recalling that the group process is an attempt to bridge a gap, one Sense-Making methodological note is that Skip and Wilma were pointing to significantly different gaps than the other women, all of whose gaps were the same or complementary. Skip was intent on bridging the gap between individuals and a collectivity, the church and these women. Wilma wanted to bridge the gap which might be defined as a collectivity relating to itself -- she saw the institutional church as flawed by oppression but capable of transforming.

In contrast, the other women saw their gaps as ones that they could bridge by being with each other, being with "these women," particularly in the face of a shared recent experience of disappointment with the church. They did not want to transform the institution so much as to create a new structuring together. Those who stayed had a vision of the group that either matched or was harmonious with this vision. They agreed sufficiently on the identity of the gap for which this group was to be a bridge.

This is an instance where "difference makes a difference" in significant ways. Even this small group was not monolithic in understanding what it was doing together, which nicely illustrates an axiom of Sense-Making: even those apparently occupying the same time-space are not.

Discussion and Conclusions

This was the first time I had used a communication-as-procedure perspective to study individual sense-making in the context of collective structuring of a group process. In the context of this project, a communication-as-procedure perspective was applied in two primary ways. One was embedded in the in-depth Sense-Making interviews, as is common to all Sense-Making interviews, attending to how people see themselves as moving through time-space. The second was as the primary analytical tool for "reading" informant narratives and organizing what they had to say about feminist group process as they lived it.

In essence, then, I used a communication-as-procedure perspective both as a way of observing and listening and as a way of organizing data. As is characteristic of qualitative research, I did many less structured readings of my informant's interview transcriptions. It was only after I began to systematically apply the communication-as-procedure analytic pictured in Figure 1 that it became clear that this was a powerful tool for systematically revealing patterns and practices which I could grasp only intuitively or anecdotally without it.

In addition, the systematization imposed by the analytic constrained my biased perceiving as a participant observer. Without using it, I would never have been so scrupulous and non-judgmental in listening to each women's perspective, nor would the fullness of their sense-making have been revealed. The theoretic underpinnings allowed me to create my own deductive frame and helped me to address systematically what other theorists had only presented anecdotally.

The intent of this project was to examine the intentional, emancipatory collective invention of a feminist group process. By participating in and observing the feminist process of a naturalistic, bona fide small group, I encountered the difficulty of realizing an emancipatory vision by such a group. Many of the problems seemed centered in inadequate communicative procedures and ignorance, indifference or inability to both dismantle previous habitual communicative procedurings and to create new ones which were adequate to realize the vision.

The analysis of the feminist consciousness raising group process as presented in the literature suggested that it involves egalitarian, pluralistic and democratic ideals which rest on assumptions about communication. The process described by Folb was very structured, and if followed closely, would seem to have the potential to achieve some of the goals of consciousness raising, specifically as a tool to create a new social structuring.

In the naturalistic, bone fide women's spirituality group which I studied, axiomatic elements of the process common to all small groups were obscured and not entirely constrained by the intentional procedurings of the group so that their vision was incompletely realized. As long as group members remained in ignorance of these axiomatic elements, the deeper processes remained invisible to them, yet still governed the group process, leading to unintended and undesired consequences.

The primary conclusion to be drawn is that incomplete attention to the specific procedurings of group process meant that the group was unable to invent alternative procedurings that fulfilled their process ideals. This limited the differences the group was able to handle. It is a basic premise of Sense-Making that achieving emancipatory ideals requires communication invention. Inattention to micro-practices limits that potential and, thus, the useful struggle toward ideals.

That being said, the women who remained in the naturalistic, bona fide group which I studied, particularly those who initiated its organization, often commented to me during the time the group met and in the years that followed, that this group was deeply meaningful to them, that something remarkable happened in it. They felt that they had realized their vision, at least in part.

Notes

[1] A distinction can be made between procedurings and verbings with the former term reserved for sequences or chains of verbings, which have been routinized in some way. This distinction is not central to the arguments presented in this article.

[2] This article is drawn in part from the author's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Clark, 1995). Portions of the dissertation have been presented in conference papers in 1996 and 1997 at meetings of the International Communication Association.

[3] For contemporaneous authors writing about the role of consciousness raising or CR groups in the second wave of the Women's Liberation Movement, see Cassell, 1977; Freeman, 1995; Morgan, 1970; Starhawk, 1982; and Steinem, 1992.

[4] Contemporaneous feminist scholars and activists who attended to the processes of feminist small groups include Allen, 1970; Cassell, 1977; Dreifus, 1973; Freeman, 1975; Morgan, 1970; Sarachild, 1968.

[5] For discussions of the other small group processes that second wave feminists relied upon for their invention of the consciousness raising group, see Chesebro, Cragan and McCullough, 1973; Dreifus, 1973; Steinem, 1992.

[6] For scholars dealing with the observation that women seem to derive much of their sense of self in their connecting with others, see Belenky et al., 1986; Butler & Wintram, 1991; Counselman, 1991; Gilligan, 1982; Meyers & Brashers, 1994; O'Brien Hallstein, 1999; and Welch, 1985.

[7] Scholars who are concerned that women's voices have been silenced in a male-dominated society, see Benhabib, 1992; Cannon, 1988; Chopp, 1989; Christ, 1986; Collins, 1986; Fulkerson, 1994; Harding, 1991; Hartsock, 1983; Morton, 1985; Ronan, 1998; and Wetherilt, 1994.

[8] Scholars and workers who have written about the use of feminist groups to help women discover and reclaim their voice include Butler & Wintram, 1991; Chinn, 1999; Counselman, 1991; O'Brien Hallstein, 1999; Iannello, 1992; Meyers & Brashers, 1994; Starhawk, 1982; and Wetherilt, 1994.

[9] Feminist theological explorations of the emancipatory potential of women's spiritual and/or religious groups include Cannon, 1988; Clark, 1999; Clark & Diggs, in press; Chopp, 1989; Christ, 1986; Fulkerson, 1994; Isasi-Diaz, 1993; Morton, 1985; Ronan, 1998; Starhawk, 1982; Welch, 1985; Wetherilt, 1994.

[10] The choice to use the sometimes awkward gerund form to describe these behaviors -- e.g. behavings, verbings (Dervin and Clark, 1993; Dervin, 1993) -- is an intentional interruption of the reduction of process to outcome which has pervaded communication theorizing. Making the gerunds plural is intended to emphasize that there is no one way to enact a given behavior, either across time-space or across persons.

[11] See dell'Olio, n.d. for one instance of dysjuncturing mentioned in the literature on consciousness raising group. In her letter of resignation, dell'Olio strongly critiques the procedures of one feminist consciousness raising group.

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