Talk And Social Structure

Talk and Social Structure is an up-to-date and provocative survey of current developments combining the complementary fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The book provides a distinctive debate that relates these innovative areas to important issues in the social sciences. Including contributions from many of the world leaders in these fields, the book offers both new theoretical depth and an extensive range of empirical studies that focus on the reflexive relation of everyday talk and social structure. Contributors include Emanuel A. Schegloff, John Heritage, Thomas P. Wilson, Hugh Mehan, Douglas W. Maynard, George Psathas, Paul ten Have, Robert Hopper, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Graham Button, and David Greatbatch, with a thematic chapter from the editors. Through the use of many examples, they demonstrate that studies of talk are important in their own right, while also having fundamental theoretical significance for social analysis.

This volume contains a collection of original studies in conversation analysis (C.A.) arranged and presented both to introduce the discipline to the newcomer and to reveal some of the expanding range of discoveries which conversation analysts are making in the course of their distinctive enquiries into the order and organisation of natural language. Though sociological in its orientation. C.A. and the papers here represented are of direct methodological and substantive interest to linguists, philosophers, discourse and speech analysts and social anthropologists. Indeed the strict adherence to the methodological principle that analysis can and must be shown to be grounded in data represents a challenge to all those disciplines which set out to use their materials as mere hand-maidens to support preconstructed models, theories and hypotheses. In this series of papers which includes previously unpublished works of the late Harvey Sacks and the last completed joint researches of Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff ordinary talk is shown as consisting of a variety of previously unnoticed socially organised practices which conversationalists engage in to generate the organisation which talk has. The methods and the analytic mentality of conversation analysts are, and are here shown to be, designed to make conversationalist's methods, structure and modes of orientation available for empirical study. The search for order and organisation reveals it everywhere. Laughter is shown to be concertedly organised and negotiated in the finest detail. The machinery of delicate repair systems is revealed. Conversational completions are shown to be the product of elaborate negotiating machineries. Conversationalists are revealed as subtly orienting-to and invoking the visual contexts of their interaction within the framework of the turn-taking organisation of conversation. This volume also contains examples of conversation analytic work into the talk produced in organisational settings such as courts and Doctor/Patient interviews. Such analyses reveal the contribution that the discipline might make towards the exploration of the kind of social phenomena traditionally researched by sociologists, social psychologists and social anthropologists.

A study of conversation analysis

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

These essays reflects fresh developments in the increasingly influential field of conversation analysis.

Contents: Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis; Parties and Joint Talk: Two Ways in Which Numbers are Significant for Talk-in-Interaction; Laughing at and Laughing with: Negotiations of Participant Alignments Through Conversational Laughter; Episode Trajectory in Conversational Play; Mm Hm Tokens as Interactional Devices in the Psychotherapeutic In-take Interview; Meeting Both Ends: Standardization and Recipient Design in Telephone Survey Interviews; The Distribution of Knowledge in Courtroom Interaction; Seeing Conversations: Analyzing Sign Language Talk; Multiple Mode, Single Activity: Telenegotiating as a Social Accomplishment; Assembling a Response: Setting and Collaboratively Constructed Work Talk; A Technology of Order Production: Computer-Aided Dispatch in Public Safety Communication; The Mundane Work of Writing and Reading Computer Programs. Contributors: Steven E. Clayman, Douglas W. Maynard, Emanuel A. Schegloff, Phillip J. Glenn, Robert Hopper, Marek Czyzewski, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Martha L. Komter, Paul McIlvenny, Alan Firth, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jack Whalen, Graham Button, Wes Sharrock, Paul ten Have, and George Psathas. Co-published with the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.