How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is “culture in interaction,” which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.

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Culture in Interaction 1

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim ...

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Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis

Sociology as a Natural Observational Science@@@Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis.

1. Introduction 2. Context and social cognition 3. Context and society 4. Context and culture 5. Context and politics: the Iraq debate in British parliament 6. Conclusions.

Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk

Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social sciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics, interview research has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly in qualitative studies that aim to investigate participants’ identities, experiences, beliefs, and orientations toward a range of phenomena. However, despite the proliferation of interview research in qualitative applied linguistics, it has become equally apparent that there is a profound inconsistency in how the interview has been and continues to be theorized in the field. This article critically reviews a selection of applied linguistics research from the past 5 years that uses interviews in case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, and related qualitative frameworks, focusing in particular on the ideologies of language, communication, and the interview, or the communicable cartographies of interviewing, that are evident in them. By contrasting what is referred to as an interview as research instrument perspective with a research interview as social practice orientation, the article argues for greater reflexivity about the interview methods that qualitative applied linguists use in their studies, the status ascribed to interview data, and how those data are analyzed and represented.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0267190510000085

Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics: From Research Instrument to Social Practice

Contents: Preface. R.E. Sanders, Introduction: LSI as Subject Matter and as Multidisciplinary Confederation. Part I: Language Pragmatics. Preface to Part I: Language Pragmatics. F. Cooren, The Contribution of Speech Act Theory to the Analysis of Conversation: How Pre-Sequences Work. R.B. Arundale, Pragmatics, Conversational Implicature, and Conversation. Part II: Conversation Analysis. Preface to Part II: Conversation Analysis. P. Drew, Conversation Analysis. J. Heritage, Conversation Analysis and Institutional Talk. A. Pomerantz, J. Mandelbaum, Conversation Analytic Approaches to the Relevance and Uses of Relationship Categories in Interaction. Part III: Language and Social Psychology. Preface to Part III: Language and Social Psychology. J.B. Bavelas, The Two Solitudes: Reconciling Social Psychology and Language and Social Interaction. J.J. Bradac, H. Giles, Language and Social Psychology: Conceptual Niceties, Complexities, Curiosities, Monstrosities, and How It All Works. C. Gallois, S. McKay, J. Pittam, Intergroup Communication and Identity: Intercultural, Organizational, and Health Communication. Part IV: Discourse Analysis. Preface to Part IV: Discourse Analysis. D. Edwards, Discursive Psychology. S. Blum-Kulka, Rethinking Genre: Discursive Events as a Social Interactional Phenomenon. K. Tracy, Reconstructing Communicative Practices: Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis. Part V: Ethnography of Communication. Preface to Part V: Ethnography of Communication. W. Leeds-Hurwitz, Ethnography. G. Philipsen, L. Coutu, The Ethnography of Speaking. J. Streeck, S. Mehus, Microethnography: The Study of Practices. Part VI: Extensions of Technology. Preface to Part VI: Extensions of Technology. M. Aakhus, S. Jackson, Technology, Interaction, and Design. I. Hutchby, Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcast Talk. K.L. Fitch, Conclusion: Behind the Scenes of Language and Scholarly Interaction.

Handbook of Language and Social Interaction

In every society groups rather than individuals are given responsibility for producing results that individuals potentially could produce just as well, but without the benefits of group effort. Onc...

The Existential Center of Small Groups: Member’s Conduct and Interaction

We specify 2 independent theoretical frameworks in which it is a practical necessity to engage in compliance seeking incrementally and interactively in order to establish the social meanings of solicitation and of response. One theoretical framework ties social meaning to the interactional positioning of solicitation and response; the second framework ties social meaning to the way solicitation and response each are framed relative to shared cultural or other premises about persuadables and about the rights and obligations of each party. Accordingly, the chief communication mechanism that promotes compliance must be a give-and-take process in which each party can influence, and accommodate, the other's understanding of what solicitation and response mean. We analyze 2 naturally occurring compliance-seeking episodes and find support for our initial theorizing and discuss consequences for theory.

The actual practice of compliance seeking

It is widely assumed in studies of conflict that either persons address and resolve disagreement by waging conflict or that persons avoid conflict and thereby fail to address disagreements. However, through our analysis of interactions of people engaged in a collaborative writing task, we found a number of instances where steps were taken to avoid waging conflict or to attenuate it when there was disagreement while still addressing the disagreement and seeking to resolve it. This was done by making use of the alternative footings of speakers engaged in collaboration on a writing task to wage conflict indirectly, off the record. Speakers faced with disagreement changed or adopted footings so as to secure or reify accord or avoid further discord. Three functions of adopting or changing footings when disagreements arise are identified.

Robert E. Sanders

Papers

Handbook of Language and Social Interaction

The Existential Center of Small Groups: Member’s Conduct and Interaction

The actual practice of compliance seeking

Speakers' Footing in a Collaborative Writing Task: A Resource for Addressing Disagreement While Avoiding Conflict

The basic interactional competence of language learners