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This paper discusses communicative decision making as an ‚action complex‘. To this end it combines empirical results on communicative decision-making processes from different fields (law, medicine, economics, politics) and compiles the constitutive action components therein. The results obtained through this are then further differentiated by analyses of “Supported Decision Making” in the German Betreuungsrecht (adult guardianship). The analyses led to the conclusion that the action complex can be described as a selection process, which is composed of different stages. Each stage can be reconstructed as a decision-making process in its own right (including a decision each). Thus, decision making systematically consists of several decision-making processes. The analyses show how participants negotiate their communicative movements through the action complex and how decisions emerge in the process.

The article focuses on methodological issues of practice-oriented discourse research and suggests several methodological approaches to assess conversational practice. It makes an argument for the relevance of assessing conversational practice and for why aspects of good practice should be included more systematically in the analyses by way of considering objectives in the examined practice domains. We provide examples of different institutional fields (mostly doctor-patient and lawyer-client interaction) and discuss how actual communicative practices can be assessed with methods of discourse analysis. We thus aim to expand the methodological spectrum of conversation research by including matters of immediate social interest and aspects that are relevant for practitioners.