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This study uses Conversation Analysis to investigate an interactional practice in US Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) lower court nomination hearings. Drawing from 13 hr and 36 min of data from Q&A rounds across 12 SJC hearings during 2020 and 2022, I document how senators' invocations of the hearing's time limits function as a resource for managing judicial nominees' responses to their questions. I examine senators' time invocations (TIs) in two main sequential areas: (1) When designing questions, and (2) when pursuing or challenging nominees' responses. As a feature of question design, TIs help senators 'move things along' during their brief questioning time, as well as pin nominees to respond in ways preferable to the question. As a feature of pursuits or challenges, TIs help senators manage nominees' off-topic, evasive, or unsound responses, thus ascribing different levels of accountability onto both nominees (for their inadequate responses to senators' initial questions) and senators themselves (for the sequential and affiliative consequences associated with doing pursuing/challenging). Seven extracts are presented from a collection of 82 cases. Findings reveal how time limits can be leveraged by senators to advance various goals in this highly constrained and institutionalized context, including exhibiting and implicitly legitimizing partisan bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's global world, many people can move across borders as travelling has become much easier in many ways. However, the securitization of borders has not been relaxed, implying that multilingual police-civilian interactions are becoming more 'commonplace'. Within the framework of conversation analysis, this article presents a novel study on multilingual police border checks. These are police encounters "on the ground" (not in police custody), and as such, there are no interpreters or language experts present. Focusing on the analysis of a single-case police encounter in which participants have to rely on a second language (English) that none of them are proficient in (i.e., 'novice-novice interaction'), this article examines practices that speakers use to resolve a crime involving the illegal possession of drugs. In addition, some complementary findings from other border checks are presented. Overall, this study shows that participants attempt to achieve intersubjectivity by using interactional (and embodied) practices (e.g., word choice, repair, speech simplification) oriented toward recipient design. By doing so, participants shape the progressivity of the encounter and ultimately achieve their objectives in the interaction. As such, this article shows how a high-stake (police) multilingual situation can also be resolved in the absence of a language expert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A professional language is crucial for kindergarten teachers' professional identity and status as a profession. What characterizes kindergarten teacher's professional language in parent--teacher conferences, and how can conversation analytic research contribute to a more nuanced debate regarding degree of academic knowledge? The data material consists of 10 audio-recorded parent--teacher conferences, and the study is inspired by the ethnomethodological tradition, institutional talk. The article argues for grounding professional language in verbal actions strengthening the kindergarten teacher's authority (deontic and epistemic), rather than academic vocabulary per se. The analysis shows that vertical frames and institutional routines organize the parent-teacher conference, where the kindergarten teacher constitutes herself as entitled to regulate talk and describe and evaluate the child as well as the parents' talk. Mostly, this is accomplished through everyday language, but there are signs of academic knowledge too, in terms of vocabulary and reference to research. While it might be desirable to intensify the expert role through more use of expert knowledge, this strategy is at the same time likely to threaten the so-called partnership ideal, already under pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the dynamics of questioning practices and speech-style shifting in Korean entertainment talk shows. While prior research has examined the topic of questioning practices in the Korean language, mostly in everyday conversation or educational discourse, this article expands this investigation to encompass semi-institutional discourse, particularly focusing on the context of entertainment talk shows. This research also contributes to understanding the pragmatic characteristics of two Korean honorific speech styles, namely the polite (-yo) and deferential (-(su)pnita/-(su)pnikka) styles, by investigating their interplay and transitions. Adopting an interactional approach to discourse and drawing upon membership categorization analysis and conversation analysis, this study analyzes the discourse of 15 entertainment talk shows, with a special focus on approximately 1500 sentential units, 325 of which are questions. The analysis of these utterances provides an account of the utilization of linguistic resources in questioning practices and the utilization of the two Korean honorific speech styles in the joint construction of social activities and identities within the entertainment talk show setting. The selection of linguistic resources for questioning practices and style shifting is closely intertwined with the management of entertainment and institutional dynamics among the participants in this particular setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions to this special issue investigate rare, acute and hard-to-access interactions in situations of crisis, conflict and emergency. They study low frequency but high stakes communication between crisis-related professionals and citizens, or among professional parties themselves. The data used for the analysis are audio and/or video recordings of naturally occurring and real-life events, either actual crisis situations or training situations. The settings range from audio-only emergency telephone calls to complex multimodal training events, including police negotiations with suicidal persons, suicide helplines, police-lay people interactions, call/dispatch centres, mass casualty exercises, and United Nations crisis management training. By building on the background and principles of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), the studies focus on live interactions in various situations involving crisis as they unfold in real time. The topics range from preparing and training for crises before they have happened to ongoing live crisis; how decision-making happens in time-limited environments which are also uncertain or ambiguous in nature; how professionals deal with unpredictable external challenges (e.g., technology failure), and how the management of extraordinary events may nevertheless be routinized. The papers in the special issue show how interaction in crisis settings actually unfolds, moment by moment and step by step. They complement an emerging body of EMCA work on acute crisis, which is not only proving impactful on the organizations themselves (e.g., via research-based training), but also on our fundamental understanding of the organization of talk. • The articles in the SI investigate communication during crises and emergencies. • They study events involving dispatchers, medics, police, soldiers, call-handlers. • They analyse practices that shape events and outcomes in crisis interaction. • They analyse hard-to-access audio and/or video recordings of real-life events. • The SI extends research in pragmatics on crisis and emergency interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some restorative justice schemes, facilitators have been found to control discussions and outcomes, influence the participation rights of offenders and victims and coax offenders into explanations of accountability. This study used audio-recordings of four restorative justice meetings that were transcribed and examined using the method of conversation analysis. I examined the questions asked by the facilitator, focusing on the role of epistemics in how the questions were constructed. Findings revealed a relationship between asking questions and having control, showing the significant role the facilitator played in shaping the restorative justice narrative through the question–answer framework. Offenders and victims were questioned differently by the facilitator, resulting in the talk of offenders being restricted and scrutinised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation analytic study investigates the chair's practice of addressing participants in multiparty meeting interaction. Paying close attention to the participants' verbal and embodied actions, I examine 12 h and 30 min of video-recorded faculty meetings in a U.S. school district. I focus on how the meeting chair uses terms of address (e.g., first name, occupational title) during the meetings. The analyses show that when the chair uses an address term, she not only establishes a recipient, but also invokes and makes her institutional identity relevant as a meeting chair. In particular, the chair uses an address term while carrying out actions such as 1) opening or closing a topic, 2) managing the floor for different speakers, and 3) conducting relational work (e.g., welcoming a new member). The findings show that the address terms facilitate the chair's actions that promote progressivity – between and within (a) topic(s) in the meeting agenda – and foster social solidarity by displaying affect toward individual participants. This study contributes to research on address terms and their functions, as well as to meeting interaction, particularly with regard to chairing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on video recordings of police checks in the Spain-France border area, conversation analysis is applied to circumstances in which police officers decide to expand the encounter in search of grounds for suspicion. Police construct a "funnel of suspicion" that gradually intrudes further into the civilians' personal spheres. This is used to gather information on which to base choices regarding subsequent actions, such as seeking further details or ending the encounter. The results show that police pressure when assessing what constitutes suspicion and attempts by civilians to be released from the encounter shape the interaction of these police border checks. • Parties deal with the resolution of police suspicion. • Police officers exercise choice of suspicion moment-by-moment. • Suspicion is the resource that makes the actions of officers and civilians coherent. • The police pressure to resolve suspicion shapes the progressivity of the encounter. • Parties co-construct the overall structural organization of police border checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of medical encounters is an excellent example of both institutional talk and the discourse of power and its prominent features can be analysed from various aspects. This paper deals with interruption as an important characteristic of both doctor-patient communication and institutional talk in general. The research is focused on comparing the ways doctors and patients interrupt each other and the amount of power they need for this. First, some previous research in this field has been reviewed – it is discussed how interruptions are different from overlaps, how typical it is for patients to interrupt their doctors, how and why doctors and patients interrupt each other and whether they have equal rights when it comes to interrupting their interlocutors. As we aimed at checking these results and investigating if, how and when patients interrupted their doctors, a corpus of 37 recordings made in a tertiary referral hospital in Belgrade, Serbia, in the department of pulmonology, has been analysed. Examples of interruptions by doctors and patients were analysed according to the principles of conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis. The obtained results confirmed an ever-present asymmetry in doctor-patient communication, although it was not as conspicuous as it had been stated in some previous research. Finally, the difference between the ways in which doctors and patients interrupt each other and the reasons behind these interruptions were emphasized.

Power is a key concept in institutional talk as it structures both the discourse of that institution and the relationships within it. It influences the formation of identities and is highly indicative of the culture the institution promotes. Humour serves a wide range of functions within an organization and is closely related to power. The paper aims to investigate the relationship between power and humour in educational setting, namely a high school. It analyses two different meetings – a school board meeting and an evaluation meeting, both held in the same school; these meetings differ in terms of formality, number of participants, and purpose. The paper aims to identify the way humour is used by the more and less powerful participants in the meetings. The paper is structured into two parts – a theoretical presentation of power and humour and the data analysis. The practical part looks separately at each meeting and at the functions humour serves when used by the power holders and the subordinates.

The deployment of mixed reality systems in professional settings demands adaptation of the physical environment and practices. However, technology-driven changes to the environment are problematic in some contexts. Specifically, face-to-face advisory services rely on scripted material routines using specific tools. This manuscript explores challenges encountered during the development of LivePaper, a mixed-reality system for supporting financial advisory services. First, the article presents a range of design requirements derived from existing literature and multiple years of research experience concerning advisory services and physical collaborative environments. Second, it discusses technical and design challenges that emerged when building LivePaper along with those requirements. Third, the article describes a range of technical solutions and new design ideas implemented in a working system to mitigate the encountered problems. It explores potential alternative solutions and delivers empirical or conceptual arguments for the choices made. The manuscript concludes with implications for the advisory services, the systems used to support such encounters, and specific technical guidance for the developers of mixed reality solutions in institutional settings. Overall, the article advances the discourse on the application of technology in advisory services, the use of mixed-reality systems in professional environments, and the physical nature of collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help‐seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers' identities as victims or clients rendered their help‐seeking accountable and invoked identities for call‐takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers' identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of medical encounters is deemed to be an excellent example of both institutional talk and discourse of power. Asking questions is probably the most prominent characteristic of doctor-patient interaction and this paper deals with tag questions as one of the question types that can be found in almost every medical encounter. We will explore tag questions by reviewing current research results in the field of medical discourse and by comparing and discussing examples from transcribed medical encounters in English and Serbian. It will be discussed how often tag questions are used in both corpora, whether doctors and patients use them in the same way and what role these questions have in a medical encounter. Finally, having in mind that getting to ask any question in institutional talk requires a certain amount of power, we will also try to determine if using tag questions affects doctor and patient's positions in a medical encounter.

Increasing recognition of the long-term negative impacts of gendered violence has led to the establishment of a variety of social support services. Feminist research has examined the barriers that prevent women from accessing these services and the problems women report getting the help they need. However, little is known about what happens in situ when women interact with support services. This paper is a novel empirical investigation of naturalistic social interactions where women seek help with problems resulting from violence at home. We used conversation analysis to examine how problems of housing instability and help-seeking unfolded in recorded telephone calls to a victim support service. We found that the routine institutional practice of asking for an address posed interactional trouble for women who were seeking to leave violence, had left a violent home, or were homeless as a result of violence. When answers could not be provided, callers' responses included disclosures of violence or challenges to the meanings of address. Our findings point to an interactional burden that women confront in institutional interactions. We suggest institutions should carefully consider how routine practices such as asking for an address might pose unintended problems for service users in vulnerable circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant's actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real (rather than mock) juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant methods of studying police have involved quantitative analyses of surveys and systematic social observations of police behavior or qualitative methods such as ethnographies and interviews. The same trend applies to procedural justice research in policing. In prior works, the question of how police officers and citizens interact in situ is absent. We argue that procedural justice police research should move beyond the quantitative/qualitative distinction and consider other ways to collect and analyze data. We begin by providing a methodological critique of procedural justice research, and demonstrate the assumptions of discourse in extant works before we provide a blueprint for how to incorporate discourse analytic methods in the study of procedural justice and policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Discursive Psychology (DP) to investigate formulations of worry as an interactional resource. DP conceptualizes emotion as something people display or formulate in interaction with other people, and draws on conversation analysis (CA) to examine its social functions across settings. Data consist of 366 recorded phone calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's customer service for housing allowance – a benefit targeting financially vulnerable youth and families. The article examines how clients' worry is formulated (e.g., 'I'm really worried now'), what functions such formulations serve, and how they are responded to. In line with the broader DP goal of uncovering how institutions are characterized by psychological business, the study shows how worry is linked to lack of knowledge, building worry as warranted and as warranting further institutional activity (or not). Speakers thus treat worry as morally and institutionally constrained. The analysis shows how orientations to worry in the context of state welfare customer service both corresponds and contrasts with what research on worry formulations in other institutional settings has found. This highlights the way that psychology is locally specific and bound up with institutionality, and reinforces the need for close empirical analysis of psychology-relevant matters across settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a language ideological assemblage approach to examining the politics of multilingual communication at a wildlife sanctuary in Limbe, Cameroon. At the Limbe Wildlife Centre, English is treated as the primary and even neutral lingua franca of the institution, although it is almost no one's first or preferred language. In reality, the majority of communication takes place either in Cameroonian Pidgin English (used by animal keepers and staff) or French (used by foreign NGO managers and volunteers). In this institution, the shared belief in the neutrality and accessibility of English leads to the erasure of work done in other languages, thereby magnifying the neocolonial, racial, and epistemic divides between Cameroonian staff and French NGO workers. • Case study of language ideological assemblage of a Cameroonian wildlife sanctuary. • English treated as neutral, despite turbulent national politics of language usage. • Majority of workplace communication occurs in Cameroonian Pidgin English and French. • Erasure of linguistic diversity magnifies disparities between workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of emotion ability to illuminate the process whereby institutional meetings become an arena for testing, evoking, and regulating emotions that are deemed necessary to meet institutional goals. It focuses on the relationships and practices that are collaboratively constructed by welfare workers and clients when they interact within the context of institutional meetings. Based on an interactional analysis of a multi-party meeting, this article demonstrates the ways in which clients' ability to read, interpret, and follow specific feeling rules becomes the focal point of attention. Using video recordings, we illustrate that this process is highly collaborative, and it involves both language and body. The ability to act in accordance with the expected and required 'right feelings' emergent in the institutional encounter is, thus, a result of highly interactive processes. We discuss the concept of emotion ability as a concrete micro-level mechanism through, which practices of affective citizenship are realized in the context of institutional interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, with particular attention to the role of the Committee chairperson within this procedural infrastructure—an infrastructure that, we argue, systematically provides for and thereby implicitly legitimizes the insertion of bias in its proceedings, while nonetheless orienting to an ideology of fairness based on time limits for speaking. Focusing on the linguistic and interactional mechanisms through which chairpersons may use the 'interstitial spaces' that emerge within such hearings, we conclude that the structural privileges afforded to partisan chairpersons can compromise the Committee's ability to reach impartial and unbiased conclusions in its investigations, and we offer recommendations with regard to how this might be resolved. • 'Interstitial spaces' can emerge between phases in Committee hearings. • Committee chairpersons can make use of these spaces to insert partisan perspectives. • There are linguistic and interactional mechanisms that chairpersons can deploy to monopolize use of interstitial spaces. • Impartiality (in terms of equal time limits for speaking) is undermined by such interstitially-produced commentaries. • Committee members should learn to combat these practices if the role of chairperson is to be filled by the Majority Leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using conversation analysis and a collection of naturally occurring US primary care consultations, this article explores the search for pain during primary care physical exams. Inhabiting this activity is a 'collision' of expertise between physicians' clinical knowledge about bodies and patients' knowledge about their bodies. I show how patients responding to questions like does that hurt? tacitly guide physicians to their pain using pain displays, glottal cutoffs and response delays to observably react to the physician's touch, delineating painful from non- or less-painful areas. Physicians respond to these practices by altering the trajectory of their touch in coordination with the patient's embodied behavior. In this local context, physicians' touch not only constrains patients to (dis)affirm pain in a particular location, but it is also a unique affordance for patients to guide physicians while nonetheless preserving the physician's authority over where to test for pain, thereby maintaining the physical examination activity framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that stigma can be a barrier to service use but there has been little work examining actual service encounters involving members of stigmatized groups. One such group are those with problematic or unmanageable debts. Providing advice to members of this group is likely to be particularly difficult due to the stigma associated with being in debt. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this study examines 12 telephone advice conversations between debt advisors and individuals in debt. Both clients and advisors oriented to the negative moral implications of indebtedness and typically worked collaboratively to manage these issues. Clients often claimed a moral disposition as a way to disclaim any unwanted associations with debt, but could find it difficult to reconcile this with an insolvency agreement. Moreover, the institutional requirements of the interaction could disrupt the collaborative management of stigma and advisors could manage the subsequent resistance from clients in either client‐centred or institution‐centred ways. The findings suggest that the products offered by debt advice agencies, as well as the manner in which they are offered to clients, can either help or hinder debtors negotiate the stigma‐related barriers to service engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how one United States Southern female professional, Suellen, navigates the 'double bind' of being a culturally appropriate woman and culturally appropriate leader. Data analysed include a two-hour audiorecorded meeting from eight months of fieldwork with a Texas organisation. Analysis illustrates how Suellen enacts a Southern feminine identity when implicitly claiming authority on business matters and overtly claims her identity as a woman when explicitly claiming authority on women-related matters. These findings address debates among language and gender scholars about determining the relevance of gender to interaction. We show how gender is a culturally specific identity that participants simultaneously implicitly perform and explicitly construct in ways that meet institutional goals. Multiple approaches to language and gender are not in contention but rather complement one another to highlight the variety of resources participants can use when making gender relevant in interaction to meet institutional goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores educational meetings that have a goal of promoting the Belarusian language and providing a platform for people who want to interact in this language. These meetings are not like any traditional language courses; they are rather a public discussion space for a community of people who speak Belarusian, try to speak this language, or are interested in it. Findings demonstrate how the identity of a Belarusian-speaking Belarusian is interactionally constructed and speaking Belarusian is framed in relation to identity formation and language ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from the assumption that organizational culture can be defined as the type of behavior, mainly considered in interactional terms, which is deemed acceptable by the employees (Hofstede 45). By analyzing frames, footing and their changes, the paper aims to compare the culture in two companies–a joint company (Romanian Belgium where English is used as the language of communication) and a Romanian one. The data used for the analysis come from two face-to-face meetings in these two companies.

This article examines the relationship between whiteness and communication through analysing how white business community members acknowledge their own, usually invisible, white identity. Discourse analysis of interactions in a Texas organization shows how white members construct white identity as intersecting with Texan, masculine, age and professional identity categories. Members mark the overt construction of white identity as a dispreferred action through using disclaimers, formulations, pauses, humour and non-racial terms. Analysis of minority business member talk illustrates how minorities orient to white members' talk as exclusive towards minorities because they do not overtly and directly discuss race and because they orient to regional identity in a way that ignores racial diversity among Texans. Thus while white members attempt to acknowledge their raced position in the Texas business community, their communicative actions repeatedly index white identities and reproduce the hegemonic position of white, male, Texan professional identities in this community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between everyday talk, the reproduction of political ideology and the interactional accomplishment of situated identities through analyzing how institutional members index neoliberal ideology in their everyday interactions. Analysis of audio- and video-recorded data from racially diverse business members of two Texas chambers of commerce illustrates how chamber members indirectly index neoliberal ideology through taking stances toward government policies. White, upper class participants display neoliberal stances through using complaints – constituted by questions, humor, idioms and inference-rich terms – about the Affordable Care Act because it is a form of government interference that increases taxes and the federal deficit. Minority business members use discursive strategies such as double-voiced discourse and self-repairs to balance tensions between criticizing neoliberal ideology because it does not benefit minorities yet still orient to its taken-for-granted value in their business community. Overall, while participants' interactions generally seem to operate within the structural constraints of neoliberal ideology, our analysis illustrates how participants take up neoliberal ideology in situated ways that, at times, provide avenues for negotiating the relevance of neoliberal ideology to everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, introducing the Special Issue, investigates the notion of "agency of language" and its historical roots: the phenomenological emphasis on the social actors' role in constituting their Life-World. It reconstructs the genesis – at the beginning of the 20th century – of two ideas that still nourish contemporary interactional and pragmatic views of language: language meaning relies on use, language is a tool to perform activities. Focusing on dialogue in institutional settings, it illustrates how cultures, social orders, and moral horizons are talked-into-being and shaped through the activities performed in institutional talk. It also presents the contributions in the Special Issue that address the co-constitutive relationship between language, interaction, and culture from different disciplinary perspectives as well as methodological approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In welfare encounters, clients may from time to time report about other peoples’ doings in ways that are heard as more or less downgrading. This article examines how these reports are brought off in Norwegian vocational rehabilitation encounters, and especially, how the professional party aligns. Do such practices represent what Levinson calls ‘allowable contributions’ in the vocational rehabilitation meeting or are they treated as matter out of place? The analysis of five data extracts suggests that it is very important for the reception that the report is well contextualized and attuned to the institutional agenda. The counsellors displayed a neutral but cooperative alignment to reports integrated neatly in the business-at-hand in a top-down fashion (extracts 1–3). Here, the reports served as a tool to inform the recipient about the client’s own character and/or her experience of the rehabilitation process. However, in the two latter cases (extracts 4 and 5), where the client had a more initiating role, the reports appeared to have a more humorous or entertaining function. In response, the counsellors did not display alignment but searched for institutional relevance before re-contextualizing the report into a proper (institutional) context. This suggests that out-of-frame reports about other people delivered on a humorous footing do not straightforwardly fall into the category of ‘allowable contributions’ in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between communication and cross-cultural adaptation through conducting a membership categorization analysis of interactions among members of an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC). Analysis of audio-and-video-recorded data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork illustrates how immigrant AACC members adapt to US notions of race through adopting the “Asian” racial category yet define “Asian” in creative ways that meet institutional goals. AACC members also resist US essentialist racial ideology through identifying with ethnic categories that help members meet situated institutional goals. Overall, this paper highlights how members routinely switch among racial, ethnic, and professional identity categories when navigating structural constraints of racial ideology during cross-cultural adaptation in institutional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When citizens are pulled over by police for traffic violations, they often volunteer accounts for their driving conduct. These accounts convey important character qualities about the citizen, as well as exigencies (e.g. they are late) that motivate officer response. We use the method of conversation analysis to show that where a citizen positions an account in the course of an encounter is subject to different interactional-organizational constraints, which in turn afford citizens different resources for self-presentation. We also show that officers are sensitive to citizens’ accounts and respond to them in differentiated ways. In addition to being a resource for self-presentation, citizens’ volunteered accounts are a resource for motivating and shaping police action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an analysis of how constituents procure services at the constituency office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom. This paper will investigate how several previously documented interactional practices (e.g. entitlement) combine at the constituency office in a way that secures service. From a corpus of 12.5 hours of interaction, and using conversation analysis, we examine constituents’ telephone calls and meetings with constituency office staff and the MP, identifying practices constituents use. First, constituents opened encounters with bids to tell narratives. Second, constituents presented lengthy and detailed descriptions of their difficulties. These descriptions gave space to manage issues of legitimacy and entitlement, while simultaneously recruiting assistance. Third, we examine ways in which constituents display uncertainty about how the institution of the constituency office functions, and what services are available. The paper offers original insights into how constituency services are provided, and how constituency offices give access and support to ordinary citizens, while expanding the conversation analytic literature on institutional service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on frames theory as an analytical framework, this study examines discourse interaction of a radio phone-in programme in Shanghai, during which professionals specialised in psychology or a related field provide advice to audience callers by answering questions and addressing concerns on the phone. It aims to describe and analyse what frames are constructed, and how these frames are linguistically and discursively accomplished at a local level in institutional settings. Identifying three major frames (Host, Professional, and Community), the author demonstrates how participants create, shift, and blend frames in response to the contingency of the local discursive and interactional context. This study also underlines the benefits of incorporating multiple perspectives in examination of discursive interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis focuses on two possible approaches to the phenomenon of identity. Identity emerges, it is maintained and changes in everyday talk-in-interaction in the process of communicative action interpretations achieved by speakers and their reactions. Consequently, identity can be observed in the individual narratives and in the structure of conversation. In the paper, the author observes the emergence of identity in the texts of qualitative semi-structured focus group interview (in the Russian language). The text analysis is based on the theoretical and methodological background of conversation analysis and narrative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation analytic study examines the use of reported thought in advice-giving sequences. In particular, the study focuses on how the writing instructor uses reported thought as an interactional resource to provide a critical assessment on student writing. The target practice takes the following format: quotative (e.g., be like ) + response particle (e.g., oh, okay, well ) + clause (e.g., there's this random image here ). The analyses show how the reported thought depicts a reader's real-time reaction to the current issue in student writing as well as to the potential issue to be avoided. Such a depiction provides a case for the instructor's accompanying advice for revision. As the practice of embedding reported thought allows the instructor to displace speakership and respond to student writing as an intended reader, it is used as an instructional tool to “bend space and time” (Barnes and Moss, 2007, p. 142) and substantiate the here-and-now advice. This study has implications for conversational analytic work on reported speech and thought and advice-giving in educational discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines references interactants make in the course of mediation sessions with the purpose of understanding how these references serve as indicators of the mediation session being on-task or off-task and a type of interactional resources mediators use to manage conflict. An existing collection of transcripts from audio recordings of mediation sessions at a mediation center in the western United States serves as a source of interactional data. The study identified references that are employed to create an institutionally preferred form of the interactivity, namely, references to interactional products (e.g., a plan and an agreement), people outside of the immediate situation (references to children, agents of an organization such as judges, counselors, and lawyers, clients, and abstract people), and external matters related to the agenda of the meeting (e.g., references to custody and visitation matters and the process disputants have to go through to resolve their dispute). The analysis shows that these references perform a number of functions such as setting a task before the disputants, keeping the discussion focused on task or showing that the conversation is off-track. It indicates that there are differences in mediators’ and disputants’ usage of references, for example, in terms of the use of linguistic tokens, frequency, and what they refer to. The article also demonstrates that it is important to consider references in the context and in combination with other references, as, when taken in isolation, they are not necessarily a sufficient indicator of the discussion being on-task. Finally, the article discusses what the findings mean in terms of conflict, communication design, and institutional talk.

The analysis in this paper draws from customer service calls to an electronic repair facility and systematically examines the interactional dynamics between customers and service representatives as they each manage to keep service complaints from becoming overt. This paper considers how the recognizability of a complainable matter can be used as leverage for achieving other types of interactional projects, such as gaining additional assistance or, for representatives, working to quickly close down the call before the customer has a chance to complain. By building upon Schegloff's (2005) observations regarding suppressing complaints in ordinary encounters, the analysis in this paper contributes to our understanding of the function of complaints within institutional encounters, with implications for understanding complaint management in service encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper starts from the assumption that organizational culture can be defined as the type of behavior, mainly considered in interactional terms, which is deemed acceptable by the employees (Hofstede 45). By analyzing frames, footing and their changes, the paper aims to compare the culture in two companies-a joint company (Romanian Belgium where English is used as the language of communication) and a Romanian one. The data used for the analysis come from two face-to-face meetings in these two companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper is a persistent element of financial advisory encounters, despite the increasing digitisation of the financial industry. We seek to understand the reasons behind the resilience of paper-based encounters and advisors' resistance to change by understanding the paper's roles in financial advisory encounters. While applying multimodal analysis to a set of field and experimental data, we point to a range of prevalent advisory practices that rely on the use of paper documents and hand-written notes. We focus on the choreography of paper and how this intersects with the participants' institutional identities and goals. Specifically, we show how advisors' paper-oriented actions seek to convey a positive impression about the advisor and about the bank to the client, i.e. how they engage in seemingly mundane practices to impress their clients. Paper is far more than a medium for saving and presenting information: it is an interaction resource, a semiotic resource and an institutional resource; all these aspects of paper come into play during a financial advisory encounter. The manuscript concludes with suggestions on the design of technologies that may potentially replace the paper in financial advisory encounters and assesses the likelihood of this in light of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation studies buying and selling encounters in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. It is a conversation-analytic study that shows aspects of the institutional character of these interactions, their overall organisation and sequential structure. It suggests that the core sequential structure of these encounters consists of two base adjacency pairs, buying (requesting–giving a product) and selling (requesting–giving money). In particular, the analysis describes the preparatory characteristics of the pre-expansions that precede the product request formulations, the linguistic composition and sequential positioning of request formulations, the insertions of the buying adjacency pair and the sequencing of the commercial exchange which is described as the climax of the institutional event. The designs of the first pair part of the selling adjacency pair and the product request formulations are presented as clear instances of the referential framework or common ground shared by seller and customer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]