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Objective: This article explores the ideological dilemmas of decision making identified in members' and staff's talk in Clubhouse communities. Method: The data are drawn from a corpus of 10 video-recorded focus group interviews with Clubhouse members and staff, which were collected at five Finnish Clubhouses in 2020. The method used is discursive psychology, and the analysis identifies interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas. Results: Clubhouse members and staff express diverse opinions regarding decision making at the Clubhouse. We identified six interpretative repertoires and three ideological dilemmas between these repertoires. The first dilemma deals with participation and efficiency, advancing the idea that everybody should be allowed to participate in decision making, but the decision making should be efficient. The second dilemma regards the passivity or activity of the participants, suggesting that decision-makers should be allowed to be themselves, but participation in decision making requires activity. The third dilemma is associated with power structures in decision making, proposing that joint decision making requires active resistance against power structures, but these structures are both inexorable and partially necessary. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: In introducing a discursive perspective to joint decision making in the Clubhouse community, this study makes visible the conflicting ideals of decision making. The acknowledgment of these dilemmas can guide interventions aiming at improving genuinely participatory joint decision-making practices at the Clubhouse. Impact and Implications: The study shows that Clubhouse members and staff have conflicting ideals about joint decision making at the Clubhouse. The staff's views constitute a potential risk, as they highlight the active role of members and associate efficient decision making with the inexorability of power structures. By making the conflicting ideals visible, the study can inform interventions to improve joint decision making in the Clubhouse community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display "alignment" with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey "affiliation" with the storytellers' affective stance. In this paper, we elaborate these insights on the basis of a quantitative study informed by conversation analysis. Using a database of 317 stories told in Finnish, we analyzed how story recipients' nods and continuers in different phases of storytelling (before and after the story climax) predict naïve raters' judgments of the story recipients' "empathy" toward the storyteller. We found that vocal continuers accounted for the perception of empathy during mid-telling, whereas the effect of nods remained weak. The study offers further support to the notion of structural organization of storytelling, and suggests that the significance of vocal continuers as a vehicle of empathy may be greater than has been generally thought of.

Identifying precisely what teachers do to elicit desired changes in their students' knowledge and skill is a long-lasting challenge of educational research. Here, we use conversation analysis to contribute to a deeper understanding of this matter by considering how Finnish-speaking musical instrument teachers use directives to guide their students. Our data consist of 10 video-recorded instrument lessons (violin, piano, guitar, and ukulele). In our findings, we provide an account for the variance in the musical instrument teachers' use of six second-person directive forms in Finnish. We argue that the teachers' choices between these directive forms are warranted by three dimensions of the participants' conduct: (1) location of the directive within the participants' wider activity structure, (2) degree of the student's cooperation at the given moment, and (3) the institutional priority of action that is being called for.

The article presents an editorial focuses on examining the complex relationships between Conversation Analysis (CA), sociology, and social theory, exploring how CA's connections to sociology have evolved since its inception, including its role in understanding the micro-macro linkage in social dynamics. Topics include the historical and intellectual roots of CA within sociology and the incorporation of social theory to address power dynamics and inequalities in conversational interactions.

Peer-based interventions are increasingly used for delivering mental health services to help people with an illness re-examine their situation and accept their illness as part of their life story. The role of the peer supporter in these interventions, known as experts-by-experience (EbE), is situated between mutual peer support and semi-professional service delivery, and they face the challenge of balancing an asymmetric, professional relationship with a reciprocal, mutuality-based, equal relationship. This article investigates how EbEs tackle this challenge when responding to clients' stories about their personal, distressing experiences in peer-based groups in psychiatric services. The results show how the EbEs responded to their clients' experience-sharing with two types of turns of talk. In the first response type, the EbEs highlighted reciprocal experience-sharing, nudging the clients toward accepting their illness. This invoked mutual affiliation and more problem-talk from the clients. In the second response type, the EbEs compromised reciprocal experience-sharing and advised clients on how to accept their illness in their everyday lives. This was considered less affiliative in relation to the client's problem description, and the sequence was brought to a close. Both response types involved epistemic asymmetries that needed to be managed in the interaction. Based on our analysis, semi-professional, experience-based expertise involves constant epistemic tensions, as the participants struggle to retain the mutual orientation toward peer-based experience-sharing and affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine how support workers produce requests for concrete actions and, in this way, manage client participation in mental health rehabilitation. Drawing on Finnish rehabilitation group meetings as data and on conversation analysis, we examine how support workers design their requests for concrete action from clients, how clients respond, and how support workers deal with clients' responses. The results reveal that support workers tend to use verbs indicating willingness when implementing their requests, whereas clients resort to the modality of possibility. By orienting to willingness, the support workers invoke clients' sense of responsibility to contribute to group activities and simultaneously avoid questioning their capabilities. On the other hand, clients orient toward the underlying assumptions of social responsibility rather than to their own personal preferences. To conclude, our study demonstrates how support workers address the dilemma of increasing client participation and showing respect for client self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a documentable issue. We describe the process by which the problem that the employee initially described as an organizational leadership issue became redefined as a personal matter, which was not the responsibility of the supervisor. We show how this happened by the supervisor refraining from treating the employee's problem as "tellable" on its own terms, which led to the employee repeatedly changing her storyline. We argue that the persistence of inequalities in organizational interactions may be due to documentation difficulties, which are anchored in cultural expectations that bias the tellability of events in ways that promote gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current times call for continuous communication across countries, negotiations on several levels, and the creation of international relationships based on dialogue and participation. Those ideals are often pursued in intercultural communication contexts and written about, as a desideratum, in the Intercultural Communication literature. However, how can this be achieved concretely? In this article, we analyze how decisions are taken by newly founded intercultural teams of higher-education students playing a so-called intercultural game online via Zoom. The game revolves around the creation of a development plan for a fictitious city. In our study, we conducted a conversation-analytic investigation of decision-making processes by players oriented towards the ideal of 'intercultural speakers' as the ones mediating between different points of view and giving voice to all parties in an inclusive way. We illustrate our analysis with examples that range from unilateral decision making to decisions achieved through highly collaborative processes. We point to how expectations of inclusion-oriented interactional moves in intercultural situations are sometimes at odds with how these interactions and the related decision-making processes actually unfold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersubjectivity is a concept central to human interaction, broadly understood as the sharing of minds. There is a rich diversity of conceptualizations of intersubjectivity, but detailed operationalization for its component processes in social interactions are scarce. We propose a novel approach to examine detailed variation in intersubjectivity in interaction. Our approach combines two previously formulated frameworks: the hierarchically organized developmental levels of intersubjectivity put forth in the field of developmental psychology, and three domains or orders of social interaction - affect, deontics, and epistemics - discussed in conversation analytic research literature. The interdisciplinary integration of these two frameworks allows a more crystallized view of intersubjectivity, which will benefit our understanding of the fine-scale social interaction processes as they vary in the course of the moment-to-moment unfolding of social action, across different stages of human social development, and between individuals belonging to different clinical groups and even to different species.

Purpose: The integration of mental health rehabilitees into the labour market is an important policy objective everywhere in the world. The international Clubhouse organization is a thirdsector actor that offers community-based psychosocial rehabilitation and supports and promotes rehabilitees' state of acting and exerting power over their lives, including their (re)employment. In this article, we adopt the perspective of discursive psychology and ask how mental health rehabilitees' agency is constructed and ideally also promoted in the Clubhouse-based Transitional Employment (TE) programme. Methods: The data consisted of 26 video-recorded TE meetings in which staff and rehabilitees of one Finnish Clubhouse discussed ways to further their contacts with potential employers. The analysis was informed by discursive psychology, which has been heavily influenced by conversation analysis. Results: The analysis demonstrated how rehabilitees adopt agentic positions in respect to TErelated future activities, and how Clubhouse staff promote and encourage but also discourage and invalidate these agentic positionings. The analysis demonstrated the multifaceted nature of agency and agency promotion in the TE programme. Conclusions: Although ideally, Clubhouse activities are based on equal opportunities, in everyday interaction practices, the staff exercise significant power over the question whose agency is promoted and validated in the TE programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]