Gamblers, grinders, and mavericks: The use of membership categorisation to manage identity by professional poker players

Historically, gambling has varied considerably regarding its moral and social meanings. Whilst frequent gambling is often constructed as deviant, professional poker playing can be argued to occupy the conflicting position of both deviant and legitimate. This study explored how professional poker players negotiate this potentially troubled aspect of their identities. Semistructured interviews were conducted with four men from the United Kingdom who played casino poker. The data were analysed using membership categorization analysis. The following membership categorisations were in use within participants' accounts: gambler, grinder, maverick, and nongambler, as well as the central categorisation of professional poker player. Participants constructed themselves as stigmatised because they were frequent gamblers and poker players. Thus professional poker players utilised membership categorisation to distance themselves from other membership categories, particularly gamblers, which was achieved primarily through claims warranted by reference to skill and control

I take full responsibility, I take some responsibility, Ill take half of it but no more than that:Princess Diana and the location of blame in the Panorama interview

The focus of this article is the conversational management of blaming and accountability. In particular, we explore how involved speakers routinely allocate and avoid blame in everyday talk. In considering such a problematic notion of social interaction, we analyse the BBC interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir that was aired on British national television on 20 November 1995. In the analysis, we consider how different discursive strategies are employed by speakers in ways that work up credible and authentic accounts. More specifically, we argue that Diana attributes blame to external `others' within a negotiated context of routine description of past events. Categories such as `the media', `the royal household' and `Charles' are constructed and made relevant throughout the interview and the analytic interest is what is accomplished rhetorically for both Diana and Bashir. Of further interest is the overall script design of the interview and how devices such as script formulation, stake management, footing shifts and progressive narrative function in the negotiation of blame. We conclude that `doing blaming' is attended to and managed locally by participants in conversation and this `doing' can be accomplished in a number of ways

Self-sufficient arguments in political rhetoric: constructing reconciliation and apologizing to the Stolen Generations

Copyright © 2002 SAGE PublicationsThis article focuses on the rhetorical and argumentative organization of a major political address by the Prime Minister of Australia on the topics of reconciliation and apologizing to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous peoples. The analysis documents the interpretative repertoires that were mobilized to argue around these sensitive, controversial issues in a public forum, in particular the deployment of discursive formulations of `togetherness', of `culture' and of `nation'. The analysis also demonstrates the ways in which a limited number of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments, identified in recent studies of the language of contemporary racism, was mobilized in this important public speech. We argue that the flexible use of such rhetorically self-sufficient arguments concerning practicality, equality, justice and progress worked to build up a particular version of reconciliation which functions to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia.Martha Augoustinos, Amanda Lecouteur, and John Soylan