Public Intimacy in Neighbour Relationships and Complaints

This paper examines neighbour relationships as an example of non-familial intimacy. It focuses on the way disputes between neighbours often hinge on notions of obtrusive public intimacy, in which the sights and sounds of normatively private domestic lives become sources of complaint. The analyses are based on approximately 150 hours of naturally-occurring interaction with neighbours including telephone calls to mediation centres, environmental health departments and anti-social behaviour units, neighbour mediation interviews, police-suspect interrogations in neighbour crime, and neighbour issues broadcast on television and radio. It was found that while the neighbours maintain good relations at the edges of private spaces, the physical arrangements of domestic properties, with their shared boundaries, means that personal information can be transmitted and observed as a routine matter of course. Disputes often have their basis in the illegitimate breach of boundaries, and in the unwanted and unavoidable receipt of the sights and sounds of other people\'s intimate lives.Neighbour Relationships, Intimacy, Complaints, Disputes, Ethnomethodology

Applying findings and creating impact from conversation-analytic studies of gender and communication

Studies of workplaces frequently focus on gender, investigating and challenging inequality. In that many studies start with ‘gender’ as a taken-for-granted category, measuring gender differences in organizational life, or interviewing participants to elicit accounts of their employment experiences, they exaggerate and even create stereotypical ‘common knowledge’ about gender. In contrast, this paper illustrates a conversation analytic approach which can show if, when, and how, gender becomes consequentially relevant within any given communicative encounter. Drawing on a large corpus of institutional interaction, the paper demonstrates two things: that (1) robust claims about the gendering of social life can be made once those claims are grounded in what people actually do; and (2) systematic patterns in people’s endogenous orientations to gender can be found in communication. Finally, the paper showcases a real-world application of conversation analytic work, demonstrating the impact and relevance of such research programmes for understanding everyday gendered social life

"Have you been married, or ...?": Eliciting and accounting for relationship histories in speed-dating interaction

Studies of personal relationships have often been conducted in the laboratory, on the self-report questionnaire, or in the interview. In contrast, this article studies relationships via a corpus of 30 British speed-dating encounters between 30–45-year-old heterosexual couples, in which talk about previous relationships was pervasively relevant. The analysis examines how talk about prior relationships, and current relationship status, was occasioned and accounted for. The first section shows that, in the overall structure of the date, talk about relationship histories was located after talk about other matters (e.g., occupation, place of residence). Second, relationship history questions contained design features for managing the delicacy of answering them (e.g., trail-off “or” turn endings), as well as paired categorial items (e.g., a question about children was answered in terms of one's marital status and vice versa). In the final section, the analysis shows that and how participants treat some relationship histories as more accountable than others (e.g., being never married). The analysis revealed a more general set of accountabilities: of being single, of being previously unsuccessful in relationships, of being unable to meet people in natural settings, and, therefore, for attending speed-dating events. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of examining the richly detailed brief encounters of social life, in order to better understand people's understandings of, troubles with, and goals for their personal relationships

'I'm not gonna hit a lady': conversation analysis, membership categorization and men's denials of violence towards women

This article examines the way male suspects deny accusations of assaulting women in interrogations by police officers. It draws on a large corpus of British police interrogation materials, and uses conversation analysis to shed light on the location and design of, and responses to, suspects’ ‘category-based denials’ that they are not ‘the kind of men who hit women’. Two sections of analysis identify how, first, such denials routinely follow police officers’ direct questions about violent behaviour, and, second, how they become embedded in extended narratives that are not directly describing violence. In contrast to other discourse-analytic studies of men’s accounts of violence towards women, the article unpacks the component features that comprise what others might label grossly as the ‘discourse of gendered violence’. Rather than see how such ‘discourses’ operate in interview contexts, it shows how suspects construct, in a high-stakes setting for a particular purpose, different categories of men, claiming membership in one (who do not hit women) by recruiting the notion of the other (who do). Thus, in addition to its contribution to the study of gender and violence, the article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization and conversation analysis, showcasing a type of systematic sequential analysis that can be done with membership categories

The conversational racetrack

The conversational racetrac

Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis

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 of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach

The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM): a method for training communication skills as an alternative to simulated role-play

The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM) is an approach to training, based on conversation analytic evidence about the problems and roadblocks that can occur in institutional interaction. Traditional training often relies on role-play, but that differs systematically from the actual events it is meant to mimic and prepare for. In contrast, CARM uses animated audio- and video-recordings of real-time, actual encounters. CARM provides a unique framework for discussing and evaluating, in slow motion, actual talk as people do their jobs. It also provides an evidence base for making decisions about effective practice and communication policy in organizations. This article describes CARM's distinctive practices and its impact on professional development across different organizations. Data are in British English

Producing and responding to –isms in interaction

We provide an introduction to some of the conceptual and methodological debates with respect to the focus of this special issue on -isms (a term used to refer to phenomena, e.g., racism, sexism, and heterosexism), focusing on the definition and identification of these phenomena. We offer an overview of the different approaches to research in this regard and conclude by summarizing the contributions to this special issue

Identifying and responding to possible ‘-isms’ in institutional encounters: alignment, impartiality and the implications for communication training

This paper examines sequences of interaction in which speakers utter a possible -ism; that is, something possibly racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced, in the course of making, warranting or defending against complaints. Recorded encounters between mediators and their (prospective) clients were analysed using conversation analysis. I show how participants orient to their own or recipients’ talk as possibly prejudiced, occasionally explicitly characterising that talk as racist (sexist, etc.). Mediators’ responses fell into one of two broad categories, either deleting (e.g., through reformulation) or challenging the -ism (e.g., through admonishment). Both involve misalignment or disaffiliation rather than the mediation-mandated impartial stance. Two upshots will be discussed. First, the fact that few instances of –isms are treated explicitly as such goes to the heart of debates in conversation analysis about warrants for particular kinds of observations, and the designed defeasibility of social action. Second, the paper discusses the way the data and analysis are used in communication training workshops with mediators, for whom such cases present challenges to their commitment to impartiality

The (in)authenticity of simulated talk: comparing role-played and actual interaction and the implications for communication training

How authentic is simulated, or role-played, interaction, of the kind produced in communication training contexts? The article addresses this question by comparing actual and role-played police investigative interviews. Both types of interviews were recorded by the police: real ones to fulfill British legal requirements and training ones to maximize the authenticity of the training experience. Interview openings were examined using conversation analysis. Officers must adhere to Police and Criminal Evidence Act (2008) guidelines, turning them into spoken actions. The analyses revealed that while, in gross terms, officers in real and simulated interviews opened interviews by formulating the same actions (e.g., identifying copresent parties), differences were observable in their design and organization. In simulations, actions were more elaborate or exaggerated; that is, they were made interactionally visible and “assessable.” Furthermore, some actions were only present in simulations. Implications for the efficacy of role-play methods for training and assessing communication are discussed