The recurrent court-related mediation discourse studies have focused on mediation participants’ willingness. Drawing on a corpus of five situated recorded court-related civil mediation data in China, this article takes one of the frequently-used mediation resources ‘I don’t want X/y’ as a case study of formulating mediation ‘wants’. It is intended to explore mediation participants’ exploitation of the court-related mediation resources to express their mediation willingness/ intentions: how the mediator manipulates either side of the participants’ mediation discursive concepts; how the mediator (...) shift the trajectory of narrating the participants’ mediation dispute-facts to judging on the dispute-facts; and how the mediator deviates himself from the third-party neutral mediators’ mediating role. The value of analyzing this formulation ‘I don’t want X/y’ is to reveal the fact that such mediation practices in their recurrent environments might go against the court-related mediation principles such as being self-willingness, neutrality and uprightness. This article contributes to formulate mediation ‘wants’ strategically and promote the court-related mediation practices in the service of sequentially unfolding mediation interaction effectively. (shrink)

This article describes interactional features of an interrogation method that is used by law enforcement and private security companies in the US known as the ‘soft accusation’ method. We demonstrate how the method, in contrast to the more common ‘story solicitation’ method, makes use of a ‘telling about oneself ’ activity to actually suppress a subject’s talk by setting up and maintaining an exceptionally long turn by the interrogator. This turn not only constrains subjects’ speaking contributions to the issuing of (...) continuers and acknowledgments, and, as such, their opportunities to challenge or resist, but, based as it is on ‘telling about oneself ’, re-organizes the knowledge differential to one in which it is the interrogator rather than the subject who has primary epistemic rights of disclosure. We provide an overview of interactional problems associated with the story solicitation method and then consider how the soft accusation method is designed to counter them, particularly via practices of informing and describing that are associated with the activity of ‘telling about oneself ’. As we show, these practices make use of techniques of elaboration that provide a resource for turn expansion, as well as for seamless topical movement that works to positively align the subject to the interrogator’s talk and, thus, to smooth the interactional pathway to the subject’s admission of guilt. (shrink)

We examine the asking and answering of `silly questions' in British police interviews with suspects, the courses of action SQs initiate, and the institutional contingencies they are designed to manage. We show how SQs are asked at an important juncture toward the ends of interviews, following police officers' formulations of suspects' testimony. These formulations are confirmed or even collaboratively produced by suspects. We then examine the design of SQs and show how they play a central role in the articulation of (...) suspects' reported `state of mind', and particularly attributing to them criminal intentions constitutive of the offence with which they may be charged. In cases where SQs do not produce unambiguous answers about `state of mind' or intentionality, police officers move toward direct questioning about suspects' intent, thus making explicit the project of SQs in such interviews. Following SQ—Answer sequences, police officers reformulate suspects' testimony, with subtle but crucial differences with regard to suspects' knowledge state and criminal intent. Suspects overwhelmingly align with police officers' formulations of their testimony, and such agreements have the interactional shape of affiliation. Yet SQs may work in ways that are institutionally adversarial with regard to criminal charges, relevant evidence and self-incriminating testimony. (shrink)

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a two-part structure, ‘I don’t want X, I want/just want Y’. Drawing on a corpus of recordings of family mealtimes and television documentary data, I show how speakers use the structure in two recurrent environments. First, speakers may use the structure to reject a proposal regarding their actions made by an interlocutor. Second, speakers may deliver the structure following a co-interactant’s formulation of their actions or motivations. Both uses decrease the likelihood of (...) challenge in third-turn position. When responding to multi-unit turns speakers routinely deal with the last item first. The value of ‘I want Y’ is to formulate an alternative sense of agency which undermines the preceding turn and shifts the trajectory of the ongoing sequence. The article contributes to work in discursive psychology as I show how speakers may formulate their ‘wants’ in the service of sequentially unfolding social interaction. (shrink)

This article considers the advice found on six internet sites written for people who are considering coming out. The article uses Edwards’ script formulation theory to examine how the grammatical choices by the writers formulate the dispositions of the main actors in the texts: the advice seeker, LGB individuals, and the people to whom they come out. The writers’ formulations are shaped by a view of coming out as the act of a reasonable, emotionally healthy, moral and loving lesbian, gay (...) or bisexual individual. It is argued that one of the purposes of these texts is to normalize coming out as a routine event and as a rational course of action for an LGB individual. Furthermore, the use of script formulation is seen to be characteristic of written texts and a strategy by which advice writers can legitimize themselves as qualified to give advice. (shrink)

This paper examines public meetings in the Netherlands where experts and officials interact with local residents on the human health effects of livestock farming. Using Conversation Analysis, we reveal a ‘weapon of the weak’: a practice by which the residents resist experts’ head start in information meetings. It is shown how residents draw on the given question-answer format to challenge experts and pursue an admission of, for example, methodological shortcomings. We show how the residents’ first question functions as a ‘foot-in-the-door’, (...) providing them with a strong basis for skepticism. By systematically challenging the expert responses, the residents exploit the interaction’s sequential organization, with the effect that the goal becomes them being convinced rather than being informed. Consequently, the withholding of consent becomes the residents’ ‘weapon’. Finally, we argue that in an age where expertise is increasingly contested, it is crucial to understand how, and to what end, this contestation may occur. (shrink)

Using a discursive and ethnomethodological analytic framework, this article explores the social construction of moral transgression and moral meanings in the context of coming to terms with the recent communist past in Eastern Europe. This article illustrates some significant aspects of everyday uses of morality and the socio-communicative organization of public judgements on moral transgression. The article considers the range of public reactions and commentaries to a public confession of having been an informer for the former Romanian secret police. Moral (...) reasoning around transgression takes several forms: a) invoking everyday psychological categories and morally implicative descriptions associated with identities of persons and actions; b) drawing upon culturally available metaphors and images with roots in Judaeo-Christian ethics and morality; c) using the wider political context of coming to terms with the past as foundation and criterion for moral judgement. This article argues that rather than attempting to analyse moral judgement in abstract, one must focus on the everyday constructions and uses of morality found in social interaction and social responses to moral transgression. (shrink)

This article draws upon discursive psychology to explore the organization of public accountability in accounting for an alleged conflict of interest in journalism. The analysis focuses on the published record of an interview given by the editorial director of one of the major Romanian daily newspapers on the issue of an assumed conflict of interest involving a senior editor of the same newspaper. The analysis shows how a moral order is constituted by the use of various discursive resources: role and (...) professional incumbency discourse, disposition avowals and doing being fair/ democratic. This is a moral order where adherence to personal ethical principles, professional incumbencies and responsibilities are practically managed in dialogue and publicly displayed. Acting in-role, reporting a general disposition to engage in moral courses of action and making reference to the values of citizenship and democracy are all publicly available discursive resources used in this context to express a cautious moral judgement bounded and constrained by both personal and professional accountability perspectives. (shrink)

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. 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. (shrink)