Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and uses (...) of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness. (shrink)

During the course of this article the themes of public accountability, government policy, and interaction in media settings are examined. In particular, we examine empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates, and configurations as a means of accomplishing policy debate in participatory frameworks such as radio phone-ins and the accountable frames of political interviews. This paper respecifies and explores the situated character of media settings as a means of documenting, describing, and (...) illustrating the interactional methods associated with policy debate, public participation/representation, and democracy-in-action. (shrink)

The article begins with a sketch of the relation of interaction to language and to culture, and of the students of interaction to the students of language and of culture. A 10-second segment of recorded interaction at a family dinner is then examined in a fashion meant to preserve the integrity1 of what is being done interactionally while incorporating attention to the deployment of various facets of the language that is used, and its relationship to simultaneously ongoing bodily doings. An (...) interactional practice – whining – from that episode is then juxtaposed with the same practice in several other segments of interaction in the interests of developing a more formal, transsituational account. The viability of research focused on phenomena in an analytically distinct domain of events while preserving the integrity of the occasions in which instances of the phenomenon occurred is then reviewed, using a case study of the conjoint use of phonetic analysis and conversation analysis. The article concludes with a reply to Levinson's article in this special issue of the journal, and uses the occasion to sketch the relationship between interaction and so-called ‘macro’ social and cultural formations such as kinship. (shrink)

Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have grown interested in the daily practices of scientists. Recent studies have drawn linkages between scientific innovations and more ordinary procedures, craft skills, and sources of sponsorship. These studies dispute the idea that science is the application of a unified method or the outgrowth of a progressive history of ideas. This book critically reviews arguments and empirical studies in two areas of sociology that have played a significant role in the 'sociological turn' in science (...) studies: ethnomethodology and the sociology of scientific knowledge. In both fields, efforts to study scientific practices have led to intractable difficulties and debates, due in part to scientistic and foundationalist commitments that remain entrenched with social-scientific research policies and descriptive language. The central purpose of this book is to explore the possibility of an empirical approach to the epistemic contents of science that avoids the pitfalls of scientism and foundationalism. (shrink)

Two uses of the modal verb would in police interrogation are examined. First, suspects use it to claim a disposition to act in ways inconsistent with whatever offence they are accused of. Second, police officers use it in challenging the suspect’s testimony, asking why a witness would lie. Both uses deploy a form of practical inferential reasoning from norms to facts, in the face of disputed testimony. The value of would is that its semantics provide for a sense of back-dated (...) predictability with regard to the actions in question. Further, although police officers provide minimal acknowledgement of suspects’ uses of the term, suspects tend to provide a response when police officers use it. This difference is explained by the different actions being done in each case - normative self assessments by suspects, and challenges by police officers - and their interactional and institutional relevance in and for police pursuit of factual testimony. (shrink)