Personal identity requires agentic mediation of overlapping social structures and categories; and further the maintenance of a coherent self across different life contexts. A central means of achieving/maintaining identity is through self-narratives and modes of discursive positioning. In this article, we examine the intersection of two key identity categories, gender and nationality, in the biographical accounts of two female friends. Both categories can be seen to structure the speakers’ identities as particular types of people, and to interact in mutually defining (...) ways. However, the speakers actively negotiate these structures and constraints to produce specific versions of themselves. While, on occasion, they invoke national stereotypes in constructing their identities, they both counter-position themselves in relation to gendered expectations within their respective national contexts. Drawing on selected extracts, we examine the discursive strategies through which they construct and maintain such identities across different biographical contexts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of the testimony of the leaders of British banks during a UK public inquiry into the financial crisis. We examine the discursive devices that were used to handle the accountability of banking leaders, particularly their role in the events leading up to the collapse and subsequent state bail-out of the banks. Our analysis identifies two competing interpretative repertoires: an agentic repertoire and a structural repertoire. These repertoires are significant, we suggest, because they (...) inform understanding of what went wrong with the banking system and what should be done to reform and regulate the sector. We conclude by calling for the notions of agency and structure to be treated as an object of study within discourse analysis rather than a form of social scientific explanation. (shrink)

This study is the first to address the ways in which male perpetrators of intimate partner violence talk about memory in their reports of their IPV and how these are used to manage their accountability for the violence. Drawing on and developing the discursive psychological literature on talk about memory, which highlights how such talk is used to perform practical actions within interactions, a discourse analysis is conducted on interviews with six male perpetrators of recent, multiple incidents of IPV who (...) were undergoing treatment. The analysis identified the varying ways in which memory was used: first, claims of forgetting were used to avoid answering difficult and potentially incriminating questions; second, claims of clear memories were used to position partners as problematic and responsible for violence; and third, claims about simultaneously remembering and forgetting were found. The implications of these strategies for managing identity and accountability are discussed. (shrink)

How did UK political elites publicly represent the economy after the Financial Crash? In his budget speeches, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, talked about finance and mortgages much more, and taxation much less, than one would expect by comparing him to other chancellors. With his rhetoric he constructed a vigorous defence of the financial sector and mortgage market, and described limited technical reforms comfortably. But as well as avoiding taxation as a topic, he appeared less comfortable and more inconsistent (...) defending his taxation policies. Refusing to increase corporate or capital-gains taxes, he argued instead that top-percentile earners, banks, and tax evaders should pay more tax. Coming many months before Occupy would encamp at St. Paul’s, these are surprising characterizations of top-earner and financial taxation from an elite orator. I argue that Darling understood the power of anti-elite critique, and so was willing to criticize some limited and select elements of financial activity and taxation in order to protect more fundamental aspects of the financial system, particularly the capital upon which it depends. Via an appropriation of critical language about finance and the Crash, his elite rhetoric defensively protected owned-capital and corporate profit from other claims. (shrink)

Educational assessment and marking, in particular, give teachers considerable power over students and their future possibilities. Analysing a teachers' meeting discussing school reports in a secondary school showed that marking involves teachers' accountability to colleagues. An examination of the situated interpretations and explanations of unsatisfactory school marks also showed how various discursive devices were used for building a factual account. Confirmed expectations, extreme case formulations, introducing corroborating witnesses, the deployment of cited others, defining exceptional cases, detailed descriptions and narratives, and (...) the use of different accounts all served to emphasize the role of the students and hide the teachers from view. In addition, teachers' joint constructions had practical consequences for remedial interventions. Decisions for intervention were dependent on the accounts given. (shrink)

This paper attempts to uncover the interpretive models underlying the construction of social representations about the identity of young people associated with crime by El Salvador's written press. To achieve this goal, I explore the ways in which these young people are categorized and characterized and the metaphors used to represent them and their actions as well as the consequences of the latter. My research has been carried out from the interdisciplinary perspective I call ‘sociological and linguistic discourse analysis’. This (...) examines the resources and strategies used in oral and written texts to impose, maintain, justify, or propose certain interpretive models seeking to make sense of social reality. (shrink)

The paper discusses the early findings of ongoing research on the representation of labour, workers, industrial relations and their context in Argentine political discourse. Argentine Presidents' first addresses to Congress from 1983 to 2010 are examined from the standpoint of Sociological and Linguistic Discourse Analysis. The linguistic resources used by the speakers are explored, as well as their relation to the argumentative strategies through which proposals are justified.

We study the life story of a former SS Leibstandarte soldier and we focus on the way the narrator deals with face threats by negotiating his identity constructions. The interviewee positions himself as a sportsman and an ignorant soldier, thus constructing denial of knowledge of and agreement with Hitler's ideology. These identities can be considered to be complementary, but they are built in quite different ways: the narrator explicitly presents himself as a sportsman, but mitigates his implicit construction of ignorance. (...) Given the social and historical context, this contrast in degree of explicitness is expected since the ignorance claim has been the subject of many previous discourses and debates of this subject. (shrink)

In this article I develop tools for analyzing the identities that emerge in qualitative material. I approach identities as historically, socially and culturally produced subject positions, as processes that are in a constant state of becoming and that receive their temporary stability and meaning in concrete contexts and circumstances. I suggest that the identities and subject positions that materialize in qualitative material can be analyzed from four different perspectives. They can be approached by focusing on (1) classifications that define the (...) boundary lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as (2) participant roles that refer to the temporal aspect of subject positions and outline their meaning for action, as (3) structures of viewpoint and focalization that frame meaning and order to opinions and experiences of the world, and as (4) interactive positions that articulate the roles and identities taken by the participants of communication. (shrink)

Outside Waco, Texas, on 19 April 1993, a 51-day standoff between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and David Koresh and the Branch Davidians concluded with a devastating fire. Despite the fact that FBI negotiators talked on the telephone with Koresh or his main spokesman almost every day, the negotiators were unable to bring the standoff to a peaceful end. A frustrating yet persistent aspect for the FBI negotiators was the Davidians' talk about the Bible and their religious beliefs, what agents (...) dismissively described as `Bible babble'. In this study, we analyze several exchanges between Koresh and one of the FBI agents. The analysis shows how the FBI's identifying their problem as `Bible babble' contributed to the negotiation failure. Through their talk, Koresh was positioned as a biblical expert and the FBI agent as a novice. The FBI's talk also supported Koresh's face. These two conversational patterns, we argue, legitimated God as a key party and Koresh as the person who could best speak for him. In the conclusion, we suggest how a renaming of the problem might have reshaped the FBI's moves. (shrink)

This article focuses on sequences of classroom talk, in which Swedish junior high-school pupils engage in reproaches of absent parties or, to use an established gloss, `gossiping'. This kind of talk makes up a significant part of the off-task talk that pupils engage in when working in small groups. In order to initiate and participate in gossip interaction, pupils need to master sophisticated social competencies. The study focuses on these competencies and on one major function that gossip can be seen (...) to perform for the primary gossiper: gossip as remedial action. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive uses of a self-quotation in adolescent talk. The self-quotation uses the quotative marker be + like to convey or project bold statements as part of a larger narrative. We will demonstrate how the preface leading up to the self-quotation is designed as hard to counter, and instructs the hearer how to understand what comes next. The self-quotation, on the other hand, constitutes the assessment as a `mere characterization' that provides the speaker with a number of (...) opportunities for testing the proposed view. Speakers are thus able to bolster potentially controversial views against refutation while also giving them a preliminary status. These features make for an interesting conversational resource that enables speakers and recipients to engage in a collaborative process of putting potentially bold statements to the test. (shrink)

Constructivism has been a key referent for research into the learning of science for several decades. There is little doubt that the research into learners’ ideas in science stimulated by the constructivist movement has been voluminous, and a great deal is now known about the way various science topics may commonly be understood by learners of various ages. Despite this significant research effort, there have been serious criticisms of this area of work: in terms of its philosophical underpinning, the validity (...) of its most popular constructs, the limited scope of its focus, and its practical value to science teaching. This paper frames this area of work as a Lakatosian Research Programme (RP), and explores the major criticisms of constructivism from that perspective. It is argued that much of the criticism may be considered as part of the legitimate academic debate expected within any active RP, i.e. arguments about the auxiliary theory making up the ‘protective belt’ of the programme. It is suggested that a shifting focus from constructivism to ‘contingency in learning’ will allow the RP to draw upon a more diverse range of perspectives, each consistent with the existing hard core of the programme, which will provide potentially fruitful directions for future work and ensure the continuity of a progressive RP into learning science. (shrink)

This article examines task-setting sequences in university tutorial sessions. Classes from three higher education institutions were audio- and video-recorded. The resulting data, which included both tutor-led and peer group discussions, were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. A number of themes emerged from our analysis. First, we found that the tutor's opening turns routinely followed a three-part sequence, the interpersonal and metadiscursive functions of which, we argue, are crucial components in the educative process. Second, we found that students displayed discursively (...) their reluctance to engage in discussion activities and a resistance towards academic or intellectual identities. In contrast to findings from previous studies of tutor—student interaction, we found that interactional power was negotiated in complex and contradictory ways. This, in turn, may embody a range of complex social functions including attention to the `face' concerns of the group, category membership and orientation to broader cultural trends. (shrink)

This paper describes how language contributes to the oppression and exploitation of animals by animal product industries. Critical Discourse Analysis, a framework usually applied in countering racism and sexism, is applied to a corpus of texts taken from animal industry sources. The mass confinement and slaughter of animals in intensive farms depend on the implicit consent of the population, signaled by its willingness to buy animal products produced in this way. Ideological assumptions embedded in everyday discourse and that of the (...) animal industries manufacture and maintain this consent. Through analysis of texts, this paper attempts to expose these assumptions and discusses implications for countering the domination and exploitation of animals. (shrink)

The emergence of new technologies regularly involves comparisons with previous innovations. For instance, analogies with asbestos and genetically modified organisms have played a crucial role in the early societal debate about nanotechnology. This article explores the power of analogies in such debates and how they could be effectively and responsibly employed for imagining and governing emerging technologies in general and nanotechnology in particular. First, the concept of analogical imagination is developed to capture the explorative and anticipatory potential of analogies. Yet (...) analogies do not simply stimulate imagination, they also restrict it by framing emerging technologies in specific ways. Thus, second, the article argues that tracing the rhetorical and persuasive power of analogical arguments is essential for understanding how analogies are constructed to legitimise assessments, funding policies, and governance approaches. Third, the article addresses factors that account for the persuasiveness of analogies in debates about emerging technologies. The article concludes with reflections on how analogical imagination and an enhanced analogical sensibility for framing and persuasive effects can foster responsible research and innovation. (shrink)

This article suggests a discourse analysis suitable for multi-dimensional processes. The exemplar in focus is a single narrative that travelled a long way through an English criminal pre-trial to the finalising Crown Court-hearing. The following case study asks how this story was mobilised by the defence to challenge the prosecution's case. The resulting sequential analysis of the story's career profits a good deal from Laboratory Studies. Like ethnographies in Science and Technology Studies, the analysis involves an extended production process—and the (...) productivities of the artefacts produced. It shows, furthermore, how the mobilisation of the alibi is at some points threatened by emerging potentialities to undermine it. All in all, the resulting micro-history on the story's career hinges on as well as exceeds common preferences in social constructivism: for collaborative and local accomplishments, for structural and antagonistic oppositions, and for success stories. (shrink)

SARGENT A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 134–143 [Epub ahead of print]Reframing caring as discursive practice: a critical review of conceptual analyses of caring in nursingThis study critically examines the way in which the concept of caring is presented in the nursing literature through conceptual analytic approaches. A critical reflection on the potential consequences of representing a concept of caring as vague and ambiguous, yet central to ontology and epistemology in professional nursing is presented drawing on comparisons between the conceptual analyses (...) of caring, and of structuralist perspectives of language, and how this potentially limits scholarship in this area. A search of the literature revealed nine conceptual papers. These papers highlight the self‐referential characteristics of the concept of caring, and of analytical methods in general. It is proposed that this is the result of a systematic adherence to a rigid, structuralist view of language, whereby stable relationships between words and their meanings are assumed. An alternative perspective is offered by viewing caring as a discursive practice rather than a fixed conceptual entity, calling into question the role that the concept plays in nursing practice. A poststructuralist perspective requires caring to be perceived as a discourse of nursing that is fluid and contingent, rather than a central and guiding concept, opening up a new orientation for nursing scholarship in caring research. (shrink)

This article presents a follow-up examination of 10 iterations of a blended course on educational psychology and e-learning carried out at the University of Bari. All iterations of the course considered in this study were designed using the Constructive and Collaborative Participation (CCP) model. Our main research questions are: What are the students’ long lasting memories of this course? How do the students use the skills and the competences acquired through the course across an extended period of time? In line (...) with these research questions, the aims of this investigation can be summarized as follows: i) to understand the students’ perceptions and long lasting memories of the course and (ii) to investigate the transfer of skills and knowledge across an extended period of time, based on a self-reported survey. The analysis was carried out by administering the survey to all 196 students who took part in the course in the 2005-2015 decade. 96 participants responded to the survey. The survey is designed to collect data in two areas. First, the memories related to the course and second, the way skills and content knowledge acquired during the course have been transferred to and used in other contexts after the course ended. The data were analyzed using a mixed methods approach, which revealed trends in the responses across the decade. In general, participants remembered the teaching methodology and often recalled specific activities such as Role Taking and the creation of products through group-work. These activities and approaches seemed to provide significant learning opportunities for the students. Several students also recalled key concepts and content knowledge acquired during the course. In relation to transfer of skills, participants tended to reuse mostly transversal skills, such as communicative and organizational skills, especially in work contexts. Further, about half of the respondents reused the content knowledge of the course. This analysis is valuable because it allows us to understand the aspects of the model that are significant for the students in the long term, and to discover and interrogate the acquisition and transfer of skills useful for the students’ personal and professional lives beyond the academy. (shrink)

This paper reports on a rhetorical analysis of interviews with fifteen white Australian citizens who had undertaken offshore commercial surrogacy in India. Extending previous research, the findings suggest that genetic relatedness was valorized, and surrogacy constructed as a less tenuous route to family formation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for further research on 1) how the contentious nature of offshore commercial surrogacy may prevent full consideration of its ethical implications, 2) the differing belief systems between India (...) and Australia in terms of children as alienable objects, and 3) ongoing consideration of how and when genetic-relatedness is made to matter. (shrink)

Journalists are frequently used as a source of information for those studying news production and practice and as a means of describing the ‘real’ world of news. However, these conversations between researcher and journalist have often largely been treated as a transfer of neutral, transparent information about news practice rather than a discursive practice in itself. Discourse analysis has been extensively applied to the output of news, yet is underdeveloped in the area of production studies. This article argues that a (...) more discursive approach to news production studies yields a more nuanced understanding of journalistic culture and practice. This is illustrated by using the tools of discursive social psychology to analyse interviews with 23 broadcast journalists about the nature of news. The analysis helps with the identification of the use of empiricist discourse to construct a ‘natural’ journalism and to justify certain constructions of journalistic practice. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to elaborate on the scholarly debate on affect. We consider the site of affect to be the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: “Affective activity is a form of social practice” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as a social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. Moreover, we suggest that to consider affect (...) a social ontology connects affect to agency. We regard affect as a participants’ phenomenon where emotions and knowledge are not separated, i.e. as a social epistemology. To capture the complexity of affective activity, the study of situated participation requires video data. We collected data at a centre for persons with acquired brain injury (ABI), which highlights research ethics. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society. We turn ICF’s abstract societal perspective on participation to meaningful local accomplishments in lived social practices. Our focus is, in line with a critical social ontology in disability studies, on how-ability, the communicative abilities of the residents (Hughes, 2007). To get closer to life situations as they unfold, we analyse participation in its details as embodied actions during activities in the material environment of the centre. To conclude, we demonstrate a resident’s competent participation in an occupational therapy session through a fine-grained analysis of affective activity. Interaction, practices and phenomena are complex theoretical and practical issues. In the analysis of the encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations, we use an extended version of Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) that incorporates the body and material environment with the interconnectedness of interactional episodes. To do this, we enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. In the indicated work we draw on theoretical (lamination) and methodological (nexus analysis) suggestions in order to best pursue the sociocultural nature of situated interactions. (shrink)

The article investigates the rhetorical means of mediating affective experience in occasioned storytelling. The completion of this article has been supported by The Emil Aaltonen Foundation and The Academy of Finland project (285144) The Literary in Life and The Academy of Finland project (326645) European Solidarities in Turmoil. We are interested in the forms and aspects of bodily action in signifying and communicating a “para-factual experience” that was triggered by a real-life incident, but in fact only took place in a (...) person’s imagination. We explore the case of a TV interview in which an American living in Finland narrates a personal, disturbing experience related to the news about 9/11. The story presents a visual scenario of the teller’s affective reaction towards two Muslim women in a grocery store. What is interesting in the story are its involuntary dimensions: the scenario portrays a picture of the teller that he finds unrecognizable and detached from his sense of self as a person. Even if the act was never actually realized, to the teller it felt real and compelling, as is manifest in the way he translates the scenario into a bodily performance. The teller not only uses his body to tell the story but momentarily turns the surrounding setting into a scene in the storyworld in which he plays the unidentified me. We call this physical performance of the imagined scene the embodied ekphrasis of experience. In Semiotica, the rhetorical device of ekphrasis has appeared before (see Frosh 2003; Hopkins 2015; Nesselroth 2016; Sarapik 2009) from such literary and linguistic perspectives, as well as through the lens of media research and cultural studies, to which our application will add from the viewpoint of ethnomethodology and the social sciences. Deploying research on multimodal interaction and intermediality, our empirical analysis explicates how the teller’s body, and not just words, build action, convey affective meaning, and resemiotize and mobilize a physical enactment of the past hypothetical scene. (shrink)

This article analyses occupational health and safety discourse, bringing special attention to dilemmas that emerge as employees name and negotiate particular risks and safety measures. The study is based on 46 interviews conducted with employees in three chemical factories, and combines Michel Foucault’s conception of governmentality with a discursive psychology approach. The study demonstrates how dilemmas emerge when 1) respondents make others responsible for health and safety risks; 2) they personally assume responsibility as ‘risky’ workers; and 3) different rationalities – (...) such as environmental and behavioural or hierarchical – appear in the same set of statements. Overall, occupational health and safety management tends to exclude egalitarian beliefs, which creates dilemmas that become visible as speakers find themselves compelled to excuse, ironize or systematically downplay discursive moves that may diminish or exclude themselves or others. Given that previous research suggests that behavioural approaches to health become increasingly widespread in working life, this article contributes by highlighting the presence of dilemmas that implies some flux and openness to change. (shrink)

We focus on assessments in conversation, paying particular attention to a distinction between object-side and subject-side assessments. O-side assessments are predicated of an object, whereas S-side assessments formulate a disposition of the speaker toward that object. Despite looking somewhat interchangeable, logically, these different ways of making assessments serve different interactional functions. In particular, S-side assessments allow for contrasting assessments of the same object by different persons. They are therefore useful in the management and avoidance of conflict and misalignment in the (...) performance of actions such as compliment receipts, avoiding giving offense and disagreeing. We link the analysis to conversation analytic work on assessments and to discursive psychology’s focus on the everyday management of relations between mental states and an external world. (shrink)

This paper responds to, and comments on, Coulter''s (1999) critique of discursive psychology with particular reference to how cognition is conceptualised theoretically and analytically. It first identifies a number of basic misreadings of discursive psychological writings, which distort and, at times, reverse its position on the status of cognition. Second, it reviews the main ways in which cognition, mental states, and thoughts have been analytically conceptualised in discursive psychology (respecification of topics from mainstream psychology, studies of the psychological thesaurus in (...) action, and studies of the way psychological issues are managed). Third, it considers two of Coulter''s substantive issues: the role of correct usage and the role of conceptual vs. empirical analysis. A series of problems are identified with Coulter''s development of both of these issues. (shrink)

This commentary identifies a range of flaws and contradictions in Parker’s critical realist position and his critique of relativism. In particular we highlight: (1) a range of basic errors in formulating the nature of relativism; (2) contradictions in the understanding and use of rhetoric; (3) problematic recruitment of the oppressed to support his argument; (4) tensions arising from the distinction between working in and against psychology. We conclude that critical realism is used to avoid doing empirical work, on the one (...) hand, and to avoid scholarly interdisciplinary engagement, on the other. (shrink)

This article considers the different approaches to cognition in conversation analysis and discursive psychology. Its points are illustrated through a critical but appreciative consideration of an article by Drew in which he uses conversation analysis to identify ‘cognitive moments’ in interaction. Problems are identified with Drew’s analysis and the conclusions he draws. In particular, he a) presupposes a dualistic division between depth and surface; b) makes circular inferences from conventional conversational patterns to underlying cognitive entities; c) presupposes that the underlying (...) cognitive entities influence conduct. It is argued that none of these things is required by conversation analysis; rather Drew is imposing cognitivist assumptions on conversational materials. Discursive psychology’s approach focuses on cognitive issues in terms of how they are constructed and oriented to in interaction; its virtues are pressed. (shrink)

In this discourse analysis of how memory acquires and is acquired in interview exchanges, we investigate remembering as a category-bound activity, both a tensional and collaborative process of moral ratification of `survivor' as membership category. We propose the term re-membering to mean piecing together possible versions of survivor experiences in talk; these versions, offered by respondents and elicited by interviewers through questioning strategies, are epistemic claims to acquire the Holocaust as memory, or institutional History. We explore the accounting dynamic of (...) interviewer and respondent, the relationship of ownership between survivors and memory, and the duties and moral obligations of the category `Holocaust survivor' that can be shown through the interviews of survivors and their adult daughters. (shrink)

This article explores some of the most significant questions in feminist epistemology: how do academics demarcate what constitutes ‘proper’ academic knowledge? And to what extent is feminist theory and research recognised as such? I draw on material from an ethnographic study of academia in Portugal to examine the claims that non-feminist scholars make in classrooms and conferences about the epistemic status of feminist scholarship. I observed that feminist work was very commonly described as capable of generating credible and valuable knowledge, (...) but only in some instances and in limited ways. I present examples of these adversative claims (i.e. propositions that express opposition or discrepancy through a ‘but’ or equivalent adversative conjunction) and analyse their structure, content and uses of caricature and humour, showing how epistemic boundaries are drawn in them and how feminist scholarship is positioned in relation to those boundaries. I argue that this boundary-work produces a representation of feminist scholarship as being located partly within, and partly outside, the realm of proper knowledge, a move which I designate as an epistemic splitting of that scholarship. I suggest that this splitting enables and legitimates a selective engagement with feminist work, because it provides non-feminist scholars with a recognised epistemological rationale for taking into account the feminist insights which broadly fit mainstream frameworks, while simultaneously rejecting as epistemologically unsound the feminist critiques of those frameworks. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and social psychology, this article describes some interactional features of two celebrity TV confessionals and the resources used by the TV interviewers and celebrity guests to attribute, accept or deny responsibility for their transgressions. The analytic interest lies in how confessions are locally and interactionally managed, that is, how ‘doing confessing’ is achieved in the television interview context. We show how the host’s opening turn constrains the celebrity guest’s contribution and secures overt (...) admission of guilt, while simultaneously inviting the celebrity guest to tell their side of the story. We also show how celebrity guests produce descriptions which minimize the extent and severity of their transgressions, reduce agency and transform the character of their transgression. In doing so, we argue that celebrity interviewees can convey mitigations and extenuations which diminish the extent of their responsibility – calling into question the very nature of their confession. We propose that our findings demonstrate the hybrid nature of interviewing in the celebrity TV confessional and contribute to our understanding of how ‘doing confessing’ in the public eye is discursively and interactionally negotiated. (shrink)

Relativism in psychology unravels the truth-claims and oppressive\npractices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge\nhas not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline\nas part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution\nand problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so\nthis article reviews four problematic rhetorical balancing strategies in\nrelativism before turning to the contribution of critical realism. Critical\nrealism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself\non what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds (...) discursive\naccounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those\nsympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’\nto warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research that situates\npsychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an\naccount of how psychological facts are socially constructed within\npresent social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical\nconditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’. Only by understanding\nhow the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of\nindividuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be\npossible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different. (shrink)

Family therapists face a number of challenges in their work. When children are present in family therapy they can and do make fleeting contributions. We draw upon naturally occurring family therapy sessions to explore the ‘pseudo-presence’ and ‘pseudo-absence’ of children and the institutional ‘gossiping’ quality these interactions have. Our findings illustrate that a core characteristic of gossiping is its functional role in building alignments’ which in this institutional context is utilized as a way of managing accountability. Our findings have a (...) number of implications for clinical professionals and highlight the value of discourse and conversation analysis techniques for exploring therapeutic interactions. (shrink)

This article studies argumentation for acceptability of corporate environmental actions in corporate environmental statements, with emphasis on stakeholder relations and environmental values. Stakeholder theory is commonly taken as the basis for corporate environmental management, and rhetoric typical of the stakeholder approach dominates the field. Although environmental issues are strongly charged with values, the dominant stakeholder approach does not stress the value dimension. The data of the study consists of environmental statements by Finnish forerunning business corporations in the forefront of corporate (...) environmental responsibility. The results of the study indicate that the statements argue for the acceptability of corporate environmental actions through three power-related rhetorical forms that are competing ways to produce acceptability in the data: dominance, subordination and equality, and joint action. Each rhetorical form describes a power-based relationship between stakeholders and the corporation and leans on a specific value type producing legitimacy for that rhetoric form. (shrink)

Organizations are altering their office settings to non-territorial workspaces, where employees do not have assigned desks but are supposed to choose freely where they sit. In this context, the metaphor of the nomad appears to be an understandable way to position the employees of organizations within non-territorial workspaces. Drawing on the empirical data of a study of organizational change in a Nordic media company, this study applied the discursive resources from the field of institutional interaction in the analysis. This article (...) presents how the participants employed the same metaphor of the nomad as a rhetorical strategy to support and resist change, and suggests that the use of a particular discourse does not necessarily contribute to the desired outcomes. Furthermore, the study shows how constructing senses of legitimacy involves the use of the same metaphor to construct arguments and counter-arguments toward the change. (shrink)

Organisational planning processes often materialise as a series of meetings, where the future of the organisation is jointly discussed and negotiated as a part of local decision-making sequences. Using conversation and discourse analytical approaches, this article investigates how proposals concerning the future can also be resisted by employing a specific device, a conditional construction. The data for the study originate from a city organisation, whose customer services are being developed. The results show how the conditional constructions work in two interrelated (...) ways. First, by introducing a problematic hypothetical situation, they outline the undesirable consequences of the proposed idea in real work life. Second, by highlighting the experience of the customer, they present the organisation as benefitting from the potential rejection of the idea. The article discusses the implications of the results for the study of proposal and decision-making sequences in longitudinal, multisemiotic discursive processes. (shrink)

In everyday conversations, people put forward versions of events and provide supporting evidence to build a credible case. In environments where there are potentially competing versions, case-building may take a more systematic format. Specifically, we conducted a rhetorical analysis to consider how in child mental health settings, families work to present a credible ‘doctorable’ reason for attendance. Data consisted of video-recordings of 28 families undergoing mental health assessments. Our findings point to eight rhetorical devices utilised in this environment to build (...) a case. The devices functioned rhetorically to add credibility and authenticate the case being built, which was relevant as the only resource available to families claiming the presence of a mental health difficulty in the child was their spoken words. In other words, the ‘problem’ was something constructed through talk and therefore the kinds of resources used were seminal in decision-making. (shrink)

Responding to serious environmental problems, requires urgent and fundamental shifts in our day-to-day lifestyles. This paper employs a qualitative, cross-cultural approach to explore people’s subjective self-reflections on their experiences of pro-environmental behavioral spillover in three countries; Brazil, China, and Denmark. Behavioral spillover is an appealing yet elusive phenomenon, but offers a potential way of encouraging wider, voluntary lifestyle shifts beyond the scope of single behavior change interventions. Behavioral spillover theory proposes that engaging in one pro-environmental action can catalyze the performance (...) of others. To date, evidence for the phenomenon has been mixed, and the causal processes governing relationships between behaviors appear complex, inconsistent and only partly understood. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by investigating accounts of behavioral spillover in three diverse cultural settings using qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that while around half of participants overall who were questioned recalled spillover effects, the other half had not consciously experienced spillover. There were few significant differences across cultures, though some forms of spillover effects were reported more in some cultures than others. More environmentally-engaged participants across all three countries were significantly more likely to experience spillover than those who were less engaged. Accounts of within-domain spillovers were most commonly reported, mainly comprising waste, resource conservation and consumption-related actions. Accounts of between-domain spillover were very rare. Recollection of contextual and interpersonal spillover effects also emerged from the interviews. Our findings suggest that more conscious behavioral spillover pathways may be limited to those with pre-existing environmental values. Behavioral spillover may comprise multiple pathways incorporating conscious and unconscious processes. We conclude that targeting behavioral catalysts that generate more socially diffuse spillover effects could offer more potential than conventional spillover involving a single individual. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

We examine how displays of not remembering are used as an interactional resource in couples therapy. Our study contributes to the understanding of the social epistemology of memory; that is, how displays of not remembering relate to issues of knowledge and how they are assessed and understood with respect to the local interactional projects made relevant in therapy. From our analysis of transcribed audio- and video-taped couples therapy sessions, we found that clients’ displays of not remembering opened up a range (...) of practical epistemic and rhetorical issues: 1) it enabled the creation of new ‘participation frameworks’ in which the client’s spouse could display first-hand knowledge; 2) it made relevant issues of accountability and blame for not having remembered important relationship events; 3) it indexed an avoidance or resistance of conforming to the therapeutic agenda; and 4) it deflected against the interpretation that one may have a certain interest in not remembering. (shrink)

This paper considers the ways in which Wittgenstein’s (1958) later philosophy and his ideas on language games, as well as Sacks’ (1992) work on conversational turns, has been applied in relation to the notion of context in language use discourse studies, and in particular discursive psychology. In terms of the application of Wittgenstein, I argue that it is not simply the case that he is referring to different language games as different interactional contexts, but rather that he is making a (...) much more complex point concerning language use by competent users within a given game. In the case of Sacks, I argue that turns within conversation cannot be simply read of as evidence of a particular (inter-)action on the analyst’s part but rather must be considered in terms of how interlocutors render to one another the intelligibility of “what is going on” within the ordering of turns. (shrink)

This article analyses the dynamics of the use of institutional categories in institutional encounters. The focus is on documenting how categories are invoked to index what is relevant to situated knowing in interactional sequences where there is a need to bridge the gap between action and expectation. This general problem has been studied in the context of interactions between job applicants and vocational guidance officers in a public employment agency. Institutional categories are inference-rich, and they work as flexible tools that (...) allow participants to recontextualize and negotiate the issues at stake. In this sense, categories serve as constitutive tools that can be crafted to fit into a broad range of circumstances. However, in order to produce a relevant account, participants’ ways of reasoning need to fit into the institutionally specific traditions of argumentation and the practical outcomes which need to be produced. In this sense, the focus on accounting practices is illuminating when attempting to understand the situated knowing that maintains institutional practices. (shrink)

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this article, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider (...) the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating. (shrink)

That the issue of racism is a pressing social concern which requires serious and detailed attention is, for ethnomethodology, not a first principle from which its own inquiry is launched but rather a matter to be considered in light of how mundane actors (both professional and lay) treat that very topic. This paper explores how the assumption of an ontological distinction between social structure and individual agency is integral to the intelligibility of racism as formulated in scholarly accounts. In particular, (...) I explore how recent scholarly treatments of racism pose as problematic the diverse formulations of racial identity assembled through the deployment of various measures, and then seek to adjudicate upon the resulting inconsistency with an analytic heuristic that assumes an underlying or foundational source for the various expressions it seeks to resolve. Further, I explore examples of analytic work that makes use of first-person accounts of racially significant episodes and experiences as a means to document the formulation of the events and actions those accounts describe in terms that warrant a reading informed by the assumption of the structure-agency distinction. I relate the corroborative work that takes place in the research relationships between students and teachers with ethnomethodology’s own project to explore how the efficaciousness of analytic readings of racism entail the pervasive assumption of the structure-agency distinction in order to be rendered them with the sense they have for the various participants involved. (shrink)

This paper explores how providing the inferential basis to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretations features as a way of managing issues of accountability in talk about armed confrontation. We examine conversation produced in open-ended interviews with diplomatic representatives of the United States and Great Britain in discussion about those countries'' involvement in the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–91. By providing the inferential basis upon which to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretative scenarios, speakers attend to (...) the potential for any one account to be privileged over another. Further, in speculating upon the relationship between interpretative particulars and the inferential outcome to be drawn for some specific version of events in question, speakers work to establish the parameters of an admissible narrative trajectory with which to account for those events. In so doing, they manage the implications that excluded versions would otherwise make relevant. (shrink)

This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social psychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examine examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the expense of and in preference to the work of examining participants' own formulations of those same activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology which seeks (...) to the explore how participants' talk is responsively oriented to foreclosing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a way for speakers to account for their own and others' activities within the controversy which that same body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical context of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities whereby speakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some independent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episode of talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-cultural contact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the conflicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement as Western expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials, the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakers in the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they are engaged. (shrink)

This article contributes to the development of a rhetorical approach to the public understanding of science or science literacy. It is argued that rhetoric promises an alternative approach to deficit models that treat people as faulty scientists. Some tensions in the relevant rhetorical literature need resolution. These center on the application to science of an Aristotelian conception of rhetorical reasoning as enthymematic, without breaking from the Platonic/aristotelian division between technical and public spheres. The former opens science to the potential of (...) public critique; the latter closes this, effectively reinstating a deficit model. Gross’s writings are used to bring this point out sharply. A resolution is proposed, building on a view of rhetoric as socially constitutive and leading to a conception of public understanding as witcraft. Here, Billig’s rhetorical psychology provides the basis for reconfiguring the enthymeme in a manner that construes the division between spheres as itself rhetorically constituted. Creationism is used to provide brief illustration. (shrink)