ABSTRACT This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the philosophical perspectives of hyperrealism, surrealism, ethics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on official government texts and speeches on the continuing development of Singapore’s education policy, the paper examines the way metaphors of flexibility, diversity, choice, and opportunity are used within an evolving ideological context that work to continually produce truth conditions as justifications for inequality. In doing this, the analysis foregrounds a functional aspect (...) of policy metaphors as divisive mechanisms of neo-liberalism through associating individuals with the appearance of discriminatory forms of economic materiality which does not in fact exist in reality. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of Sacks’ work on membership categorization has highlighted the growing analytic interest in how members’ social category orientations operate at multiple levels of interactional work. One of the outcomes of this, highlighted in Stokoe’s discussion, is the re-emergence of the question of whether membership categorization analysis has been, is, or can be an approach in its own right. In this brief discussion I consider the emergence of ‘MCA’ as an approach to the study of social-knowledge-in-action, the relationship (...) between MCA and contemporary directions in conversation analysis, and finally the future of MCA as it continues to develop. (shrink)

While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new opportunities for public expression and political engagement in a ‘virtual public sphere’, Chinese Internet censorship has meant that users have to develop creative ways to engage in political criticism. In a context where both mechanical and human censors are employed, Chinese users have become adept at utilizing the affordances of technology, Chinese language and cultural resources to express their opinions through social media. Drawing upon data (...) from the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo, surrounding the major chemical explosions in 2015 in Tianjin, the study explores three discursive techniques of indirection by Chinese social media users to express political criticism in the context of censorship. The study highlights that through the creative use of quotation, allusion and irony, users challenged the authority’s official narratives of the event. The study not only demonstrates the pluralization and dynamics of Chinese online expression, but also points to a better understanding of Chinese censoring as a continuingly evolving interplay between technology and cultural forms and between layers of government and users. (shrink)

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks's original analyses - concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members' actual activities - demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social (...) organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks's approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks's legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society. (shrink)

Although the past plays a large part in election campaigns, predictions and promises are its lifeblood, with the various parties promising great things if elected and predicting doom if not. Indeed the `manifestos' usually published at the beginning of an election campaign are a study in pledges, promises and wishes that parties use to entice the electorate to vote for them. Whilst talk of the future often dominates election discourse, one aspect of the future that is largely passed over without (...) comment is the actual make up of the result, despite the relentless publication of opinion polls results. However, towards the end of the general election campaign in the UK in 2001, the Conservative Party began to warn of the dangers of the Labour Party winning the election by a large majority. The media gave wide prominence to this event, seen as tantamount to conceding defeat to the Labour Party, though the reaction of all the main political parties was to downplay its significance. In this article, we explore the discursive manipulation of temporal relations in the 2001 election campaign, and the politicians' work in gaining political capital out of the Conservative Party `breach' in the routine election prediction structure. (shrink)

Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of human societies. The interactional practices through which instruction is accomplished have provided a rich focus for ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies examining classroom settings, and, more recently, non-classroom environments of instruction in practical and manual skills. This paper examines the work of instruction in basketball training and in particular the correction of player performances, which are a ubiquitous and central feature of instruction in basketball training sessions. A central (...) part of this instructional action relies on the coach observing training activities to determine players’ competencies and to extract relevant correctables from the players’ embodied displays, which are in turn embedded within complex arrangements of rapidly moving bodies situated in material environments. In this paper we examine the visual-analytic work involved in both organizing and observing a basketball training activity, demonstrating the sequential layering of multiple membership categorization devices drawn upon in producing and recognizing actions in this setting. We argue that the coach deploys spatial orientations which function analogously to membership categorization devices, with players’ bodily positions relative to one another and the material structure of the surround generating category-like sets of rights, responsibilities, and sequential relevancies. As we demonstrate, these orientations provide crucial resources for the identification of players’ errors and thereby for the organization of instruction in interaction in this setting. (shrink)

This article explores the temporal organization and manipulation of time in the production and presentation of news reports. Time is often cited as one of the most central organizing concepts of news production; indeed one of the major features of news reporting is the breaking of stories and the reporting of events `as they happen'. However, whilst much emphasis is placed upon time within media production, much of this pertains to the reporting of past and present events rather than the (...) reporting of the future. This article explores the future within news reporting through an examination of sequential events leading up to a main scheduled newsworthy event: the execution of Timothy McVeigh. It analyses how the production of `news' utilizes the future by relying upon prediction and speculation about what will happen and examines: how news can be seen to depend to a large degree on uncertainty for its value; the use of time frames within media reporting; and the way time is manipulated in the service of the recency and immediacy of news reporting. (shrink)

This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis can mutually benefit from each other to produce new methodological and reflexive directions in neo-liberal policy research to examine the phenomenon of 'What is '. Through this we argue that augmenting linguistic analysis with philosophical perspectives develops and supports CDA scholarship more broadly by accommodating the shifting complexity of social problems of ideologically driven inequality that are inbuilt through, in our case, social policy texts. In discussing philosophical-methodological issues, the paper (...) argues for the need to continually adapt CDA to the particular data so as to remain sensitive to and avoid hegemonic tendencies in analysis. Through adopting the principles of a working methodology, we discuss a micro-meso-macro CDA framework that draws on the analytical concepts of movement, metaphorical superfluidity, thematic condensation, and surrealism to conceive of a research approach capable of examining and comprehending evolving discourses of political economies. The most immediate benefit of this framework is its capacity to illustrate how forms of valuations perpetuated by and through policy discourse are the motivational locus of meaning making insofar as they strongly inform the moral underpinning the ideology of economic growth. (shrink)

Drawing on drafts and other material from the Harvey Sacks archive this paper examines the development of one of the defining papers of Conversation Analysis, _A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation_ (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The discussion examines four drafts of the paper along with correspondence between the authors and with William Bright, the editor of the journal _Language_ where it was to be published. The four drafts trace the development of the paper from a (...) 13-page draft to the final 106-page final draft submitted to the journal. By exploring the drafts as they evolved the discussion highlights the development of the central ideas in the paper, the distinctive style of the paper as it is revised, the changes of authorship, and the role of the editor of _Language,_ William Bright, in helping to shape the paper through his own detailed reviews. (shrink)

This article investigates the new phenomenon of e-mailed questions to a radio phone-in programme, BBC Radio 4's `Election Call'. Our interest in this phenomenon arose for several reasons. First, as a new form, e-mails were singled out at the beginning of each broadcast for special instructions to listeners, although there was evidence that as the series progressed, dealing with e-mail became more of a routine event in each subsequent programme. Second, on listening to the Election Call broadcasts, the sequential introduction (...) of an e-mail question appeared to be problematic for the host. First mentions of e-mailed questions were often subject to a noticeable amount of disfluency and repair work, in contrast to the well-rehearsed and highly routine introduction of callers' questions. Third, we are interested in the function of e-mail questions in terms of how they are handled by the host and guest. Are they given the same status as a `call', and if not, where do the differences lie? In our analysis we show how the introduction of this new media form into a well-established context opens up new structural possibilities for both host as interviewer and politician as interviewee, in terms of how questions get framed, and how they get responded to. (shrink)