Abstract
Talk in Action presents a thorough compilation of Conversation Analysis (CA) research in the field of talk in institutional contexts. Applying the principles behind institutional CA, the book rests on the premise that actions are reflexive, dynamic and context- renewing, and that interactants build the context of interaction through their talk. The book makes a significant contribution to the recently emerging field of institutional talk by presenting a selection of materials the authors have used when teaching a course at the University of California at Los Angeles. With the aim of exploring ‘the intersections between interactional practices, social identities and institutional tasks’ (p. 2), the book focuses on the study of how ‘ordinary conversational practices are brought to bear in task-focused interactions’ (p. 2). This is reflected in the analytic perspective adopted throughout the book by which institutional talk, or ‘social institutions in talk’, is made context-relevant when compared with ‘ordinary’ talk.
The book is divided into five parts, the first of which comprises three chapters and provides a useful theoretical and methodological overview of CA. It offers an introduction to the discursive nature of social institutions, to the normative characteristics of institutional talk and to the accountability of adjacency pairs. This introduction becomes highly relevant to the understanding of how CA can be employed in an array of institutional contexts. The following four parts, with 14 chapters in total, illustrate how CA can be employed in the study of calls for emergency services, doctor–patient interactions, trials, juries and dispute resolution, and news and political communication.
The first section of these institutional contexts, calls for emergency services, is made up of three chapters, each of which has a unique yet related focus. This section starts by taking a ‘macroscopic’ look at the different phases of the call and the patterns of inference associated with requests for help, with a focus on the structure of the opening and closing phases. The focus then shifts to the ‘gatekeeping considerations that inform conduct in emergency service calls’ (p. 72). The most salient of these considerations include: asking investigatory questions as a way of assessing the problem’s genuineness, displaying the proper motivation for calling, and establishing the relevance of the problem as a public safety issue.
The next part of the book comprises four chapters that explore doctor–patient interactions in acute care visits. The first chapter in the section looks at the interactional phases of such visits, focusing on the general characteristics of the ‘problem (= illness) presentation’, such as their length, doctors’ question design and patients’ responses. Providing a more detailed analysis of this phase, the following chapter discusses how patients’ accounts legitimize their visit and how different kinds of problems are presented. The authors then present an analysis of the grammatical design of doctors’ questions which shows that they can display doctors’ epistemic stance, and they can signal response preference with the aim of optimizing questions. The last chapter deals with the interactional processes involved in giving diagnosis and treatment recommendation.
The three chapters in section four of the book explore interactions in different legal contexts, the first of which is trials. In this chapter, it is shown how language practices are used to influence the perceptions and interpretations of the events in question to the point of overruling material evidence. The following chapter opens what is termed the ‘black box’ of jury deliberations. It examines how resourceful jurors can be when it comes to ‘contextualizing, and formulating aspects of the legal framework that they are duty-bound to uphold’ (p. 199) in order to, for instance, persuade other jurors to change their minds. The last chapter of this section looks at informal modes of dispute resolutions, mainly at plea bargaining and mediation sessions. Through an analysis of the phases and the roles of the participants involved in such negotiation sessions, the authors illustrate how the description of the event in question and the identity of the ‘client’ are implicitly negotiated through the particularly flexible use of ordinary language.
The last part of the book is concerned with news and political communication. The first chapter of this section unpacks the dynamics involved in turn-taking sequences of media interviews. It explores, for instance, how the interviewer establishes the relevance of their questions and how the interviewees are expected to provide lengthy responses to these questions as a normative characteristic of this type of discourse genre. The subsequent chapters discuss several aspects of the turn-taking rules in broadcasting media as an institutionalized part of the linguistic activity involved in addressing participants’ viewpoints, and helping direct the discussion for a ‘ratified but unaddressed audience of overhearers’ (p. 225).
Talk in Action offers an interesting and enriching analysis of the architecture of interaction in institutional contexts. A strength of this book lies in its avoidance of pre- formulated theoretical specifications in favor of pursuing the ‘empirical identification of diverse structures of practices’ (p. 14). A practical significance of the book is the useful comparison between institutional talk and ordinary talk that helps the reader understand the scope and salience of institutional talk. In addition, though discussions of the interactants’ identities are generally scarce and some of the studies on which the discussions of the analysis are centred are rather out-dated with no new data presented here, the book provides a rich review of each topic in each context. As an additional asset, Heritage and Clayman take particular pride in the careful and well-informed selection of topics and materials used in this book, as they have been evaluated in a number of courses and are presented in a student-friendly way. Also, its strong orientation towards exploring the applicability of CA in real-world interactional contexts makes it a very valuable reference book for researchers, and a great read for students who are coming to terms with different methodologies in the area of discourse analysis. Finally, this book not only explores one of the most popular interests in the field at the moment – institutional interaction – but also reminds us of the potential of conversation analysis as an analytic tool.