Foundations

aimed at, and that he is willing to go along with that” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 297-298). However, there is a range of different phenomena described throughout the CA literature associated with how participants explicitly orient towards the “meaning” of the prior turn. For instance, by producing a formulation (Heritage and Watson 1979; 1980), the speaker is explicitly orienting to what the prior turn “was about”:

A member may treat some part of the conversation as an occasion to describe that conversation, to explain it, or characterize it, or explicate, or translate, or summarize, or furnish the gist of it, or take note of its accordance with rules. That is to say, a member may use some part of the conversation as an occasion to formulate the conversation (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 350, cit. in Heritage and Watson 1979: 124, emphasis in original).

In this way, the speaker who produces the formulation is explicitly displaying his/her understanding of the prior turn. However, this “unpacking” of the prior turn is extraordinarily rare if we look at the big picture. Most of the time, people just do

“business as usual” as part of the ongoing interactional building of social action.

societal rules without explicitly addressing the rules themselves. The answer was a process of internalization through which institutions such as the educational system, family and religion passes on norms and values of a given society. Once internalized, people act according to the prescribed norms and values, and “fear that others will punish them for not acting appropriately” (Heritage 1984: 17). Garfinkel criticized this top-down perspective. Rather than being “judgmental dopes” (Garfinkel 1967: 68) and passive receivers of some pre-defined norms, people constantly establish and re-define them through interaction with other members of the society. In this way, norms and values are established THROUGH social relations. The question, therefore, should not be to describe how norms are passed on to the next generation, but to describe the PRACTICES people rely on in order to interact “competently”. One way, in which Garfinkel tried to capture these norms, was to deliberately violate them, i.e. by questioning “what we all know and what we all do without thinking about it”. He did this, or in fact his students did it for him (Garfinkel 1967) through what he referred to as breaching experiments. The most famous example is greeting exchanges. Whenever someone asked the question how are you? the experimenting student would reply for instance with what do you mean 'how are you'? In what way do you mean – economically? Mentally? Physically?, or initiate a lengthy story about the student's (lack of) well-being. Garfinkel reports that most students were met with anything from wondering about the format of the reply to anger. To Garfinkel, this was evidence for a norm indicating that how are you is (rarely) a genuine question, except in certain medical encounters (e.g., psychiatrists), but A GREETING, and everybody knows that this is so. This is revealed precisely by the fact that “people” normally respond to a how are you with fine, how are you. In this sense, they orient to the SOCIAL ACTION accomplished through interaction, and through the interaction (re-)defines it as a norm. In this way, Garfinkel adopted a bottom-up perspective, rather than Parson's top-down approach, for explicating how norms come to be defined and how they are “passed on”. Ethnomethodology is interested in describing the methods people use (hence the terms ethno, methods and logy) to make sense of social life. As we will see later, this fundamental understanding of the relationship between people, interaction and society plays a crucial part in CA.

4.3.2 Goffman – the interaction order

Another (micro)sociologist of the time was Erving Goffman. He argued that the study of face-to-face interaction was analytically viable, and that the best way to study it was through microanalyses.⁶ He termed the object of study the interaction order and argued that

the contained elements [in the interaction order] fit together more closely than with elements beyond the order; that exploring relations between orders is critical, a subject matter in its own right, and that such an inquiry presupposes a delineation of the several social orders in the first place, that isolating the interaction order provides a means and a reason to examine diverse societies comparatively, and our own historically (Goffman 1983:

2, emphasis added),

In this way, he criticizes “macro-sociological” approaches to the social world. Goffman did not ignore the influence of “macro-social” factors, but his aim was to study the social order on an interpersonal level (Drew and Wootton 1988: 3). He was interested in the procedures through which people manage face-to-face interaction. He argued that

conversational interaction represents an institutional order sui generis in which interactional rights and obligations are linked not only to personal face and identity, but also to macro-social institutions (Heritage 1998: 3).

To study this order, he conducted a number of ethnographic studies (i.e. naturally occurring social interactions) on “stigmatized” people (Goffman 1963b), people in prison and other “inmates” (Goffman 1961), as well as social situations in everyday public places (Goffman 1963a, 1974). From this diversity of situations, he wanted to extract the underlying systematic, or procedures, on the basis of which people conduct interaction.

His idea was that these procedures are RITUAL and SYSTEMATIC (Goffman 1981 [1976]) and largely defined on the basis of morality.⁷ The ritual nature of interaction concerns

6 Although Schegloff (1988: 100 ff.) argues that Goffman's analyses were not, from a CA perspective, “micro” – see below.

7 “[...] a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives. The set of norms does not specify the objectives the participants are to seek, nor the pattern formed by and through the coordination or integration if these rules, but merely the modes of seeking them”

(Goffman 1963a: 8).

people's social selves, i.e. the way people present themselves when interacting with other people. This “controls” our protection of face, how we tend to “down tune” our critique of others and politeness (see e.g., Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 28). The systematic character of interaction deals with the conversational machinery, such as the transition of turns between speakers in interaction. This theoretical distinction has later been criticized by Schegloff who notes that

the greatest obstacle to Goffman's achievement of a general enterprise addressed to the syntactical relationship between acts was his own commitment to “ritual”, and his unwillingness to detach such “syntactic”

units from a functionally specific commitment to ritual organization and the maintenance of face (Schegloff 1988: 95),

and argues that Goffman's emphasis on face as the center of interaction steers him away from the social character of interaction (“interaction as non-interactional”) towards the individual and psychological.

Despite the focus on face-to-face interaction as a valid analytic object in its own right, which was to be continued by Sacks, Goffman's analytic empirical approach was quite different from that of Sacks (and conversation analysis as such). Goffman's primary approach was OBSERVATIONS of how people act, and react, in social situations. Through observations he made fascinating descriptions. However, he documented the observations and the theoretical distinctions made from them by providing examples that would demonstrate his points. As we will see, this is fundamentally different from CA where claims and descriptions are made on the basis of close analyses of collections of data.

4.3.3 Harvey Sacks

Sacks was interested in conversation as the place where social structures can be found, described and analyzed. He worked in the early 1960s as a researcher in the Los Angeles Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, and through this position he got access to audio recordings from a suicide prevention center (reported in Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 18). Among other things, he observed that most calls begin with the representative

of the center giving his/her name followed by the caller giving his/her name. But he came across a deviant case:

A: This is Mr. Smith may I help you B: I can't hear you.

A: This is Mr. Smith.

B: Smith.

(Sacks 1992, vol. 1, part 1, lecture 1, p. 3).

One question puzzled him. During the rest of this call the representative of the center tried to get the caller to say his name without luck. So Sack posed the questions:

Is it possible that the caller's declared problem in hearing is a methodological way of avoiding giving one's name in response to the other's having done so? Could talk be organized at that level of detail?

And in so designed a manner? (Schegloff 1992b: xvii).

This came to be CA's endeavour – to outline the systematic organization of (talk-in-) interaction on the basis of which people make sense.

Sacks was killed in a car accident in 1975, but recordings of his lectures at UCLA (1964-8) and UC Irvine (1968-72) have been transcribed by Gail Jefferson, and were published in 1992 (as Sacks 1992). Even today, Sacks' lectures serve as inspiration to many conversation analysts, and include the most extraordinary observations about social life and conversation in particular.