Conversation Analysis

Abstract

Keywords: Conversation analysis (CA); adjacency pair; sequence organization; turn taking; repair

1. Introduction

People socialize, build, and maintain their relationships with one another through conversation. There is a linguistic communication going on when individuals are conversing, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the usage of a linguistic code. In addition to verbal language, additional factors such as body language, silences, and the atmosphere in which the discussion is created play a significant role in conversation. In contrast to strictly focused linguistic explanations of language, Goffman (1964) maintained that the study of talking involved interaction, which had its own set of laws and structures that were not inherently linguistic in nature. As a result, the study of language from a linguistic perspective alone could not effectively explain the nature of languagein-use (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2014). The foundation of conversation analysis (herein, after CA) is a sociological understanding of the fundamentally social aspect of language use in interpersonal communication. But as the area of CA work has grown, it has become really multidisciplinary. The main sociological finding of CA is that we carry out the routine—and sometimes the extraordinary—features of our lives through talk. Talking to one another involves more than just exchanging ideas, facts, and expertise. Whether we speak face-to-face or over the phone, our talks create, manifest, sustain, and manage our connections and our sense of ourselves to one another. According to Drew & Curl (2008), people “construct, establish, reproduce and negotiate their identities, roles and relationships in conversational interaction” (p.22). A number of fields including linguistics (Mazeland, 2006), applied linguistics, (Seedhouse, 2004; Kasper & Wagner, 2014), education (Watson, 1992; Koole, 2013), communication (Beach, 2012), anthropology (Zeitlyn, 2004; Clemente, 2012), sociology (Heritage & Stivers, 2012), and psychology (Potter & Edwards, 2012) are influenced by CA. It is commonly employed in many domains as a research methodology, frequently as a critical voice against more interpretive approaches and methodologies that have a propensity to utilize exogenous ideas like gender, power, or culture as justifications for human behavior (Brandt & Mortensen, 2016). CA, which deals with social interaction, is positioned as an “inductive, micro-analytic, and predominantly qualitative method” for language study. It sees language as

resource for social action and focuses on conversation naturally occurs in a context. It provides a progressive means for describing conversational interaction and empirically proving the analysis (Hoey & Kendrick, 2017, p.152). As an approach for social action, conversation research provides an insight for the behaviors and pursuits that constitute social life. As a result, it is largely a strategy for social action (Drew & Curl, 2008; p. 23). It has been useful in many ways to understand both the mechanics of social interaction in daily life and the nature of professional interaction. CA, an inductive study area, examines how social contact develops in real-world, non-experimental circumstances. In this context, the term “inductive” refers to the general theoretical rule of refraining from any theorizing that does not derive from an empirical investigation of the available evidence. The purpose is to demonstrate how participants prompt sense-making behaviors for social action, that is, to assess how participants utilized their spoken, auditory, and bodily cues to show that they understood the interaction’s progression in real time. (Brandt & Mortensen, 2016). In the almost half-century that have passed since Sacks’s groundbreaking research, a substantial amount of empirical research has uncover the essential structural elements of talk-in-interaction that underpin all social interaction. These include of how participants take turns speaking, how activities are arranged in a certain order, and how speakers and listeners handle difficulties pronouncing, hearing, or comprehending what is being said (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2014). The purpose of this study is to provide an insight for CA. Based on this, a literature view on the background and development of CA is presented. Then, the main structural elements of CA are discussed. The method of data collection and transcription of CA is explained. Finally, the place of CA in management research is argued.

Conversation Analysis

Harvey Sacks, along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson who are his colleagues, articulated CA in the 1960s and 1970s. Sacks passed away in a car accident in 1975, leaving his colleagues, students, and collaborators to carry out the majority of the development of CA in its wake.

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His seminal work is still available in written form, mostly as lectures given to University of California undergraduate students. Jefferson’s original tape records were transcribed, and Schegloff provided a thorough introduction before the work was published (Sacks 1995). CA became a unique approach to sociology mostly due to Erving Goffman’s and Harold Garfinkel’s influence (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990). Face-to-face interaction was a completely new area of sociological study that Goffman (1967) first identified. Sacks and Schegloff gained an understanding of interaction as a site of social organization whereas Harold Garfinkel developed ethnomethodology, a fresh look at daily activities contradicting established theories of social order (Hoey & Kendrick, 2017). CA, born out of ethnomethodology, is still deeply rooted in sociology (Brandt & Mortensen, 2016) because it was a sociological approach to using daily common sense as the foundation for human activity. In the sociological discipline of ethnomethodology, it is investigated how individuals within a society create and recognize things, events, and actions that are mutually understandable. Studies in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), which laid the groundwork for the approach, contains these key concepts. The primary focus of ethnomethodology is on small-scale social order as viewed through members of society’s shared social knowledge of the factors that affect how people understand the circumstances and messages they come across in their social environment. In actuality, a conversation analyzed, for example, an interview or classroom role play, may occur regardless of the desire of the researcher to investigate (Liddicoat, 2021). From a methodological standpoint, CA looks for common behaviors, patterns, and ways that people execute and understand social activity. Two sociological thought streams gave rise to CA. The first is primarily derived from the studies of Goffman (1967) who contends that social interaction is a unique institutional order made up of normative duties and rights that govern interaction and operate largely independently of an individual’s psychological, social, and motivational traits. The second approach is Garfinkel ‘s ethnomethodology (1967), which emphasizes the socially constructed and contingent nature of action and action perception as well as the significance of shared methods in the creation, acknowledgment, and comprehension of cooperative activities. By combining these two viewpoints, CA was able to appreciate how the “Goffmanian interaction order structures the production, recognition, and analysis of action” as it occurs in real time by utilizing common techniques or procedures. Because each person in the interaction displays their understanding of the other’s behavior instinctively with each new input, this process (and its analysis) is made feasible. (Drew & Curl, 2008, p.23). Since the 1960s, the main contribution of CA has been the description of the systematic utilization of verbal and vocal resources to achieve locally ordered turns at discourse. From the standpoint of CA, the social behavior of

interaction participants is a public demonstration of how they comprehend one another and collectively construct meaning as they conduct their social affairs. Many social science scholar have long placed a high priority on understanding and misunderstanding. However, CA takes a rather unusual stance in this situation because comprehension is viewed as a praxeological issue that individuals exhibit in and via their social behaviors (Brandt & Mortensen, 2016). While a large amount of conversation analysis research has focused on casual conversation in ordinary social environments, a growing corpus of work has also used the same theoretical and methodological techniques to study discourse in institutional settings (Heritage, 1997; Drew & Heritage; 1992; Antaki, 2011). CA has evolved as a result of empirical research concentrating on certain, observable events. Therefore, CA is not a theoretical endeavor but rather a very concrete empirical one. However, a body of theoretical information regarding the structure of conversation has been developed through empirical studies, in an inductive manner. Methods for analyzing social interaction and social interaction theory are extremely closely related in conversation analysis (Peräkylä, 2004).

Assumptions Of Conversation Analysis

Gardner (2004) demonstrates how CA took the three fundamental ideas of responsibility, reflexivity, and indexicality (or context-boundedness) from ethnomethodology. For the aim of effective engagement, speakers are accountable, reflexive, and indexical in addition to being grammatically correct and suitable. Accountability pertains to the ways in which members choose to make their acts public and reportable to other members; in other words, accountability relates to ways in which members carry out routine tasks. It is assumed that these behaviors are structured, observable, typical, aimed toward, logical, and comprehensible. Accounts are made feasible by the fact that social behaviors, such as talking, have practices that may be taught and replicated, for instance by very young people or outsiders. The belief that this kind of responsibility reflects the talk in all of its facets—the realm of action, the environments, the talk practices, and the acts and activities of a social interaction—is known as reflexivity. The social activities themselves are reflected in the members’ reports of everyday social interactions. Indexicality is the idea that a language’s meaning depends on the context in which it is employed. This goes beyond the linguistic concept of deixis to assert that all language is indexical, or, in a less extreme sense, that all utterances are sufficient only if they are appropriate for the context in which they are being used. As such, it dismisses as insufficient and unrealistic a context-free description of language (or of situated activity). One way to look at the ethnomethodological aspect of CA is as an attempt to pose the question of how actors in

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their social field generate sufficient meaning and context. Instead of trying to interpret talk from the outside in, this approach is inside-out (Gardner, 2004; Seedhouse, 2004). The majority of the early CA research were based on casual phone conversations between friends and acquaintances. The underlying premise was that social order originated from everyday talk, a fundamental mode of structure that sociologists had hitherto disregarded. But soon after, CA researchers started focusing on more specialized settings, like offices, courts, clinics, and doctor’s offices. Studies on communication in particular circumstances have multiplied significantly in recent years, surpassing the amount of studies on the general mechanics of everyday speech. An initial analysis of these professional or institutional environments reveals that the fundamental mechanisms that underpin everyday communication are still in place. Individuals must trade turns, create action sequences with conditional relevance, open, close, and shift between sequences, fix trouble spots, and so on. Nonetheless, a lot of behaviors that are highly erratic and locally controlled in casual discourse seem ritualized, extremely predictable, and restricted in these settings. These interactional characteristics, given in table 1 below, are related to particular institutional goals that members actively pursue and orient toward by acting in certain ways or not acting at all (Palotti, 2007). Most studies on conversation analysis rely on essential components of conversational organization. These include turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1978), sequences of action (Schegloff, 1995), and repair (Schegloff et al., 1977; Schegloff, 1992).

Conversation Analysis

CA has studied interactions of an institutional nature since its early years. Sacks’ early lectures addressed phone calls to a San Francisco suicide prevention center, and many of his subsequent lectures addressed group therapy encounters (Heritage, 2004). Two elements from the original Sacks data set continue to be crucial to CA work today. First, rather than being created by researchers, the data are real. Sacks examined the helpline calls itself rather than speaking with suicidal persons about their experiences dialing the helpline. Instead of analyzing a retroactive account of social life, he examined an actual aspect of it. This indicated that rather than responding to research questions, the hotline callers were pursuing actions in their own lives and resolving their own concerns. Today’s CA still relies on the examination of real-world examples of talk-in-interaction rather than imagined, hypothetical, or retrospective self-reports produced by researchers through interviews or focus groups. Secondly, data are captured, enabling repeated playback for analysis. This was made possible for Sacks by the development of the tape recorder since recordings could now be examined in much more depth than was previously conceivable. Sacks discovered that interactional participants are more focused on such fine-grained features of talk-in-interaction and that these are particularly crucial for how an interaction develops (as opposed to imagined or hypothetical examples or retrospective self-reports generated by researchers via interviews). Video or audio recordings are used in modern CA. For the study of face-to-face interactions, video is essential because it allows for the

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investigation of interactional elements such gesture, body deployment, and gaze (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2014). CA deals with interactional life in real time, using audio and video recordings as data sources (Antaki, 2008). Naturalistic data, or interactions that happen without the need for the researcher to record and analyze them, are the foundation of CA research. In order to notice certain conversational features, conversation analysts do not collect their data by establishing experimental methods, communication tasks, role plays, or interviews. This is not to suggest that conversation analysts are uninterested in these more fabricated contexts, as they too are part of the range of talk interactions that really occur in society. In actuality, whether or not conversation analysts were interested in examining them, an interview or classroom role play would have taken place (Pallotti, 2007). When doing a conversation analysis, the investigator first records audio or video of real-world dialogue. These recordings have been meticulously transcribed using precise guidelines that Gail Jefferson first established. The CA transcription notation is made to give information that aids in the structuring and comprehension of talk. Prosodic elements and turn location should be preserved in the transcription. Researchers can evaluate the types of language use that were available to the participants in the recorded encounter itself by combining the transcription with the original tape. A CA transcript can still be understood without significant specialized knowledge. The etic approach that is typical of phonetics is not represented in the transcript, which is not talk creation at the level of its mechanical reproducibility. Instead, the transcription offers an emic approach-based empirically accurate approximation of the interpretative assemblies that discourse participants are using. A transcription is the end product of the transcriber’s interpretive labor as a skilled member of the culture being studied and their careful listening to how and where utterances are created (Mazeland, 2006).

And Organization Research

The success of many management tasks, such as planning, merchandising, interviewing, leading meetings, negotiating, and representing, depends heavily on communication. In spite of this, organizational discussion has received comparatively little attention in the literature on management and organization research. But recently, a number of academics have started to think about how different methods for analyzing talk—developed across a variety of disciplines—can be utilized to provide unique and significant insights into the execution and coordination of management tasks (Greatbatch & Clark, 2012). The use of broader social and organizational contexts and identities to explain interactional discourse traits is severely constrained by CA. Talk-in-interaction participants may be precisely

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classified according to a wide range of social identifiers, such as age, sex, race, social class, occupation, and organizational level. (Sacks, 1992). In the context of management research, a disadvantage of CA is that it uncovers organizational tasks that are not largely completed through talk-in-interaction. Nonetheless, a variety of workplace studies of interaction in natural settings have surfaced recently. These studies take a broader approach by examining the role that different artifacts—such as tools, texts, and technologies—play in the accomplishment and coordination of organizational tasks. The workplaces where these studies have been conducted include offices (Suchman, 1987; 1992), airport operation rooms (Goodwin & Goodwi,n 1996), city trading rooms and urban transport control rooms (Heath et al., 2004), and emergency dispatch centers (Whalen, 1995). These studies, in contrast to mainstream CA research, frequently depend on data from qualitative interviews and non-participant observation. This has proven vital since video analysis alone is frequently insufficient to identify or comprehend interaction patterns and activity organization in complicated organizational environments. (Greatbatch & Clark, 2012). The use of CA to analyze interactions where participants carry out role-based or organizational tasks has increased over years. Therefore, interactions in classroom settings (Gardner, 2012), emergency call centers (Kevoe-Feldman, 2019), business meetings (Nielsen, 2009), divorce mediation sessions (Greatbatch & Dingwall, 1997), medical consultations (Peräkylä, 1997), broadcast interviews (Clayman, 2012), small claims courts (Atkinson & Drew, 1979), and psychiatric intake interviews (Roca-Cuberes, 2014) have all been the subject of CA studies. These studies examine how participants use speech to orient to social institutions and the identities that accompany them, and how this might serve as a tool or a hindrance to completing the tasks at hand. CA might potentially contributes significantly to the theoretical advancement of many management research topics and literatures.

6. Discussion And Theoretical Implications

CA, which is the study of talk-in-interaction, is a novel theoretical and methodological approach to comprehending social activity. It is currently an interdisciplinary field that includes communication studies, linguistics, psychology, and sociology in particular. It was initially articulated in American sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Harvey Sacks and his associates Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2014). A CA viewpoint considers the social behavior of individuals interacting as a public demonstration of how they comprehend one another and collaboratively generate meaning while engaging in social interactions (Brandth & Mortensen, 2016). One technique for examining the composition and dynamics of human social interaction is

conversation analysis. Conversation analysis studies use audio or video recordings of naturally occurring interactions—that is, interactions that would occur even in the absence of data collection—as their source of data. Empirical research centered on distinct, observable events has given rise to CA. First and foremost, then, CA is an extremely empirically grounded endeavor rather than a theoretical one. However, a corpus of theoretical information regarding the structure of conversation has been gathered through empirical investigations conducted in an “inductive” manner. The real “techniques” of performing CA can only be comprehended and valued in light of of these fundamental CA theoretical presumptions (Peräkylä, 2004). The field of CA has grown to be an empirical discipline that focuses on a variety of interactional conduct domains, such as turn-taking (“the distribution of speaking opportunities among participants”), sequence organization (“internal structuring of turns at talk and the formation of actions”), organization of repair (“addressing difficulties in speaking, hearing, and understanding talk”), narrative and story-telling, phonetic and prosodic aspects of talk, body behavior, and so forth (Drew & Curl, 2008, p.4). Its popularity in the realm of management and organization has increased over years. However, the scope of research using CA is till restricted to organizational contexts, such as classrooms, emergency call centers, business meetings, divorce mediation sessions, medical consultations, broadcast interviews, small claims courts, and psychiatric intake interviews. Organizational researchers might find fruitful to use CA in their studies, extending the array of research on organizational roles or tasks performed in those institutional settings.

7. Conclusion

CA is an interdisciplinary field that studies talk-in-interaction, focusing on how individuals understand and generate meaning through social interactions. Initially created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, CA examines the composition and dynamics of human social interaction using audio or video recordings of naturally occurring interactions. CA is empirically grounded, focusing on various interactional conduct domains such as turn-taking, sequence organization, and organization of repair. While its popularity in management and organization has increased, its scope of research is limited to organizational contexts, such as court laws, emergency centers, and business meetings. Organizational researchers can more rely on CA in their studies to expand their understanding of organizational roles and tasks in different institutional contexts. Disclosure Statement: The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

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