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Applied CA: Institutional Interaction

Paul ten Have

 

Focus: Applying CA to structured questioning

In this paper, Have analyzes question/answer speech interaction by applying theories of pure CA to survey data.  I’ll first define some key concepts, then show them in action and finish by summarizing the main issues.

 

Pure CA

Applied CA

Procedural study of talk in interaction, ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’, largely theoretical.  Can be used to study any kind of talk-in-interaction (conversation or institutional interaction).

Application of methodologies arising from Pure CA, largely analytical, often with wider concerns (bias) in the realm of psychology, sociology, etc.

[161]

 

One of the main differences between speech interaction types – interview, debate, conversation, etc. -  seems to be turn taking.  Have gives two general categories of speech types: [162]

           

Conversation

Institutional Interaction
  • Talk about the playoffs, what you had for dinner, the validity of synthetic apriori judgments in the empirical sciences
  • Root conversation type (i.e. there are many other types but all stem from this basic one)
  • Locally managed turn taking
  • Interactively managed turn taking
  • Not much restriction in terms of what constitutes a turn
  • Debate, interview, doctor-patient meeting
  • Transformation of conversation
  • Pre-established turn allocation
  • Often pre-established turn type allocation (i.e. in a job interview the interviewee is expected to give answers, not questions)
  • Often viewed as restrictive. 

 

This study focuses on institutional interaction.  Have points out two issues. [164]

1.      Some people believe the restrictive quality of this interaction inhibits communication while others believe it is functional.  An example that might illuminate this debate is asking questions in a certain format to fill out a form properly rather than to be intuitive to the interviewee. 

2.      Some people believe institutional “properties” arise from institutional talk i.e. as soon as I start forming identities by referring repetitively to people and things in a formal manner a sense of institution is constituted.  Others say this ignores the specifics of local professional work.

Have believes the main “…point in all this seems to be where one locates the “center of gravity” for understanding interactional phenomena: in the local interaction and its procedural infrastructure itself, in the general institutional arrangements, or in the institutionalized power of one category of participants over another.  Have follows the lead of Drew and Heritage, viewing “…activities as interactional products, and taking a dynamic view of context, both the local context of consecutive utterances and the larger context of institutional frameworks.”  These studies however will not provide “hard and fast distinctions” between the institutional and non-institutional realms because of the dynamic nature of context.[165]

 

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