Book review: Simona Pekarek Doehler, Johannes Wagner and Esther González-Martínez (eds), Longitudinal Studies on the Organization of Social Interaction

Abstract

analytically), providing readers with a personal window into her thinking about the social organization of interaction and repair, as well as her ways of working. Jefferson is refreshingly and disarmingly honest about how she forms collections (including core cases, boundary cases, deviant cases and negative cases) and about the limits of conversation-analytic claims (even though she continuously and amazingly finds ways to overcome such limits). For example, Jefferson wrestles in several papers with how to deal with events that ‘should’ have happened but did not (i.e. how to deal with negative observations (e.g. the ‘failure’ to initiate repair), as well as with participants’ cognition (e.g. Jefferson’s notion of ‘corrective monitoring’). Finally, and relatedly, this volume is not merely about repair. For example, Jefferson’s papers deal with general features of interaction (e.g. ‘something that might be called “understanding assumed”’, p. 384), with Harvey Sacks’ notions of categorization (e.g. Jefferson’s discussion of co-class and colist membership), and with Harold Garfinkel’s notion of accountability. While the collected papers certainly contribute to our understanding of the structural organization of repair – as was the primary focus in ‘The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation’, which is reprinted in this volume – they expose Jefferson’s unique and pioneering ideas regarding what conversationalists do with the structures of repair (e.g. their ‘uses and affordances’, as the editors put it, p. 5). For example, Jefferson demonstrates that ‘uh’ can be used to demonstrate that one is ‘watching their language’. Relative to the ‘preference for self correction’ paper, Jefferson’s body of repair work takes up more centrally ‘how correction and repair are often bound up with discord, misalignment, and disaffiliation between participants’ (Bergman and Drew’s introduction, p. 17). Beyond this, the collected papers address: numerous types and forms of interactional trouble (e.g. production vs interactional errors); what different forms of trouble can tell us about what participants orient to as ‘problems’ in interaction; the (appropriate) methods for identifying interactional trouble, not only when it breaks the surface of interaction (thus the title of the volume), but also when it does not (which is a persistent analytic conundrum that Jefferson explicitly struggles with throughout several of the papers); forms of correction, as well as analytically defensible forms of ‘non’-correction (e.g. what Jefferson calls ‘error-locating non-corrective queries’); and how repair’s operation affects – and is affected by – various aspects of social accountability (e.g. of initiating repair, of committing ‘errors’ and of ‘failing’ to repair ‘errors’). Like many of the ‘great’ conversation-analytic articles, Jefferson’s papers require, yet richly reward, multiple readings. These rewards are to be had not only by conversation analysts, but by all scholars of language and social interaction.