Don H. Zimmerman

The Diary: Diary-Interview Method

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The ethnographic study on which this paper draws was funded by Grant 70-039, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, United States Department of Justice. The findings and interpretations presented in this paper do not necessarily reflect the policies or offical position of the funding agency. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, August 1972. DON H. ZIMMERMAN is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent publications include &dquo;Sex-Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversation&dquo; (with Candace West) which appeared in the 1975 volume, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, edited by B. Thorne and N. Henle; and &dquo;A Reply to Professor Coser&dquo; in The

When Words Fail: A Single Case Analysis

This paper reports on research into the social organization of citizen phone calls to emergency service agencies, focusing on the constitutive function of talk in the activity of “calling for help.” We explore how these occasions of talk can themselves become problematic events for members. Our report centers on the detailed analysis of a single, very fateful conversation, showing how a seemingly aberrant event can be understood in terms of the natural language practices involved in its orderly, joint production by the actual parties to the call. This single case analysis also reveals when and how words can “fail”: it is the sequential context within which words are produced and the interactional treatment they thereby receive that is crucial for whatever status and consequences they come to have.

Sequential and institutional contexts in calls for help

In this paper we argue that the organization of citizen calls to emergency services reveals how the sequential machinery of conversation is adapted by speaker-hearers to organize, coordinate and exhibit to one another their knowledge and purposes on particular occasions. It is in the way such knowledge is brought to bear, and purposes at hand made evident, that recurrent sequences of interactionally and institutionally relevant activity are built out of local and particular materials. Thus, the sequential organization of conversation is a fundamental resource for social activities directed to matters outside of, but addressable through talk, and for achieving regular, recurrent patterns of action in the face of varying details and circumstances.

The structure of silence between turns in two‐party conversation

Turn taking is a fundamental structural feature of social interaction. Three major approaches to describing turn taking have emerged: stochastic, signaling, and sequential‐production models. The first two treat silences between speakers as simple response latencies, whereas the third views silence as generated collaboratively by the parties to the conversation. The simple response‐latency interpretation predicts a distribution of be‐tween‐turn silences that declines monotonically with duration, whereas the sequential‐production model predicts a periodic pattern of peaks and valleys, with an overall decline in the heights of the peaks as duration increases. Analysis of the frequency distributions of durations of silences between speakers in two‐party conversations finds the periodic structure predicted by the sequential‐production model. The finding is interpreted as supporting a view of social interaction as a fundamentally collaborative activity.

Models of Turn Taking in Conversational Interaction

The routine exchange of turns is a fundamental structural feature of conversational interaction. This paper reviews current attempts to understand the mechanisms by which turns are exchanged and considers three major approaches: stochastic models, signalling models, and sequential-production models. Conceptual and empirical strengths and limitations of each approach are examined, and it is suggested that a synthesis combining some ideas from the signalling approach with the sequential-production approach offers the greatest promise. Attention is directed to three major concepts: conversational events as resources; the functions of social organisational, relational, and sequential contexts in the management of turn taking; and the interactional construction of turns.

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

In this article, we examine a corpus of calls occasioned by a single event, the 1990 Mountain Glade Fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast, to consider (a) how the distribution of rights and responsibilities are displayed in the talk of callers to the emergency phone line (9-1-1) and call takers (CTs) who receive them and (b) how these are linked to the directionality and action trajectory of such calls. In the case of the Mountain Glade corpus, the organization of emergency calls and the presuppositions and distribution of rights and responsibilities that it institutionalizes was incrementally but systematically altered over the course of multiple calls. In describing the problems encountered by callers and CTs in managing these calls, we note that even in departing from the institutionalized activities emergency telecommunications were designed to facilitate, callers and CTs were not free to disregard its constraints. These observations suggest that the ways in which the organized practice through which an institution is routinely produced and embodied in interaction can be a source of institutional resistance to change. In conclusion, we consider how other events with community wide impact—whether actual or merely potential—may have similar consequences for emergency services such as 9-1-1.

Closing matters: Alignment and misalignment in sequence and call closings in institutional interaction:

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing (as a method for ‘project’ completion) and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe (1) a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and (2) the locations from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are (or could have been) for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters.

Mind and Institution: An Interactional PerspectiveInstitutional Interaction: Studies of Talk at Work, by ArminenIlkka. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. 269 pp.

Ilkka Arminen’s Institutional Interaction and Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter’s edited collection Conversation and Cognition afford a view of the institutional order and the cognitive domain that will be familiar to students of talk-in-interaction. The two volumes may inform scholars interested in looking at familiar disciplinary topics from a distinctive interactional perspective. For most sociologists, the institutional order and the more encompassing society strongly, if not decisively, influence the shape of interaction and the activities and relationships it sustains. I presume most psychologists and cognitive scientists view cognitive events as indispensable causal factors in determining human conduct. Arminen’s book, an overview and introduction to what is variously known as institutional interaction, talk at work, or institutional talk, examines interaction as the enabler of institutions, the means by which institutional settings are built out of interactional practices that address and accomplish their distinctive tasks. The Molder and Potter collection examines the possible cross-fertilization of interaction studies and cognitive science, but settles into the view that cognitive events figure in interaction by virtue of being displayed in, and made relevant and consequential by, the practices of interaction itself. Thus, both works affirm the autonomy of interaction as a topic of study. They do not so much do away with social structure or an inner mental life as respecify the relationship of the interaction order to “larger” distal formations, such as institutions, and “smaller” proximal processes, such as cognition. The expressed aim of the Molder and Potter collection is to address cognition and conversation in a way of interest to researchers studying talk-in-interaction, discursive psychology, and, presumably, those working in the broad area of cognitive science. The latter field, as represented in the editors’ useful and comprehensive introductory chapter, is concerned with representations (symbolic mental constructs of internal and external states of affairs) and the computational procedures that operate on such representations. These cognitive structures and processes provide the proximate explanation of human action. There are no contributions by cognitive scientists, an unfortunate absence highlighted by the fact that (not surprisingly) the contributors, who represent several strands of interactional analysis (conversation analysis [CA], discursive psychology, and ethnomethodology) are at best guarded in their assessment of the relevance of cognition for interactional studies. Jeff Coulter, the only contributor to reject cognitivism outright, favors instead a focus on the logical grammar of language. Other authors explore positions that do not reject cognitive constructs out of hand, but redefine or respecify them in ways that situate them within the interactional context. Anita Pomerantz allows the existence of phenomena “such as understandings, aims and concerns .|.|. [that may] influence the selection and employment of specific practices” (p. 96). She observes that while analysts focus on participants’ displayed aims and understandings in talk, participants may not always oblige, prompting her interest in recapturing such covert events by, as an aid to analysis, securing participants’ commentary stimulated by the reviewing of recordings of their interactions.

99.95 cloth ISBN: 0754642852.Conversation and Cognition, edited by MolderHedwig te and PotterJonathan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 284 pp.

The examination of change a t the personal and societal level raises several sorts of questions. What predisposes individuals to embark on change or “opens them” to the possibility of change? In a population of individuals predisposed to or open to change, what accounts for the fact that some persons change and others do not? Finally, among those who have changed or are changing, what is the process of that change? Although these are coordinate questions, answers to one of these questions are unlikely to provide answers to the others.