Ian Hutchby

Technologies, Texts and Affordances

In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.

Power in discourse: The case of arguments on a British talk radio show

This article presents an approach to exploring the ways in which power functions in institutional discourse. The principal aim of the article is to show how the play of power in discourse can be analysed from the fundamentally local, sequential perspective of conversation analysis. I argue that power is best seen as a shifting distribution of resources which enable some participants locally to achieve interactional effects not available to others. Using calls to a British talk radio show as a case study, I show how these resources are linked to the interactional and technological organization of participation in the setting.

Active Listening: Formulations and the Elicitation of Feelings-Talk in Child Counselling

This article presents an analysis of the talk of child counsellors in interaction with young children (4-12 years). The data consist of recordings of counselling sessions offered to children whose parents are in the process of separation or divorce. The ostensible aim of the service was to provide normalizing interventions rather than dealing with clinical referrals. The focus of the article is on the practice of what is known in counselling psychology as active listening. This refers to the ways in which counsellors seek to show responsivity to what the child is saying. Based on analysis of naturally occurring child counselling talk, this article shows how the conversational practice of formulation is utilized to achieve some of the complex interactional work involved in active listening.

Aspects of recipient design in expert advice‐giving on call‐in radio

This article analyzes the management of expertise in advice‐giving in a public context: calls to a radio advice line. Instead of being a two‐way dialogue between advice‐seeker and advice‐giver, advice talk on call‐in radio has a more complex communicative framework in which four parties are involved: the caller (advice‐seeker), the expert (advice‐giver), the studio host (professional broadcaster), and the overhearing audience. This article analyzes the ways in which the experts talk handles the tension between the personal and the public dimensions of advice‐giving in such a communicative setup. By looking at systematic features of the recipient design of responses to advice‐seeking questions, it is shown how advice talk on call‐in radio deals with this private‐public tension by being constructed to be simultaneously relevant to a specific (private) recipient—the caller—and to a nonspecific (public) recipient—the various potential constituencies of the overhearing audience.

Resisting the incitement to talk in child counselling: aspects of the utterance `I don't know'

Data from naturally occurring child counselling sessions are used to explore how counsellors seek to elicit therapeutically relevant talk in the face of resistance, or non-cooperation, from children. Focusing on a case in which a 6-year-old child persistently avoids collaborating in the kind of counselling talk that the counsellor is evidently aiming to produce, the analysis focuses both on the childs resistance strategies and on the counsellors techniques for attempting to combat resistance and work towards a therapeutically relevant outcome. The article makes a contribution both to our understanding of the social and communicative competencies of children, especially in institutional settings, and to our understanding of the practices, discursive techniques and competencies of child counsellors.

Aspects of the sequential organization of mobile phone conversation

This article presents an investigation of the organization and structures of talk-in-interaction over mobile phone. The analysis is based upon naturally occurring data consisting of a corpus of calls recorded during everyday activities of a young adult. Using these data we reveal a range of sequential phenomena associated with mobile phone usage. Established conversation analytic work on landline telephone conversation is used in order to build a comparative analysis of how actions such as openings, caller–called identity management, and topic introduction are accomplished in mobile vs landline telephone conversation. We first show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk. Subsequently, focusing on those modifications that are identifiable in our data, we show how these are related to aspects of the communicative affordances of mobile phones, orientations to which are observable in the talk of participants in mobile phone conversation.

Affordances and the Analysis of Technologically Mediated Interaction: A Response to Brian Rappert

rian Rappert (2003) takes me to task on a number of grounds in my discussion of the potential of ‘affordances’ as a conceptual resource in the analysis of social interaction involving technology. These include his claims (a) that my article ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’ (Hutchby, 2001a) and the book Conversation and Technology (Hutchby, 2001b), to which Rappert also addresses many of his remarks,1 fail adequately to acknowledge that others in the sociology of technology have developed similar ‘third’ positions between determinism and constructivism, some of them using the concept of affordances itself; (b) that I unfairly caricature the ‘post-essentialist’ approach exemplified in the work of Grint and Woolgar (1997); and (c) that when it comes down to the actual analysis of the role of technological artefacts in social life, the concept of affordances does not in fact offer the kind of fruitful line of inquiry that I suggest it does. Within the space allotted to me by the Editors, it is impossible for me to respond in detail to each and every one of Rappert’s claims, and to each and every one of his characterizations of my argument. I will try, however, to deal with what I believe are the key points at issue between us. I hope along the way to offer some clarification as to what I was trying to get at in my original article, including both the sociological significance of that argument and its limits of application. Let me begin, for the sake of establishing the grounds upon which debate may meaningfully take place, by briefly recapitulating the key points at stake in ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’. This is important because Rappert often takes me to task for failing to address issues which he takes it should be addressed, but which are in fact of a different order to the kinds of questions that I am arguing need to be addressed. In that article I proposed that the

Participants' orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction

Abstract This paper demonstrates how impoliteness is viewed from the perspective of conversation analysis. Offering an alternative to sociolinguistic policies of establishing the linguistic features that characterize impolite speech acts, it explores the ways that members themselves orient to actions in interaction as impolite, i.e., “rude” and/or “insulting”. The analysis draws on data from a range of settings including ordinary conversation, small claims courts, counselling sessions and broadcast talk to examine how, in such interactional environments, insults or episodes of rudeness may be produced, reported and responded to.

Non-neutrality and argument in the hybrid political interview:

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it.

Children's participation and the familial moral order in family therapy

This article examines discourse practices surrounding children’s participation, non-participation, and the ‘moral order’ of the family in the setting of family therapy consultations. The analysis focuses on two central issues. First, the relationship between therapists’ questions, the speaker selection techniques built into those questions, and the responses produced by family members. Second, the relationship between turn-taking and the linguistic features of person deixis in disputes that emerge around children’s orientation to implicit accusations in the talk of other participants about them. The findings reveal how a familial ‘moral order’ is often at the root of how children’s competence as participants is managed by the parents, the therapist, and the children themselves.