Ilkka Arminen

Mobile phone call openings: tailoring answers to personalized summonses

Conversation analytical (CA) methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of these changes reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology.

Respecifying Mediated Interaction

ABSTRACT In this introduction to the special issue on “Orders of Interaction in Mediated Settings,” we explore the fundamentals of an ethnomethodological/conversation analytical perspective on mediated social interaction. We take an exchange to qualify as “mediated” when the people involved orient to the affordances that the mediating channel (phone, e-mail, videolink, and so on) offers. After specifying what we mean by this sense of mediation, and comparing it to others, we offer an overview of recent developments in the study of mediated practices. We argue that the trajectory is, and should be, away from the “deficiency” perspective previously common in the literature, and we suggest some guidelines to avoid commonsensical pitfalls in studying mediated settings.

Review Essay : Conversation Analysis: A Quest for Order in Social Interaction and Language Use: Paul ten Have: Doing Conversation Analysis - A Practical Guide. (London: Sage, 1999). Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt: Conversation Analysis. Principles, Practices and Applications. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). David Silverman: Harvey Sacks - Social Science and Conversation Analysis. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)

a strictly formal analysis of conversation makes it a worthy human science (ten Have 1999:196-197). That is, a conversation cannot be represented with a closed set of formal rules that would allow an infallible prediction of the next possible conversational move, or the set of next possible moves. Instead, every next conversational move renews our understanding of the prior move, so that each turn at talk orients to a preceding context, but also recreates the context anew (Heritage 1984:242). Therefore,

Environmentally coupled repairs and remedies in the airline cockpit: Repair practices of talk and action in interaction

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment.

An Airline Checklist Use as a Sociomaterial Practice

Checklists form the basis of procedural standardization in the airline cockpit, with the help of which safety-critical measures become a routine part of flight crew task management. In this paper, we discuss the normal checklist use and its problems as a socio-material practice. We show how routine problems in checklist use are resolved, and point out how procedural and interactive backups function in action, thereby securing flight safety. We also examine the nature of problems in the checklist use that occur within the performance of individual checklists, within the order between checklists, and within the order between the checklist performance and other flight task activities. The problem types include premature, absent and excessive actions. The problems within checklists reveal troubles in the cognitive ergonomics of task design and logics of checklist use. The order problems between checklists appear as cognitive mis-performances, though cognitive overloading may have organizational grounds.

Active and latent social groups and their interactional expertise

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.