No finish line: How formalization of academic assessment can undermine clarity and increase secrecy

This article analyses how formalization of promotion criteria and procedures influences clarity and transparency of academic assessment. Based on a longitudinal, structural micro‐study of a new tenure track system in a Swedish higher education institution, we find that inequality was reproduced through the choice of explicitly gendered metrics across all areas of assessment (research, teaching and service). We further demonstrate how the formalization of a ‘good enough’ standard, in addition to a standard of ‘excellence’, reinforced the scope for interpretational flexibility among assessors. This combination of explicitly gendered metrics and dual standards of performance gave gatekeepers broader discretion in hiding or communicating failure, with gendering effects. Finally, we conclude that the choices made about how to formalize assessment work placed a small group of senior academics firmly behind closed doors, thus ensuring that gatekeepers’ discretion and power were entrenched rather than restricted by formalization.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.     

Mind the gap: financial London and the regional class pay gap

The hidden barriers, or ‘gender pay gap’, preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class‐origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey (N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this ‘class ceiling’ is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high‐status occupations who are from working‐class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the ‘engine room’ of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high‐status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality.     

Commodity Price Volatility,Vulnerability and Development

This article examines the meaning and consequences of the developing countries’ vulnerability to the volatility of commodity prices. It first considers how to define and measure a country’s shocks and exposure arising from commodity price volatility in order to identify structural as distinct from policy vulnerability. The main channels through which price vulnerability influences economic growth are then presented. Finally, the policy implications for development aid, its allocation and design, are outlined. It is found that, while structural vulnerability is bad for growth, a policy of openness contributes to resilience. With the right rules, aid could play an important growth‐enhancing and poverty‐reducing role if allocated at least partly on the basis of vulnerability.     

When a scratch becomes 'a scary story': the social construction of micro panics in center-based child care

This study analyzes the everyday world of center‐based child care and the climate of suspicion that permeates that world. Based on four and a half years of participant observation field research and thirty focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author examines the existence of ‘micro panics’ which occur in child care centers when deviant labels are attached to caregiving acts or activities. Drawing from traditional Moral Panic Theory, this paper demonstrates how the context of suspicion surrounding center based child care and the ‘micro panics’ that sustain it are generated historically, structurally, and interactionally. These phenomena, in other words, are in part, a historical artifact from the 1980s moral panics concerning day care abuse, an interactional product of the gendering of child care as ‘women's work’, and a phenomenological byproduct of the positioning of paid child care in the everyday lives of workers, children, and parents.     

“Those foreigners ruin everything here”: Interactional functions of ethnic labelling among pupils in the Netherlands

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of ethnic labelling practices by examining their interactional functions among secondary school pupils in Venlo, the Netherlands. Pupils with migration backgrounds often labelled themselves and others “Turk,” “Moroccan,” or “foreigner,” and labelled others “Dutch.” The paper highlights that ethnic labelling can be understood not only as identity construction, but also as interactional work. I build on membership categorization analysis (MCA), complemented by conversation analysis (CA), to analyse how pupils’ use of ethnic labels evoked an expert role which altered interactants’ power positions; and how, often, pupils engaged in jocular mockery with ethnic labels and in that way mitigated the effects of exclusionary and stigmatizing discourses about people with migration backgrounds. Finally, I argue that pupils’ labelling practices had locally occasioned meanings and functions, but that they ultimately reflect wider‐spread systems of categorization and marginalization of people with migration backgrounds in the Netherlands.     

Streetwise sales and the social order of city streets

This paper analyses how a Big Issue vendor approached passers-by and how they responded, how recognizable courses of social and economic activity were interactionally produced from initiation through to some conclusion. The paper recovers how the vendor's work was contextually embedded in the urban landscape, how it was constrained by, and actively shaped, the social order of the street. Drawing on video-audio recordings the paper contributes to a growing body of ethnographic and ethnomethodological research which has emphasized the embodied, contingent and interactional character of economic activity. By examining such materials, the paper is well positioned to describe how the vendor found his market on the street, social interventions that propelled passers-by into buying behaviour. The paper sheds light on now familiar encounters which occur millions of times each week in the UK and beyond.     

‘Taking advantage’ or fleeing persecution? Opposing accounts of asylum seeking

This paper discursively analyses advocates' explanations of asylum seeking in the 2001 Australian parliamentary debates. Previous research has mapped the negative discourses used to present asylum seekers as economic migrants ‘taking advantage’ of soft laws. This paper analyses how advocates oppose this rhetoric, re‐categorising asylum seekers as potential refugees, and establishing Australia as legally and morally responsible for providing protection. This paper examines three influences shaping advocates' arguments: opposing anti‐asylum seeker rhetoric; theories of the formation of anti‐asylum seeker public opinion; and the parliamentary and wider liberal democratic intellectual political framework. It then analyses four extracts taken from political speeches in the parliament, focussing on the rhetorical strategies used to counter a pervasive ‘culture of disbelief’ against asylum seekers.     

Laughter in medical interaction: From quantification to analysis,and back

This study discusses the use of quantification in analysing interactional practices, especially in conversation analytical work. The paper concentrates on laughter in medical interaction and starts from a quantitative point of view. West (1984) found certain statistical patterns of laughter in medical interaction: the patients laugh more than the doctors and most laughter is not reciprocated, i.e. the interactants mostly laugh alone. This statistical pattern is also found in Finnish data but it is approached again from the micro‐analytical point of view and some features of it are problematised through analysing in more detail: (1) the ways in which laughter is made relevant; (2) how laughter is responded to; and (3) the interactional functions laughter can have. The paper shows that Schegloff’s (1993) critique of quantitative interactional work is indeed called for, but nevertheless also presents advantages of quantification: the distribution of laughter between the participants in medical interaction turned out to be an interesting issue, one which is revealing of their different interactional roles and footings.     

The telling or the tale? Narratives and gender in adolescent friendship networks

The paper analyses the narratives told between adolescent friends, recorded in single-sex friendship groups with a fieldworker. It confirms the importance of narratives in the construction of friendship and, specifically, in the interpretation of past experience according to peer group norms. The link between the self and others is different in the narratives told by the male friends and the female friends. The boys establish a sense of group identity through the joint activity of ‘telling’, whilst for the girls the links are between individual selves, constructed through their tales. Key figures in the friendship groups take the lead in demonstrating how events are interpreted. The same speaker uses styles that could be labelled ‘competitive’ and styles that could be labelled ‘cooperative’, depending on the interactional context.     

Practising Gender When Networking: The Case of University–Industry Innovation Projects

This paper gains insight into the role of gender in interpersonal networks, which is largely neglected in research on networking. We do so by exploring the concept of ‘practising gender’, the spatial‐temporal accomplishment of gender practices, when people build, maintain and exit social networks. The paper is based on a study of male‐dominated technological collaboration projects between universities and industry. Our analysis of observations of project meetings and interviews with project participants demonstrates how people in real time and space draw from culturally available gender practices in their networking with each other. This practising of gender was found to be done largely unreflexively, sometimes through humour, within allegedly trivial activities such as pouring coffee and socializing as well as in critical activities such as composing the network. The exploration of the practising of gender in relation to culturally available gender practices enabled us to examine how those gender practices are reproduced, stretched or challenged when people network. We show how focussing on the dynamic side of gender allows us to get better insight into how gender inequalities in networks are reproduced or countered on the micro‐interactional level.     

On the relevance and accountability of dialect: Conversation analysis and dialect contact

The present study seeks to illustrate how the theory and method of conversation analysis (CA) can be used to begin to unpack the notion of ‘contact’ in contact linguistics research. After reviewing language and dialect contact as they are traditionally conceptualized, we describe an additional set of questions inspired by CA's fundamental concern with relevance and accountability. It is argued that, by analyzing the structure and design of turn‐by‐turn talk in situations of dialect contact, we are able to investigate how co‐participants themselves go about carving out the boundaries of their respective dialects, how they can link those dialects to social identities, and how those social identities can become ‘procedurally consequential’ for the design of subsequent talk between the interlocutors. It is ultimately hypothesized that relevance and accountability at the micro‐interactional level may provide new insight into the moment‐by‐moment mechanisms that bring about the comparatively more macro‐level outcomes of dialect contact (e.g. leveling, koineization, etc.) that have been previously identified in contact linguistics research.     

Copula variation in Asturian Spanish and the multidimensionality of stancetaking in interaction

In this study, I analyze the relationship between stance, style and sociolinguistic variation in a situation of language contact between Asturian and Spanish in the urban areas of Asturias (Spain). Using different types of data, and a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods, I explore the interactional functions of Asturian ‘ye’ (‘he/she/it is’), a salient marker of Asturian identity, and how the stances indexed by this form – low epistemic commitment, lack of seriousness and social solidarity – are connected to more enduring social identities. In the analysis, I provide a possible operationalization of stances that takes into consideration the multidimensionality of the stancetaking process. I also show how examining stance can provide a tool to move beyond monolithic representations of social meaning, and dichotomous distinctions between standard and non‐standard variants.     

Negotiating an agentive identity in a British lifestyle migration context: A narrative positioning analysis

This paper presents an analysis of agency and positioning in a context of British migration in the Ariège département of south‐west France. A narrative positioning framework is used to explore the relationship between local discursive positioning and broader social obligations, specifically by integrating data from an online forum for British residents with an interview carried out with two forum users. Although there is thematic coherence across the datasets, particularly in relation to the social obligation to be the ‘right kind’ of migrant, the two speakers in the joint interview represent their actions using conflicting approaches. The analysis of agentive positioning shows the strategic use of both agentive and inagentive language where the narrated actions did not align with those of the ‘right kind’ of migrant constructed by forum members. The study shows how attempts at positive self‐representation can reflect awareness of the ideological context but can nevertheless be interpreted in very different ways. The paper concludes that we should not restrict ourselves to seeking recurrent and stable patterns when exploring indexical links between micro contexts and wider social reality, particularly when the interactional context is overshadowed by a broader moral landscape.     

Does Economic Crisis Always Harm International Migrants? Longitudinal Evidence from Ecuadorians in Barcelona

Current research on the impacts of the 2007 global economic crisis on international migration takes two different positions. Some studies emphasize the negative impacts while others are more positive. This article argues that these two positions offer simplistic interpretations which fail to take account of the complex micro‐level realities that determine migrant experiences. The article discusses how a small group of migrants from Guayaquil, Ecuador, accumulate and consolidate a complex portfolio of assets both before and during the economic crisis in Spain. Conceptualized in terms of an asset accumulation framework, and based on micro‐level longitudinal trend data, rather than the more generally used macro‐level snapshots or anecdotal evidence, the study highlights the fact that the formalization of legal status or citizenship is a crucial pre‐condition, which sets in motion a ‘virtuous’ cycle of consolidation of an interrelated portfolio of assets, regardless of the wider macro‐economic environment. Even if this turns into a ‘vicious’ cycle, for those losing jobs, to date Spanish welfare benefits have acted as a social protection mechanism.     

The Processes of Social Construction in Talk

Sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to the idea that many aspects of human life are socially constructed. However, there has been far less attention to the concrete interactional processes by which this construction occurs. In particular, scholars have neglected how consensual meaning is constructed in verbal interaction. This article outlines nine generic construction tools used in everyday talk, based on a review and synthesis of past work. These tools fall into three general categories: building blocks, linking devices, and finishing devices. The authors argue that scholars must pay greater attention to the interactional nature of social construction, and discuss three interactional processes that are central to the social construction of meaning in talk: challenge, support, and non‐response. The article presents concrete illustrations of these processes using examples from focus group discussions about gender and violence. These micro‐interactional processes often reproduce, sometimes modify, and (more rarely) resist larger institutions and structures, and thus are indispensable to understanding social life.