Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

Gendering the Eye of the Norm: Exploring Gendered Concertive Control Processes in Two Self‐Managing Teams

This article is the result of an ethnographic research project exploring the workplace interactions of two self‐managed teams of recruitment consultants. I use data from participant observation and recorded interviews to show the gendered nature of what Barker terms concertive control: the social processes by which team members regulate each others' conduct in line with negotiated team values. My analysis examines how team members negotiate core team values, translate these into specific actions and regulate these actions through concertive control interactions. I then set out three ways in which gender acts as a resource for these concertive control processes. These are: team members' assumptions about men's and women's relative skills and capacities, the ‘tough’ masculinity of the haulage industry in which one of the teams operates and the regulation of performances of heterosexuality during customer interactions. Building on research by others, I show gender to be not only embedded in the values and managerial style associated with teamwork but also integrated into the collaborative process of team‐working itself. I emphasize that social categories like gender become resources in the regulation of conduct at work and can reify hierarchies even in so‐called participative practices like self‐managed teamwork.     

The uses of stance in media production: A study in embodied sociolinguistics

While many conversation analysts and scholars in related fields have used video recordings to study interaction, this study is one of a small but growing number that investigates video recordings of the joint activities of media professionals working with, and on, video. It examines practices of media production that are, in their involvement with the visual and verbal qualities of video, both beyond talk and deeply shaped by talk. The article draws upon video recordings of the making of a feature‐length documentary. In particular, it analyses a complex course of action where an editing team are reviewing their interview of the subject of the documentary, their footage being intercut with existing reality TV footage of that same interviewee. The central contributions that the article makes are, firstly, to the sociolinguistics of mediatisation, through the identification of the workplace concerns of the members of the editing team; secondly, showing how editing is accomplished, moment by moment, through the use of particular forms of embodied action; and, finally, how the media themselves feature in the ordering of action. While this is professional work, it sheds light on the video‐mediated practices in contemporary culture, especially those found in social media where video makers carefully consider their editing of the perspective toward themselves and others.     

Children's talk and social competence

This article reviews research on the organisation of children's talk. It outlines the range of disciplinary concerns that contribute to the study of children's talk, and focuses on a range of work which foregrounds linkages between children's talk, social interaction and wider social processes. Paying particular attention to studies in conversation analysis, the emphasis is on how talk in peer‐group and in child‐adult interaction contributes to various theoretical and practical interests in children and society.     

Visual Narrative and Temporal Relevance: Segueing Instant Replay into Live Broadcast TV

Professional production of live TV combines real‐time and recorded video into a single broadcast stream. In “live” TV, non‐live “instant replay” footage can help viewers to make sense of what has just happened. This article shows how multi‐person TV production teams assemble timely and relevant instant replays that can be seamlessly combined with real‐time footage during live broadcasts. Detailed interaction analysis demonstrates how this work is dependent on coordinated practices, and how team members achieve this by orienting to narrative concerns across multiple temporalities to produce topically useful instant replays, displaying clip relevance, and help segueing transitions between the ongoing action and replay. We conclude by examining the interrelationships between the sequential flow of visual content, the role of talk in mediating time‐shifted visual alignments, and how members make their work visible and accountable to one another and to their intended audience.     

Semiosis,interaction and ethnicity in urban Java1

This paper teases out the interdiscursive relations between local and perduring signs of personhood and their recontextualization in situated talk. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence of the utility of incorporating ethnography, linguistic anthropological work on semiotics and work on face‐to‐face interaction. My empirical focus is on two consecutive men's meetings that occurred in an urban Indonesian milieu. In particular, I draw upon work on semiotic register formation and processes of social identification to flesh out how signs from different temporal‐spatial scales figure in the social identification of a non‐present neighbor as deviant and Chinese. By taking an interactional view I also attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship on such inter‐ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto primarily been historical in nature.     

Navigation, interaction and bridge team work

During the course of this paper we explore the interaction of seafarers engaged in navigation on the bridge of a merchant ship. More specifically we examine how ‘bridge teams’ utilise a range of practical conversational methods and devices in carrying out the days work within a context where temporal and spatial considerations are paramount. Utilising the principles of ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis we analyse transcribed materials gathered from a working bridge. The business of bridge team‐work is the generation of a mutual frame of navigational perspective and decision making. A central aspect of this interactional accomplishment is a confirmatory form of talk that is utilised in order to avoid confusion and maritime disaster. The paper also explores empirical examples of interaction and identifies the way in which bridge team‐work is accomplished, organised and sustained. The paper suggests how consideration of these features may inform further enquiry and modify training practice.     

Belonging to the library: humanising the space for social work education

Abstract

This article describes the running of four Living Libraries on a UK postgraduate social work course. A Living Library is a metaphoric remodelling of a conventional library where people, as authors of their experiences, provide specialist knowledge based on authorial areas of expertise. In the Living Libraries discussed here, ‘Living Books’ carried stories of social work—their narratives were of lived experiences as people using social care services; as carers in personal relationships with others who use social care services; or, as social work practitioners. The focus of this article is on those Living Libraries involving the participation of the first two of these groups. Drawing on social psychology, phenomenology and human geography, we propose that a Living Library can act as a connective space within social work education by engendering a discursive forum where all participants—people with experiences of services, students, practitioners and social work educators—are given both the freedom and obligation to talk openly about their differential experiences, fears and hopes for social work. Through this process, opportunities are created to consider how improvements that meet all stakeholders’ interests may be achieved.     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

The Psychiatrist's Role in Implementing an Open Dialogue Model of Care

The Open Dialogue approach is a family‐oriented early intervention model for mental health problems developed in the health district of Western Lapland, Finland. Since the 1990s the psychiatric service system in Western Lapland Health Care District has been organised according to Open Dialogue principles and applied to the treatment of any mental health concerns. The Open Dialogue approach considers the client and their family as active participants rather than as objects of treatment in its planning and implementation with a psychotherapeutic focus. In daily work, the responsibility for the treatment process is shared with the case‐specific team. The model of care requires a dialogical orientation from all staff members, psychiatrists included, to interact with the team and the client's network. In this article I describe the role of the psychiatrist in implementing an Open Dialogue model of care in psychiatric services leaning on my experiences of clinical work in the adolescent psychiatric team in Western Lapland.     

“Scissors,Please”: The Practical Accomplishment of Surgical Work in the Operating Theater

The focus of this article is on professional activity in the operating theater. We explore how surgeons and nurses organize their activities, how social interaction is used to help structure and define situations, and how differentials in knowledge are constructed and oriented to. We utilize some ideas and concepts from symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis to analyze small clips of audio‐ and video‐recorded interaction. Focusing on how surgeons and nurses request, provide, and apply surgical instruments, the analysis shows how surgical work is accomplished through talk and bodily conduct. We conclude that, examined in detail, the social interaction between surgeons and nurses is analytically inseparable from the “technical” demands of their work.     

COMMENTARY (12 YEARS ON) ON ‘THE CONTRIBUTION OF OBSERVATION TRAINING TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOCIAL WORK’ BY JUDITH TROWELL AND GILLIAN MILES

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving ‘Sally’ and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a ‘case experience’.

Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner‐resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems.     

The art and science of teamwork: enacting a transdisciplinary approach in work rehabilitation

Teamwork, collaboration and interprofessional care are becoming the new standard in health care, and service delivery in work practice is no exception. Most rehabilitation professionals believe that they intuitively know how to work collaboratively with others such as workers, employers, insurers and other professionals. However, little information is available that can assist rehabilitation professionals in enacting authentic transdisciplinary approaches in work practice contexts. A qualitative study was designed using a grounded theory approach, comprised of observations and interviews, to understand the social processes among team members in enacting a transdisciplinary approach in a work rehabilitation clinic. Findings suggest that team members consciously attended to a team approach through nurturing consensus, nurturing professional synergy, and nurturing a learning culture. These processes enabled this team to work in concert with clients who had chronic disabilities in achieving solution focused goals for returning to work and improving functioning. Implications for achieving greater collaborative synergies among stakeholders in return to work settings and in the training of new rehabilitation professionals are explored.     

Talk About Embarrassment: Exploring the Taboo-Repression-Denial Hypothesis

Theory and research suggest that, while embarrassment may be intrinsic to social interaction, its expression is C. taboo. Embarrassment is seen as reflecting social incompetence. As such, members make routine attempts to repress embarrassment in the self and to deny embarrassment to self and others. I call this the taboo–repression–denial hypothesis. However, despite attempts at repression and denial, members reveal embarrassment in a variety of ways, including verbally, paralinguistically/vocally, and facially/bodily. This paper is an initial investigation of emotion denial in verbal discourse. Through an analysis of embarrassment talk and non-embarrassment talk, I discover six features of the verbal context of references to embarrassment which aid in the disguise and denial of feeling: (1) verbal mitigation; (2) a link between references to embarrassment and mitigation; (3) verbal projection; (4) a link between use of “ya know”, embarrassment references, and mitigation; (5) a link between use of “I don't know”, embarrassment references, and mitigation; and (6) a link between references to embarrassment and laughter. Findings indicate verbal and nonverbal methods of emotion denial, and provide initial support for the taboo–repression–denial hypothesis.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

Rendering sexism invisible in workplace narratives. A narrative analysis of female entrepreneurs’ stories of not being talked to by men

Entrepreneurism is widely regarded as being one way in which women can sidestep the sexism of male‐dominated institutionalized work environments and enter into a world in which men and women operate on a level playing field. Yet, in a corpus of stories of female entrepreneurs’ experiences, we noted that being ignored by men was a constant theme. Taking a social constructionist and narrative approach to identity, we analyse the gendered identity work that female entrepreneurs do in these stories and we seek to explicate the process through which female entrepreneurs do not evaluate being ignored by men as sexism‐in‐action. Using positioning theory as an analytical tool, we analyse these stories at three different levels: the here‐and‐now interaction between interviewer and storyteller; the there‐and‐then identity work of the characters in the storyworld; and the wider societal Discourses that the storytellers enact, and which are enacted by such identity work. Findings indicate that despite making gendered difference, inferiority and lack of agency relevant, the stories are not evaluated as sexism‐in‐action because the female entrepreneurs enact a postfeminist and neoliberal Discourse of freedom, autonomy and choice, rather than a feminist Discourse of discrimination and sexism.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Status differences in cross-functional teams: effects on individual member participation, job satisfaction, and intent to quit

Cross-functional teams (CFTs) play an increasingly important role in health care. However, despite their potential, CFTs often fail to function effectively. This paper contributes to the literature in medical sociology by examining how the steep and well-defined hierarchy characteristic of the health occupations proves to be dysfunctional in the CFT setting. Previous research has shown that status differences among members of work teams negatively affect their functioning. Yet the specific mechanisms that connect variations in status to poor team functioning remain unclear. We hypothesize that it is the suppression of participation among low status team members that leads to poor CFT functioning. Our theoretical model integrates status characteristics theory and the value attainment theory of job satisfaction to link team members' statuses to participation in team decision-making and, ultimately, to their attitudes about the job. We use causal modeling to test our hypotheses. Our results indicate that relationships between health professionals defined in broader social contexts affect status, roles, and functions within CFTs, and these, in turn, affect the team's interpersonal processes. We suggest changes in organizational structure and in team leadership styles that might make CFTs more effective.     

Multiple Perspectives of Teams’ Experiences of a New Zealand Wraparound Process

Since it was first introduced in the 1980s, Wraparound has been defined as ‘a philosophy,’ ‘an approach,’ and ‘a service’ which is designed to work with youth and families with high and complex needs. Wraparound is most commonly understood as an intensive, individualised care planning process. It aims to achieve positive outcomes through a structured, creative, and individualised team planning process, which results in effective and more relevant plans for the youth and family. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of Wraparound facilitators, caregivers, youths, and team members to gain a multi‐perspective insight into the process. Sixteen families and Wraparound teams participated in the study which resulted in 56 semi‐structured interviews being conducted involving 16 Wraparound facilitators (some facilitators were interviewed more than once because they served multiple families who participated in the study), 16 caregivers, eight youth, and 16 team members (one person from the team, i.e., teacher, social worker, or mentor). Thematic analysis gave seven themes organised into three broad domains: (1) key elements of the Wraparound process including the Wraparound facilitator, Wraparound's philosophies and principles, and the supportive nature of the process; (2) the outcomes achieved throughout the process including family empowerment and hope, improved family dynamics and relationships as well as individual parent and youth change; and (3) the challenges and feedback respondents identified through the process, which included personal and systemic challenges, improved transition, and continuity of care, role clarity, and accessibility of the service. Overall, the findings from this study support Wraparound as an effective process for youth and their families, identify the importance of key aspects of the process, and suggest some improvements to increase the efficacy of and accessibility to the process.