Melvin Pollner: A View from the Suburbs

This paper considers the relationship between Melvin Pollner’s sociology of mundane reasoning and conversation analysis. We suggest, first, that Pollner’s revolutionary view of the role of accounts in everyday life provides a basic framework for understanding how norms of conversational organization are sustained across time periods ranging from the evanescent moment to the longue durée of historical time. Second, we argue his work on conflict and reality disjunctures is important for the light it sheds on conversational processes concerned with the avoidance and/or management of disagreement. Although Pollner was not personally engaged with conversation analysis, his theorizing is nonetheless of great significance in understanding some of its basic preoccupations.     

Factors affecting social presence and word-of-mouth in corporate social responsibility communication: Tone of voice,message framing,and online medium type

To understand how tone of voice, message framing, and type of online media affect public perceptions and reactions to an organization in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, this study conducted a 2 (tone of voice: human voice vs. organizational voice) x 2 (message framing: gain-focused vs. loss-focused) x 2 (online media: Facebook vs. organizational blog) online experiment (N?=?394). Conversational human voice and gain-focused framing significantly influence the social presence of the organization and publics’ positive word-of-mouth intention. Publics’ intention to generate positive word-of-mouth was highest when the organization used conversational human voice with gain-focused message and conveyed the message on its Facebook page.     

Spiritual but not religious seek unrestricted connection to selves,others, and earth: Formative research on the explosive growth of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization

In the last half century, we have observed an explosive growth in individuals who identify as spiritual but not religious. Today, over one in four U.S. adults fall into this category. This phenomenon is an influential component of our modern and changing society, as spiritual beliefs are associated with health, well-being, goals, feelings, and attitudes. In this formative research study, we apply the public relations’ approach of Sense-Making of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization to explore how these individuals define themselves, how their beliefs influence their behaviors (such as political, environmental, communal) and how they feel they are perceived by those around them. Amongst others, our main findings reveal that the spiritual but not religious have disparate specific beliefs and often struggle or resist articulating who they are, yet more broadly share a common belief in connection to others, the natural environment, and one’s self. The majority emphasize acceptance, tolerance, compassion, and the importance of each individual embracing their own spiritual positions. The participants report feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, or ignored by others and media, and that their behaviors (perspective on the world, actions, political ideologies, etc) are influenced by their spiritual beliefs.     

Pragmatics-Language,Meaning & Communication——Take an example of conversational implicature and show how they might be derived,discussing any problems that arise

It is quite normal that in our daily communication,people sometimes do not produce utterances that containing their real meaning for various reasons,that is to say they implicate something by saying something else.Grandy and Warner(2006)suggest that people experience implicatures all of the time in their life and are seldom aware of it.Therefore,it is interesting to investigate the implicature of people’s utterances.People often tend to simply use‘implicature’to refer to the notion‘conversational implicature’for a shorthand,but actually they cannot be treated as the exactly same notion.Horn(2004)points out"Implicature is component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what is said"Horn’s notion of implicature is close to the notion that Grice calls conversational implicature.Grice(1975)classified implicature into conventional implicature and nonconventional implicature and treated the conversational implicature to a subclass of the nonconventional implicature,which means the implicature is not part of the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered but greatly depends on the particular conversational context.     

Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self,senses and society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.     

Coming Across: Family Therapy in Australia and New Zealand*

In this Keynote Address I ask where family therapy comes from in Australia and New Zealand, as a way of seeing where it might go. I look at our histories, cultures and traditions and how they are connected. What happened to the old certainties of our field, and where do we take a stand today? How can we come across with courage, imagination and a sense of community? How can we maintain those impulses to justice and to remembering that psychotherapy stands for at its best?     

Eating Disorders and Recovery: Lessons from Overeaters Anonymous

The experience of compulsive eating and recovery, as perceived by women members of the self-help organization Overeaters Anonymous (OA), was qualitatively studied by examining the worldview transformation of the members. A worldview transformation was found in four domains: (a) experience of self; (b) Universal Order/God; (c) relationships with others; (d) perception of the problem. Understanding the personal experience of worldview transformation of OA members may be adapted to the clinical setting for eating disorders. Guidelines for such an adaptation are proposed.     

Exposure to sided media coverage of an organization,subsequent group conversations,and public relations outcomes

We experimentally found a negative effect of subsequent group conversations after media exposure on the audience's attitudes toward the covered organization, while we found sided media exposure to predict both attitudes and behavioral intentions relevant to the covered organization. The extent of conversational engagement immediately following media exposure also helped predict future word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions. These results highlight the roles of interpersonal interactions after media exposure to explain and predict public relations outcomes.     

Conversational evidence in therapeutic dialogue

Family therapists' participation in therapeutic dialogue with clients is typically informed by evidence of how such dialogue is developing. In this article, we propose that conversational evidence, the kind that can be empirically analyzed using discourse analyses, be considered a contribution to widening psychotherapy's evidence base. After some preliminaries about what we mean by conversational evidence, we provide a genealogy of evaluative practice in psychotherapy, and examine qualitative evaluation methods for their theoretical compatibilities with social constructionist approaches to family therapy. We then move on to examine the notion of accomplishment in therapeutic dialogue given how such accomplishments can be evaluated using conversation analysis. We conclude by considering a number of research and pedagogical implications we associate with conversational evidence.     

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).     

Small Disagreements: Character Contests and Working Consensus in Informal Talk

This article is an analysis of a single conversational episode. A disagreement about the significance of a shared event between two participants in a conversation leads to what Goffman calls a character contest. It is resolved by three others present to achieve a new working consensus. The analysis is about character contests and examines face threat, accounts, and working consensus as constituents of the interaction order which operates to maintain face and self presentation. Gender and role are part of the institutional context of this dispute. They provide ideological resources which contribute first to the conflict and later to a new working consensus. The analysis explores how the interactional and institutional orders are intertwined in informal talk.     

Self and other: The importance of social interaction and social relationships in shaping the experience of early-stage Alzheimer's disease

Various factors influence how individuals experience illness. Especially important, however, is the reaction of others whose response shapes the meaning of the illness for the person who is ill, and the impact it will have on her or his sense of self. Adopting a symbolic interactionist perspective, and drawing on data obtained from in-depth interviews conducted with nine individuals living with early-stage Alzheimer's disease, this paper examines how others’ reactions to and treatment of persons living with the condition can influence how they experience dementia. The findings reveal that the majority of the participants did not believe others’ treatment of them had substantially changed, nor did most express the level of concern about the possible negative response of others reported in other studies. Within their relationships and social interactions participants received the essential support, cooperation, and encouragement that enabled them to create meaning in life and sustain identity.     

Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency

In conversation, actors face constraints on when they can speak, whom they can address, what they can say, and what they can safely expect from others by way of cooperation. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their idiosyncratic interests and objectives, success at which constitutes conversational agency. In principle, agency is made possible by the "looseness" of conversational constraints. This does not create a clear path for the advancement of personal ends, however, since options are always limited by the context, and success is always contingent upon the cooperation of others. Ultimately, the most agentic people are those who readily exploit imperfect options though this means abandoning the inflexible pursuit of pre-conceived objectives.     

Clarifying question meaning in a household telephone survey

This study contrasts two interviewing techniques that reflectdifferent tacit assumptions about communication. In one, strictlystandardized interviewing, interviewers leave the interpretationof questions up to respondents. In the other, conversationalinterviewing, interviewers say whatever it takes to make surethat questions are interpreted uniformly and as intended. Respondentsfrom a national sample were interviewed twice. Each time theywere asked the same factual questions from ongoing governmentsurveys, five about housing and five about recent purchases.The first interview was strictly standardized; the second wasstandardized for half the respondents and conversational forthe others. Respondents in a second conversational interviewanswered differently than in the first interview more often,and for reasons that conformed more closely to official definitions,than respondents in a second standardized interview. This suggeststhat conversational interviewing improved comprehension, althoughit also lengthened interviews. We conclude that respondentsin a national sample may misinterpret certain questions frequentlyenough to compromise data quality and that such misunderstandingscannot easily be eliminated by pretesting and rewording questionsalone. More standardized comprehension may require less standardizedinterviewer behavior.     

The Importance of Authenticity for Self and Society

The transition from industrial to postindustrial society and from modern to postmodern culture has led to increased interest in authenticity. Such interest is widespread not only among those studying changes in social structure and culture but also among those who adhere to the social psychological tenet that self reflects society, and society, the self. In this article, I specify how issues of authenticity have become a pervasive part of our culture, our institutions, and our individual selves. Building on both Rosenberg and Turner, I conceptualize authenticity in terms of a commitment to self-values. The relevance of this conceptualization is illustrated, first by demonstrating its implications for identity theory and second through its implicit use by others writing about the contemporary experience of being oneself. I conclude with a discussion of how this approach to authenticity may be used by social scientists to better conceptualize self in a way that explicitly incorporates the cultural implications of today's postindustrial society.     

Recognizing difference: in/visibility in the everyday life of individuals with facial limb absence

People who lack part(s) of their face have a visibly different appearance both due to their facial difference itself and the medical aids that they use to cover it (e.g. prostheses, bandages). In this article, we draw on interviews with affected individuals in order to investigate how visible difference features in their everyday experience. The visibility of their facial difference, we show, comes into play as they interact with various others in the contexts of their daily life. However, respondents’ visibility manifests in different ways, depending on whether they cover or uncover their facial difference. These different modes of visibility make for distinct ‘visibility experiences’, as participants meet others who notice – or fail to notice – their atypical appearance. By exploring these experiences, our article provides insights into the role of visibility in interviewees’ everyday life, and demonstrates how they actively negotiate their social recognition within encounters with various others.     

Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.     

Managing metaphorically

While the relevance of metaphor to management and organizational analysis is now accepted in theory, if not by managers themselves, the way metaphor organizes us is not as well understood. This is because accounts of metaphor and organization neglect the embodied working of metaphor and of language in general. Metaphor works by enacting the relational quality of the world within our embodied experience. A metaphoric capacity is a capacity for organization. Poets develop this capacity through language; a good manager develops it through organization of themselves, other people and the material world. Such managing requires an openness to experience that allows organization to develop within a situation, rather than being imposed from outside or on top of it.     

Super PACs and Strong Relationships: The Impact of Digital Interaction on the Political Organization–Public Relationship

Contributing to the development of digital political public relations scholarship, this study examines the political organization–public relationship cultivated via social media. Using Twitter as a vehicle, this posttest-only experimental design looked at whether interaction with a political organization facilitated a relationship. Furthermore, the study examined whether that relationship might manifest into political support. Results indicate active engagement (tweeting at an organization), even for a short term, increases the sense that there is a real conversational exchange, enhancing the organization–public relationship. Internal political disposition such as political cynicism, political information efficacy, or strength of ideology in some cases can help predict organization–public relationship.