Case presentations have totemic significance in medical sociology, analysed as emblematic of medi... more Case presentations have totemic significance in medical sociology, analysed as emblematic of medical professional culture and discourse. This article makes a case for conceptualising these exchanges in terms of Mauss' account of gift giving, which theorises sociality in terms of obligations voluntarily incurred and reciprocated and the performative recognition of hierarchy. This conception is an alternative to two others in existing literature: the case presentation as an instance of pedagogically-oriented supervision and legitimate peripheral participation; and as representative of professional discourse more generally. We make our case for re-framing the case presentation in relation to video and audio data generated within a study of the organization of work in an Accident and Emergency hospital department in the UK. We conclude that Mauss' concept of community allows the work of junior doctors to be understood in terms of collegiality in a hierarchically-organised profession, by contrast to a defective version of the work of their superiors or the manifestation of singular professional discourse.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2017
The paper discusses how visual research methods that draw on ethnomethodology and conversation an... more The paper discusses how visual research methods that draw on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can help sociologists to reveal how optometrists' assess the clarity of their clients' distance vision. It argues that the detailed analysis of video-recorded interactions in optometric consultation rooms can help reveal the practical organization of the 'routine' work through which optometrists examine and assess their clients' sight. Save for the contribution of the paper to methodological discussions about the use of visual data for the analysis of the practical work of optometrists, the paper also demonstrates how video-based research can add to recent debates in organizational sociology, workplace studies, and practice theory as well as to discussions about service quality and quality of care in health-service settings.
The notion of analysis in qualitative research work • The nature of qualitative enquiry • Theory ... more The notion of analysis in qualitative research work • The nature of qualitative enquiry • Theory and qualitative enquiry
In this paper we argue that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong met... more In this paper we argue that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong methodological focus on people's accounts of their sensorial experiences at the expense of studying the practical achievement of sense work as an interactional phenomenon. Recent work has called for more innovative methods in sensorial scholarship and the use of creative approaches to explore the senses. While we applaud this move, this paper shows the importance of a focus on micro-behavioural actions in studying the senses. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, we analyse video recordings of near vision tests in optometry consultations illustrating the highly routinised, but also the embodied and improvised character of the actions through which the vision is made available for scrutiny. We argue that sensorial scholarship has side-lined the study of social context as a lived-order and we demonstrate the importance of treating sensorial actions as routinised, embodied and improvisatory. We agree that using more creative methods would be valuable but caution against relying exclusively on methods that do not sufficiently contextualise the senses as a lived and practical social accomplishment.
This paper reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK's National Health Service website... more This paper reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK's National Health Service website where participants debated the provision of homeopathy as publicly funded medical treatment. Using membership categorisation analysis, this paper looks at how members negotiated a category distinction between homeopathy and 'orthodox Western medicine', focussing on the discursive resources that the participants drew on to position each other and the website itself in moral terms. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the institutionalisation of complementary and alternative medicine by demonstrating the strong polarisation of views that are present in the public domain, and the ways that public institutions become held accountable to ideologies of evidence and choice. In this way, the study adds to our growing knowledge about public engagement in pluralistic healthcare systems, showing further the limitations of the 'rational choice' assumptions that underlie pluralism.
This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mo... more This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mobile reading community in China. In contrast to semiotic approaches to emoji that focus on their cultural signification, or that treat them as reflections of users' inner intensions, we analyse emoji as communication phenomena by exploring their relation to other textual actions in the production of text-talk. The emoji analysed here functioned as a laughter token, and performed specific interactional work related to laughter. We conclude that conversation analysis offers an important corrective to abstracted semiotic analysis and a useful resource for exploring the demonstrable meaning of emoji for interlocutors. However, we also emphasise the importance of capturing the process of composing messages, the challenges of dealing with the variety of forms that emoji take and their relation to gestural and other actions in face to face communication.
In this article we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to analyse conversations in an online f... more In this article we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to analyse conversations in an online forum in the British newspaper The Guardian. The comments thread followed an Op Ed piece that discussed the exclusion of ‘under-performing’ children in British secondary schools. Our analysis of these comments contributes to existing studies of online forums as a mode of public discourse and demonstrates the importance of research that focusses on interactional practices rather than on notions such as ‘politeness’ or ‘framing’. We show the ways that participants used endogenous conversational categories to produce epistemic alignment and disalignment with each other, employing various strategies such as expanding category collections, creating relations between ‘culpable’ categories and ‘trouble’ categories, and re-describing categories through alternate category predicates. Through this, we see that the conversational actions undertaken in the forum are much more complicated than current concepts allow for, and we reflect on what such complexity might mean for the study and design of news forums.
Waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments are a key performance indicator for the... more Waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments are a key performance indicator for the UK National Health Service (NHS) and are linked to medical decision making. We use the concept of medical disposal to consider the ways in which patients' medical problems are remoulded and transformed into a solvable problem enabling what he refers to as 'medical disposal'. Drawing on a study of 16 video-recorded cases from a single A&E Department in the UK, collected in 2014 and 2015, conversation analysis is used to explore how options for disposal (referral and discharge) are constructed and received in interactions between junior doctors and consultants. We consider the potential impact of information imbalances between junior doctors and consultants, as well as orientation to organisation goals in the form of standardised procedures and guidelines and constraints on time. In this way we demonstrate the interactional delicacy of discussions between junior doctors and consultants concerning moving patients on from A&E. We show how when juniors discuss cases with consultants the resultant decision making may be viewed as co-constructed. We make a case for detailed and nuanced understanding of interactions in A&E departments in order to understand the complexity of decision-making in this highly politically visible setting.
The paper explores the organization of the Distance Vision Test as a process through which optome... more The paper explores the organization of the Distance Vision Test as a process through which optometrists derive an objective test score from subjective assessments of their clients' quality of reading out lines of letters. The analysis of video-recorded optometric consultations explores how the standard letter-chart features in the interaction between optometrist and client. It examines specific fragments of test procedures to reveal how aspects of the chart are used by optometrist and client to practically organize the test and to determine the quality of clients' distance vision. The paper argues that the objective definition of the test result requires that optometrists carefully introduce clients to the test procedure to avoid the reading quality and the test result being influenced by influences such as anxiety. Only after this introduction to the test, clients are encouraged to read a line of letters that follows a larger line they had difficulty to read out from the chart. The quality of the reading out of this line then is transformed into the visual acuity score. This process of transforming incommensurable qualities, reading out and seeing, into quantities in order to make them comparable, is called commensuration.
This paper analyses the sequential ordering of multi-modal discussions in real-time online classe... more This paper analyses the sequential ordering of multi-modal discussions in real-time online classes in postgraduate education contexts. The paper explores the ways that text and verbal talk are organised by the participants as inter-connecting modes of interaction.
Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 2008
This paper reviews research on learner and tutor interaction in asynchronous computer-mediated (A... more This paper reviews research on learner and tutor interaction in asynchronous computer-mediated (ACM) conferences used in distance learning. The authors note claims made for the potential of ACM conferences to promote higher order critical inquiry and the social construction of knowledge and argue that there is a general lack of evidence regarding the actual achievement of these aims in such conferences. We present and discuss the relevant research literature currently available on the effects of social presence, the tutor's teaching and moderating strategies, and task type. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research in each of these areas.
This paper works through the methodological issues involved in treating "culture" and "intercultu... more This paper works through the methodological issues involved in treating "culture" and "interculturality" as interactionally demonstrable and observable phenomena in written online asynchronous discourse. In particular, the paper explores the ways that conversation analysis (CA) and its focus on sequentiality and membership categorization analysis might aid the analysis of culture as a textural interactional achievement. The paper argues that, while there are some clear differences between sequential talk and written asynchronous discourse, there are still interesting ways in which CA's analytic foci may be worked through in relation to online discourse. Both the concern with sequentiality and with membership categories may well help us to see how the construction of visible and recognizable intercultural discourse practices are accomplished through written modes in online forums.
Work-Based Learning in Clinical Settings: Insights from socio-cultural perspectives, 2012
Workplace studies is a branch of interactional sociology concerned with the analysis of knowledge... more Workplace studies is a branch of interactional sociology concerned with the analysis of knowledge and practice in work settings. This chapter provides an overview of the key conceptual features of the perspective and an outline of the methodological strategies that are typically applied within it. By drawing on a research study of optometric work practices, the discussion aims to show how this perspective can contribute to the analysis, understanding and design of medical clinical education. Our analysis of optometric work looks at how problems are established within consultations and at the conduct of a particular eye examination test. The interactional practices used by optometrists in these sequences display communication skills that have been learnt in situ rather than through formal education contexts. As assessment relies in many cases on the subjective reporting of vision, these communication skills are crucial for establishing accurate evaluations of vision. By producing empirical findings such as those reported in this paper, workplace studies is able to generate important insights that can inform medical educational processes by, for example, preparing trainees to enter clinical professions.
This chapter provides an analysis of the processes of negotiating identity in the production of i... more This chapter provides an analysis of the processes of negotiating identity in the production of improvised performance in the jazz rhythm section. I show that, for jazz musicians, identity is an important and complex concern that is managed through the frame of their various role functions. This analysis aims to expand upon symbolic interactionist studies of music
and to provide a critique of the ‘‘discursive’’ focus on music in social life.
Case presentations have totemic significance in medical sociology, analysed as emblematic of medi... more Case presentations have totemic significance in medical sociology, analysed as emblematic of medical professional culture and discourse. This article makes a case for conceptualising these exchanges in terms of Mauss' account of gift giving, which theorises sociality in terms of obligations voluntarily incurred and reciprocated and the performative recognition of hierarchy. This conception is an alternative to two others in existing literature: the case presentation as an instance of pedagogically-oriented supervision and legitimate peripheral participation; and as representative of professional discourse more generally. We make our case for re-framing the case presentation in relation to video and audio data generated within a study of the organization of work in an Accident and Emergency hospital department in the UK. We conclude that Mauss' concept of community allows the work of junior doctors to be understood in terms of collegiality in a hierarchically-organised profession, by contrast to a defective version of the work of their superiors or the manifestation of singular professional discourse.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2017
The paper discusses how visual research methods that draw on ethnomethodology and conversation an... more The paper discusses how visual research methods that draw on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can help sociologists to reveal how optometrists' assess the clarity of their clients' distance vision. It argues that the detailed analysis of video-recorded interactions in optometric consultation rooms can help reveal the practical organization of the 'routine' work through which optometrists examine and assess their clients' sight. Save for the contribution of the paper to methodological discussions about the use of visual data for the analysis of the practical work of optometrists, the paper also demonstrates how video-based research can add to recent debates in organizational sociology, workplace studies, and practice theory as well as to discussions about service quality and quality of care in health-service settings.
The notion of analysis in qualitative research work • The nature of qualitative enquiry • Theory ... more The notion of analysis in qualitative research work • The nature of qualitative enquiry • Theory and qualitative enquiry
In this paper we argue that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong met... more In this paper we argue that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong methodological focus on people's accounts of their sensorial experiences at the expense of studying the practical achievement of sense work as an interactional phenomenon. Recent work has called for more innovative methods in sensorial scholarship and the use of creative approaches to explore the senses. While we applaud this move, this paper shows the importance of a focus on micro-behavioural actions in studying the senses. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, we analyse video recordings of near vision tests in optometry consultations illustrating the highly routinised, but also the embodied and improvised character of the actions through which the vision is made available for scrutiny. We argue that sensorial scholarship has side-lined the study of social context as a lived-order and we demonstrate the importance of treating sensorial actions as routinised, embodied and improvisatory. We agree that using more creative methods would be valuable but caution against relying exclusively on methods that do not sufficiently contextualise the senses as a lived and practical social accomplishment.
This paper reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK's National Health Service website... more This paper reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK's National Health Service website where participants debated the provision of homeopathy as publicly funded medical treatment. Using membership categorisation analysis, this paper looks at how members negotiated a category distinction between homeopathy and 'orthodox Western medicine', focussing on the discursive resources that the participants drew on to position each other and the website itself in moral terms. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the institutionalisation of complementary and alternative medicine by demonstrating the strong polarisation of views that are present in the public domain, and the ways that public institutions become held accountable to ideologies of evidence and choice. In this way, the study adds to our growing knowledge about public engagement in pluralistic healthcare systems, showing further the limitations of the 'rational choice' assumptions that underlie pluralism.
This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mo... more This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mobile reading community in China. In contrast to semiotic approaches to emoji that focus on their cultural signification, or that treat them as reflections of users' inner intensions, we analyse emoji as communication phenomena by exploring their relation to other textual actions in the production of text-talk. The emoji analysed here functioned as a laughter token, and performed specific interactional work related to laughter. We conclude that conversation analysis offers an important corrective to abstracted semiotic analysis and a useful resource for exploring the demonstrable meaning of emoji for interlocutors. However, we also emphasise the importance of capturing the process of composing messages, the challenges of dealing with the variety of forms that emoji take and their relation to gestural and other actions in face to face communication.
In this article we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to analyse conversations in an online f... more In this article we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to analyse conversations in an online forum in the British newspaper The Guardian. The comments thread followed an Op Ed piece that discussed the exclusion of ‘under-performing’ children in British secondary schools. Our analysis of these comments contributes to existing studies of online forums as a mode of public discourse and demonstrates the importance of research that focusses on interactional practices rather than on notions such as ‘politeness’ or ‘framing’. We show the ways that participants used endogenous conversational categories to produce epistemic alignment and disalignment with each other, employing various strategies such as expanding category collections, creating relations between ‘culpable’ categories and ‘trouble’ categories, and re-describing categories through alternate category predicates. Through this, we see that the conversational actions undertaken in the forum are much more complicated than current concepts allow for, and we reflect on what such complexity might mean for the study and design of news forums.
Waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments are a key performance indicator for the... more Waiting times in Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments are a key performance indicator for the UK National Health Service (NHS) and are linked to medical decision making. We use the concept of medical disposal to consider the ways in which patients' medical problems are remoulded and transformed into a solvable problem enabling what he refers to as 'medical disposal'. Drawing on a study of 16 video-recorded cases from a single A&E Department in the UK, collected in 2014 and 2015, conversation analysis is used to explore how options for disposal (referral and discharge) are constructed and received in interactions between junior doctors and consultants. We consider the potential impact of information imbalances between junior doctors and consultants, as well as orientation to organisation goals in the form of standardised procedures and guidelines and constraints on time. In this way we demonstrate the interactional delicacy of discussions between junior doctors and consultants concerning moving patients on from A&E. We show how when juniors discuss cases with consultants the resultant decision making may be viewed as co-constructed. We make a case for detailed and nuanced understanding of interactions in A&E departments in order to understand the complexity of decision-making in this highly politically visible setting.
The paper explores the organization of the Distance Vision Test as a process through which optome... more The paper explores the organization of the Distance Vision Test as a process through which optometrists derive an objective test score from subjective assessments of their clients' quality of reading out lines of letters. The analysis of video-recorded optometric consultations explores how the standard letter-chart features in the interaction between optometrist and client. It examines specific fragments of test procedures to reveal how aspects of the chart are used by optometrist and client to practically organize the test and to determine the quality of clients' distance vision. The paper argues that the objective definition of the test result requires that optometrists carefully introduce clients to the test procedure to avoid the reading quality and the test result being influenced by influences such as anxiety. Only after this introduction to the test, clients are encouraged to read a line of letters that follows a larger line they had difficulty to read out from the chart. The quality of the reading out of this line then is transformed into the visual acuity score. This process of transforming incommensurable qualities, reading out and seeing, into quantities in order to make them comparable, is called commensuration.
This paper analyses the sequential ordering of multi-modal discussions in real-time online classe... more This paper analyses the sequential ordering of multi-modal discussions in real-time online classes in postgraduate education contexts. The paper explores the ways that text and verbal talk are organised by the participants as inter-connecting modes of interaction.
Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 2008
This paper reviews research on learner and tutor interaction in asynchronous computer-mediated (A... more This paper reviews research on learner and tutor interaction in asynchronous computer-mediated (ACM) conferences used in distance learning. The authors note claims made for the potential of ACM conferences to promote higher order critical inquiry and the social construction of knowledge and argue that there is a general lack of evidence regarding the actual achievement of these aims in such conferences. We present and discuss the relevant research literature currently available on the effects of social presence, the tutor's teaching and moderating strategies, and task type. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research in each of these areas.
This paper works through the methodological issues involved in treating "culture" and "intercultu... more This paper works through the methodological issues involved in treating "culture" and "interculturality" as interactionally demonstrable and observable phenomena in written online asynchronous discourse. In particular, the paper explores the ways that conversation analysis (CA) and its focus on sequentiality and membership categorization analysis might aid the analysis of culture as a textural interactional achievement. The paper argues that, while there are some clear differences between sequential talk and written asynchronous discourse, there are still interesting ways in which CA's analytic foci may be worked through in relation to online discourse. Both the concern with sequentiality and with membership categories may well help us to see how the construction of visible and recognizable intercultural discourse practices are accomplished through written modes in online forums.
Work-Based Learning in Clinical Settings: Insights from socio-cultural perspectives, 2012
Workplace studies is a branch of interactional sociology concerned with the analysis of knowledge... more Workplace studies is a branch of interactional sociology concerned with the analysis of knowledge and practice in work settings. This chapter provides an overview of the key conceptual features of the perspective and an outline of the methodological strategies that are typically applied within it. By drawing on a research study of optometric work practices, the discussion aims to show how this perspective can contribute to the analysis, understanding and design of medical clinical education. Our analysis of optometric work looks at how problems are established within consultations and at the conduct of a particular eye examination test. The interactional practices used by optometrists in these sequences display communication skills that have been learnt in situ rather than through formal education contexts. As assessment relies in many cases on the subjective reporting of vision, these communication skills are crucial for establishing accurate evaluations of vision. By producing empirical findings such as those reported in this paper, workplace studies is able to generate important insights that can inform medical educational processes by, for example, preparing trainees to enter clinical professions.
This chapter provides an analysis of the processes of negotiating identity in the production of i... more This chapter provides an analysis of the processes of negotiating identity in the production of improvised performance in the jazz rhythm section. I show that, for jazz musicians, identity is an important and complex concern that is managed through the frame of their various role functions. This analysis aims to expand upon symbolic interactionist studies of music
and to provide a critique of the ‘‘discursive’’ focus on music in social life.
This special issue of Symbolic Interaction aims to explore the role of the concept of interaction... more This special issue of Symbolic Interaction aims to explore the role of the concept of interaction in contemporary theory and research within the discipline and cognate areas. The impetus for this collection of essays came from the observation that studies in symbolic interaction and other "interactionist" approaches differ greatly in the extent to which interaction is a focus of concern and, where it is of interest, in the theoretical and methodological resources employed to explore it. As the essays that form the beginning section of this edition show, interaction ritual theory, structural symbolic interactionist approaches, ethnomethodology, and the Iowa School all represent quite distinctive orientations to this issue.
Entre los años 1990 y 2002 hubo una guerra civil en el área de la investigación social en el cont... more Entre los años 1990 y 2002 hubo una guerra civil en el área de la investigación social en el contexto de la educación. Todo comenzó con las observaciones de varios políticos, profesionales del campo de la educación y miembros de la comunidad de investigadores, quienes detectaron un problema que, según su punto de vista, podría llegar a ser desoladora para la comunidad de investigadores. El problema se refería dos aspectos distintos: Uno, que la investigación era de mala calidad, y no alcanzaba los estándares de rigurosidad o validez que son claves para cualquier disciplina científica. Dos, que el impacto de la investigación era mínima, y en muchos casos, los temas de interés de los investigadores eran ajenos a las prioridades de los profesionales educativos (profesores, instructores, administradores, gerentes, etc).
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and to provide a critique of the ‘‘discursive’’ focus on music in social life.
and to provide a critique of the ‘‘discursive’’ focus on music in social life.