CONVERSATION ANALYSISOther forms of interaction—in this case, so-called
‘‘institutional’’ forms—are in part constituted and
recognizable through systematic variations from
conversational turn taking, or through the narrow-
ing and respecification of particular conversation-
al practices involved in the organization of se-
quences, repair, and other activities.
Take the case of courtroom interaction. The
turn-taking system operative in these encounters
places restrictions on turn construction and alloca-
tion: Coparticipants ordinarily restrict themselves
to producing turns that are at least minimally
recognizable as ‘‘questions’’ and ‘‘answers,’’ and
these turn types are pre-allocated to different par-
ties rather than locally determined. The relatively
restricted patterns of conduct observable in these
settings is, in large part, the product of this form of
turn taking. Accordingly, variation in turn taking
in such settings has been shown to have a ‘‘perva-
sive influence both on the range and design of the
interactional activities which the different parties
routinely undertake and on the detailed manage-
ment of such encounters’’ (Heritage 1987, p. 261;
Atkinson and Drew 1979).
Note that throughout the above discussion,
the term ‘‘institutional’’ has been presented with
quotation marks around it. This was done to em-
phasize ethnomethodology’s preoccupation with
the local production of social order. From this
view, that some activity or encounter is recogniz-
ably either an ‘‘ordinary conversation’’ or more
‘‘institutional’’ in nature—for example, is recog-
nizably a ‘‘cross-examination,’’ a ‘‘call to the po-
lice,’’ a ‘‘clinical consultation,’’ or whatever—is
something that the coparticipants can and do
realize, procedurally, at each and every moment of
the encounter. The task for the analyst is to dem-
onstrate how they actually do this; how, for exam-
ple, they construct their conduct, turn by turn, so
as to progressively constitute and thus jointly and
collaboratively realize the occasion of their en-
counter, together with their own social roles in it,
as having some distinctively institutional sense
(Heritage and Greatbatch 1991). Conversation ana-
lytic research on ‘‘institutional’’ interaction has
therefore undertaken, through its investigations
into the methodic practices by which this gets
done, a systematic study of a wide range of human
activities.
This mode of research, with its commitment
to understanding precisely how any activity be-
comes what it recognizably and accountably is—
that is to say, how it acquires its social facticity-has
tended to focus in the 1990s on work activities and
settings, under the rubric of ‘‘workplace studies.’’
The scope of investigation has expanded to en-
compass all forms of ‘‘embodied action’’ (that is,
not only the talk), with extensive use of video
recordings and, influenced by Suchman’s (1987)
pioneering study of human-machine interaction,
with careful attention to how the machines, tech-
nologies, and other artifacts that saturate the mod-
ern work site are taken up and enter into the
endogenous organization of work tasks (see, for
example, Whalen (1995), and the papers collected
in Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath in press).Research into conversation’s organization al-
so continues to evolve. While there has been rela-
tively little work that attempts to fundamentally
deepen the original account of the turn-taking
system developed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jeffer-
son (for a notable exception see Lerner 1996),
there has been important research at the intersec-
tion of grammar and interaction—recognizing that
talk-in-interaction is in fact the natural home of
human language. This work demonstrates that the
approach to language taken Chomsky’s Transfor-
mational Grammar could be supplanted by one
based on naturalistic study of the ‘‘grammar for
conversation.’’ Given that Chomsky’s approach
has decisively shaped, both directly and indirectly,
the understanding of language in cognitive sci-
ence, psychology, computational linguistics, and
the other disciplines that rely on a model of gram-
matical organization for their own research, these
findings are plainly significant.Conversation analytic work on graamar and
interaction was launched by Schegloff’s (1979)
paper on the ‘‘relevance of repair for a syntax for
conversation.’’ This line of work has underscored
the need for studies of language to draw on natu-
rally occurring spates of talk. As Schegloff ob-
served, while nearly every episode of ordinary talk
contains instances of repair within the ‘‘sentenc-
es’’ (or sentential turn constructional units) out of
which it is built, the entire view of language devel-
oped by linguists is based on imagined (or what
might as well be imagined) instances of language