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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.