21 - Where the Action Is: Positioning Matters in Interaction

Summary

When examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – conversation analysts monitor for, and organize collections of target phenomena around, structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? This chapter demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. After first considering how to identify the position of participant conduct, this chapter presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned, including how the position of a silence affects its meaning; the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and the position of an action within a sequence, explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. To exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action, this chapter describes how its author has gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions.