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or patterns of social relationships; systems of popular attitudes, values, and behavior; and systems of political and economic control. Finally, he specifies the different forms convergence and divergence may take: (1) simple convergence involving the movement from diversity to uniformity; (2) convergence from different directions involving movement toward a common point by an increase for some cases and a decrease for others; (3) convergence via the crossing of thresholds rather than changes in absolute differences; (4) divergent paths toward convergence, where short-term fluctuations eventually fall into line or a ‘‘deviant’’ case that eventually defines the norm for other cases (for example, France’s move toward small family size in the late eighteenth century); and (5) convergence in the form of parallel change, where nations all moving in the same direction along some dimension of change continue to remain separated by a gap. Although parallel change of this sort does not represent true convergence, it is consistent with the key assumption of convergence theory, namely, that ‘‘insofar as they face comparable situations of action . . . nations and individuals will respond in broadly comparable ways’’ (p. 21).

Inkeles (1981) also describes various forms that divergence may take: (1) simple divergence, the mirror image of simple convergence, in which movement occurs away from a common point toward new points further apart than the original condition; (2) convergence with crossover, where lines intersect and then proceed to spread apart; and (3) convergent trends masking underlying diversity (for example, although the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden all experienced large increases in public assistance programs from 1950 to the early 1970s, the social groups receiving benefits were quite different among the three nations, as were the political dynamics associated with the spending increases within each nation).

Finally, Inkeles (1981) notes the importance of selecting appropriate units of analysis, levels of analysis, and the time span for which convergence, divergence, or parallel change can be assessed.

These comments echo earlier sentiments expressed by Weinberg (1969) and Baum (1974) about how to salvage the useful elements of standard convergence theory while avoiding the pitfalls of a simplistic functionalist-evolutionary approach. Common to these attempts to revive convergence theory is the exhortation to develop more and better

empirical research on specific institutional spheres and social processes. As the following sections demonstrate, a good deal of work along these lines is already being done across a wide range of substantive questions and topical concerns that can aptly be described in the plural as convergence theories, indicating their revisionist and more pluralistic approach.

INDUSTRIAL SOCIOLOGY

Despite criticisms of Kerr and colleagues’ (1960) concept of the logic of industrialism, the question of convergent trends in industrial organization has remained the focus of active debate and much research. The large research literature related on this question, reviewed by Form (1979), has produced mixed evidence with respect to convergence. Studies by Shiba (1973, cited in Form 1979), Form (1976), and Form and Kyu Han (1988), covering a range of industrializing and advanced industrial societies found empirical support for convergence in workers’ adaptation to industrial and related social systems, while Gallie’s (1977, cited in Form 1979) study of oil refineries in Great

Britain and France found consistent differences in workers’ attitudes toward systems of authority. On the question of sectoral and occupational shifts, Gibbs and Browning’s (1966) twelve-nation study of industrial and occupational division of labor found both similarities—consistent with the convergence hypothesis—as well as differences. Studies across nations varying in levels of industrial development revealed only ‘‘small and unsystematic differences’’ in worker commitment (Form 1979, p. 9), thus providing some support for the convergence hypothesis. Japan has been regarded as an exceptional case among industrialized nations because of its strong cultural traditions based on mutual obligation between employers and employees. These characteristics led Dore (1973), for example, to argue vigorously against the convergence hypothesis for Japan. A more recent study by Lincoln and Kalleberg (1990) ‘‘stands convergence on its head,’’ arguing that patterns of work organization in the United States are being impelled in the direction of the Japanese model.

Finally, with respect to women in the labor force, the evidence of convergence is mixed. Some studies found no relationship between female laborforce participation and level of industrialization

(Ferber and Lowry 1977; Safilios-Rothchild 1971), though there is strong evidence of a trend toward increasing female participation in nonagricultural employment among advanced industrial societies

(Paydarfar 1967; Wilensky 1968) along with the existence of dual labor markets stratified by sex, a pattern found in both communist and capitalist nations in the 1970s (Cooney 1975; Bibb and Form

1977; Lapidus 1976).

STRATIFICATION

Closely related to the study of industrial organization is the question of converging patterns of stratification and mobility. The attempt to discover common features of the class structure across advanced industrial societies is a central concern for social theorists of many stripes. The question has inspired intense debate among both neo-

Weberian and Marxist sociologists, although the latter, for obvious ideological reasons, tend to eschew the language of convergence theory. An early statement of the class convergence thesis was made by Lipset and Zetterberg (1959), to the effect that observed rates of mobility between social classes tend to be similar from one industrial society to another. Erikson et al. (1983) conducted a detailed test of the class mobility convergence hypothesis in England, France, and Sweden, and found little support for it. They conclude that the ‘‘process of industrialization is associated with very variable patterns . . . of the social division of labour’’ (p. 339).

A subcategory of comparative stratification research concerns the evidence of convergence in occupational prestige. A study published in 1956 by Inkeles and Rossi, based on data from six industrialized societies, concluded that the prestige hierarchy of occupations was ‘‘relatively invariable’’ and tended to support the hypothesis that modern industrial systems are ‘‘highly coherent. . . relatively impervious to the influence of traditional culture patterns’’ (p. 329). Although the authors did not specifically mention convergence, their conclusions were fully consistent with the idea of emergent similarities. A subsequent study by Treiman (1977) extended the comparison of occupational prestige to some sixty nations, ranging from the least developed to the most developed. The study found that occupationalprestige rankings were markedly similar across all

societies, raising the question of whether convergence theory or an explanation based on the functional imperatives of social structure of all complex societies, past or present, was most consistent with the empirical findings. The conclusion was that both explanations had some merit, since although all complex societies—whether developed, undeveloped, or developing—showed similar oc- cupational-prestige rankings, there was also evidence that the more similar societies were in levels of industrialization, the more similar their patterns of occupational-prestige evaluation appeared to be.

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

The theory of demographic transition provides one of the most straightforward examples of convergence. The essence of the theory is that fertility and mortality rates covary over time in a predictable and highly uniform manner. Moreover, these changes are directly linked to broad developmental patterns, such as the move from a rural, agriculturally based economy to an urban-industrial one, increases in per capita income, and adult literacy (Berelson 1978). In the first stage of the demographic transition, both fertility rates and death rates are high, with population remaining fairly constant. In the second stage, death rates drop (as a result of improvements in living conditions and medical care) while fertility rates remain high, and population levels increase rapidly. In the third stage, fertility rates begin to decline, with total size of the population leveling off or even decreasing. This simple model works remarkably well in accounting for demographic patterns observed among all industrialized (and many industrializing) societies during the post-World War II period. A large spread in fertility rates among nations at the beginning of the 1950s gave way to declining rates of fertility ending with a nearly uniform pattern of zero population growth in the 1970s.

The convergent tendencies predicted by the theory of demographic transition have not gone unchallenged, however. Freedman (1979), for example, suggests that cultural factors mediate the effects of social structural factors central to transition theory. Coale (1973) and Teitelbaum (1975) note that demographic transition theory has not provided much explanatory or predictive power

with regard to the timing of population changes or the regional variations observed within nations undergoing change.

FAMILY

Inkeles (1980) explored the effects of putative convergent tendencies discussed above for family patterns. While he found evidence of convergence in some aspects of family life, other patterns continue ‘‘to be remarkably stable in the face of great variation in their surrounding socio-economic conditions’’ (p. 34). Aspects of family life that show clear convergent patterns include the trend toward falling fertility rates and a shift in relative power and resource control in the direction of increasing autonomy of women and declining authority of parents. Other aspects of the family, such as age at first marriage, appear to present a more complex picture, with short-term fluctuations obscuring long-term changes, and great variation from one culture to another. Still other characteristics of family life seem resistant to change; cited as examples in Inkeles (1980) are cultural patterns such as veneration of elders in many Asian societies, basic human needs for companionship and psychological support, and the role of husbands helping wives with housework. In all,

Inkeles (1980) estimates that only about half the indicators of family life he examined showed any convergence, and even then not always of a linear nature.

EDUCATION

Following Inkeles’ (1981) reformulation of convergence theory, Inkeles and Sirowy (1983) studied the educational systems of seventy-three rich and poor nations. Among thirty different ‘‘patterns of change’’ in educational systems examined, they found evidence of marked convergence in fourteen, moderate convergence in four, considerable variability in nine, mixed results in two, and divergence in only one. Based on these findings, they conclude that the tendency toward convergence on common structures is ‘‘pervasive and deep. It is manifested at all levels of the educational system, and affects virtually every major aspect of that system’’ (p. 326). Also worthy of note is that while the authors take the conventional position

that convergence is a response to pressures arising from a complex, technologically advanced social and economic system, they also identify diffusion via integration of networks through which ideas, standards, and practices in education are shared. These networks operate largely through international organizations, such as UNESCO and the

OECD; their role as mediating structures in a process leading toward cross-national similarities in education constitutes an important addition to convergence theory, with wide-ranging implications for convergence in other institutions.

THE WELFARE STATE

The development of the welfare state has inspired active theoretical debate and empirical research on convergence theory, with researchers divided over the nature and extent of convergence found across nations. On the one hand, there is indisputable evidence that extensive social security, health care, and related benefit programs is restricted to nations that have reached a level of economic development where a sufficient surplus exists to support such efforts. Moreover, the development of programs of the welfare state appears to be empirically correlated with distinct bureaucratic and demographic patterns that are in turn grounded in economic development. For example, Wilensky

(1975) found that among sixty nations studied the proportion of the population sixty-five years of age and older and the age of social security programs were the major determinants of levels of total welfare-state spending as a percent of gross national product. Since levels of economic development and growth of the elderly population both represent areas of convergence among advanced societies, it is reasonable to expect that patterns of welfare-state development will also tend to converge. Indeed, in such respects as the development of large and expensive pension and health-care programs, of which the elderly are the major clientele, this is the case (Coughlin and Armour

1982; Hage et al. 1989). Other empirical studies have found evidence of convergence in public attitudes toward constituent programs of the welfare state (Coughlin 1980), in egalitarian political movements affecting welfare effort across nations (Williamson and Weiss 1979), and in levels of spending (Pryor 1968), normative patterns (Mishra 1976), and social control functions of welfare-state

programs across capitalist and communist nations (Armour and Coughlin 1985).

Other researchers have challenged the idea of convergence in the welfare state. In a historical study of unemployment programs in thirteen Western European nations, Alber (1981) found no evidence that programs had become more alike in eligibility criteria, methods of financing, or generosity of benefits, although he did find some evidence of convergence in duration of unemployment benefits in nations with compulsory systems. A study conducted by O’Connor (1988) testing the convergence hypothesis with respect to trends in welfare spending from 1960 to 1980 concluded that ‘‘despite the adoption of apparently similar welfare programmes in economically developed countries there is not only diversity but divergence in welfare effort. Further, the level of divergence is increasing’’ (p. 295). A much broader challenge to the convergence hypothesis comes from studies focusing on variations in welfare-state development among western capitalist democracies. Hewitt

(1977), Castles (1978, 1982), and Korpi (1983), to cite a few leading examples, argue that variations across nations in the strength and reformist character of labor unions and social democratic parties account for large differences in the levels of spending for and redistributive impact of welfarestate programs. However, the disagreement among these studies and scholars arguing for convergence may be simply a function of case selection.

For example, in a study of nineteen rich nations, Wilensky (1976, 1981) linked cross-national diversity in the welfare state to differences in ‘‘democratic corporatism,’’ and secondarily to the presence of Catholic political parties, thus rejecting the simplistic idea that the convergence observed across many nations at widely different levels of economic development extends to the often divergent policy developments in the relatively small number of advanced capitalist societies.

The debate over convergence in the welfare state is certain to continue. A major obstacle in resolving the question involves disagreement on the nations chosen for study, selection and construction of measures (see Uusitalo 1984), and judgments about the time frame appropriate for a definitive test of the convergence hypothesis. Wilensky et al. (1985, pp. 11–12) sum up the mixed status of current research on convergence in wel- fare-state development as follows:

Convergence theorists are surely on solid ground when they assert that programs to protect against the seven or eight basic risks of industrial life are primarily responses to economic development . . . . However, showing that societies have adopted the same basic programs. . . is only a partial demonstration of convergence insofar as it does not demonstrate convergence in substantive features of the programs or in the amount of variation among affluent countries compared to poor countries.

GLOBALIZATION

Growing attention to a variety of large-scale changes in economic relations, technology, and cultural relations, broadly subsumed under the description ‘‘globalization,’’ has inspired renewed interest in the ideas of convergence and modernity (see Robertson 1992 for a critical account). The literature on globalization has several threads. One approach focuses on the economic and cultural impact of transnational capitalist enterprises that are judged to be responsible for the spread of a pervasive ideology and culture of consumerism (Sklair 1995). Ritzer (1993) summarizes this phenomenon as the ‘‘McDonaldization of society’’—a broad reference to the ubiquity and influence of the consumer brand names (and the large corporate interests behind them) that are instantly recognizable in virtually every country in the world today. The main implication of this perspective is that indigenous industries, habits, and culture are rapidly being driven aside or even into extinction by the ‘‘juggernaut’’ of the world capitalist economy dominated by a relatively few powerful interests.

Meyer et al. (1997) provide a different interpretation of globalization in their work on ‘‘world society.’’ Although they argue that ‘‘many features of the contemporary nation-state derive from a worldwide model constructed and propagated through global cultural and associational processes’’ (pp. 144–145), the essence of their position is that nations are drawn toward a model that is ‘‘surprisingly consensual. . .in virtually all the domains of rationalized social life’’ (p. 145). Meyer et al. contend that various core principles, such as those legitimating human rights and favoring environmentalism, do not emerge spontaneously as an imperative of modernity, but rather diffuse

rapidly among nations worldwide through the agency of international organizations, networks of scientists and professionals, and other forms of association. Although not referring specifically to convergence theory, this world society and culture approach makes a strong case for the emergence of widely shared structural and cultural similarities, many of which hold out the promise of improvement, among otherwise diverse nation-states.

The rapid growth of telecommunications and computing technology, especially apparent in the emergence of the Internet as a major social and economic phenomenon of the 1990s, presents yet another aspect of globalization that holds profound implications for possible societal convergence. However important and wide-ranging, the precise patterns that will ultimately emerge from these technological innovations are not yet clear. While new computing and communication technologies compress the time and space dimensions of social interaction (Giddens 1990), and have the potential to undercut national identities and cultural differences along the lines envisioned by McLuhan’s (1960) ‘‘global village,’’ the same forces of advanced technology that can level traditional differences may ultimately reinforce the boundaries of nation, culture, and social class. For example, even as the computers and related communication technologies become more ever more widely disseminated, access to and benefits from the new technologies appear to be disproportionately concentrated among the ‘‘haves,’’ leaving the ‘‘have nots’’ more and more excluded from participation (Wresch 1996). Over time, such disparities might well serve to widen differences both across and within nations, thus leading toward divergence rather than convergence.

Finally, interest in convergence has also been given a boost by various political developments in the 1990s. In particular, the twin developments of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the progressive weakening of economic and political barriers in Europe are notable in this regard. The demise of state socialism has revived interest in the possibilities of global economic and political convergence among advanced industrial societies (see, for example,

Lenski et al. 1991, p. 261; Fukuyama 1992). Although ongoing economic and political turmoil in the ‘‘transition to capitalism’’ in the former Soviet

Union during the 1990s may cast serious doubt on the long-term prospects for convergence, developments have clearly moved in that direction with astonishing speed.

The continuing movement toward unification in Europe associated with the European Union (EU, formerly the European Community) represents another significant case of political and economic convergence on a regional scale. The gradual abolition of restrictions on trade, the movement of labor, and travel among EU nations (and not least of all the establishment of a single currency in 1999), and the harmonization of social policies throughout the EU, all signal profound changes toward growing convergence in the region that promises to continue into the twenty-first century.

CONCLUSION

The idea of convergence is both powerful and intuitively attractive to sociologists across a range of backgrounds and interests (Form 1979). It is difficult to conceive of an acceptable macro theory of social change that does not refer to the idea of convergence in one way or another. Despite the controversy over, and subsequent disillusionment with, early versions of convergence theory in the study of modernization, and the often mixed results of empirical studies discussed above, it is clear that the concept of societal convergence (and convergence theories that allow for the possibility of divergence and invariance) provides a useful and potentially powerful analytical framework within which to conduct cross-national studies across a broad range of social phenomena. Even where the convergence hypothesis ultimately ends up being rejected, the perspective offered by convergence theories can provide a useful point of departure for research. Appropriately reformulated, focused on elements of the social system amenable to empirical study, and stripped of the ideological baggage associated with its earlier versions, convergence theories hold promise to advance the understanding of the fundamental processes and regularities of social change.

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RICHARD M. COUGHLIN

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Conversation analysis has evolved over several decades as a distinct variant of ethnomethodology. Its beginnings can be traced to the mid-1960s, to the doctoral research and the unpublished but widely circulated lectures of Harvey Sacks. Sacks was a University of California sociologist who had studied with Harold Garfinkel, the founder of the ethnomethodological movement, as well as with Erving Goffman. While not an ethnomethodologist, Goffman’s proposal that face-to-face interaction could be an analytically independent domain of inquiry certainly helped inspire Sacks’s work. Two other key figures whose writings (separately and together with Sacks) contributed to the emergence of conversation analysis were Gail Jefferson, one of Sacks’s first students, and Emanuel A. Schegloff, another sociologist trained in the University of California system who was decisively influenced by Garfinkel and, in much the same manner as Sacks, by Goffman (Schegloff 1988).

Sacks, like Garfinkel, was preoccupied with discovering the methods or procedures by which humans coordinate and organize their activities, and thus with the procedures of practical, com- mon-sense reasoning in and through which ‘‘social

order’’ is locally constituted (Garfinkel [1967] 1984).

In addressing this problem, he devised a remarkably innovative approach. Working with tapes and transcripts of telephone calls to a suicide prevention center (and with recordings of other, somewhat more mundane sorts of conversations), Sacks began examining the talk as an object in its own right, as a fundamental type of social action, rather than primarily as a resource for documenting other social processes. In short, Sacks came to recognize that the talk itself was the action. It was in the details of the talk that we could discover just how what was getting done in the activity was accomplished, systematically and procedurally, then and there, by the coparticipants themselves. This appeared to be an especially fruitful way of investigating the local production of social order.

As Schegloff (1989, p. 199) later wrote in a memoir of these first years, Sacks’s strategy in his pioneering studies was to first take note of how members of society, in some actual occasion of interaction, achieved some interactional effect— for example, in the suicide center calls, how to exhibit (and have others appreciate) that one has reasonably, accountably, arrived at the finding ‘‘I have no one to turn to’’—and then to ask: Was this outcome accomplished methodically? Can we describe it as the product of a method of conduct, such that we can find other enactments of that method that will yield the same outcome, the same recognizable effect? This approach provided, Sacks suggested, an opportunity to develop formal accounts of ‘‘members’ methods’’ for conducting social life.

In this way, Sacks sought to address the basic question of (as he put it in one of his early manuscripts) ‘‘what it is that sociology can aim to do, and . . . how it can proceed’’ (Sacks [1964–1968]

1984, p. 21). Sociology, he argued, could be a

‘‘natural observational science,’’ concerned with the methodic organization of naturally occurring events, rather than with behavior that was manipulated through experimental techniques or other interventions such as surveys, interviews, and the like. And it could be committed to direct observation of this organization in situ, rather than dependent upon analytic theorizing and a concomitant reliance on idealized models of action.

Naturalistic observation also met the ethnomethodological mandate that all evidence

for the use of members’ methods, and for members’ orientation to or tacit knowledge of them, was to be derived exclusively from the observed behavior of the coparticipants in an interactional event. As Schegloff and Sacks (1973, p. 290) subsequently summarized the logic of this stance, if the event, the recorded conversational encounter, exhibited a methodically achieved orderliness, it ‘‘did so not only to us [the observing analysts], indeed not in the first place for us, but for the co-partici- pants who had produced’’ it. After all, the task was to discover members’ methods for coordinating and ordering conversational events, and these could not in any way be determined by analysts’ conceptual stipulations or deduced from inventive theories.

The contrast with other methods and approaches for studying interactional processes could not be sharper, particularly with those methods adopted by Bales (1950) and Homans (1961) and their many followers, with their commitment to theoretically derived and precise operational definitions of social phenomena as a prerequisite to any scientific investigation (see Sacks 1992, vol. 1, p. 28 and p. 105, for his thinking on Bales and Homans).

But Sacks’s methodological stance contrasts even with those traditions usually regarded as neighbors of conversation analysis, such as symbolic interactionism and Goffman’s ‘‘micro-Durkheimian’’ approach. These approaches assume that without an analytically stipulated conceptual scheme, there is no orderliness (or the orderliness cannot be seen) in what Garfinkel (1991) terms ‘‘the ple- num’’—the plentitude of members’ lived experience.

Sacks was also making a well-reasoned argument for the importance of studying mundane conversation, directly confronting the belief that sociology’s overriding concern should be the study of ‘‘big issues’’; that is, the belief that the search for social order should center on the analysis of largescale, massive institutions. Social order, he insisted, can be found ‘‘at all points,’’ and the close study of what from conventional sociology’s point of view seemed like small (and trivial) phenome- na—the details of conversation’s organization— might actually give us an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of methods they use to order their affairs (Sacks

[1964–1968] 1984, p. 24).

This last proposition bears special emphasis, for Sacks felt that these details went unnoticed,

and perhaps could not even be imagined, by conventional analytic sociology. When had sociologists concerned themselves with the profoundly methodic character of things like how to avoid giving your name without refusing to give it, he argued, or with how to get help for suicidalness without requesting it? Or with members’ methods for things like ‘‘doing describing’’ and ‘‘recognizing a description,’’ methods that provide for hearing the first two sentences from a story told by a young child—’’The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.’’—as saying: The mommy who picked up the baby is the baby’s mommy, and she picked it up because it was crying. Though apparently mundane, this observation provided the basis for a series of investigations regarding members’ categorization methods and eventually came to provide for an entirely different approach to studies of social institutions and phenomena like race and gender. Sacks noted that since every person can be categorized at any time in various ways (for example, in terms of age, gender, or stage of life), a person’s use of, or reliance on, one category rather than another to guide his or her actions with others must be grounded in one of a multitude of discoverable systems of relevance, some of which are potentially applicable in any situation, such as age, race, and gender, and others that are more limited in their use, such as occupationally defined categories or those made relevant by the organization of conversation itself, such as speaker/hearer, caller/called, and the like.

As these last examples of categories suggest,

‘‘membership analysis’’—making sense of who someone is for the purpose of appropriately designing some next action—is an unremitting problem for members of a society, one that has to be solved in real time, and for which there is no single solution. Furthermore, who a person relevantly ‘‘is’’ for the purposes of some next action can change from moment to moment. As a consequence, Sacks pointed out that sociologists can no longer innocently categorize populations whatever way they (and their theories) see fit. Instead, analysts must similarly demonstrate the relevance of a category to the participants in any scene, as well as its consequentiality for them in terms of how the action proceeds, in order to ground its use in any sociological investigation (see Silverman 1998 for a useful summary of this argument).

Such grounding would stand in contrast to the epidemiological uses of categorization that underpin standard social scientific research. Sacks’s colleague, anthropologist Michael Moerman (1974, pp. 67–68), once noted that social scientists ‘‘have an apparent inability to distinguish between warm

. . . human bodies and one kind of identification device which some of those bodies sometimes use.’’ Further, since Sacks was primarily concerned with categorization as a thoroughly practical, procedural activity for members he was not much interested in the content of categories, with drawing the cultural grids that preoccupied cognitive anthropologists and many social psychologists. Instead, Sacks believed that by starting with the close study of actual events—such as members’ observable use of categories in situ—and showing that they happened in an endogenously, socially organized manner, a much sounder basis for studying and understanding social life could be established.

It should be evident, then, that the appellation conversation analysis does not really capture the enterprise’s commitment to addressing the most basic problem for the social sciences: the underlying character and structure of social action. As the title of one of Sacks’s first publications, ‘‘An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational

Data for Doing Sociology,’’ makes clear, the use of recorded conversational materials was more of an opportunistic research strategy than a commitment to studying talk per se (Sacks 1972). Tape recordings of conversations constituted a record of the details of actual, singular events that could be replayed and studied extensively, and would permit other researchers direct access to exactly these same details. Still, for these identical reasons, it is conversation’s organization—its detectable, orderly properties—that has remained the concrete object of study for the enterprise.

During years since the ‘‘initial investigations,’’ conversation analysis has given rise to a substantial research literature. Pursuing the lines of analysis first identified in the early studies while simultaneously opening up many new avenues of inquiry, researchers working in this tradition have produced findings that are, in the words of one contemporary practitioner, ‘‘strikingly cumulative and interlocking’’ (Heritage 1987, p. 256). Important collections of papers include those of Sudnow (1972), Schenkein (1978), Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Button and Lee (1987), and ten Have and

Psathas (1995). Sacks’s lectures have now been edited and published in complete form (Sacks 1992). Special issues of Sociological Inquiry, Social Psychology Quarterly, Human Studies, Social Problems, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Text, and the Western Journal of Speech Communication have also been devoted to ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic topics.

Three major domains in conversation’s organization identified in this literature are the organization of sequences, of turn taking, and of repair. These organizations can be described as systems of naturally organized activity, systems known and used by members as courses of practical action and practical reasoning, and designed to resolve generic problems of coordination that confront any conversationalist (and perhaps members of all social species). A sketch of some research findings with respect to these organizations should serve to illustrate how they function in this fashion, as well as the interlocking nature of their domains.

Consider first the organization of sequences.

Begin with the fact that even the most cursory inspection of conversational materials reveals that talk-in-interaction has a serial arrangement to it. For example, in a conversation between two parties, party A will talk first, then party B, then A, then B, and so forth. Accordingly, in two-party conversations, turns at talk constitute a series of alternately produced utterances: ABABAB. But overlaying this serial arrangement of utterances are distinctly characterizable conversational sequences, where turns at talk do not simply happen to occur one after the other but rather ‘‘belong together’’ as a socio-organizational unit, and where there is thus a methodic relationship between the various turns or parts.

This methodic, structurally linked relationship between sequence parts is central to how sequences work in resolving coordination problems in conversation. This point can be demonstrated by briefly focusing on one of the earliest studies of sequence organization by Schegloff

(1968), an investigation into how the initiation of conversational interactions is coordinated. Schegloff directed attention to a frequently occurring initial exchange, which was called a ‘‘summons–answer sequence.’’ This sequence is composed, he discovered, of closely linked parts. The production of the