Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._4

dictionaries and audio and phonemic recording of phonological systems) of languages in specific, usually nonmodern societies.

3.Psycholinguistics, which covers a wide range of topics, including the acoustics of perception, cognitive constraints on the complexity of clausal embedding, theories of innateness and learning in language acquisition, and the physical location of language functions in the brain.

4.Social psychology of language (from psychological social psychology), wide-ranging specialty that includes research on message characteristics and influence, selfdisclosure, relationships between personality and speech, and relationships among body movements, speech, and ‘‘meaning.’’

5.Conversation analysis/ethnomethodology (CA), an approach that views talk in muchthe same way formal linguists view language: as a system that is syntactically organized and has structure that can be discerned independently of the social attributes of participants in particular talk.

CA has identified devices such as ‘‘preinvitations’’ and ‘‘preclosings’’ as well as ways of constructing accusations without accusing anyone explicitly (Atkinson and Drew 1979); workers in the field are interested in how these devices are used in the course of the immediate talk, not in how they might be directed to more complex goals of conversational participants. Whalen (1991) notes that CA ‘‘examines 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.’’ None of the five activities listed above deals with language primarily as social resource.

In contrast, another handful of specialties focuses on the social dimensions of language/talk as interactional resource, a component of individual and group identity, and a social object. The ethnography of speaking and ethnolinguistics, like the anthropological practices from which they take their names, focus on the diversity of available linguistic resources and the uses to which those resources are put in individual speech communities and in human society at large, respectively.

There is a strong comparative dimension to these arenas of investigation.

Sociolinguistics manifests a different kind of comparative orientation. The micro variety usually focuses on interactional accomplishment through the medium of language in use in social contexts:

(1)comparisons of means and ends, including attention both to how individual ends can be accomplished by different means (ways of talking) and to how different outcomes may simultaneously result (intentionally or otherwise) from the production of same or very similar bits of talk, and

(2)comparisons of the different resources available to different participants in talk. The sociology of language, as the macro variety of sociolinguistics often is called (Grimshaw 1987a), tends to focus on distributional studies, such as the distribution of language varieties across individual repertoires and the distribution of repertoires across social aggregates, categories, and groups (nations or classes, genders or age groups, and families or friendship networks, respectively). At the most macro level, this implies studies of language maintenance, supersession and change, conflict, and so on.

The sociological social psychology of language is oriented to group effects on individual behaviors, including the acquisition of social-cultural competence through the medium of talk, the role of talk in the acquisition and organization of evaluative orientations, and uses of talk/written language in social control. At some point, the last activity shades off into symbolic interactionism; this boundary is not explored here. Finally, specialized studies of proxemics (social and interpersonal spacing) and kinesics (body movement, the organization of facial features, gesture, posture) have been done from both sociological and psychological perspectives (Hall 1966, 1974; Kendon, [1977] 1990).

SOME QUESTIONS OF ORIENTATION

Since later sections of this article illustrate how sociological theory can be enriched by empirical SL/SOL research in specific substantive areas, the comments here are limited to four questions of general orientation in theoretical work in SL/ SOL: (1) What are causal and other relations between language/speech and other social behavior(s)? (2) Are grammars of social interaction pos-

sible, and is there a universal grammar? (3) What is the relevance of a micro–macro distinction for understanding the importance of language/speech in social life, and now are the two levels articulated in social behavior? (4) Is theoretical advance and/or understanding best sought by focusing on social processes or on specific substantive arenas of social behavior?

Causal Directionality/Covariation/Cotemporality/Mutuality. As in other varieties of social behavior, SL/SOL theory and research must deal with complex problems of cause and effect. There are four principal perspectives on the causal relationship between social structure and language (see Grimshaw 1974b; Hymes 1966):

1.That which sees language as fundamental (or as source, cause, independent variable, or set of independent variables), a position consonant both with an extreme Whorfian position (language determines how people think) and the commonsense observation that people sometimes do not know what is going on until they hear other peo-

ple talking

2.That which sees social structure as a determinant or an independent variable or set of such variables, position consonant with people’s awareness that they talk differently in different situations, with different interlocutors, and depending on the nature of their interactional goals

3.That which sees neither as prior to the other, with both being seen as co-occur- ring and codetermining

4.That which sees both as being determined by a third factor, whether innate features of the human mind—the view of Cartesian linguistics (Chomsky 1966, 1968)— Weltanschauung, or the intrinsic demands of an ordered universe

Most SL/SOL correlational studies focus on how the location of individuals or groups in the social structure is reflected in speech and/or other language behavior, as in the case of regional or class dialects, or determines it, as in the case of the section of a language variety in different situations and with different conversational partners (Blom and Gumperz 1972) or of pronominal forms or

other names (for a review of some of this literature, see Grimshaw 1980a). A smaller but substantial number of correlational studies attempt to discover how language use (spoken and written) is associated with interactional outcomes as varied as providing or not providing a requested favor, succeeding or not succeeding in school, and deciding whether to go to war (for a review, see Grimshaw 1981; for illustrations of claims about language use and the risks of war, see Chilton 1985; Wertsch and Mehan 1988). Although closer scrutiny often reveals that ways of talking are themselves resources that are differentially available to interactants with different social origins, some language resources appear to be available throughout social structures. Ways of talking in turn have been shown to have effects independent of structural relations.

Figure 1 is a simplified schematic representation of a mutual-embeddedness perspective. It is also a schematic showing how the processes of cultural reproduction would operate in a world without change. Bernstein (1975), Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), Cicourel (1980a, 1980b, 1981), Collins (1981a, 1981b), and Habermas (1984–1987) all address the question of cultural reproduction and questions of change. All take essentially mutuality perspectives. All accord central importance to language in the reproduction process. Collins explicates ways in which language is simultaneously a resource in interaction and a source of change. Only Bernstein and Cicourel actually collect data on language in use, and only Cicourel directly investigates talk. None of these scholars would strongly disagree with this characterization; each would wish to ‘‘complete’’ the chart by incorporating neglected features (see Bernstein’s diagram of the process [1975, p. 24], with its foregrounding of different transmission agencies, such as family and education; modes of social control; specific speech varieties; and context-de- pendent and -independent meanings).

In the mid-1960s, Fischer (1965, 1966) published perhaps the strongest version of the mutualembeddedness position and, from the disciplinary perspective of sociology, perhaps the most esoterically documented. (The papers are reviewed extensively in Grimshaw 1974b.) Fischer argued nothing loss that phonological and syntactic differences between two related but mutually unintelligible languages (Trukese and Ponapean, separated for

about eight centuries) are isomorphic to differences in the social structures of the two societies:

As societies become more complex and social roles become more differentiated, the realized meaning of words in particular contexts becomes less important than the common or basic meaning. Speakers are forced to assume a greater cognitive gap between themselves and their listeners. At the same time, the basic meaning of the items of the lexicon tends to become more abstract and attenuated, since speakers have less need for words which can express much meaning in compact form to listeners who are conceived as being much like the self; they have more need, instead, for words which can be used in many different contexts with many different listeners who

are conceived of as being very different from the self and from each other. (Fischer 1966, p. 178)

The mutuality perspective is a richly suggestive one.

Grammars of Social Interaction/A Grammar of Social Interaction. Linguists write grammars; that is, they describe and write ‘‘rules’’ for phonological and syntactic systems for individual languages. They are also committed to the goal of writing a grammar of language, that is, identifying in grammars of individual languages features and/or rules that hold for all languages: a universal grammar. They distinguish between absolute and quantitative universals (i.e., between features

of all languages that can be explained on theoretical grounds as required constituents and features that occur in all or most languages, such as terms for female derived from that for male [this kind of feature is known as marking], but for which no theoretically principled basis can be identified) and between weaker and stronger claims of universality (i.e., between a claim that all languages contain certain elements [nouns, verbs, prepositions] and a claim that those elements appear in the same order in utterances in every language).

An interest in the intrinsic ordering of the universe and a concern to avoid repeating old errors and rediscovering the already known are central in linguists’ interest in both the regularities in individual languages and universal rules. Sociologists have similar concerns in seeking to discover the rules of interactional grammars for specific societies or groups and in seeking social interactional universals and the role of language in use in both grammars and the grammar. Although there are greetings in most, if not all, societies (this is more a quantitative than an absolute universal, and there are societies in which greeting is the marked case and nongreeting the unmarked), how they are done, to whom, and to what purpose may vary considerably (Firth 1972; Goffman 1971; Ibrahim et al. 1976; Kendon and Ferber 1973).

Similarly, there must be a need for information everywhere, but questions are not the appropriate manner for obtaining information in every

society (see Goody 1978; sources cited in Grimshaw 1969). Again, it seems likely that interpersonal relations of power and affect and considerations of valence and cost are everywhere involved in requesting behavior (Brown and Levinson 1987; Grimshaw 1989); their relative importance and the consequent variety of modes of requesting behaviors vary considerably.

Ways of talking are everywhere critical resources in interaction; very little is known, however, about what features of language in use in social contexts may be universal or, for that matter, about which rules within speech communities (or social groups) are variant and which are invariant (Labov 1968; Grimshaw 1973a). Indeed, some sociologists find the notion of rule misleading on grounds that expectations and behaviors are always under negotiation (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Notions of rules and exceptions vary across disciplines (Edgerton 1985; Labov 1968; Grimshaw 1973a, 1981).

Micro–Macro, Conversation, and Interaction/ Official Languages and Language Policies, SL/ SOL. These distinctions, along with the familiar polarities of social psychology and social organiza- tion—or qualitative and quantitative methods— often appear in discussions of sociological interest in language and language in use. Three sorts of questions can be asked in this arena:

1.What are sociology’s interests in what goes on in conversation/interaction, and what does a specific focus on talk teach sociologists that other modes of

study do not?

2.What are sociology’s interests in looking at language as an individual social attribute that, aggregated, has supraindividual importance in ways similar to ethnic group, class, religion, and other categorical attributes? What are sociology’s interests in questions about how language is linked to life chances, why and how it becomes a focus of positive and negative attitudes, and how languages spread, change, contract, and die?

3.How do the things that go on in individual conversations on the micro level get articulated with, and aggregated into, processes of change in languages themselves, in their prestige, in policies re-

garding their use, and so on, on the macro level?

As was suggested above, the micro–macro question is closely related both to those about mutual embeddedness and to those about cultural reproduction. The dimension added by asking the articulation question is that of social change: If socializing/cultural transmission agencies operate to reproduce values, attitudes, behaviors, and so on, in new generations, how does change occur? A perspective offered by Collins (1981a, 1981b) is that participants bring to everyday conversations interactional resources that are enhanced or reduced in the course of interaction and that modest changes in interactional resources ultimately eventuate in changes in institutions and cultural sys- tems—and languages. Related formulations are cited in Grimshaw (1987b). The macro–micro questions constrain one to think deeply both about processes of change and about how people try to get co-conversationalists to agree with them or to do what they want those them to do.

Substance or Process: ‘‘Top-Down’’ or ‘‘Bot- tom-Up.’’ Two additional questions about the construction and use of theory have methodological as well as theory-building implications. The first question is whether when sociologists study the uses of language in specific contexts such as educational, military, or medical institutions, they are interested primarily in understanding (1) the institutions themselves, (2) social processes such as negotiation or socialization or, more broadly, conflict or cooperation, (3) a specific kind of situated interaction, such as an interview, as a representative of a species of situation, or (4) how talk works in interaction. There are, of course, no pure cases The second question has been put by Cicourel (1980a) as a distinction between ‘‘top-down’’ and ‘‘bottom-up’’ theorizing. By ‘‘top-down,’’ Cicourel means approaching corpora of talk with sets of conceptual notions ranging from the generality of ‘‘cultural reproduction’’ or ‘‘role’’ and/or ‘‘conflict’’ to the specificity of ‘‘role conflict’’ or different ‘‘footings’’ in talk (Goffman 1981). By ‘‘bot- tom-up,’’ he refers to researchers immersing themselves in their data and identifying regularities, then validating that identification, then discovering regularities in relations between previously observed regularities, and so on. All the investigators whose work is mentioned in this

article—indeed, all sociologists—would like to believe that they let their data guide them to theory construction, and all are to some extent guided in their work by prior theoretical constructions.

DATA, DATA, EVERYWHERE

While sociologists sometimes are intimidated by the complex structure of formal linguistic theory, they may be equally envious of the easy access of linguists to their data, either in their own intuitions about the languages they speak or in the bath of talk and writing in which all people live (compare the ways of studying phonology in, for example, Chomsky and Halle 1968; W. Labov 1980). Students of SL/SOL share the advantage that many of the data in which they are interested are fairly accessible and, with modern technology, fairly easy to collect (denial of access and questions of ethics aside). They share the disadvantage that many of the sociological questions they want to study—matters as varied as (1) attitudes about different speech varieties, (2) the impact of stratification on the acquisition of those attitudes, and (3) the ways in which phonological variation affects stratification—can be considerably more difficult to identify, conceptualize, and measure. Just as there are fundamental questions about theoretical orientation in SL/SOL, there are fundamental questions about methods.

This brief discussion can comment on only a few of these methodological questions: (1) What constitutes optimal data for SL and SOL, or micro and macro, research? (2) How can the optimal data best be collected? (3) What need is there for modes of work, such as comprehensive discourse analysis (CDA), that differ from more familiar modes of sociological investigation? (4) What are the roles of collaborative and comparative studies in SL/ SOL research?

What Constitutes Optimal Types of Data for SL/SOL? Labov (1972a) remarked that linguists work variously in library, bush, closet, laboratory, and street, where they collect and/or produce data that can be labeled texts, elicitations, intuitions, experimental results, and observations, respectively. Among the many sorts of data that can be useful in the investigation of SL/SOL issues, those associated with the following four ‘‘how’’ questions are central:

1.How do people actually talk/write? This has two dimensions: (a) What varieties of language (spoken and written are assumed in the following discussion) do individual members of speech communities control?

(b) How do individuals employ their language resources in social interaction? The optimal data for such studies are extended texts.

2.How are language varieties and patterns of use distributed across categories of age, class, gender, occupation, nationality, religious affiliation, and residence? The optimal data here are a combination of sampled texts and observations.

3.How do members of social groups learn about language and its appropriate use, and how do they learn second (and higher-order) languages? The optimal data here are experimental results and observations and, to a lesser extent, texts.

4.How do people feel about language; that is, what are the attitudes of individuals and groups toward language varieties, repertoires, language change, and literacy? Data that have been employed in addressing these questions have included all five of the varieties listed by Labov (1972a), and each has proved useful.

What Are the Criteria for Optimal Data?

There is no such thing as a ‘‘verbatim’’ record without electronic recording, and optimal records of conversation include both high-fidelity audio recording and possibly multiple sound-image recordings (for discussions of sound-image recording, including some of the controversies about such data collection, see Feld and Williams 1975; Grimshaw 1982, 1989). When one is working with written texts, optimal data include photographic copies of handwritten originals as well as printed versions. Whatever texts and observations are collected and used as data, however, those materials are valuable only to the extent that contexts of both ‘‘situation’’ and ‘‘text’’ (i.e., embedding talk and written material) are provided (the distinction is Halliday’s following Malinowski). Two excellent articulations of the importance of context that suggest different boundaries for what must be taken into account are those of Corsaro (1981, 1985) and Cicourel (esp. 1994).

People are often skeptical of claims about what talk is actually like until they see it transcribed; they then are skeptical that the transcription is accurate until they hear electronically recorded audio while reading a transcript. Investigators who work with texts, elicitations, and observations must always take into account the effects of monitoring in most varieties of SL/SOL data; Labov (1972a) has referred to the Observer’s Paradox; that is, ‘‘we want to observe how people talk when they are not being observed.’’ One also should keep in mind, however, Sol Worth’s observation that all behavior, however carefully monitored, is ‘‘natural’’ (personal communication). Labov has developed elicitation techniques that have the advantage of generating different levels of self-con- sciousness of, and thus monitoring of, talk (see, e.g., 1972b).

Other concerns with data in SL/SOL research are, like those just reviewed, quite similar to those in sociological research in general. Self-report data on language varieties employed by oneself or one’s family or of uses of literacy are notoriously unreliable, and definitions and measurements of individual attributes such as literacy and bilingual fluency are often inconsistent.

The Need for Methods Specific to SL/SOL.

Many of the data employed in SL/SOL research are the same as or very similar to those employed in other arenas of sociology, as are the methods employed in analysis. This similarity may be least evident in the case of the activities labeled ‘‘conversation analysis’’ (see Whalen 1991) and ‘‘comprehensive discourse analysis’’ (Labov and Fanshel 1977). Labov and Fanshel realize that the goal of comprehensiveness is chimerical: their pioneering study demonstrated the importance of such aspects of talk as prosodic and paralinguistic features. Lexical, syntactic, and even phonological selection are deeply involved in what is ‘‘actually said’’ (i.e., interactionally intended) in talk (for a discussion of the process of ‘‘disambiguation’’ of text, see Grimshaw 1987c). Sociologists have employed CDA and adaptations of it to ask more specifically sociological questions. Other students have developed similarly fine-grained approaches to written texts (Silverman and Torode 1980). Perhaps sociologists are now aware that questions about language as language have sociological significance and that talk and writing are no longer just media that contain answers to other questions.

Collaborative, Comparative, and Corroborative Research on SL/SOL. While SL and SOL research and publications have increased tremendously in the last few decades, their literatures continue to be diffuse. There have been few replications. Most research has been on English, and much of the material on other languages is published in English. While much of the early activity in SL was interdisciplinary, there have been few truly interdisciplinary studies (for a discussion of problems with such projects, see Grimshaw, Feld et al. 1994) or parallel studies of shared data (see, however, Chafe 1980; Dorval 1990; Grimshaw, Burke, et al. 1994). There have been few explicitly comparative studies in which the same or collaborating investigators have simultaneously studied the ‘‘same’’ phenomenon in different speech communities (see, however, Watson-Gegeo and White 1990) or in different institutional contexts in same societies (see, however, Grimshaw 1990). There is reason to believe that all three of these important kinds of research are on the increase. Scholars all over the world are trying out SL formulations largely generated in the United States and Europe in their own societies, more and more work is being done on related SL phenomena in societies and speech communities where earlier work followed more traditional courses in linguistics and anthropological linguistics, and researchers from an increasingly wide range of disciplinary backgrounds are finding in SL/SOL data and theory materials to use in addressing their own questions.

An Additional, Residual, Neglected Question. Claims about the relative validity, reliability, and general worth of quantitative and qualitative research appear in SL/SOL, as they do in most areas of sociological work. While the modes of work are loosely associated with the micro–macro distinction, there are representations of both modes in both arenas.

SL/SOL AS A RESOURCE IN

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY BUILDING

A diminishing number of sociologists remain unfamiliar with SL/SOL and therefore unaware of both substantive findings and theoretical developments that could be helpful in their work. It is possible here to mention only a few contributions to the understanding of (1) substantive areas, (2) social processes, and (3) relations among language,

literature, identity, and so on. Let us begin with two instances of sociologically relevant contributions by the linguist best known to sociologists (possibly excepting Chomsky), William Labov, and then turn to research by sociologists and other nonlinguists that focuses from the outset on identifiably sociological concerns.

Suggestive Empirical Findings. Studies of classrooms, courtrooms, and clinics have generated findings that sometimes have resulted in changes in pedagogic, legal, and medical practice as well as contributed to our theoretical understanding of SL/SOL. Studies of a multitude of other settings, ranging from street, to dinner table, to backyard party, to workplace, also have produced important theoretical insights. Two of these findings come from Labov’s quantitative studies of language use in urban areas of the eastern United States (New York City and Philadelphia); the first has important implications for understanding social stratification, the second for understanding ethnic (and possibly class) relations, and both for understanding processes of social change.

In studies of dialects associated with class, Labov and others have shown that linguistically insecure informants, more often than not women with aspirations for upward social mobility (or concerns about slipping), often hypercorrect their phonological production in the direction of what they perceive as prestige variants, thus producing the prestige variant with higher frequencies than do those at social levels above them—and sometimes produce it inappropriately (Labov gives as an example, ‘‘Hi, say, that’s hawfully good of you’’). Awareness of this phenomenon should alert sociologists to look for analogues in other behavioral arenas (there is a family relationship to anticipatory socialization; the roots of the labeled behaviors may differ quite considerably); Labov (1972b, 1986) has pointed out important implications of this research for studies of linguistic (and, one may add, social) change.

Labov’s second finding is that the speech of urban blacks who have contact with whites continues to be modified in the direction of the grammar of the dominant group, while blacks in the increasingly segregated inner cities speak ever more divergent language varieties. This divergence cooccurs with concommitant differentiation in incomes and educational achievement, heightening

social distance and probably enhancing intergroup hostility (see Williams et al. 1964). Labov comments, ‘‘The linguistic situation correlates with the formation of what has been called a ‘permanent underclass’’’ (1986, p. 278).

Some Little Concepts and Some Central Processes. Studies of actual talk that occurs in the course of everyday interaction have generated both (1) concepts that allow one to taxonomically identify previously unspecified regularities in that interaction (in a manner similar to Goffman’s labeling of, among other things, front and back regions, side involvements, and the more specifically talk-related ‘‘footing’’) and (2) new understandings of the working of what might be called ‘‘master social processes,’’ such as conflict and socialization. Instances of the former (all from Grimshaw 1989) are the identification of hyperinvolvement (a phenomenon in which interactants are so deeply involved in the ongoing that they miss the things they intend to monitor), defects of nerve (a situation in which interactants know how to do something but are reluctant to do it because they are concerned that it may generate injury to self or another party), and phenomena such as topic avoidance, topic exploitation, and topic truncation (the last occurring when it becomes obvious to an interactant that interactional goals are not going to be accomplished).

An instance of this is Corsaro’s (1985) demonstration of the processes involved in children’s learning how to recognize and construct the cultures and social structures in which they find themselves. Another is Grimshaw’s (1990) distillation of the reported findings of a number of individual studies of conflict talk into propositions about the conflict process (see below).

Discourse in organizations: What can be learned from a language-oriented approach to social structure and social behavior depends on researchers’ choices of an ‘‘entering wedge’’ (the term is John Useem’s), that is, the selection of units of analysis, particulars of language in use to be attended, and questions to be asked. The paragraphs below will address things that have been learned from studies of language in use in (1) public bureaucracies in Sweden, focusing on narratives in the public domain, (2) organizations (primarily in the United States), employing a conversation analytic method,

(3) a specific event within a university (a disserta-

tion defense) examined by an interdisciplinary group employing a range of approaches and asking a number of different questions, and (4) a sampling of more narrowly focused studies of language in use.

Focus on narrative: Czarniawska is a student of management and organization who disclaims linguistic or sociolinguistic competences language in use is nonetheless central to her analyses of public administration in Sweden. In Narrating the Organization (1997), Czarniawska demonstrates for the study of organizations, a central descriptive and analytic role of stories/narratives and a dramaturgical perspective. Czarniawska asserts that stories rule people’s lives and constitute the basis for the construction of society (p. 5); she seems to believe that the centrality of narrative as the main source of knowledge ‘‘in the practice of organizing . . . is not likely to generate much opposition’’ (pp. 5–6). I find this surprising if true. Her project is to apply the narrative perspective (for which she credits Jean-Francois Lyotard) to elucidate continuities and change in Swedish public institutions and/or organizations at various governmental levels. The argument is dense, and the examples unfamiliar; the demonstration is persuasive both for the organizations studied and for the application of this perspective to other arenas of social life.

Czarniawska conceptualizes organizational life as stories, and organizational theories as ways of reading stories (pp. 26–29). She invokes Burke and Goffman in identifying drama and autobiography as special kinds of narratives (p. 32), noting (following Merelman) how drama, for example, can simultaneously or alternatively generate catharsis, personification, identification, and suspense (p. 36). She observes that stories not only can be vehicles for identity claiming by their tellers but also can be contested by other stories, unsuccessfully performed, and turned into serials (and sagas); importantly, all descriptions favor the theories of their tellers (p. 71).

In her exposition of how she studied Swedish public organizations, Czarniawska reviews a number of methodological conundrums related to the logic of inquiry of interpretive studies, including

(1) interruption of texts (p. 92, per Silverman and Torode 1980), (2) the advantages of ‘‘outsideness (p. 62), (3) issues of case studies versus ‘‘window’’ studies (pp. 64 ff), (4) the identification of action

‘‘nets’’ in organizational ‘‘fields’’ (p. 66), and (5) the place of notions of institutionalization and norms in studies focusing on narratives (pp. 68 ff.).

Focusing on two specialized fields—municipal administration and social insurance—she shows how stories, themes, and serials can be employed to elucidate the role of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ friction in social change, how new and old ways of acting have been integrated, and how new processes of ‘‘companyization’’ and ‘‘computerization’’ change the workplaces of individuals as well as the larger bureaucratic landscape. Narratives are central to people’s lives, and Czarniawska has shown the necessity of attending to them.

Conversation(al) analysis as a sociological method: CA is treated elsewhere in this encyclopedia; conversational analysis (CAs) do not consider themselves sociolinguists or sociologists of language. For many years, the author has told CAs that their work is highly original, exciting, and of great potential value to sociology and that that potential will be achieved only when they integrate CA methods and concepts into more traditional sociology, simultaneously showing how traditional sociological concepts and perspectives ranging from status and role, to social structure, to socioeconomic status (SES), to self-esteem could help in interpreting CA findings.

Increasing numbers of researchers across the social sciences and humanities have come to value CA as an approach to everyday talk; until recently, CA-trained sociologists did not undertake to demonstrate the value of talk as data for studying fundamental sociological questions such as how social organization is constituted, reproduced, and modi- fied—and how members contribute to that constitution, reproduction, and modification through talk—in what may appear to be mundane and unremarkable interactions. (CA methods are increasingly being employed in sociological analyses. Atkinson and Drew [1979] on Court proceedings, Maynard [1984] on plea bargaining, and Goodwin [1990] on black children’s play groups are impressive examples. These studies do not as directly as the work discussed here foreground the epistemological issues implied by the CA posture described above [see, for example, Boden pp. 214–215].)

Boden (1994) provides a demonstration that many readers will find convincing. Using audiorecorded talk from telephone calls and meetings

of varying levels of formality collected in organizations ranging from a travel agency and a local television station to hospitals and a university administrative department to the Oval Office, Boden shares her understanding of the sometimes extraordinarily delicate but analytically identifiable ways in which talk is employed to ‘‘inform, amuse, update, gossip, review, reassess, reason, instruct, revise, argue, debate, contest, and actually constitute the moments, myths and, through time, the very structuring of [the] organization’’ (p. 8). The argument is often dense, and for readers unfamiliar with CA, it may be difficult to follow. The way in which an accountant comes to see that physicians in different departments may differently view policy change that could improve a hospital’s overall revenue position but reduce ‘‘their’’ money (p. 58 ff) is a case in point.

Boden’s goal is to use her collected talk to undertake two quite different but complementary projects:

(1) to examine a range of more specific aspects of the organization of talk in the work settings that make up the business day; and (2) to discover through those materials how an apparently fragmentary process of information gathering, transmission, and very local assimilation is transformed into the goals, agendas, and decisions of organizations (p. 107).

In the course of pursuing her projects, Boden shows how members of organizations can at the same time account for their behaviors in terms of a ‘‘rational actor’’ model and be unaware of how actual decision making is accomplished incrementally in fragments of unremembered and individually unremarkable chat rather than through a focused weighing of ‘‘rational’’ considerations. Boden simultaneously shows how concurrent and articulated employ of the previously segregated conceptual apparatuses of general sociology and CA (e.g., adjacency organization, agenda, bracketing, placement, sequence [centrally and critically], turn and so on) is mutually enhancing.

Boden argues that stages of (1) collection of actual talk, (2) identification of sequentiality in that talk, and (3) discovery in the talk and its sequentiality of the fundamental stuff and fundamentals of organization, (4) allow and/or contribute to sociological theory at levels of considerable abstractness (p. 206 ff). One may find in Boden’s

study a convincing demonstration of Collins’s ‘‘microfoundations of macrosociology’’ perspective.

Boden goes a step further and anticipates the result in offices of the future of today’s incremental changes (p. 209 ff); they will be places with more talk (and reduced opportunities for reflection), sped-up expectations of productivity, increased scope of action for all personnel, a flattened hierarchy, and real downsizing. Careful study of Boden’s book allows one to see how (1) she came to make such a projection and (2) one can evaluate a novel and productive application of CA to central sociological issues.

Collaborative work across disciplines: As early as the 1970s, concern was expressed about the increasingly disparate and noncumulative character of work on language in use in social contexts (Grimshaw 1973b, 1974a). In response to this concern, the Committee on Sociolinguistics of the Social Science Research Council initiated in the 1970s the Multiple Analysis Project (MAP), in which representatives of different disciplines and different theoretical and methodological approaches agreed to undertake analyses of a shared corpus of data, in this case a ten-minute fragment of a doctoral dissertation defense (Grimshaw 1989; Grimshaw, Burke, et al. 1994). The author has (Grimshaw 1994a) attempted to assess the success of this project in achieving its goals of theoretical cumulation, testing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of analytic approaches and methods, and an illumination of a shared corpus of data beyond that available from one or two studies by individual researchers. While it is not possible to conclude that one or another of the analytic modes employed is more comprehensive, a reading of the studies together conveys a sense of the complexity of language use in talk in its several contexts beyond the richness of most studies done from single analytic perspectives (but not all; see Labov and Fanshel [1977], who synthesized a variety of perspectives in their pioneering study of Rhoda and her therapist).

The anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists who investigated the dissertation segment variously focused on laminations of context (Cicourel 1994), formulaic talk (Wong Fillmore 1994), clause structure (Halliday 1994), humor (Fillmore 1994), [Who didn’t find funny that which sociologists in the defense thought was.], speech acts, cohesive

devices (Burke 1994; Hasan 1994), prosodic features and contextualization cues (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz 1994), proforms (Grimshaw 1994b), and many other elements of the talk to study an equally wide range of behavioral outcomes. The outcomes included the reproduction and/or reshaping of social structure; control of the course of talk (and, by extension, interaction); creation of social relations; social and sociolinguistic constraints on discourse and interaction; negotiation of meaning; the notion of fluency, humor, laughter, and short-term social reorganization; membership-af- filiation-identification processes and the structuring of group boundaries; and ‘‘face work’’ and political maneuvering. Each of these varieties of behavioral outcome is autonomously a sociological matter. In more macro directions, they are also deeply implicated in the search for answers to the following five interrelated questions; the answers to which require attending to particularities of language in use:

1.How is social structure generated, sustained, reproduced, and changed?

2.What is the role of social interaction/talk in the creation, realization, maintenance, and so on, of social structure?

3.How does interaction work? What permits it to continue and even flourish in

social environments of competitiveness and aggressiveness?

4.What is the role of ‘‘meaning’’ in driving interaction and shaping social relations? How is ‘‘meaning’’ socially constrained and sociolinguistically/linguistically signaled?

5.What resources—social, sociolinguistic, and linguistic—are available to interactants for signaling meaning, sustaining interaction, and creating social relations?

What is going on, in short, when someone orders another person rather than asking or cajoling, or when someone says, ‘‘Don’t include me in that you!’’ or when an interactant says, ‘‘Along those lines . . . ’’ and then challenges something said by an interlocutor/conversational partner?

Other convergences: Ochs, Schegloff, et al. (1996), another volume of studies of language in use, provides additional evidence of the convergence of CA (and linguistic) concerns with those of

both sociolinguists and more traditional sociologists. The book is innovative in that the collaboration it reports is among pioneers in articulating work in formal syntax, CA, paralinguistics (e.g., voice quality, intonation, and tempo), kinesics (e.g., facial expression, gesture, and ‘‘body language’’), and proxemics (interpersonal distancing and arrangements of ‘‘things’’ in space) in investigating interactional accomplishment. It illustrates some of the range of autonomously syntactic (e.g., clausal organization and reorganization, employ of inflection and particles, movement of nouns or verbs), prosodic and paralinguistic, pragmatic, and other devices available in different languages and cultures (English, Finnish, Japanese, Kaluli) for the management of turns (including shifts of rights to the floor, acceptance or rejection of interruptions, and simultaneous speech), making credible claims, and making cautious characterizations of those not present or accomplishing a joint response to disruption. Fox et al. (1996) claim that English clause beginnings are richer than Japanese with information about ‘‘how clause is likely to continue,’’ thus providing potential interrupters with valuable information. They also observe that repair (by the speaker or another person) extends the possibilities for how an utterance can be completed in any language (p. 220). They are talking about syntactic resources for interaction. Some of these resources and/or devices are both familiar and fun in a Goffmanesque manner, as when the reader is introduced to and immediately resonates to notions such as ‘‘trailoffs’’ and ‘‘rush-throughs’’ (Schegloff) and ‘‘outlastings’’ (Lerner 1996).

The book is informative because in addition to demonstrating the interinfluence of syntax and interaction, it provides windows to sociological understandings revealed when seldom exploited perspectives are applied to concerns at the core of sociology, including issues of symbolic interaction, the socialization of neophytes, and social change. Beyond this, it allows similarly (and seminally) novel views of specialties such as the sociology of science and that of occupations. Particularly instructive, for example, are Ochs, et al. (1996), on how scientists construct indeterminate referential identities—sometimes in the process blurring the distinction between themselves and the physical world under their scrutiny—and how meaning is built through routine interpretive activity involving talk, gesture, and graphic representation. Also