Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._1

first turn in the sequence, the summons, projected a relevant next action, an answer, to be accomplished by the recipient of the summons in the very next turn. Moreover, the occurrence of the expected answer cannot properly be the final turn in the exchange. The summons–answer exchange is therefore nonterminal: Upon production of the answer, the summoner is then expected to speak again, to provide the reason for the summons.

This provides for a coordinated entry into conversation, and for the possibility of an extended spate of talk.

Observe that a set of mutual obligations is established by the structural relationships between these sequence parts, with each current action projecting some ‘‘next.’’ In the strongest form of these obligations (sequence classes vary in this regard), the property of ‘‘conditional relevance’’ holds between the parts of a sequence unit. A ‘‘summons–answer’’ sequence is but one type of a large class of utterance units, known as ‘‘adjacency pairs,’’ that are characterized by this property. Examples here include ‘‘greeting–greeting,’’ ‘‘ques- tion–answer,’’ and ‘‘invitation–acceptance/decli- nation.’’ In adjacency pairs, when one utterance or action is conditionally relevant on another, the production of the first provides for the occurrence of the second. It could be said, then, using the example above, that the issuance of a summons is an action that selects a particular next action, an answer, for its recipient. If this action does not occur, its nonoccurrence will be a noticeable event. That is to say, it is not only nonoccurring, it is notably, ‘‘officially’’ absent; accordingly, this would warrant various inferences and actions. For instance, the summoner might infer that a recipient ‘‘didn’t hear me,’’ which would provide for the relevance and grounds of a repetition of the summons.

The discovery that human activities like conversation were coordinated and organized in a very fundamental way by such methodic relationships between actions, with some current or ‘‘first’’ action projecting and providing for some appropriate ‘‘second,’’ led to investigations into the various methods by which the recipient of a first may accomplish a second, or recognizably hold its accomplishment in abeyance until issues relevant to its performance are clarified or resolved, or avoid its accomplishment altogether by undertaking some other activity. Researchers learned, for

example, that for some firsts, there was not a single appropriate second but rather a range of alternative seconds. Note that in the examples of adjacency pair structures listed just above, invitations project either an acceptance or a declination as a course of action available to the recipient. In this case, and in others like ‘‘request–granting/denial’’ and ‘‘compliment–acceptance/rejection,’’ it was found that the alternative second parts are not generally of equal status; rather, some second parts are preferred and others dispreferred, these properties being distinct from the desires or motivations of the coparticipants. ‘‘Preference’’ thus refers to a structural rather than dispositional relationship between alternative but nonequivalent courses of action. Evidence for this includes distributional data across a wide range of speakers and settings, and, more important, the fact that preferred and dispreferred alternatives are regularly performed in distinctively different ways. The preference status of an action is therefore exhibited in how it is done.

Related to this, conversation analytic researchers observed that the producers of a first action often dealt in systematic, methodic ways with these properties of preference organization. To take one example, the producer of a request can and often does analyze the recipient silence that follows as displaying or implicating a denial—a denial as-yet-unstated, but nevertheless projected— and seeks to preempt the occurrence of this dispreferred action by issuing a subsequent version of the request, before the recipient starts to speak. Subsequent versions attempt to make the request more acceptable and provide another opportunity for a favorable response (Davidson 1984).

Moreover, members were observed to orient to the properties of preference organization through their performance of actions plainly meant to be understood as specifically preliminary to some adjacency pair first action. Such ‘‘pre"-type actions are designed to explore the likelihood that producing that first part of some pair will not be responded to in a dispreferred way. For instance, an utterance like ‘‘Are you doing anything tonight?’’ provides, in a methodical way, an opportunity for its producer to determine, without yet having to actually issue the invitation, whether it would most likely be declined. Similarly, this provides an opportunity for the recipient of the ‘‘pre’’

to indicate that a dispreferred action would be forthcoming without ever having to perform that action. Additionally, because ‘‘pre’’ actions themselves engender sequences by making some response to them a relevant next action, they constitute the first part of a ‘‘pre-sequence.’’ It follows that since these and other features of preference organization together maximize the likelihood of preferred actions and minimize the likelihood of dispreferred ones, they serve as important structural resources for maintaining social solidarity and ‘‘preserving face.’’

These interrelated observations on the organization of sequences were generalized outward in conversation analytic research from the relatively simple adjacency pair organization by the recognition that virtually every utterance occurs at some sequentially relevant, structurally defined place in talk (see especially Atkinson and Heritage 1984, pp. 5–9). Moreover, it is this placement that provides the primary context for an utterance’s intelligibility and understanding. Put another way, utterances are in the first place contextually understood by reference to their placement and participation within sequences of action, and it is therefore sequences of action, rather than single utterances or actions, that have become the primary units of analysis for the conversation-analytic enterprise. Accordingly, researchers in this tradition have not restricted themselves to studying only especially ‘‘tight’’ sequence units, but have instead broadened their investigations to (mentioning just a few) the sequencing of laughter, disputes, story and joke telling, political oratory, and the initiation and closing of topics. In addition, the sequential organization of gaze and body movement in relation to turns at talk has been the focus of some truly pathbreaking research using video recordings (see, for example, Goodwin 1981, 1994; Heath 1986).

Now let us consider the organization of turn taking, surely a central feature of virtually all talk- in-interaction. Recall that the prior discussion on the organization of sequences frequently made reference to sequence parts as ‘‘turns,’’ implicitly trading on the understanding that talk in conversation is produced in and built for turns, with recurring speaker change and a consequent serial ordering of utterances. In conversation, this turn ordering, as well as the size and content of each

turn, is not predetermined or allocated in advance. Instead, it is locally determined, moment- by-moment, by the coparticipants in the talk. In fact, this completely local determination of who speaks when, how long they speak, and what they might say or do in their turn, is what provides for talk being hearable as a ‘‘conversation,’’ rather than as, say, a debate or a ceremony of some kind. But this does not tell us just how—methodically— speaker change is achieved such that, ordinarily, one party talks at a time and there is little or no silence (or ‘‘gap’’) between turns. Clearly, this requires close coordination among coparticipants in any conversational encounter. The systematic practices by which this is accomplished are analyzed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson in a 1974 paper that remains one of the most important in the conversation-analysis literature.

Basic to the accomplishment of turn taking is the practice of changing speakers at possible utterance completion places, what Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson term transition relevance places. How are such places, where speaker change may relevantly occur but is in no way guaranteed or required, discernable by members? A key feature of the units by and through which turns are constructed offers one resource here: For an utterance to be usable as a turn constructional unit, it must have a recognizable completion, and that completion must be recognizable prior to its occurrence (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson [1974] 1978, p. 12). That is to say, its completion is projectable, and a coparticipant in the conversation who wishes to speak next can therefore begin his or her turn just at the place where the current speaker projects completion.

Of course, this does not preclude this coparticipant, or any other, from starting to speak elsewhere in the course of a current speaker’s turn. (Indeed, what actually constitutes a ‘‘turn at talk’’ is as locally and mutually determined as any other aspect of conversation’s organization, even as the resources for doing so are general ones.) There are various interactional moves that could involve, as one way they might be accomplished, this sort of action. At the same time, however, research on turn-taking has revealed that turns beginning elsewhere may well be met with procedures systematically designed to enforce the practice of starting at possible completion places. Further, features of the turn taking system such as that

described just above account for a great deal of the overlapping speech that can occasionally be observed. For instance, a speaker might append a tag question like ‘‘you know?’’ to his or her turn, while a coparticipant, having no resources available to project such an action, starts to speak just prior to or at the beginning of that appended tag, at the place that was projectably the ‘‘first possible completion’’ of the turn. This would result in overlapping speech, with both parties talking simultaneously. This was just one example; studies of ‘‘more than one party at a time’’ speech have uncovered massive evidence that its occurrence and its resolution (the restoration of one party at a time), as well as the solution to the problem of which overlapping action should then be consequential for next action, is methodically organized.

Having described the function of turn constructional practices in turn taking, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson still faced the issue of how coparticipants, at possible completion places, determine just who will be the ‘‘next speaker’’ (note in this regard that conversation can involve more than two parties) or even if there will be a next speaker, given that a current speaker might want to continue talking. They discovered that to deal with this problem, members have available a ‘‘turn allocational component’’ for the system. This component consists of a set of ordered rules that come into play at transition relevance places and which provide for the methodic allocation of the right to produce a next turn, or more accurately, a turn constructional unit. In related research, methods for securing the temporary suspension of turntaking procedures (to tell an extended story, for example) and for coordinating exit from the system (to end the conversation) have been documented.

Finally there is the entire set of procedures by which any troubles in speaking, hearing, and understanding talk are systematically handled and ‘‘repaired.’’ As Schegloff (1979, p. 269) points out, insofar as ‘‘any of the systems and contingencies implicated in the production and reception of talk—articulatory, memory, sequential, syntactic, auditory, ambient noise, etc.—can fail,’’ any piece of talk is susceptible to, or can reveal, troubles in speaking, hearing, or understanding. As a consequence, members of society must have some systematically organized set of methods for managing such trouble when it arises. Further, in order for interaction to serve as a primary site for the

coordination of social activity, any such troubles must be located and dealt with as quickly as possible to avoid whole stretches of talk developing on a problematic basis. Finally, this set of methods must provide the opportunity to discover and display trouble in speaking, hearing, or understanding by any of the ratified coparticipants to the interaction, while simultaneously managing such trouble from the variety of quarters from which it might arise, whether the trouble is noticed or produced by the current speaker or her recipient, and whether its source is endogenous to the interaction or impinges on it from outside.

When Schegloff, Sacks, and Jefferson (1977) began examining the related set of practices through which speakers managed such troubles they discovered two important features. First, they noticed that participants in interaction treat the initiation of repair as a separate matter from the actual accomplishment of a solution. That is, they distinguish between the various practices for locating a trouble source and making it the focus of the interaction and the set of practices for implementing a solution. Second, they observed that these two activities were not distributed evenly among the parties: The organization of repair exhibited a preference for self-repair and a preference for selfinitiation of repair. And they went on to show that this latter feature is primarily a product of the way that the organization of repair relies on, and is

fitted to, the system for distributing turns.

The organization of repair initiation operates in a restricted ‘‘repair initiation opportunity space’’ that is organized around the trouble source or ‘‘repairable.’’ Within this repair initiation opportunity space each party to an interaction moves through a series of discrete opportunities to locate and indicate potential and actual troubles. In turn, these discrete opportunities to initiate repair shape where (relative to the trouble source) a repair is effected, and by whom. The current speaker has the first opportunity to initiate repair on any trouble source within his or her own turn while still in the midst of it, or just after it is complete but before a next speaker starts. If they do initiate repair during (or immediately following the possible completion of) their own turn, such speakers also have the first opportunity to effect repair as well.

Of course, as we noted above, conversation is characterized by the alternation between current

and next, thus once a current speaker completes her turn a next speaker begins, typically by addressing herself to that just-prior talk. Accordingly, if a next speaker has some trouble with the prior speaker’s turn, the next turn is the place where she can initiate repair (using a variety of forms, including ‘‘what?’’ and ‘‘huh?’’ and other designs that vary in the degree to which they specify the exact source of trouble). By initiating repair using one of these methods, that speaker selects the speaker of the trouble source to speak next, and to offer a solution to the trouble indicated. If the next speaker has no trouble with the prior turn, and she uses it to move the action forward (instead of stopping it to initiate repair), her turn will display a variety of understandings regarding the talk it follows. In doing so, her turn may also reveal some type of misunderstanding (from the point of view of the speaker of the prior turn). If that occurs the speaker of the prior turn can then initiate repair in ‘‘turn after next’’ (or ‘‘third position’’) and offer a solution immediately. Perhaps the recurrent and recognizable format for this is ‘‘I don’t mean x, I mean y.’’

Thus, the movement of talk through these three positions—current, next turn, and turn after next—systematically provides the various parties to the interaction the opportunity to detect any trouble in speaking, hearing, and understanding, whatever its source, and initiate repair on it. As a consequence almost all instances of repair are initiated in one of these adjacent locations. The localization of repair initiation opportunities, and the distribution of them over three turns, has several consequences for the organization of social life. First, the localization of repair within a finite, and relatively restricted, space ensures that trouble is dealt with swiftly. Second, and related to this, given the systematic relevance of repair, if speakers move through these three positions without any party initiating repair, a shared understanding of the talk is thereby confirmed en passant.

Finally, as with sequence organization, the issue of preference is best grasped as a structural property of the organization of talk-in-interaction

(rather than being a product of concerns regarding the private desires of the parties). The two preferences observed by Schegloff, Sacks, and Jefferson are a product of the distribution of opportunities to initiate and effect repair that systematically favors the speaker of the trouble source over

others. As Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson ([1974]

1978, p. 40) put it, the organization of turn taking and the organization of repair ‘‘are thus ‘made for each other’ in a double sense.’’ It is worth noting in this regard that insofar as interaction provides the primary site for the achievement of intersubjectivity, for what makes sociality possible, the organization of repair constitutes its last line of defense (Schegloff 1994).

Taken together, the operation of the turntaking system and the practices involved in the organization of sequences and repair account for many of the detectable, orderly features of conversation. This orderliness was shown to be locally organized and managed, the product of members’ methods. It will be useful to make note once again of the research strategy that enabled such findings.

Because the data consisted of recordings of naturally occurring activity, a scientific account of the phenomenon under investigation could be empirically grounded in the details of actual occurrences. The investigation began with a set of observable outcomes of these occurrences—in the case of turn taking, for example, speaker change overwhelmingly recurred; overwhelmingly, one party talked at a time; turn order, size, and content were not fixed, but varied; and so on. It was then asked: Could these outcomes be described as products of certain social organized practices, of methods of conduct? At the same time, if members of society did in fact use such formal methods, how were they systematically employed to produce just those outcomes, in just those occurrences, in all their specificity? In addressing the problem in this way, then, conversation analysis was able to discover how cardinal forms of social order were locally constituted.

The research on turn taking in conversation has provided one starting point for more recent studies of interaction in ‘‘institutional’’ settings, such as news interviews, doctor-patient and other clinical consultations, courtrooms, plea bargaining sessions, job interviews, and citizen calls to emergency services. In many of these studies, researchers pursued Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s ([1974] 1978, pp. 45–47) suggestion that the practices underlying the management of ordinary conversation are the ‘‘base’’ or primary ones (for an example, see Heritage and Maynard in press).

Other forms of interaction—in this case, so-called

‘‘institutional’’ forms—are in part constituted and recognizable through systematic variations from conversational turn taking, or through the narrowing and respecification of particular conversational practices involved in the organization of sequences, repair, and other activities.

Take the case of courtroom interaction. The turn-taking system operative in these encounters places restrictions on turn construction and allocation: Coparticipants ordinarily restrict themselves to producing turns that are at least minimally recognizable as ‘‘questions’’ and ‘‘answers,’’ and these turn types are pre-allocated to different parties rather than locally determined. The relatively restricted patterns of conduct observable in these settings is, in large part, the product of this form of turn taking. Accordingly, variation in turn taking in such settings has been shown to have a ‘‘pervasive influence both on the range and design of the interactional activities which the different parties routinely undertake and on the detailed management of such encounters’’ (Heritage 1987, p. 261; Atkinson and Drew 1979).

Note that throughout the above discussion, the term ‘‘institutional’’ has been presented with quotation marks around it. This was done to emphasize ethnomethodology’s preoccupation with the local production of social order. From this view, that some activity or encounter is recognizably either an ‘‘ordinary conversation’’ or more

‘‘institutional’’ in nature—for example, is recognizably a ‘‘cross-examination,’’ a ‘‘call to the police,’’ a ‘‘clinical consultation,’’ or whatever—is something that the coparticipants can and do realize, procedurally, at each and every moment of the encounter. The task for the analyst is to demonstrate how they actually do this; how, for example, they construct their conduct, turn by turn, so as to progressively constitute and thus jointly and collaboratively realize the occasion of their encounter, together with their own social roles in it, as having some distinctively institutional sense (Heritage and Greatbatch 1991). Conversation analytic research on ‘‘institutional’’ interaction has therefore undertaken, through its investigations into the methodic practices by which this gets done, a systematic study of a wide range of human activities.

This mode of research, with its commitment to understanding precisely how any activity becomes what it recognizably and accountably is— that is to say, how it acquires its social facticity-has tended to focus in the 1990s on work activities and settings, under the rubric of ‘‘workplace studies.’’

The scope of investigation has expanded to encompass all forms of ‘‘embodied action’’ (that is, not only the talk), with extensive use of video recordings and, influenced by Suchman’s (1987) pioneering study of human-machine interaction, with careful attention to how the machines, technologies, and other artifacts that saturate the modern work site are taken up and enter into the endogenous organization of work tasks (see, for example, Whalen (1995), and the papers collected in Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath in press).

Research into conversation’s organization also continues to evolve. While there has been relatively little work that attempts to fundamentally deepen the original account of the turn-taking system developed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (for a notable exception see Lerner 1996), there has been important research at the intersection of grammar and interaction—recognizing that talk-in-interaction is in fact the natural home of human language. This work demonstrates that the approach to language taken Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar could be supplanted by one based on naturalistic study of the ‘‘grammar for conversation.’’ Given that Chomsky’s approach has decisively shaped, both directly and indirectly, the understanding of language in cognitive science, psychology, computational linguistics, and the other disciplines that rely on a model of grammatical organization for their own research, these findings are plainly significant.

Conversation analytic work on graamar and interaction was launched by Schegloff’s (1979) paper on the ‘‘relevance of repair for a syntax for conversation.’’ This line of work has underscored the need for studies of language to draw on naturally occurring spates of talk. As Schegloff observed, while nearly every episode of ordinary talk contains instances of repair within the ‘‘sentences’’ (or sentential turn constructional units) out of which it is built, the entire view of language developed by linguists is based on imagined (or what might as well be imagined) instances of language

that are free of such repair. Schegloff went on to show that most instances of talk-in-interaction, at least in English, are organized by reference to the systematic relevance of repair, whether an instance of it actually occurs in the sentence or not.

Of course repair is not the only organization relevant for grammar, and so more recently scholars have begun to examine what more might be learned about language by studying it as produced in naturally occurring interaction. With respect to this problem, conversation analysts have argued that insofar as language most likely evolved in face- to-face encounters by members of our species, its structure and organization must have evolved, at least in part, to manage the basic exigencies confronted by speakers and hearers. Thus, in addition to the systematic relevance of repair, the structure and organization of grammar most likely evolved as resources that shape, and are shaped by, how opportunities to speak are distributed, what constraints are introduced by a current turn on subsequent ones, and how speakers’ formulations of the events, persons, and objects are organized.

Perhaps most developed are a series of findings that link the organization of grammar and the system for distributing turns at talk briefly described above.

As we stated earlier regarding turn-construc- tional units, one of their key features is that each sentence, or utterance, projects from its beginning roughly what it will take for it to be possibly complete. And over its course, each utterance projects in finer and finer detail the exact moment that a speaker may end her utterance. Thus, instead of expressing logical predicates or cognitive states, grammar may be best understood, in the

first instance, as a sequentially sensitive resource that progressively projects the course and duration of turns at talk (Ford and Thompson 1996).

One of the most striking consequences of such a view of grammar is that the locus of its organization is transformed. While most approaches to grammar rely on the sentence as the basic unit of organization (with occasional nods to the organization of ‘‘discourse’’), the grammatical units produced in interaction are fundamentally organized relative to their sequential environment, most proximally the just prior, current, and next turns. Thus, rather than the sentence, or even discourse, being the fundamental unit or environment of

analysis, interaction and sequences of turns appear to be that within which grammar is most proximally organized. This appears to be true even at levels beneath the turn whether a sentence, clause, or phrase. As Schegloff (1996) shows, turn beginnings and turn endings, as well as what happens in between, are sites of strategic manipulation. Through this manipulation, both grammatical and prosodic, speakers fit their utterances to prior talk, launch new actions, and shape when they will be heard as possibly complete. Any scientific analysis of language, then, must take into account this central function.

Thus, as the collection of papers assembled in

Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996) suggest, rather than viewing grammar as an independent, clearly delineated, and internally coherent structure, it is best approached as one more of the interrelated set of resources through which interaction, and social life more broadly, is organized.

REFERENCES

Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and Paul Drew 1979 Order in Court: The Organization of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. London: Macmillan.

Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage (eds.) 1984

Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

——— 1984 ‘‘Introduction.’’ In J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, eds., Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

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Button, Graham, and John R. E. Lee (eds.) 1987 Talk

and Social Organization. Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual

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Ford, Cecilia E., and Sandra A. Thompson 1996 ‘‘Interactional Units in Conversation: Syntactic, Intonational, and Pragmatic Resources for the Management of Turns.’’ In Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Sandra A. Thompson, eds., Interaction

and Grammar. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Garfinkel, Harold 1991 ‘‘Respecification: Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society (I)—An Announcement of Studies.’’ In Graham Button, ed., Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

——— (1967) 1984 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Goodwin, Charles 1994 ‘‘Professional Vision.’’ American Anthropologist 96:606–633.

——— 1981 Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.

Heath, Christian C. 1986 Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, John 1987 ‘‘Ethnomethodology.’’ In Anthony Giddens and Jonathan H. Turner, eds., Social Theory Today. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

———, and David Greatbatch 1991 ‘‘On the Institutional Character of Institutional Talk: The Case of News Interviews.’’ In Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, eds., Talk and Social Structure. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Heritage, John, and Douglas W. Maynard (eds.) In press

Practicing Medicine: Talk and Action in Primary Care Encounters. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Homans, George C. 1961 Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Lerner, Gene H. 1996 ‘‘On the ‘Semi-Permeable’ Character of Grammatical Units in Conversation: Conditional Entry into the Turn Space of Another Speaker.’’ In Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds., Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Luff, Paul, John Hindmarsh, and Christian Heath (eds.) In press Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing Systems Design. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Maynard, Douglas W. 1997 ‘‘The News Delivery Sequence: Bad News and Good News in Conversational Interaction.’’ Research on Language and Social Interaction 30:93–130.

Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.) 1996 Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, Harvey 1992. Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.

———(1964–1968) 1984 ‘‘Notes on Methodology.’’ In J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, eds., Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

———1972 ‘‘An Initial Investigation into the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology.’’ In David Sudnow, ed., Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press.

———, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson (1974) 1978 ‘‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.’’ In Jim Schenkein, ed., Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic Press.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 ‘‘Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.’’ In Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds., Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

———1989 ‘‘Harvey Sacks—Lectures 1964–1965. An Introduction/Memoir.’’ Human Studies 12:185–209.

———1988 ‘‘Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation.’’ In Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton, eds.,

Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

———1979 ‘‘The Relevance of Repair for Syntax-for- Conversation.’’ In T. Givon, ed., Syntax and Semantics 12: Discourse and Syntax. New York: Academic Press.

———1968 ‘‘Sequencing in Conversational Openings.’’

American Anthropologist 70:1075–1095.

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Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks 1973 ‘‘Opening Up Closings.’’ Semiotica 7:289–327.

Schenkein, Jim (ed.) 1978 Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic Press.

Silverman, David 1998 Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Suchman, Lucy A. 1987 Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Sudnow, David (ed.) 1972 Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press.

ten Have, Paul, and George Psathas 1995 Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.

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Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.

JACK WHALEN

GEOFF RAYMOND

proprietorship and the partnership. In a proprietorship a particular person owns the property of the organization; in a partnership, two or more persons share it. The right to handle the property and affairs of the organization rests with a designated proprietor or set of partners. Significantly, proprietors and partners bear personal responsibility for the debts of the organization.

COOPERATION AND

COMPETITION

See Small Groups.

CORPORATE

ORGANIZATIONS

NOTE: Although the following article has not been revised for this edition of the Encyclopedia, the substantive coverage is currently appropriate. The editors have provided a list of recent works at the end of the article to facilitate research and exploration of the topic.

Societies carry out many of their activities through formal organizations. Organizations are units in which offices, or positions, have distinct but interdependent duties. Organizations—hospi- tals, schools, governments, business firms—share certain features. Usually, at least one of the offices serves as the linchpin: It coordinates the separate duties within the organization. The key office has ultimate authority in that the orders it issues constrain the actions of lower-level offices.

But organizations also differ from one another. In some, the assets belong to particular individuals. In others, ownership resides in a collectivity. The latter represents a corporate organization or corporation. Three features describe the modern corporation. First, it has certain legal rights and privileges. By law, a corporation can sue and be sued in the courts, make contracts, and purchase and receive property. Second, it usually exists in perpetuity: It outlasts the individuals who set it up.

Ownership rests with stockholders, whose numbers and makeup can change from one time to another. Third, the owners have only a limited responsibility for the obligations the corporation makes.

These features distinguish the corporate organization from two other forms of ownership: the

The corporation constitutes a social invention. The form evolved to handle problems that arose within religious, political, and other kinds of communities. It holds a place of importance in contemporary Western societies. Because it is the product of social conditions and an influence on them, the corporation represents a topic of substantial interest in sociology.

At present, the corporation appears commonly within the world of business. But when the corporation began to take shape during the Middle Ages, the questions to be resolved lay outside that realm. One of these questions had to do with church ownership. In medieval Germany, landowners often set up churches on their estates and placed a priest in charge of them. As priests gained authority over their charges, they argued that the church and the land surrounding it no longer belonged to the donor. Deciding the true owner proved to be difficult. A given priest could die or be replaced; hence, any particular priest seemed to have no claim to ownership. One practice regarded the owner to be the saint whose name the church bore. Eventually, the idea developed that ownership inhered in the church, and that the church constituted a body independent of its current leaders or members (Coleman 1974; Stone 1975).

Thorny problems also arose as medieval settlements formed into towns. A town required someone to manage its affairs such as collecting tolls and transacting other business. But the laws that prevailed at the time applied only to individuals. Any actions individuals took obligated them personally. By this principle, managers would have to meet any commitments they made on behalf of the town. To eliminate the dilemmas that the principle situation posed, new laws made the town a corporate person. The corporate person would have all the rights and privileges of any human being. This action reduced the risks that public service might otherwise entail. For many of the same reasons

that the church and town became corporate persons, the university of the Middle Ages moved towards the corporate form.

The early corporations played rather passive roles. Essentially, they held property for a collective, whose members might change from time to time. Contrastingly, the corporations of the twentieth century constitute spirited forces. They hire multitudes of employees. They produce goods and services and mold ideals and tastes. The decisions their leaders make about where to locate often determine which locales will prosper and which will languish.

The influence that corporations have produces concerns about the control of them. Much of the work on corporations that sociologists have undertaken highlights these concerns. The work on control and corporations covers three topics: the means through which corporations control their employees; the allocation of control between owners and managers; and the extent to which societies control corporations. For all three topics, control implies command over the affairs of and operations within the corporate organization.

CONTROL OVER EMPLOYEES

The corporate form has a long history, yet it did not typify the early factories that manufacturers established in the United States. Before the early 1900s, most factories operated as small operations under the control of a single entrepreneur. The entrepreneur hired an overseer who might in turn choose a foreman to hire, discipline, and fire workers. Through consolidation and merger, the economic landscape of the 1920s revealed far more large organizations than had the tableau of a half-century earlier.

More changed over the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than just the size of organizations. The corporate form spread; the faceless corporation replaced the corporeal entrepreneur. Corporations moved towards professional management. Factories that businessmen once controlled personally now operated through abstract rules and procedures. The people whom the workers now contacted on a regular basis consisted of staff for the corporation and not the corporate owners themselves. Bureaucratic tenets took root.

A bureaucracy constitutes a particular mode that organizations can take. Consistent with all organizations, bureaucratic ones divide up duties. Two features separate a bureaucracy from other modes, however. First, a system of ranks or levels operates. Second, fixed rules and procedures govern actions. The rules define the tasks, responsibilities, and authority for each office and each level.

Few of the factories in nineteenth-century

America operated as bureaucracies. Instead, the individuals who made the products decided how the work would be done. A minimum number of levels existed. Supervisors or foremen hired and fired workers, but workers made the rules on the work itself. The workers were craftsmen or artisans, and they contended that only those who possessed the skills that the work demands should decide how or if it should be divided. Gradually, machinery took over the skilled work. Machines and not workers controlled the pace. By the end of the 1920s, neither the laborers nor the machinery shaped the work. Professional managers did. These managers enforced rules and oversaw an organization where specialized tasks and graded authority prevailed (Nelson 1975; Clawson 1980; and

Jacoby 1985).

The corporation of the late twentieth century continues to operate as a bureaucracy. Some sources argue that efficiency explains the adoption of the bureaucratic model (see especially Chandler 1980, 1984). Others challenge the emphasis on efficiency, charging it with being overly rational or too apolitical. The first challenge appears most notably in the work on organizations as institutions. This literature regards survival as the premier goal for any organization. The closer an organization approximates an institution—an element taken for granted in the society—the greater its chances for survival.

According to the institutional perspective, organizations adopt practices that appear to be reasonable. Myths develop about which patterns prove most useful and efficient, and any organization that does not adopt a pattern that the myth favors courts failure (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio

1988; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Tolbert and

Zucker 1983; also see Scott 1987 for a review of the different branches of institutional theory).

A different argument maintains that the emphasis on efficiency fails to capture the politics of

corporations. This perspective treats corporations as systems in which the interests of owners clash with those of workers. Owners, it asserts, seek to reduce uncertainties and to eliminate the vagaries that can plague organizations. From this angle, bureaucracy serves the interests of owners primarily because it reduces the influence that workers exercise and thereby removes a source of uncertainty (Braverman 1974; Edwards 1979).

Workers need not have formal authority in order to affect outcomes within organizations.

Studies document the creative ways in which employees enliven monotonous jobs and pursue their own ends (Roy 1952; Mechanic 1962; Burawoy

1979, 1985). Yet, officially, the higher levels have greater power than have the lower levels. This is the consequence of the bureaucratic nature of corporations, not of their pattern of ownership.

The bureaucratic mode is not unique to corporations. Proprietorships and partnerships can display the traits of bureaucracy. The diffuseness of ownership that one finds in the corporation possibly makes formal control less obvious than obtains when ownership resides in identifiable persons.

OWNER VERSUS MANAGERIAL CONTROL

Managers occupy important places in the contemporary organization. One argument regards managers as more powerful than stockholders. Adolph

Berle and Gardiner Means offered this argument in the 1930s. As Berle and Means saw the situation, stockholding had become too widely dispersed for any individual holder or even group of holders to command corporations. Managers, they contended, filled the void (Berle and Means 1932). Later discussions echoed the thesis that the expansion of the corporate form had raised the power of corporate managers (Berg and Zald 1978; also see Chandler 1962, 1977).

Critics contend that the thesis overstates the role and power of managers. They base their criticism on studies of the influence that corporate leaders wield. Maurice Zeitlin (1974) helped launch this line of research when he argued that few scholars had tested the Berle and Means thesis and that the handful of extant studies showed owners to be less fractious and fractionated than the thesis supposed. Michael Useem (1984), among others,

heeded the call from Zeitlin for research on the networks that link shareholders. Useem concluded from his study on contacts and networks among large shareholders that a corporate community operated, held together by an inner circle whose interests transcended company, region, and industry lines. Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz (1985) examined the connections between financial institutions and other corporations and decided that control over corporate directions rested disproportionately in the world of finance. The work from the critics cautions us against the assumption that a multiplicity of owners implies control by managers.

SOCIAL CONTROL OVER CORPORATIONS

The corporate form constitutes a remarkable innovation. But as the corporation has become ever more active and entrenched, it has generated problems for society. Corporations have at times engaged in criminal behavior (Sutherland 1949;

Clinard and Yeager 1980). At other times, their actions have violated no law but have put the wellbeing of the public at risk. Both situations often show the inadequacy of the mechanisms through which society attempts to control corporations.

Corporations are creatures of the state. Ostensibly, then, they operate only at the indulgence of the state. But myriad corporations now have greater resources than do the states that chartered them. Moreover, the laws that states have at their disposal often fit individuals better than they do corporations. Corporations can be sued for wrongdoing; but a fine that would bankrupt an individual might be a mere pittance for a large corporation. Both James Coleman (1974) and Christopher

Stone (1975) have argued that the law can never be the sole means for controlling corporations; a sense of responsibility to the public must prevail within corporations.

Even if the law were shown to be effective in constraining corporations within a state, it might prove rather impotent in the case of multinational organizations. A multinational or transnational corporation holds a charter from one nation-state but transacts business in at least one other. The governmental entity that issues the charter cannot alter the policies the corporation pursues in its