Language and Dialogue - Current Issue

Drawing inspiration from key authors such as Weick, Taylor and Van Every, Greimas, Goffman, Sbisà, and Tsui, we propose to explore what we call the basic organizing unit, in other words, the minimal form that a sequence of action must take in order to claim a certain degree of organizationality. In order to empirically test this proposition, we purposively analyze interactions taking place outside of a classical organizational context, i.e., street hypnosis sessions. What interests us is not only how these sessions are organized, but also how they organize themselves. Our aim, therefore, is to identify key moments when a certain organizationality seems to express itself, an organizationality that we propose to detect through the identification of these basic organizing units. This leads us to show that the adjacency pair model, which has been historically defined as a fundamental unit of conversational organization should, in fact, be replaced by our triadic model of interaction.

In this essay, I present data from a regional climate conference to demonstrate how speakers engage in dialogic practice to constitute a moral universe of climate actors. I employ the notion of the science-policy-practice dialogue to introduce three identity categories – scientist expert, elected policymaker, and practitioner – which participants use to position themselves and relate to others and their environments. Using discourse analysis, I attend to the membership categorization devices speakers use to deploy these identity categories and constitute the cast of climate characters. Speakers assign themselves and others to identity categories by making claims to enoughness, which are then used to establish expectations and justify actions.

Collaborative governance within natural resource management relies on dialogical forums where people can negotiate complex issues through conversations. In this paper, we investigate situations where procedural frames around these discussions are negotiated in the conversations between its participants in a corpus from five different natural resource management contexts. We present how frame discussions are initiated, how actors express that actions are not aligned with the frames, and finally, how these openings of discourse about the frames are interactively managed, maintained, and closed. We argue norms of inclusiveness, consensus, and performance shape the interaction and hamper the joint investigation of the frames, and undermine the entire justification of the collaborative processes and the core quality of dialogical conversations.

The project explores how conflict is managed in a debate talk show that addresses the current situation in Belarus and its future. The analysis shows that the debaters act as co-designers of the debate activity. They indicate a variety of moves that they find inappropriate (e.g., personal attacks) and use various interactional resources to challenge these actions, which is done directly (e.g., directly naming inappropriate actions) and indirectly (e.g., nonverbal actions). Their interventions are aimed at managing interaction, but at the same time, they undermine their opponents’ image. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of identities as an interactional resource to shape interaction. The analysis also demonstrates the role of a multi-party structure of the debate in managing interaction.

The present paper deals with an example of a TV broadcast discussion program, the Czech program Máte slovo, in which a dialogue fails. It presents a closer analysis of one representative episode of the program, which, despite being officially presented as offering space for discussion and a chance for ordinary citizens to talk to public personalities and politicians, takes the form of confrontainment, whose goal is to escalate debate. The paper reveals what practices by the discussants and the moderator contribute to the failure of a successful dialogue and discusses the role of broadcast programs of this kind in the contemporary communication sphere.

The present study investigates the increasingly common phenomenon of parental involvement in children’s education from a dialogic perspective. Drawing on video-recorded parent-child homework conversations in Italian families and adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, the study analyzes how a value-laden cultural notion like ‘family-school partnership’ is given ‘dialogic existence’ through a variety of discursive practices. Specifically, it identifies four practices deployed by parents when supervising children’s homework: (1) making the teacher speak, (2) drawing parallels between family and school, (3) siding with the teacher, and (4) adopting a teacher-like evaluative stance. Beyond their specificities, all these practices reproduce the school’s institutional culture inside the home. It is argued that, through these practices, parents ‘do being involved’ in homework and implement a partnership based on shared values between family and school.