Group Membership and Social Identities in a Formative Intervention in a Mexican Hospital

Formative intervention is a participatory methodology that supports organizational change by means of an interactive and systematic dialogue carried out by researchers and participants. In this process, the researchers contribute to expanding the conversational space in the organization by supporting participants in examining and reflecting on their own work practices, as well as in modeling, shaping, and experimenting with innovations. Drawing on transcripts of videotaped sessions, this study analyzes how change is discursively sustained by the researchers who conduct the meetings within a formative intervention in a Mexican hospital. The quantitative and qualitative analysis focuses on the collective pronoun “we” as a membership categorization device deployed by the researchers for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as questioning about the state of necessity for the intervention, engaging the participants, or introducing a proposal of innovation with the participants. Results show how group membership and social identity markers are used by researchers to support emerging forms of collaboration, involvement of participants and the creation of common ground during the intervention process. In terms of the practical implications of the study, an informed and strategic use of membership categorization devices used by the researcher can increase the effectiveness of their formative and expansive role.

Characterizing partisan political narrative frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party’s narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these diverging narratives. Here, taking the Democratic and Republican political social media posts about the pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate that a combination of computational methods can provide useful insights into the different contexts, framing, and characters and relationships that construct their narrative frameworks which individual posts source from. Leveraging a dataset of tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the ex-president, members of Congress, and state governors, we found that the Democrats’ narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. We then perform an automatic framing analysis to characterize the ways in which they frame their narratives, where we found that the Democrats emphasize the government’s role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Finally, we present a semantic role analysis that uncovers the important characters and relationships in their narratives as well as how they facilitate a membership categorization process. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the “elusive consensus” between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains.

How categorization impacts the design of requests: Asking for email addresses in call-centre interactions

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*

“I’ll just make sure we’re all on the same page”: Talking fictional worlds into being

This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information practices in tabletop roleplaying games. The focus will be on the ways in which players collaboratively construct and interact with the fictional worlds of play. A “big and small story” approach, influenced by the ethnomethodological methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, will be used to analyze the players’ talk as they intersubjectively create and sustain a fictional space of play.

When simple self-reference is too simple: Managing the categorical relevance of speaker self-presentation

Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

‘I’m calling in regard to my son’: Entitlement, obligation, and opportunity to seek help for others

© 2020 The British Psychological Society From mundane acts like lending a hand to high-stakes incidents like calling an ambulance, help is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Social relations shape who we help and how. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of an understudied form of help – seeking help for others. Drawing on a corpus of recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how social relations were demonstrably relevant when callers sought help for others. I used membership categorization analysis and sequential conversation analysis to document how participants used categories to build and interpret requests for help on behalf of others. Categorical relationships between help-seekers, help-recipients, and potential help-providers were consequential in determining whether callers’ requests were justified and if help could be provided. The findings show that different categorical relationships configured seeking help for others as a matter of entitlement, obligation, or opportunity. Analysing the categories participants use in naturally occurring social interaction provides an emic perspective on seeking help for others. This kind of help-seeking offers a fruitful area for discursive psychology to develop new conceptualizations of help and social relations.

‘I’m calling in regard to my son’: Entitlement, obligation, and opportunity to seek help for others

© 2020 The British Psychological Society From mundane acts like lending a hand to high-stakes incidents like calling an ambulance, help is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Social relations shape who we help and how. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of an understudied form of help – seeking help for others. Drawing on a corpus of recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how social relations were demonstrably relevant when callers sought help for others. I used membership categorization analysis and sequential conversation analysis to document how participants used categories to build and interpret requests for help on behalf of others. Categorical relationships between help-seekers, help-recipients, and potential help-providers were consequential in determining whether callers’ requests were justified and if help could be provided. The findings show that different categorical relationships configured seeking help for others as a matter of entitlement, obligation, or opportunity. Analysing the categories participants use in naturally occurring social interaction provides an emic perspective on seeking help for others. This kind of help-seeking offers a fruitful area for discursive psychology to develop new conceptualizations of help and social relations.

‘LEARNING MOMENTS’ AS INSPECTABLE PHENOMENA OF INQUIRY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Learning is an omnipresent feature of social life. However, in educational fields, learning is often studied through indirect instruments, such as surveys, interviews and coding schemes. In this paper, a praxiological approach to observe learning moments is proposed. This means that learning moments are not explored here through schematic reporting or statistical evaluations, but as accountable and inspectable phenomena as they became available in the corpus explored. Using a video-recorded fragment of interaction that occurred during a second language (L2) class in a primary school in Macau (China), the practical, collaborative instructed experiences of participants (teacher and students) in a lesson are analysed. It was observed that classroom participants attend to the categorial and sequential features of learning environments, which provide the contextual details that afford members’ realization of phenomena as learning moments. Stated differently, learning moments should not be confused with the successful accomplishment of a lesson plan just to satisfy programmatic (and disciplinary) requirements, but as something produced and accountable by participants as learning in and through their very practices of concerted interaction. As learning moments are ubiquitous characteristics of educational environments, the discussion of the results has pedagogical implications for teacher training, and for the assessment of teaching. Keywords: conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, learning moments, membership categorization, social competence, turn-allocated categories

Engagement Stance in the Illegitimate Discourse Practice

The paper deals with an interpersonal approach to the study of mediated political communication, that is aimed at the description of text impact capacity considered as tool of influence on group characteristic of an engaged object through the acceptance of the involving person's attitudes. The goal of the study was reached through rhetorical analysis, the methodology of critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistic theory of membership categorization. The concept of "engagement stance" is introduced and considered as metadiscourse characteristics of a communicative artefact reflecting the initiative of the subject (an initiator of engagement) whose purpose is to involve the audience to the ideology and practice of a terrorist organization. The study takes into account linguistic-parametric signs, significant for law enforcement practice, which make it possible to externalize the mindset to involve others in committing the crimes of an extremist (terrorist) orientation and to identify its verbal indicators. Rhetorical analysis of the engagement stance proves, that adaptation of the text type depends on the communicative intentions of the corporate author and shows text capacity for genre transformations caused by public circumstances, it is presented in the following characteristics: a) asymmetry as an interactional feature of the corporate subject and the object of an engagement action; b) perception of the corporate subject as an absolute truth holder, whose views acceptance is positioned as the only right decision for the object; c) the regulatory nature of the message aimed at receiving responses controlled by the sender (the corporate subject of an engagement).