Using Conversation Analysis to Change Institutional Practices
| Number: | P40 |
| Organizer: | Antaki, Charles |
| Co-Organizer: | Ray Wilkinson, Maria Egbert |
| Abstract: | |
| Classic statements of \'institutional\' Conversation Analysis, such as the pioneering collected volume Talk at Work (Heritage and Drew, 1992), have established that CA can reveal how institutions are talked into being through conversational practices. CA workers have, up to now, been far less able, or willing, to recommend that CA be used to change institutional practice. But there is a development in the air. This Panel recruits some of the very best of the emerging research projects, in Europe and the USA, that are making their mark in using CA to analyse a given institutional practice and then, often in tandem with practitioners, suggest and work towards change. That takes CA a significant step beyond being a tool of analysis, and makes it a partner in social policy - with the unique advantage, compared to other methods of social analysis, of basing its recommendations on the painstakingly close analysis of actual practices as they play out in real time. Such a move is not uncontroversial. It seems to break with the ethnomethodological injunction to be disinterested. But the initial identification of practices, and the analysis that explicates them, is as open-minded as ever; it is only in the subsequent decision about what to do about the practices analyzed that the element of partiality appears (this practice better than that) - and then only in partnership with the actors in the scene. Thus, for example, John Heritage\'s account of changing doctors\' habits is based on an analysis of the grammar of interactions, and only subsequently collaborates with the medical community to identify a practice which will get their patients to disclose more of what is troubling them. Other domains of practice include speech and language therapy; psychoanalysis; audiology; and, on the wider stage, ethnic monitoring discourse. The aim, always, is to start with disinterested analysis and then work in partnership with the participants to turn analysis into recommendation. |
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