Towards the end of his preface to Interaction Ritual, Goffman (1982, p. 3) famously proposed a vision for the study of
interaction that emphasized the investigation of (interactional) moments,
rather than the individuals who happen to ‘pass through’ them—a proposal which
Conversation Analysts have always taken seriously (Schegloff, 1988). In recent years, Goffman’s proposal has received a
fresh impetus from, among others, research on the recruitment of assistance (Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Floyd et al., 2020) and large-scale cross-linguistic studies which
followed Schegloff’s (2009) recommendation for comparative investigations to
focus on the management of recurrent interactional tasks and contingencies (Schegloff, 2006), such as locating and repairing problems in speaking,
hearing and understanding (e.g., Dingemanse et al., 2015; Dingemanse &
Enfield, 2015).
In this presentation, we take up a similar stance with
respect to the study of everyday normativity and its enforcement in ordinary,
informal social interaction. We do this by examining moments in which
departures from socio-normative expectations for conduct momentarily become the
focal business of the ongoing interaction, because one or more participants
demonstrably orient to someone else’s or their own conduct as (potentially)
problematic in terms of its socio-normative acceptability. As such, these are
moments in which the normative acceptability of social conduct is being
problematized and negotiated, as a practical concern, by the participants
themselves in, and as part of, the ongoing interaction.
For the participants, the potential
or actual engagement in such socio-normatively questionable conduct constitutes
what we call a (dis)approval-relevant
event, or (D)ARE for short. Such (D)AREs can be handled through an array of
different practices and methods, all of which have in common that they
foreground the normative and moral accountability of the targeted conduct (Heritage, 1990; Robinson, 2016; Sterponi, 2003, 2009). These sets of practices and methods are organized around the (D)ARE in
systematic ways, yielding a temporal-sequential structure of action that
furnishes part of the bedrock for how social conduct is continuously streamlined
into more or less acceptable trajectories.
The first part of our presentation
will offer an overview account of this temporal-sequential organization and the
various possibilities for action it affords for managing the occurrence of
(D)AREs. The second part aims at initiating a data-driven discussion of how,
and to what extent, this overarching organization may be inflected by various
elements of social context, as well as further aspects of social organization
that may relevantly inform the selection of specific practices and methods on
particular occasions of its instantiation.
Data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal
Interaction (PECII) (Küttner et al., forthcoming; Kornfeld et al., 2023) and consist of video-recordings of
informal interactions in a range of European languages (English, German,
Italian, and Polish) during three types of mundane activities: (1) joint car
rides, (2) adults playing board games together, and (3) family mealtimes.