16.2177, Review: Discourse/Sociolinuistics: Erickson (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2177. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2177, Review: Discourse/Sociolinuistics: Erickson (2004)

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1)
Date: 14-Jul-2005
From: Susan Fiksdal < FiksdalS at evergreen.edu >
Subject: Talk and Social Theory 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:36:57
From: Susan Fiksdal < FiksdalS at evergreen.edu >
Subject: Talk and Social Theory 
 

AUTHOR: Erickson, Frederick 
TITLE: Talk and Social Theory 
SUBTITLE: Ecologies of Speaking and Listening in Everyday Life
PUBLISHER: Polity Press 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-230.html


Susan Fiksdal, Linguistics and French, The Evergreen State College  

DESCRIPTION

In this book Frederick Erickson presents a new approach to discourse 
theory by articulating the links between the microanalysis of 
conversation and discourse at the societal level.  He begins with two 
assertions which form a paradox when held together, paraphrased 
here: (1) The conduct of talk in real time is unique, produced by social 
actors in a particular situation; (2) This conduct of talk is influenced by 
social factors beyond the situation and time of that talk.  Rather than 
focusing on one or the other assertion, Erickson presents an 
argument linking the two.

Part I "Examples of the Conduct of Talk" (Chapters 1-5) examines four 
different conversations which could be seen as pedagogically oriented 
across the life cycle: children interacting at a family dinner, a 
kindergartner interacting with her teacher, a counselor interacting with 
a community college student, and a  medical intern interacting with his 
supervisor.  Although these examples have been previously 
published, they are reframed for this book.

Chapter One: "Sketching the Terrain"
This chapter lays out Erickson's approach to conversation analysis 
which he describes as a social ecology of mutual attention taking 
place in a context of time. This notion of time is based on the Greek 
terms for time, "kronos" and "kairos."  "Kronos" refers to the rhythmic 
cadence performed by prosody and body motion.  The second aspect 
of time, "kairos," refers to the time of tactical appropriateness, the time 
that feels right for a particular purpose.  It is this dual notion of time 
that enables the social organization of talk.  Erickson proposes that to 
fully investigate the social practices within conversation, it is essential 
to examine the social practices within society.  He does not see these 
as deterministic; instead, he argues that the social structure provides 
both constraints and enablement and social processes are both 
conventional and innovative.

In Chapter Two, "Seventy-Five Dollars Goes in a Day," Erickson 
presents an analysis of a family dinner table conversation within a rich 
context of setting, participants, and organization of talk.  The 
transcription is designed to display the rhythmic organization, with 
parts of the talk transcribed a second time using musical notation.  
With eight speakers and a lively conversation with side conversations, 
contributions from everyone, passing of food, and eating, there was a 
lot going on.  Erickson points out that all of this activity was 
rhythmically oriented so that the gestures and passing movements 
matched the cadence of the conversation measured using a 
metronome and machine analysis.  Key information nouns received 
prominence in this structure by falling on the "beat" and receiving pitch 
and volume emphasis, making it easy for listeners to locate them.  
Erickson then situates the content of the talk within the family's 
socioeconomic situation at that time-1974.  The topic in effect acted as 
a socializing feature: the children were learning about their family 
budget situation and they were learning ways of talking about it.  
Erickson argues that this must have taken place in many working class 
families and acted in synergy with political discourse producing a mass 
movement which was responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan 
as president.  

Chapter 3, "I can Make a 'P'" focuses on the relative interactional 
success of two children in a combined first and second grade 
classroom.  He describes the communicative competence of the first 
graders who had already spent a year in the same teacher's 
classroom which included both responding with the correct information 
and responding at the right time-during the "kairos" moment after a 
question and on the cadential beat.  One of the children, Angie, did 
not respond appropriately in the first taping and this segment is 
carefully analyzed for the rhythmic organization of the talk.  He reports 
that by February Angie had learned the conversational practices in 
the classroom.  Another child did not achieve that competence and by 
the following year he had "faded into the woodwork."  That is, he did 
not interact in the classroom conversation and was no longer 
expected to.  Erickson points out that this interactional failure can 
follow children as it affects teachers' judgments of their academic 
ability and their motivation.  These judgments are entered in the 
children's permanent records and they influence later teachers' 
perceptions of them.  Whether this takes place in a school, a hospital, 
or periodic interviews with a parole officer, Erickson points out that an 
individual develops an identifiable deviant institutional career Cicourel 
(1967).

Chapter 4 "You Wrestlin'?" presents a conversation between an 
academic counselor at a community college with a long-term student.  
Erickson's analysis of the conversation and the playback interview 
demonstrates the ways in which co-membership in a group is 
established through talk.  In this case, the advisor revealed that he 
knew the student's family and they shared the same ethnicity. 
Erickson points out that the collusion between the advisor and 
student, which was not explicitly addressed by either, helped the 
student avoid the draft and serving in the military during the Vietnam 
War.  For example, although the community college normally 
graduated students in four semesters, this student was in his eighth.  
Erickson reports on the way he also helped students when he first 
became a professor.

In Chapter 5, "He has no history of IVDA," Erickson analyzes the 
interaction of an attending physician and preceptor with an intern in 
his first year of residency.  In contrast to the co-membership solidarity 
described in the previous chapter, in this one co-membership is 
complicated by race.  Both the intern and patient are young African-
American males while the preceptor is older and white. The hospital 
served adjacent inner-city neighborhoods where mostly African-
Americans lived, and the patient came from one of these 
neighborhoods.  Erickson finds several places in the discourse where 
co-membership is established in the intern's use of an informal 
register rather than specific medical terminology.  This practice 
establishes the young intern as a doctor like the preceptor as this 
informal register is often used between doctors.   In two places in the 
interaction, however, the intern responds to the informal register of 
the preceptor with a hyperformal response.  Erickson surmises that he 
wishes to distance himself from the street-wise patient. By distancing 
himself from the patient and what the patient knows, the intern also 
distances himself from the preceptor in his hyperformal response.  
Erickson sees this momentary chill in the two doctor's relationship as a 
consequence of the history of race relations in the US. 

Prior to the beginning of Part II, Erickson offers a summation of the 
findings in the first four chapters in "Excursus: The Cases in Synoptic 
Review."  He points out that in all cases there were various subtexts 
being expressed as well as the main topics.  While some particular 
features are specific only to individual cases, there is potential for 
what he calls "ethnographic generalization."  

Part II, "Thinking About Talk and Social Theory," reiterates the thesis 
of the book stated as a paradox in the introduction: talk is both a local 
process and a global one.  Erickson indicates the difficulties in 
addressing this paradox given the disciplinary divisions in academia 
and the importance of bridging the gulf between local practices and 
social theory.

In Chapter 6, "General Perspectives on Talk and Social Theory," 
Erickson describes and critiques social theories which he believes do 
not adequately explain both the local and global ecologies of talk.  He 
first sketches two major approaches to social processes-voluntarism 
or the result of individual effort and will; and social determinism. 
Neither can account for the ways in which local and global processes 
interact.  He then describes various explanations for the existence of 
social order including socialization, conflict theory, ethnomethodology, 
and post-structuralist accounts found in Foucault's, Bourdieu's and 
Bakhtin's writings.  These he associates with capital D "Discourse" 
approaches (Gee, 1990), which do not take into account local 
discourse practices as much as larger practices labeled as general 
workings of society.  He also examines Fairclough's notion of critical 
discourse analysis, which is concerned with language as social 
practice determined by social structure. Erickson seeks to underscore 
the multivalence in everyday talk and to create a theoretical stance in 
which to study it.

In Chapter 7, "Toward a more Practical theory of Practices in Talk," 
Erickson extends his critique from the previous chapter arguing that 
both Foucault and Bourdieu treat the relationship of culture, 
discourse, and power in a deterministic way.  In Foucault's theory he 
finds no place for the human agent and no gradation in the flow of 
power.  He reveals an analogous problem in Bourdieu's formulation of 
the relationship between "habitus" and field.  Bourdieu describes 
social reproduction in a variety of settings, but he does not describe a 
particular habitus or practice in the field-as-experienced.  Erickson 
argues that speakers as social actors in real time constitute the field-
as-experience and that this field is penetrable by local practice-it does 
not determine what can occur.  Erickson acknowledges Goffman's 
approach to face-work as an opening to the in depth work of 
understanding talk in interaction, and his notion of footings or 
alignments in which speakers adopt to indicate to others the stance 
they are taking towards the talk as contributions to his own notion of a 
theory of practicing.  

Erickson believes that to account for change in a theory of social 
reproduction, we must look within the conduct of talk.  He finds the 
notion of the "bricoleur" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) useful for explaining how 
change occurs at this level.  The "bricoleur" is the handyman who 
makes use of what is at hand to solve a problem.  In talk, a speaker 
as "bricoleur" may bring the same strategy as in another conversation 
in response to a particular situation; but, crucially, this speaker may 
also innovate at the appropriate moment.  Erickson thus expands and 
deepens this notion of timing, from the Greek notion of kairos or the 
appropriate moment which he has developed in earlier work (see 
especially Erickson and Shultz 1982).  Erickson demonstrates the 
actions of a "bricoleur," his son at age 2, who routinely ended his 
made-up stories: "And they lived happily ever after...amen."  His son 
had acquired prestructured speech through different experiences and 
combined them in an innovative way, indicating that preexisting 
structures do allow for change

In Chapter 8, "Summing Up," Erickson makes the crucial point that 
post-structuralists have extended the notion of discourse to semiotic 
systems beyond face-to-face talk such as writing, dress, food, 
architecture, systems of power/knowledge and that this breadth 
obscures the fundamental constitutive importance of local social 
ecology for the real-time production of talk.  He finds a neglect of the 
particular situation because the units of analysis are temporally and 
spatially distant.  On the other hand, the analysis of talk affords an in 
depth view of a particular situation and the ways in which that situation 
constrains the speakers.  In order to illustrate why these particular 
situations matter in the overall social system, he reviews each of the 
chapters presenting a particular conversation analysis and illustrates 
the ways in which each contributes to historical change. He argues 
that looking at change from the bottom up, the work social actors do in 
real time in conversation, reveals innovation.  Although he cannot say 
for sure what happened to the specific social actors he investigated in 
the conversations presented in this volume, Erickson does insist upon 
the importance of social theory for conversation analysts.  If, for 
example, researchers are working within a theory in which social 
actors are essential rule-followers, products of prior socialization, they 
may overlook evidence of speech genres that do not fit.

EVALUATION

Erickson has proposed an intriguing argument, linking local 
conversations in real time with the theory of discourse at a societal 
level.  It offers students of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis a 
way of understanding the importance of ethnographic microanalysis in 
the context of social change.  The discussion of four conversations in 
the first part of the book carefully lays the groundwork for the 
theoretical discussion in the second, by presenting a close analysis of 
verbal and nonverbal behavior and tying the talk to the social forces of 
the time.  Erickson thus reinforces his argument for the importance of 
talk in real time.  For those familiar with Erickson's work, this argument 
extends his work on the notion of "kairos," the right time or 
appropriate time in talk.  He proposes the "bricoleur" as agent, an 
agent that can exercise power and create change at the local level.  

I find Erickson's argument intriguing. Certainly in the eyes of many 
historians it is local practice that creates and sustains change, and 
this text provides a window into how change may occur through the 
actions of the "bricoleur."  Erickson also draws upon social theorists of 
big "D" discourse.  I am left with several questions.  Much of what 
occurs in conversation is not considered at a conscious level; for 
example, speakers may experience an uncomfortable moment, but 
may not analyze it in its verbal, nonverbal, and rhythmic context 
(Fiksdal, 1990).  Would they recognize "bricolage" and use it to the 
same effect in later conversations?  If talk constitutes the power 
relationships and identities projected in conversation, does "bricolage" 
need to be recognized by interlocutors to create change in local 
practice?  While at a microanalytic level in a conversation, one might 
recognize innovative practice, how does that practice lead to change 
across speakers and across situations at more macro levels?  How 
does socialization in certain practices such as the classroom fit into 
this argument? Despite these questions, it is certain that societal 
change does take place and conversational practices change.  
Erickson's argument proposes an argument that links the two.  

This text would serve well as an introduction to ethnographic 
microanalysis and, for those of us who have been working in this area, 
it presents a way of connecting this work to broader social forces in its 
emphasis on "bricolage" and avoidance of deterministic theories.  Part 
II requires careful reading because Erickson not only critiques major 
theorists, but also examines critiques of those theorists.  For that 
reason, the text may be best used in graduate studies, but some 
advanced undergraduates may also find it useful.  

REFERENCES

Cicourel, Aaron V. (1967) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. 
NY: John Wiley.

Erickson, Frederick and Shultz, Jeffrey (1982) The Counselor as 
Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews. NY: Academic Press.

Fiksdal, Susan (1990). The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of 
Cross-Cultural Gatekeeping Interviews.  Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 

Gee, James P. (1990) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in 
Discourses.  London: Falmer. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Fiksdal teaches linguistics and French to undergraduates at 
The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.  Her current 
research interests are in metaphor in conversation, gender, the 
rhythmic organization of talk, and classroom discourse.





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