From Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991: 102

they are speaking. As Heritage puts it, ‘the institution of interaction largely antedates the characteristics of those who staff it’ Heritage, 2001: 52. Research in CA, then, focuses on detailed description and analysis of structured interactional practices unencumbered by any formal account of the identity of the participants, speculation about their intentions or goals, or a characterisation of the context of the interaction. Moreover, it does not incorporate explanatory terms or hypotheses associated with more conventional social scientific theories and explanations of human action. Analysis is not directed to confirming or disconfirming, for example, the impact of class, status or gender variables in inter- action. For these reasons, analysis is said to be data driven, not led by theory. Summary • CA studies of institutional interaction examine how turn-taking patterns depart from those observed in informal conversational exchanges. • CA research shows how participants display their orientation to the appropriateness of these distinctive turn-taking patterns. • It thereby identifies participants’ sensitivity to the normative conventions which underpin these turn-taking arrangements. • Departures from established sequential patterns, and the participants’ responses to, or ‘noticings of’ these departures are a useful methodologi- cal resource because they display their understanding of the significance of those departures. • CA seeks to show how participants’ orientation to the relevance of the context physical setting, topic, respective identities, etc. demonstrably informs their talk. Developments, divergences, continuities and convergences In this section I want to trace how the later studies discussed in this chapter relate to the earlier work in each field. Discourse analysis: divergence, convergence and implications What, then, is the relationship between the form of discourse analysis described in Gilbert and Mulkay’s study of scientists’ discourse, and the empirical approach and theoretical arguments developed in social psychology? We start by noting some differences. Influences With the exception of a discussion of Halliday’s work on language and social context, and a brief mention of Foucauldian and sociolinguistic dis- course analysis, Gilbert and Mulkay rarely acknowledge the influence, or even existence, of related approaches to the study of language. For example, except METHOD AND CRITIQUE 65 for a passing reference to Sacks et al’s study of turn-taking procedures in everyday conversation, there is no discussion of conversation analysis. This is a curious omission: Gilbert and Mulkay were trying to establish the need to study discourse as a topic, and to demonstrate the complexity of language use, to a largely sceptical sociological community which had hitherto regarded lan- guage as an unproblematic research resource. Acknowledgement of CA’s find- ings about the action-orientation of utterances, and the level of detail at which turns can be designed, would have been useful in establishing the relevance of their arguments. It would have at the very least supported their claim that lan- guage use can be studied sociologically as a topic in its own right. Discourse analysts, however, are much more explicit about the range of intellectual influ- ences. For example, Potter and Wetherell cite the importance of speech act theory, ethnomethodology and semiotics. The findings from conversation ana- lytic studies are regularly used to illustrate general claims about language, or to strengthen the force of criticisms of traditional social psychological approaches. Their chapter on accounts uses Atkinson and Drew’s 1979 research on courtroom interaction; and their critique of social psychological attempts to study how people categorise themselves into social groups is informed directly by material from Sacks’ early lectures. Edwards’ work on categorisations in everyday speech and the use of scripts in social life is informed, respectively, by Sacks’ work on membership categorisation devices and ethnomethodological arguments about the constitutive nature of rule following in social life Edwards, 1991, 1995a. Focus Although Gilbert and Mulkay’s discourse analysis was forged from a consideration of methodological issues which have a wider relevance in sociol- ogy, their research concerned issues in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This was also true of colleagues who were sympathetic to discourse analysis. This reduced the likelihood that their broader arguments would be influential in the discipline as a whole. Edwards, Potter and Wetherell, however, explored the implications of the variable and constructive properties of language in a variety of sub-topics within social psychology: for example, the study of attitudes, cate- gorisation, social representation theory and theories of the self. This ensured that the analytic method they offered as an alternative to traditional approaches in social psychology enjoyed a wider currency. It also allowed them to identify sev- eral important new lines of empirical inquiry, thus stimulating further research. Repertoires One major difference between the initial work in DA in sociol- ogy of scientific knowledge and the subsequent emergence in social psychology research concerns the use of the concept of repertoires. There is no clear-cut distinction, but it seems reasonable to propose that the investigation of reper- toires was a much more prominent feature of the earlier discourse analytic work. There was discussion of repertoires in Potter and Wetherell’s key DA 66 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS