Introduction
The story starts with a visit to a bakery in Barcelona. When entering the shop, the protagonists—visiting from abroad—address the woman behind the counter with hola, to which she replies with hola. While they are acquiring baking goods, another customer enters the shop and addresses the clerk with bon dia to which she responds bon dia. Knowing from prior experience that hola is an informal, socially unmarked greeting, the two protagonists are able to make sense that bon dia is a specific greeting at this occasion, and—being Catalonian (the language spoken in Barcelona) and not the Castillian buenos dias—has a distinctive local key to it. The next morning, our protagonists enter the shop, greeting the clerk with bon dia, and receive bon dia in response. They have not suddenly turned local, but by their changed greeting, they show an understanding and respect for the interactional details of social encounters in this shop located in the capital of Catalonia—and they are met with the clerk’s aligned response.
Our example, though not invented, is anecdotal. But the type of phenomenon it documents is not unusual in the mundane everyday modern life where participants constantly adapt to locally distinct and contingent ways of interaction and, in that process, index interactional histories and membership categories. A collection of greetings in Spanish service encounters may contain both instances mentioned above. To describe their variation properly, however, the two instances need to be ordered in time, and only then may they be interpreted as indicating modification of interactional conduct based on prior experience, rather than on change in co-participants, speech exchange system, or settings.
This brings us to the main point of this edited volume: All chapters introduce time as an ordering principle for the analysis of the micro-level organization of social interaction, but unlike classical Conversation Analysis (CA), they do so not only within a single stretch of interaction (i.e., sequentially) but also across different interactions occurring in chronological order. CA has extensively demonstrated that orderliness in conversation is constrained in time: First pair parts set up types of second pair parts, and “things” coming in second position are routinely heard as responding to the first pair part. This sequential organization of turns and actions is the basis of intersubjectivity in interaction.
While pursuing the central concern with such sequential-temporal organization of social interaction as it materializes in single instances of interaction, the chapters in this volume address change over time across occasions, that is, across different instances of interaction. They investigate what Garfinkel has called “another first time”. As Rawls puts it in her introduction to Garfinkel (2002):
‘Each next first time’ signifies that while each next case of action is different, each next case of a particular recognizable sort of action must also be ‘another’ one of something that has been recognized before. Each is a first, but each is also a next. (…) For any situation to maintain itself recognizably over time, however, its practices must remain recognizably the same, changing slowly enough not to appear strange to members. (Rawls 2002, p. 30)
Concern with change over time across occasions has consequences for organizing the data. Instead of collections of instances of a specific social practice or resource independently of whether these occur on prior or later occasions or by whom they are produced, longitudinal studies need to order their data chronologically , contrasting instances, typically produced by the same participants, occurring at different moments in time. The focus of the investigation is not on the generic features of social interaction but on how participants’ ways of dealing with “omnipresent organizational issues” (Schegloff 2009, p. 373) change over time.
With respect to our initial anecdotal instance, we note that adapting practices to local circumstances based on earlier interactions and finding alternative ways to act according to local contingencies in subsequent interactions is mundane conduct for human beings. It becomes available for description only when conduct is analyzed as ordered in time, both sequentially and historically. By adding a new dimension, historical time, to the organization of data, it is our intention to open up another analytical take to understand sense-making practices that members deploy in real time.
The present collection of chapters is designed to advance our understanding of change over time in human social conduct and to systematically address the challenges that research on the organization of social interaction faces when analyzing that change. The volume represents the first consolidated effort to present and discuss, in a comprehensive and integrated way, how micro-analytic studies of social interaction address the issue of change over time. It offers a collection of longitudinal studies drawing on CA across a variety of settings, practices, languages, and time-scales. In this introduction to the volume, we first situate our endeavor with regard to the research agenda of classical CA and discuss earlier contributions to the topic. We then scrutinize the methodological challenges that arise at the current state of research for “vertical” (Zimmerman 1999) comparison in CA. We close the chapter by briefly discussing perspectives for future research.
Participants’ Practices Over Time and Space: Conversation Analysis
On the Ubiquitous Nature of Change Over Time
Change is a basic condition of human life. It is part of how people move through their social lives and through history, how they get acquainted, how they socialize, how they appropriate methods for accomplishing actions, and how, accordingly, they happen to act in precisely the ways they act. People are not born members; they become members while they move—over time—through the social worlds that they contribute to constitute. The contributions to this volume flesh out ways in which change is accomplished.
Systematic analysis of change in social practices is key to understanding how people develop their participation in social interaction, how they orient to changing normative expectations, how they adapt social practices to variable local contingencies, and, ultimately, how they change their practices and become able to act as members. By participating in social interaction, people create historical contingencies and social order over time and shape their own moving from past to present. Therefore, investigating change in social practices is paramount to understanding not only processes of socialization , participation, belonging, and learning 1 but also history and the continuous local shaping of the normative (i.e., moral) order pertaining to human sociality.
While CA set out to analyze the sequential organization of social interaction, change over time at a larger granularity has until very recently not been a topic for CA research.
Toward Horizontal and Vertical Comparison in Conversation Analysis
Since its emergence in the 1960s, CA has been extremely successful in bringing to light the detailed organization of practices that are key to the accomplishment of social action and social order in and through talk-in-interaction. It has identified the systematic ways in which generic interactional requirements, such as turn-taking, repair , sequence organization, or the overall structural organization of conversation, manifest themselves and are dealt with in a multitude of situations, in a (growing) range of natural languages, and by a wide array of participants. As evidenced in the seminal papers on turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974) and repair (Schegloff et al. 1977), CA has been from the onset comparative in its analytical procedures (cf. Ha...