Volume 27, Issue 5-6

Aaron Cicourel's contributions to sociology and other disciplines are discussed. Cicourel brought to sociology the philosophical and linguistic principle that language plays an active role in creating and sustaining social interaction and social reality; Cicourel and his colleagues pioneered the use of videotape as an analytic tool, which enabled them to vividly illustrate the importance of organizational and interpersonal constraints on social interaction and communication. His empirical studies of healthcare and schooling uncovered linguistic and organizational practices that contribute to the assembly of steps on students' academic careers and patients' diagnoses, treatments, and healthcare outcomes. Cicourel's work provides a wealth of empirical evidence for the argument that there is a reflexive relationship between social structure and social action as displayed in language use.

This article looks at the hospital as an expert system organized to promote distributed processes of collaborative medical problem solving. It is composed by subsystems and the collaborative processes resemble processes of socially distributed cognition. Terms like ‘medical discourse’ or ‘institutional interaction’ have been used to describe verbal activities in collaborative medical practice. But the definitions of these terms give a limited understanding of collaborative medicine. Observations of medical practice in a thoracic ward show that medical discourses work at institutional, professional, and moral levels. They deal with a multiplicity of problem types, involve a diversity of human and nonhuman agents, and take place within and generate complex layers of contexts. The development of the problem complex has to be professionally but subtly managed at an interactional level to reach conclusions that are institutionally, professionally, and morally acceptable. While extra-situational contexts may have a strong impact on these processes, medical problems are met and dealt with as concrete situational tasks, in restricted settings with different but concrete participants that operate within and generate local, linguistic, and interactional contexts.

This paper examines ways in which Cicourel's approach to understanding the construction of socially distributed knowledge in workplaces and institutions opens up possibilities for examining basic processes of social structuration. I focus on one particular dimension of that problem: how what gets to count as knowledge (of different kinds) is directly implicated in the dimensions of structuration that involve the construction and definition of categories and relations of social difference and social inequality. I draw on the notions of resources , trajectories , and discursive spaces to illustrate how Cicourel's ideas about distributed knowledge linking interactional orders and processes to institutional ones has allowed me to ask how distributed knowledge is linked to distributed power. I illustrate this approach with a discussion of such an analysis of categorization and stratification in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Canada), drawing on fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s.

The aim of this paper is to make processes of co-constructing, negotiating, defining, legitimizing, and justifying inclusion/exclusion in European Union (EU) organizations transparent, both on a structural and on a discursive level. Moreover, individual experiences from migrants present everyday exclusionary practices. In this attempt, I use research on EU organizations and on discrimination in eight EU countries (focus-group discussions) as illustrative examples. I propose a ‘discourse-historical’ framework, which relates different discursive and structural forms of inclusion and exclusion to each other. I assume that many contradictions come into play, while discursive shifts in inclusion and exclusion are decided upon. These contradictions imply— inter alia —value conflicts (conflicts between values of tolerance, democracy, etc.), conflicts of ideologies and beliefs, and power conflicts. Another theoretical assumption implies that managing ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ is a question of ‘grading’ and ‘scales’, ranging from explicit legal and economic restrictions to implicit discursive negotiations and processes of decision making. Finally, the paper illustrates the fluidity of membership categorization when defining exclusion and inclusion.

One of Aaron Cicourel's most critical contributions to social science lies in his pioneering work on gaps between the complex pragmatics of research interviews and the ways that they are conceptualized by practitioners. This article argues for systematic attention to ideological constructions of interviewing, taking as its focus George Gallup's ‘civic model’ of polls and his efforts to transform them into a crucial foundation for democratic governance in the United States and beyond. Countering deep skepticism about polling among social scientists, politicians, and journalists in the 1930s and 1940s, Gallup fused ideologies of science, quantification, and democracy with a construction of the production, circulation, and reception of discourse about ‘public opinion’. This communicable cartography (or ideological map) shapes how the current Gallup ‘Editor-in-Chief ’ positions polling as the sine qua non for constructing subjects and states in a neoliberal age. An analysis of a Gallup poll suggests that this communicable cartography is inscribed in multiple ways in each presentation of polling data, thrusting readers into a textual universe that claims to know the ‘real vox populi’ and how it has connected US citizens and politicians for six decades.

Financial markets are one of the most iconic and influential structures of our time. The foreign exchange market in particular is also the most genuinely global market—and the largest market worldwide, with an average daily turnover of 1.8 trillion US dollars. The foreign exchange market is also structurally like a massive conversational interaction system; many of its transactions are conducted through electronically mediated ‘conversations’. Transactions not conducted through conversations but through an electronic broker also display a sequential turn-taking structure. In this paper, I analyze the streaming ‘flow’ architecture of this market in terms of its sequential structures and their technological and economic aspects. I also specify and analyze several types of texted sequences that articulate and illustrate the response-based interaction system of this market. I argue that informational sequences are particularly important; the informational liquidity of this market sustains and supports the market's economic liquidity.

The notion of ecological validity has been an abiding topic either implicitly or explicitly during my entire academic career. Ecological validity focuses on how we seek to convince others of the viability and authenticity of our claims and can be understood by our use of primary and secondary data sources such as official statistics, demographic distributions, sample surveys, structured interviews, open-ended or unstructured interviews, and recorded discourse during social interaction. Ecological validity, however, can only be approximated in the social and behavioral sciences. The key issue is the extent to which data are congruent with systematic time samples of events and activities within local institutional or organizational settings. For example, direct observation of and participation in the everyday activities or practices of human actors during their daily life experiences by the use of, when possible, audio or video recordings. Systematic behavioral sampling by biological (behavioral ecological) studies of nonhuman animals (Altmann 1974; Krebs and Davies 1997) can serve as a guide for social scientists. This paper selectively discusses three previous research projects that attempted to approximate ecological validity.