Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
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Susanne Kjaerbeck
Abstract
This article explores narratives as an interactional resource to manage disagreement. On the basis of a detailed analysis of parents' meetings with three educators, three conversational phenomena were found to be particularly relevant to manage disagreement in narratives. The first phenomenon is the participants' manner of negotiating meaning in the narrative. It is demonstrated that the teller (a professional) and not the recipient (the mother) is the one who initiates the display of understanding the told events. In this kind of informal institutional talk, it emphasizes the asymmetry of the encounter. The second phenomenon is the primary speaker's accounting for and providing evidence in an attempt to obtain mutual understanding and to establish professional accountability. However, alignment is not achieved, and therefore the teller's assessments are constructed in a dispreferred format. The third phenomenon is the recipient's responding actions, which are minimal or absent and are used as a strategy for communicating disagreement indirectly. Finally, the relationship between narrative description and sequential and institutional contexts is addressed, and narratives are considered as contextualized as well as contextualizing resources of communication.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
