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Designing the recipient: managing advice resistance in institutional settings

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journal contribution
posted on 2012-02-02, 09:28 authored by Alexa Hepburn, Jonathan Potter
In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag question that treats the client as able to confirm the reformulated version despite their prior resistance to it; and (3) the dampening of the response requirement by continuing past the tag question, which would normally constitute a transition place for the advice recipient. We also discuss the tension between the contrasting projects of callers and call takers, which can lead to both delivery of advice and the resistance of that advice. In doing this we highlight the way in which advice may function as an element of broader institutional practices. In specifying these practices we draw upon analytic tools employed by conversation analysts, including various features of sequence organization (Schegloff 2007) and turn design (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The analysis is intended to contribute to three main areas of research: to the applied topic of managing advice resistance, to the growing literature on understanding institutional practices, and to broader concerns in conversation analytic and discursive psychological literature. These concerns include the status of the “psychological” in interaction and the specification of actions across turns and sequences of talk.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Citation

HEPBURN, A. and POTTER, J., 2011. Designing the recipient: managing advice resistance in institutional settings. Social Psychology Quarterly, 74 (2), pp. 216-241

Publisher

Sage © American Sociological Association

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2011

Notes

This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed article that has been accepted for publication in Social Psychology Quarterly [© American Sociological Association] but has not been copyedited. The publisher-authenticated version is available at http://www.asanet.org/ and at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0190272511408055.

ISSN

0190-2725;1939-8999

Language

  • en