---

---

URL of this page is www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/p-callewaert-031008.htm

Notes for the third seminar on Aaron Cicourel
SEC/ILU, 8 Oct. 2003

Staf Callewaert

I have during many years tried to read the papers of Cicourel that accidently came to my attention, because I always felt that they were very different from what I was doing , but at the same time relevant for what I was doing in three respects : 1. How to do classroom observation studies in order to give the talk on professions and  professional education  an empirical basis;2.To find empirically based answers to the question: in as much as professionals act because of knowledge , given that other factors are more important , which knowledge  is at stake and where does the professional has it from in the very moment of doing.3 How to deal with the relation between interactive and supra-individual aspects of social phenomena.

For several years  I have been interacting in different low profile ways with the classroom observation and  educational studies of Lindblad and colleagues in Uppsala, which can be understood as an attempt to  establish a model that comes symbolic interactionism in sociology near, and more specifically with the work of Sahlstrøm, who works in a tradition near to certain forms of social constructionism, as for example the so called conversation analysis exemplified by Schegloff .For my feeling both traditions are more interactionistic and  constructionistic than the tradition inspired by Bourdieu would accept as fully accounting for social phenomena.Cf my paper on the topic in Fra Bourdieu og Foucaults verden  Køpenhamn 2002.

Nevertheless it was not this dialogue in itself ,but  the fact that Bourdieu edited a volume with texts of Cicourel in French in 2002 , that gave me the idea to propose these texts as material for our Ph.d seminars in Uppsala. Even if I am conscious that it is possible to suppose that by  putting Cicourel on the order of the day, I tried to put on stage a critique of interactionism,constructionism, and conversation analysis as inspirations for classroom research that did not came from Bourdieu , but from a researcher that was part of the California based etnomethodology inspired  environment.That is to say: trying to  strengthen the critique by letting it be done from within.It then can be understood as a strategic move in the field struggle. 

At the second seminar Sahlstrøm intervened with some emphasis, stating as his opinion that the Cicourel critique of  conversational analysis was not to the point, which  has been proven by Schegloff himself in the same book , where one of the Cicourel papers was published, in Duranti/Goodwin ,  Rethinking Context, Cambridge 1992.

Sahlstrøms shortly formulated critique of Cicourel on this issue went like this: Cicourel does not make explicit the theory of the social that is implicit in and necessary for the validity of his critique. Cicourel has no explicit grand or medium range theory of the social, which means that his critique is hanging in the ear without attachment. Schegloff has such a theory, which amounts to the assumption that only what is relevant for the participants in the interaction that constitutes a social phenomenon counts as being part of the phenomenon and of interest for a scientific explanation. What is relevant for the participants is also all that there is of interest for social science. Therefore conversation analysis is selfsufficient as an instrument for understanding conversation, interaction etc. Cicourel’s claim that one has also to rely on contextual features relayed by ethnographic research even in order to understand conversation was dismissed. Because only what is relevant for the participants can have an impact, and  as such it is accessible for conversation analysis.

I was a little bit surprised  by this intervention, since I in my study of Sahlstrøms doctoral thesis had explained why his standpoint was not that  for example classroom interaction could or should be understood exclusively as determined by interactive elements relevant for the participants.

This reminded me of the fact that I for many years now have tried, latest in  studies of Foucault , and earlier in my defence of Bourdieus language use theory against Hasan, to pay attention to the difference between language use and social action of different types. Language use is one  form of social action, but not all social action consist of language use, or explicit language use, and even if perhaps some sort of language use is aways implied in social action, the language aspect does not fully describes social action.

So I have always felt that there are different dimensions at stake. One is the difference between intra-individual , inter-individual and supra-individual  aspects of social action, which in my mind are not reducible to each other.The other is the difference between semiotic/linguistic interaction and social interaction.As I tried to show in my discussion with Hasan, I do not think that all human social action is perpetrated , and surely not only perpetrated by "meaning" something, assuming  that the meaning is somehow the meaning intended implicitly or explicitly by the participants.

It makes a huge difference if what is meant, that is to say thought and/or said, is also done, done materially, corporally, acted out, observable as conduct, and at the end also incorporated not only in mental structures, linguistic and cultural structures, but also in  institutions, venues and avenues, landscapes and operative systems.

It is this double aspect: the unavoidable implication of the supra-individual and the materialised in each and every conversation on one side , and the relative inaccessibility of the full content of any interaction for the participants , as long it is not mediated by something else than the actual meaning of the actual conversation (all be it the intervention of another participant, new events, intercultural confrontation, violent intervention, scientific research).

That is what I think Bourdieu meant in a very innocent statement in The Weight of the world that I have tried to transform into a  rule of the thumb: the explanation of what happens on the site is not to be found on the site.

This we can contrast with the statement of Schegloff  in Rethinking Context p. 215 :

"Because the evidence of relevance of any order or type of context will be found" on the scene "so to speak – in the talk and conduct – there is  reason to believe that interest in all sorts of context will be well served by enhancing our understanding of the immediate or proximate contexts in which all conduct is situated"

"If 'context' is in the conduct itself, if it is in a sense the conduct itself, then rethinking context is the omnipresent job of analysis"

As I said, my main problem is the way both Cicourel and Schegloff move all the time from talk to conduct, as if that move was not the problem to scrutinize if we want to do sociology.

But the question is if we have to include Bourdieu himself among the "false prophets". In his introduction he presents Cicourels thinking in the following way:

 "l'analyse des textes contribue à la comprehension du contexte où ils se sont déroulés – et l’exploitation d’éléments de ce contexte contribue à l’analyse des textes.C’est ainsi , selon lui, que se realise l’intégration des niveaux "micro" et "macro" de l’analyse sociologique, ou que , dans un autre language, le sociologue peut empiriquement saisir l'effet des structures dans les interactions." P 16

(Notice: Bourdieu does not adopt the micro/macro terminology himself, and he assumes that what Cicourel is observing are not structures , but their effects)

" [Cicoural] il se donne le programme suivant :

' Il nous faut étudier la facon dont la prise de decision  dans les micro-situations complexes contribue à la creation (my emphasis SC) de macro-structures en apportant les solutions de routine nécessaieres à la simulation ou à la realisation des objectifs organisationells fondamentaux'

(Notice: Cicourel does not supposes like a trend in the Foucaultian discourse-analysis that discourse necessarily  implements objectives , but may not do more than simulate the implementation: at discourse level, that does not make a difference).

Ce n’est pas que les micro-événements "réflètent les macro-structures – ils les créent (my emphasis SC), au sens où ils les accomplissent concrètement en réalisant au jour le jour les objectifs des organisations complexes (écoles, hôpitaux, administrations, etc).

We know that Bourdieu always insisted that structures do not exist outside the action and interaction they are structuring and structured of . That is the sense of the expressions "create".

But in fact in his article Schegloff is much more discrete and  prudent than Sahlstrøm seems to pretend. He tries to show on some material previously analysed by different authors that it is not absolutely sure that knowledge of external context will change the understanding of the talk/conduct; one may add external elements of description, not known before, that do not change the understanding. And he tries to show that since external context elements do not matter unless they are relevant for the interactive participants, external elements are to that extent in this situation  internal elements.So context or conversation, it amounts to the same thing.

As I have suggested above, I do not think the argument is valid . But perhaps we would have to make a distincion between understanding and explanation , which would be very unpleasant  to reintroduce this old  topic.In the sense that external context naturally matters for the rise and persistence of the phenomenon, independently if the participants are aware of it, deal with it or not.In other words : social causality does not only operate by being the motive of actors ;or frame factors do not only operate in as much the teacher is  perceiving them and acting upon them , and in the direction he is perceiving them etc .

To what extent they are perceived by the actors, and have an impact on conduct by the perception and in the sense of the perception is a dimension for itself. These sort of constraints operate most often  preconsciously , as part of the implied framework, situation , procedure etc. But it may coexist with a conscient opposite interpretation of the matter, as is the case with most teachers. And it may operate outside even implicit perception , if  routines etc have the character of quasi-natural phenomena , like the believe that you can sit down on a  siege in all, that is to say in 99 % of the cases…

Another aspect of these studies that is problematic to me is that the researchers pass from the participant point of view to the research point of view in the understanding of a talk/conduct, and vice-versa, more or less without  accounting for the fundamental difference of these points of view.The reason is that they feel that all these points of view must be treated in the same way, that is to say, as far as they produce  an understanding that is to say a text, it must be made the  object for the same analysis. That is in principle all right; but it does not account for the radical difference of the place from which researcher/participant are talking. That we can see in another statement of Schgeloff:

"Our access to these particular contextual orientations as social science analysts is , in principle, the same as those real-world co-participants: they (the orientations) infiltrate and permeate and enter constitutively into the talk another conduct of each participant, and are thereby made accessible to others for uptake “ ( p. 215)

But the most important point I feel is the constitutive incapacity of this type of sociology: notice: sociology, to think of human action as constituted as something else, more, or less, than what the participants means by it, implicitly or explicitly. But that means that we are discarding 75 % of all sociology, classical and actual as Schegloff says. Because sociology was born as a science because of the impossibility to understand/explain human social conduct by the meanings of the actors.

That is why I have tried all these years to formulate things in the following way: social action operates  through the actors , but it is not  exclusively  by its actors , and most importantly not primarily by their conscious  insight and free will.

Schegloff is well aware of the problem. He states  that the academic analyst may bring to the understanding of the situation elements that the participants do not have, and that may be to the advantage of the interpretation, since the academic analyst may not have  the participants blind spots. But he states also somewhat  strange that there is no remedy that can free  the academic analyst from the constraint that the analysis "be subject in the first instance to contingencies that the parties seemed oriented to, not to ones which preoccupy academic or political commitments".

Exactly the claim that the participants have the  privilege of the first interpretation of their talk and conduct has been questioned in different ways by social science the last 100 years. I suppose that it will be difficult to find a classroom researcher claiming  that it is the meaning of the teacher and the pupils that explain what happens. So one lacks  a theoretical foundation for the claim if it means something else than we always start somewhere and believe that we understand something.

One of the things lacking in my preliminary comment is a well elaborated answer to the question: both Cicourel and Schegloff  comment upon small pieces of talk  very extensively;but what about the feeling that neither  proves his point by this text analysis. It seems that the points are made on other grounds than what is uptaken from the text/text analysis….One day we should go through their text analysis in detail.

---

URL of this page is http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/p-callewaert-031008.htm
This HTML version created by Donald Broady. Last updated 8 Oct 2003
Back to SEC home page