essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

222 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––In my study of elites, though, the way in which the institutional context was recursivelyevoked and maintained through their talk was found to be more fluid and difficult tocategorize into neat communication formats. In other words, identifying a relationshipbetween roles/identities and tasks and the discursive rights and obligations (for example, theuse of the turn-taking system) was not possible. These elites were not constrained by the typesof turns taken and thus, unlike other CA studies, their organizational identities were not soeasily assembled from the types of turns taken. The only role that appeared to necessitate‘occasioned obligation’ (Goffman, 1983: 7) in any clear way was that of the ‘chair’ (the MD)and whilst limited, the three extracts do enable us to begin to glimpse how this was an‘achieved phenomenon’. 7SO . . ., TO BE OR NOT TO BE A CA SCHOLAR – CONCLUDING COMMENTS ––––––––––––––––––––––––My prime objective here was to introduce CA/talk-in-interaction through a focus upon itscentral hallmark – the general parameters of the localized turn-taking system. Yet, this hasnot been a simple task knowing the CA stance and the issues, concerns, misunderstandingsand debates it has generated since its inception. Indeed, shortly after the 1998 version ofthis chapter was published, a colleague who would describe themselves as working from theinterpretive tradition exclaimed, ‘you’re not CA are you?!’ What underpinned this outburstwas a general and vague notion that CA has ‘positivist’ leanings, ‘doesn’t it?’ This is afundamental misunderstanding of much of CA studies, but in some ways understandabletoo. It is because of CA’s emphasis upon: formal and systematic analysis; the need todemonstrate that ‘extra-linguistic’ features are relevant for, or orientated to by theparticipants in some way and evident in their talk, and; the explication of genericorganization of practices, for example, the turn-taking ‘model’, that such beliefs andconcerns have arisen. Yet, as one of the original founders of the turn-taking model (Sackset al., 1974), Schegloff (1999: 415) explicitly stated, those who are critical of CA are‘mistaken’ in thinking it ‘entail[s] a systematic inattention to the contextual specifics andthe lived reality of the events being examined – a kind of dry and scientistic academicism’.He continues by stating that‘formal’ accounts are like an inventory of tools, materials and know-how from whichpracticing research analysts can draw for their analytic undertakings because practicinginteractants draw on them in concertedly constructing and grasping what transpires ininteraction . . . .(Schegloff, 1999: 415)In other words, and for example in relation to the turn-taking model considered here, thereis available a systematic approach and an analytical tool or framework for examining howinteractants deploy aspects of the model and make it work for them (given their goals andinterests). It is the activities that get done therein that underlays the interest in the model andthis orientation has revealed significant variation in institutional settings as noted in the priorsection, enabling some understanding of how pre-allocation of turns, normatively invoked,instantiate institutional identities.Disagreements over whether CA has ‘positivist’ tendencies removing it fromethnomethodology’s ‘phenomenological orientation’ (Lynch, 2000a: 517) continue, but as theethnomethodologist Lynch (2000b: 541) in a reply to Sharrock (2000) concluded, ‘(. . . our)