Conroy1999

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Conroy1999
BibType ARTICLE
Key Conroy1999
Author(s) Michael Thomas Conroy
Title “I don't want to burst your bubble”: Affiliation and disaffiliation in a joint accounting by affiliated pair partners
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Ethnomethodology, Conversation, Accounts, Affiliation, Disaffiliation, Partners
Publisher
Year 1999
Language
City
Month
Journal Human Studies
Volume 22
Number 2-4
Pages 339–359
URL Link
DOI 10.1023/A:1005452904364
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This paper examines an excerpt from a larger (televised) interview, wherein various married couples are asked to characterize their living situations in the aftermath of job loss and on the work of description and assessment by interview parties. It thus focuses on features of affiliation and disaffiliation and analyzes how both procedures work, particularly within an environment in which affiliated parties are engaged in attempting to figure out an "unpredictable" outcome of some (mutually experienced or experienceable) situation. In the excerpt, there are instances of both affiliation and disaffiliation. Using such conversation analytic structures as topic organization, story organization, preference structures, and distinguishing between content and structural affiliations, the interview excerpt is shown to contain a series of story stages, each of which is an element of the overall work of collaborative assessment. Within this assessment, parties make use of "content affiliations," wherein they reference their lived affiliation with one another, while at the same time, structuring their talk so as to disagree and disaffiliate with one another's stance. In contrast to such classical theorists as Durkheim, Simmel, Toennies and Cooley, who viewed affiliation as resulting from internal, emotive sources, or as Durkheim put it, saw this as being a non-directly measurable condition of "primary group" relationships, this report argues for the possibility of seeing affiliation as a performed, or achieved, activity. In this latter conception, one made evident through ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, affiliation - along with its counterpart, disaffiliation, are indeed external and measurable actions

Notes