Bjelic2019

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Bjelic2019
BibType ARTICLE
Key Bjelic2019
Author(s) Dušan I. Bjelić
Title “Hearability” versus “hearership”: comparing Garfinkel’s and Schegloff’s accounts of the summoning phone
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Ethnomethodology, Conversation analysis, Phenomenology, Phone-summons, Hearship, Hearability-structures
Publisher
Year 2019
Language English
City
Month
Journal Human Studies
Volume 42
Number 4
Pages 695–716
URL Link
DOI 10.1007/s10746-019-09506-6
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This paper compares Harold Garfinkel’s phenomenologically informed “radical” ethnomethodology and Emanuel Schegloff’s “classical” Conversation Analysis, by focusing on their treatments of a ringing telephone as a summons. In their diverging accounts, Garfinkel and Schegloff use similar yet different terminologies in relation to the action of hearing. Garfinkel speaks of the “hearability” of the ringing phone, while Schegloff speaks of a recipient’s “hearership”. This lexical distinction is not irrelevant. “Hearership” stresses the obligations of parties to a phone call to speak and listen to each other while co-producing conversation. In contrast, for Garfinkel an analysis limited only to the parties’ work of speaking and listening to each other from within the hearable world glosses over the pervasive presence of the “hearability-structures” of the ordinary world. His “radical” version is predicated on the claim that the ordinary world is a hearable world. Accordingly, a phone summons is a familiar sound in which “hearability” is inseparable from the “hearability-structures” endogenous to the Lebenswelt.

Notes