Context

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Context
Author(s):	Kevin A. Whitehead (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8817-1175)
To cite:	Whitehead, Kevin A. (2024). Context. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

Analyses of talk-in-interaction using CA and IL typically approach context by treating it as dynamically constituted in and through the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions. This contrasts with what Goodwin and Heritage (1990: 286) describe as “the ‘bucket’ theory of context, in which the situation of action is treated as anterior to – as ‘enfolding’ and determining – the action that takes place within it.” That is, rather than being a “static field” (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990: 289) that can be specified by analysts in advance of or exogenous to an action of interest, the contexts for participants’ conduct are built and managed endogenously by the participants themselves.

Context is thereby treated as, first and foremost, a participants’ concern and a resource for designing their own actions (i.e., for action formation) and for interpreting the actions of others (i.e., for action ascription) – rather than primarily as a resource for analysts to deploy in support of their claims (e.g., Mandelbaum, 1990/1991; Maynard, 2003; Schegloff, 1987, 1991, 1997; Whitehead, 2020; Zimmerman & Boden, 1991).

Both this dynamic view of context and the “bucket theory” involve an appreciation of the indexical nature of social actions – that is, that they must be understood, and thus analyzed, by reference to the context(s) of their production (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970; Heritage, 1984). However, there are at least two related reasons for favoring the dynamic view over the “bucket theory”. The first of these concerns the indefinite expandability of specifications of context, given that its potentially relevant features are wide-ranging, and can include aspects of the talk and other conduct immediately surrounding a target utterance; talk or other conduct occurring at some point earlier in the same interaction or in some prior interaction; the co-present and/or overhearing participants, their relationships with one another, and/or their memberships in particular social categories; and other circumstances (e.g., geographic, physical, institutional, political, economic, temporal, historical, etc.) associated with the situation at hand (cf. Schegloff, 1997). This gives rise to a risk of what Schegloff (1997: 167) calls “theoretical” imperialism, whereby analysts’ agendas, concerns, presumptions, etc. become the primary basis for specifying the context(s) of a piece of interactional conduct, at the expense of foregrounding participants’ perspectives, concerns, or “voices.”

A second reason for favoring the dynamic view of context concerns the ways in which the conduct of participants in interactions demonstrably, and on a moment-by-moment basis, adjusts or transforms the context(s) for a next action – and the associated ways in which participants reflexively orient to and take into account particular (and often “local” or immediate) features of context in designing each successive action and interpreting the actions of others (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984). This makes the a priori specification of static, exogenous context(s) for any particular action-in-interaction empirically unsustainable.

This dynamic character of context can be appreciated by reference to the data extract shown below. A primary context of the interaction shown here – namely the institutional setting of a radio call-in show, populated by the setting-based categories of “host” and “caller” – is produced from the outset in and through the participants’ conduct, and is collaboratively maintained and/or departed-from on an ongoing basis throughout its unfolding.

(1) [573 – 702, 4-23-08]
 
01  Cli:    .hh It’s thirty three minutes past three, it’s talk radio 
02          seven oh two, and five six seven cape talk. .hhh My name’s 
03          Clinton Nortje, (.) the lines are open until four o’clock, 
04          .hh anything you’d like to chat about, the numbers are oh one 
05          one, eight eight three oh seven oh two, .hh or oh two one,
06          four four six, oh five six seven, we’ve got Joe on the line 
07          from Benoni, Joe how you doing?
08  Joe:    Yeah, good morning, how you (doing)
09  Cli:    I’m very well, thanks[::.
10  Joe:                         [(It’s) a cold uh:: w(h)int(h)er morning.
11  Cli:    Ya, it’s freez[ing, hey?
12  Joe:                  [Ja. You’re right.
13          (.) 
14  Joe:    .hh Uh look, uh: thee: deputy: °president° uh:: (0.5) was 
15          talking about the skills shortage. 
16          (1.0)
17  Cli:    Mm [hm?
18  Joe:       [>↑The thing is=is< the ANC government has made a 
19          <helluva mess> hey? 
20          (0.4)
21  Joe:    And there’s no doubt about it.
22          (0.8) 
23  Joe:    I’m not a white person, °I’m a° Black person.

The collaborative production of this institutional context can be seen initially in Clinton enacting his membership in the “host” category by stating the names of the radio stations on which the show is being broadcasted (lines 1-2), announcing a period of open-line calling (line 3), inviting open-topic calls from listeners (line 4), providing the relevant telephone numbers (lines 4-6), and introducing a caller by specifying his name and location before greeting him (lines 6-7). By responding to Clinton’s greeting with a turn-initial “Yeah” (line 8), the caller, Joe, tacitly aligns with this radio call-in context and his associated membership in the “caller” category (cf. Whalen & Zimmerman, 1987).

The participants’ talk here also invokes a number of additional contexts, including a temporal one in Clinton’s announcement of the time (line 1) and the “good morning” form of Joe’s greeting (line 8), and the geographic regions of Johannesburg and Cape Town that listeners familiar with them will recognize as being associated with the radio stations Clinton has identified and the area codes of the telephone numbers he has provided.

A further aligning exchange (lines 10-12) introduces additional temporal and environmental contexts, as Joe and Clinton align in assessing the cold winter temperatures. They thereby engage in a commonplace activity – “talking about the weather” – that produces the context as one of ordinary conversational, rather than institutional, interaction. Then, following a brief silence (line 13), Joe begins to introduce his reason for calling, thereby resuming his orientation to the context as that of a radio call-in show, in which callers offer opinions, commentary, and the like. Notably, Joe produces this turn as disjunctive from the preceding “weather talk” with a turn-initial “look” (line 14), thus marking his shift away from the preceding conversational context and back to an institutional one.

In the continuing unfolding of the interaction from this point, the participants maintain their co-production of the radio call-in show context, while also collaboratively producing, using, and/or contending with a range of further contexts – both arising from the interaction and in relation to prevailing socio-political matters (also see the analysis of this case in Whitehead, 2021). For example:

• Joe prefaces his reason for calling by referring to remarks made by the country’s Deputy President “about the skills shortage” (lines 14-15), thereby introducing these remarks and associated national political and economic matters as known-in-common contexts for the action he projects will follow.
• Clinton’s utterance in line 17 displays his recognition and acceptance of the contexts Joe has introduced, and thereby serve as a “go-ahead” response (Schegloff, 2007: 30) that constitute a “welcoming” sequential context for Joe to produce the action he has projected.
• Joe’s claim about the ANC (African National Congress) government (lines 18-19) proposes that the Deputy President’s remarks about the skills shortage are highlighting a problem for which the government itself is responsible. He thereby uses this ironic juxtaposition as a context for complaining about the ANC.
• Joe’s use of the tag question, “hey?” at the end of his complaint (line 19), and his upgraded reaffirmation of the complaint (line 21) produce and reinforce a context in which Clinton is prompted to provide a “preferred” (aligning or agreeing) response – and Clinton’s non-responses during the silences at lines 20 and 22 may be evidence for a sequential context of incipient disagreement between Joe and Clinton (e.g., Heritage, 1984; Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff, 2007).
• Joe’s claims of non-membership in the race category “white” and of membership in the race category “Black” (line 23) display his recognition of the context as one of incipient disagreement, and are designed to account for and manage it. That is, Joe retrospectively treats his complaint about the government as having been produced in a context in which such actions are associated with the category “white,” and thus vulnerable to being discounted as racially motivated if produced by a speaker heard as a member of this category – and he works to eliminate this possible basis for Clinton’s apparent disalignment by contexualizing his complaint as one produced in a racialized social context by a Black rather than a white speaker (also see Whitehead & Lerner, 2021).

As this analysis demonstrates, the treatment of context as dynamic facilitates attention to the fine-grained details of the practices through which contexts are endogenously produced, maintained, and/or may shift or be reconstituted on an ongoing basis (Heritage, 1984). Moreover, it demonstrates that approaching context in this way does not preclude consideration of so-called “broader” contexts, insofar as participants may introduce them into the interaction and thereby make them part and parcel of its endogenously-organized unfolding (Whitehead, 2020).

Additional Related Entries:

• Action ascription
• Action formation
• Membership categorization device
• Preference
• Sequence organization
• Social action

Cited References:

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical actions. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), Theoretical sociology: Perspectives and developments. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Goodwin, C, & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 283-307.

Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Polity.

Mandelbaum, J. (1990/1991). Beyond mundane reason: Conversation analysis and context. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 24(1-4), 333-350.

Maynard, D. W. (2003). Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. University of Chicago Press.

Pomerantz, A. M. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 57-101). Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Between micro and macro: Contexts and other connections. In J. Alexander (Ed.), The micro-macro link (pp. 207-234). University of California Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (1991). Reflections on talk and social structure. In D. Boden & D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk and social structure: Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (pp. 44-70). Polity Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (1997). Whose text? Whose context? Discourse & Society, 8(2), 165-187.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

Whalen, M. R., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Sequential and institutional contexts in calls for help. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2), 172-185.

Whitehead, K. A. (2020). The problem of context in the analysis of talk-in-interaction: The case of implicit whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. Social Psychology Quarterly, 83(3), 294-313.

Whitehead, K. A. (2021). On Sacks and the analysis of racial categories-in-action. In R. J. Smith, R. Fitzgerald, & W. Housley (Eds.), On Sacks: Methodology, materials and inspirations (pp. 195-207). Routledge.

Whitehead, K. A., & Lerner, G. H. (2021). When simple self-reference is too simple: Managing the categorical relevance of speaker self-presentation. Language in Society, 51, 403-426.

Zimmerman, D. H., & Boden, D. (1991). Structure-in-action: An introduction. In D. Boden & D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk and social structure: Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (pp. 3-21). Polity Press

Additional References:

Duranti, A., & Goodwin, C. (1992). Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A., Rapley, M., & Antaki, C. (2008). You gotta light? On the luxury of context for understanding talk-in-interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 42-54.

Pomerantz, A. M. (1998). Multiple interpretations of context: How are they useful? Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1), 123-132.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). On talk and its institutional occasions. In Drew, P. & Heritage, J. (Eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings (pp. 101-134). Cambridge University Press.

Silverman, D., & Gubrium, J. F. (1994). Competing strategies for analyzing the contexts of talk-in-interaction. Sociological Inquiry, 64(2), 179-198.