Dupret2008

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Dupret2008
BibType ARTICLE
Key Dupret2008
Author(s) Baudouin Dupret, Jean-Nöel Ferrié
Title Legislating at the shopfloor level: background knowledge and relevant contexts of parliamentary debates
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Law, Context, Debates, Ethnomethodology, Parliaments, Audiences, Legislative relevance, Procedural rules
Publisher
Year 2008
Language
City
Month
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 40
Number 5
Pages 960–978
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.08.012
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

The issue of context has fuelled much debate in the social sciences, stretching from broad conceptions to narrow ones. It is our contention that ethnomethodology's unique adequacy requirement furnishes a sound solution, providing it is tamed with a conception of feasibility. Within parliaments, a distinction must be drawn between the dialogical site of parliamentary debates and their embedment within the broader dialogical network of public debates. On the dialogical site, parliamentary debates are organized in contextually dependent though institutionally constrained ways. Within dialogical networks, parliamentary debates are publicly and explicitly oriented to their social out-of-the-parliamentary-precinct dimension. The contribution first introduces the various ways in which the issue of context is tackled by the social sciences and re-specified by conversation analysis, arguing that a distinction must be drawn between background knowledge and context. Second, it turns to parliamentary contexts and argues that there is no context to hypothesise outside what is publicly available and empirically observable in the course of exchanges constituting and embodying parliamentary activities. Third, drawing from the empirical material of one specific parliamentary debate that took place in Syria on the issue of family and family law, it demonstrates that legislative activities within a Parliament are constrained by the MPs’ orientation to audiences, search for legislative relevance, and reference to, and use of, procedural rules.

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