Lawrence1999
| Lawrence1999 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Lawrence1999 |
| Author(s) | Samuel G. Lawrence |
| Title | The Preoccupation with Problems of Understanding in Communication Research |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, understanding |
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| Year | 1999 |
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| Journal | Communication Theory |
| Volume | 9 |
| Number | 3 |
| Pages | 265–291 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00171.x |
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Abstract
This essay appraises investigations into social interaction that display a preoccupation with problems of understanding. This critique is rendered from a conversation analytic perspective. Inquiries into interactants' methods for “doing” understanding demonstrate the stable and recurrent character of intersubjective understandings and thus indicate that bypassing these findings and giving priority to problems of understanding are problematic. This preoccupation with understanding problems is viewed as grounded in prematurely theorized idealizations and privileged perspectives that deepen skepticism concerning the extent to which interactants understand each other. Although this skepticism treats understanding problems as worthy of attention to the extent they produce dysfunctional effects on interactions, relationships, and institutions, work on doing understanding argues that a central problem for analysis is how interactants repair troubles of understanding in a way that minimizes their consequentiality for subsequent interaction. Proposals for explicitness, as in active listening techniques, and vigilance in employing existing interpretive and actional resources are critiqued as superfluous and violative of a moral-interactional order in which the presumed intelligibility of contributions to talk-in-interaction is enacted, renewed, and maintained. The essay underscores the primacy of interactants' methods for doing understanding and their implications for communication research and instruction.
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