Recruitment

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Recruitment
Author(s):	Kobin H. Kendrick (University of York, UK) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6656-1439)
To cite:	Kendrick, Kobin H. (2024). Recruitment. 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: []

Recruitment is an outcome of interactional methods that elicit or solicit involvement – assistance, collaboration, or cooperation – in the realization of practical courses of action (Drew & Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Floyd et al., 2020; González-Martínez & Drew, 2021: 47; Kendrick, 2021; Rossi et al., 2023). The concept does not represent a social action per se, nor a category of action, but rather an interactional outcome that participants have alternative methods to achieve (Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Kendrick, 2021: 69). Recruitment is a ubiquitous cooperative process found in diverse languages and cultures around the world (Floyd et al., 2020; Rossi et al., 2023).

Consider, for example, the recruitment in the following extract. As Travis begins to sign a form on his knee, without a flat surface to write on, he produces an imprecation that alerts co-participants to the difficulty (“oh god.”; line 3).

(1) [RCE07 14:23] (Kendrick & Drew 2016:7)

The alert elicits the attention of Kevin who turns to gaze at the source of the trouble (line 4) and then offers assistance, holding out a stack of forms in a plastic sleeve which he had used as a writing surface and producing a verbal offer, “you want that,” (lines 5-6). In this case, a particular interactional method – a trouble alert – recruits a co-participant’s involvement in the course of action, an involvement that manifests through various semiotic resources, including gaze direction, object use, and linguistic action.

Research on recruitment documents and compares alternative methods or practices of recruitment. These can involve visible bodily actions, such as a display of trouble that elicits an offer of assistance, as well as linguistic ones, such as a verbal request that makes the provision of assistance a conditionally relevant response (Kendrick & Drew, 2016). Recruitment is not necessarily intentional: actions not designed to solicit another’s involvement may nonetheless recruit them (Kendrick, 2021: 69). Visible searches of the environment, for example, which are in the first instance individual, instrumental actions, can recruit others to assist in the search (Drew & Kendrick, 2018). While troubles or difficulties that disrupt practical courses of action provide systematic occasions for recruitment, not all recruitments involve assistance. Co-participants can be recruited to collaborate on a joint project (Rossi & Zinken, 2016) or progress an organizational routine (González-Martínez & Drew, 2021).

Kendrick and Drew (2016) identified five basic methods of recruitment in the organization of assistance:

1. requests in which a participant who encounters a trouble, Self, formulates a possible solution for a co-present Other to implement in response;
2. reports that formulate Self’s trouble (but not a possible solution to it) and thereby create an opportunity for Other to assist;
3. alerts that index Self’s trouble (but do not formulate it) and elicit Other’s attention and involvement (see Extract 1);
4. embodied displays that expose Self’s trouble to public view and can thereby recruit Other’s assistance; and
5. projections in which Other anticipates a trouble in Self’s course of action and acts in advance to preempt it.

The methods differ systematically, according to Kendrick and Drew (2016), in three principal ways:

1. how the trouble becomes recognizable (e.g., formulated in a report vs. embodied in a physical action);
2. who generates the possible solution to the trouble (i.e., Self vs. Other); and
3. the relevance of assistance as a response (i.e., as an obligation vs. an opportunity).

The concept of recruitment – an outcome of interactional methods that secure involvement – unites analytically distinct practices and actions (see recruitment-related actions). Offers of assistance, for example, are seen as alternatives to requests wherein Other (vs. Self) formulates a possible solution to Self’s trouble and projects its implementation (Kendrick, 2021). The concept thus avoids the conflation of distinct practices and actions but also recognizes their interdependence as constituents of a coherent domain of social organization.

Recruitment has been investigated across a range of settings, including residential care homes (Jansson et al., 2019), interactions with children (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021), mobile robotic telepresence (Boudouraki, 2021), and classroom interactions (Mlynář, 2022; van der Ploeg et al., 2022; Råman & Oloff, 2022).

Additional Related Entries:

• Assistance
• Display of trouble
• Offer
• Preference
• Recruitment-related action
• Request
• Self-remediation
• Sequence
• Social Action

Cited References:

Boudouraki, A., Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., & Rintel, S. (2021). ‘I can’t get round’: Recruiting Assistance in Mobile Robotic Telepresence. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW3), 248:1-248:21.

Drew, P., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). Requesting—From speech act to recruitment. In P. Drew & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Requesting in Social Interaction (pp. 1–34). John Benjamins.

Drew, P., & Kendrick, K. H. (2018). Searching for Trouble: Recruiting Assistance through Embodied Action. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 1(1).

Floyd, S., Rossi, G., & Enfield, N. J. (Eds.). (2020). Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments. Language Science Press.

González-Martínez, E., & Drew, P. (2021). Informings as recruitment in nurses′ intrahospital telephone calls. Journal of Pragmatics, 186, 48–59.

Jansson, G., Plejert, C., & Lindholm, C. (2019). The social organization of assistance in multilingual interaction in Swedish residential care. Discourse Studies, 21(1), 67–94.

Kendrick, K. H. (2021). The ‘Other’ side of recruitment: Methods of assistance in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 178, 68–82.

Kendrick, K. H., & Drew, P. (2016). Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(1), 1–19.

Mlynář, J. (2022). Lifting the pen and the gaze: Embodied recruitment in collaborative writing. Text & Talk, 43(1), 69-91.

Pfeiffer, M., & Anna, M. (2021). Recruiting Assistance in Early Childhood: Longitudinal Changes in the Use of “Oh+X” as a Way of Reporting Trouble in German. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54(2), 142–162.

Råman, J., & Oloff, F. (2022). Mobilizing assistance through complaints in digital skills courses for adults: Valitukset avun mobilisoinnissa aikuisille suunnatuilla digitaalisten taitojen kursseilla. AFinLAn Vuosikirja, 234–260.

Rossi, G., Dingemanse, M., Floyd, S., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Kendrick, K. H., Zinken, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2023). Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale. Scientific Reports, 13(1), Article 1.

van der Ploeg, M., Willemsen, A., Richter, L., Keijzer, M., & Koole, T. (2022). Requests for assistance in the third-age language classroom. Classroom Discourse, 13(4), 386-406.

Zinken, J., & Rossi, G. (2016). Assistance and Other Forms of Cooperative Engagement. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(1), 20–26.

Additional References: