Knoblauch2022
| Knoblauch2022 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Knoblauch2022 |
| Author(s) | Hubert Knoblauch |
| Title | Towards a Social Theory of Sequentiality |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Sequentiality, Communicative action, Social theory, Theory of language, Communicative constructivism, Sociology, Objectivations |
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| Year | 2022 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion |
| Volume | 23 |
| Number | |
| Pages | 89-110 |
| URL | Link |
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Abstract
In the first part of the paper, I delineate what we mean when we talk about social theory and how it relates to language. I will argue that social theory treats language as something that must be understood without assuming that a language is already constituted. On these grounds, I will then outline the ways in which sequences have been treated in some major "Grand Theories" of sociology: Weber, Habermas, Luhmann. This overview makes it possible to highlight in the next part some of the major aspects of sequentiality: It’s being built on actions, their interconnectivity by reciprocity, the role of language and its potential to constitute (social) structures and systems over time. Surprisingly, even more recent social theories hardly relate to sequential analysis of the kind initiated by Sacks and formulated in a first concise manner in Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. As this sequential analysis will be presented in other contributions of this volume, here it serves as a background for the presentation of these social-theoretical approaches only in order to point out their blind spots and shortcomings, such as the role of objectivations other than language, their role for the reciprocation of actions and the patterns and forms of extended social structures. These shortcomings will be addressed in the next part of this text. As a frame to address these shortcomings I will draw on communicative constructivism. This approach allows for a social theory of sequentiality which can solve the problems raised by the social theories mentioned. By integrating sequential analysis as a method to address temporal aspects of communicative actions, it accounts also for the actor’s subjective embodied positionality and spatiality.
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