Organizing the “we” in interaction

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse a piece of interaction during which the participants seem to have trouble arriving at an agreement in a series of affective evaluations. The sequence does not contain other initiations of repair, third position repairs or fourth position repairs, places in which problems of intersubjectivity become visible in the conversation analytic tradition. I show that these problems are due to the fact that the participants do not share an understanding of the nature of the conversation, their respective roles in it, or their mutual relationship. In the end, I discuss my analysis in light of the Schuetzian (1953) understanding of intersubjectivity and suggest that initiating and accomplishing repair are not the only means for restoring intersubjectivity in interaction.

In this paper, I analyse a piece of interaction during which the participants seem to have trouble arriving at an agreement in a series of affective evaluations. The sequence does not contain other initiations of repair, third position repairs or fourth position repairs, places in which problems of intersubjectivity become visible in the conversation analytic tradition. I show that these problems are due to the fact that the participants do not share an understanding of the nature of the conversation, their respective roles in it, or their mutual relationship. In the end, I discuss my analysis in light of the Schuetzian (1953) understanding of intersubjectivity and suggest that initiating and accomplishing repair are not the only means for restoring intersubjectivity in interaction.