antaki social identities in talk

Bvitish Journal of Socia( Psychology ( 1 996), 3 5 , 473-492 0 1996 The British Psychological Society SP0435

Prznted in Gredt Britain 47 3

Social identities in talk: Speakers’ own orientations

Charles Antaki Discourse and Rhetorir Group, Department of Social Sciences, University of Loughborough,

Loughborough LEI I j T U , U K

Susan Condor and Mark Levine Department of Psychology. University of Lanraster, U K

What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers’ identities are much more subtle than simple pre-given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situ- ation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have seen a participant using, or being attributed with, only one identity; but we show that speakers use, and attribute each other with, a variety of different identities as their business progresses. In so doing, the speakers can be seen not only to avow contradictory identities but also to invoke both group distinctiveness and similarity-and neither of these strategies are easy to square with social psychological theories of identity. We put what we find in this particular case study into the debate between, on the one hand, ethnomethodological preference for working from participants’ own orientations to identity and, on the other hand, social psychological research practices which tend to privilege analytically given social categories. At the very least, we argue, the social psychological approach can be enriched by attending more to identity as a matter of situated description and less as a matter of perceptuo-cognitive processing.

In this paper we shall explore social identity as a resource deployed in conversational contexts. The claim that identities are mobilized as a resource in ordinary life is familiar in many sorts of constructionist and phenomenologically inspired thinking, perhaps especially ethnomethodology, and is breaking into social psychology through the work of discourse analysts such as Edwards (especially Edwards, 1991; and Edwards & Potter, 1992). This sort of perspective is also apparent in embryonic form in the social identity approaches, both as set out by Tajfel (e.g. 1978) and as later developed by Turner and his associates (e.g. Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987; Turner, Oakes, Haslam & McGarty, 1994).

Social identity To speak of someone’s social identity is to speak, at the very least, of what attaches to them in virtue of their membership of a category, usually a category constituted by social con- sensus or imposition. From this reasonably neutral baseline social theorists range them-

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474 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark k i n e

selves along a spread of ontological claims about what social identity ‘is’. The kind of range we mean is neatly set out by Edwards (1994) in his work on ‘scripts’. Edwards ranges script theorists’ assumptions about descriptions along a (seemingly) natural pro- gression, from scripts as a matter of how the world is, through being a matter of how it is perceived and along to being a matter of how it is described. If identities are (at least) descriptions, we can borrow that way of thinking here. So we can set out theorists’ claims for social identity thus: that i t is a feature of the objective world (SIworld or SI”); as a feature of perception and cognition (SIFrception or SIP); and as a feature of how people describe themselves (SIdescription or S I ~ ) .

Which of these ontological claims is held by psychologists? Social psychology’s most commonly cited definition of ‘social identity’ is doubtless ‘that part of an individual’s self- concept which derives from his [sic] knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership’ (Tajfel, 1978, p. 63). This mental-state (SIP) notion of social identity has been familiar in European social psychology for the past 20 years and has inspired an enormous body of research (for reviews, see Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Hogg & Abrams, 1988). These accounts treat social identity as a matter of perceptuo-cognitive ‘reality’ whose effects are nevertheless as palpable as anything ‘objective’ (see e.g. Oakes, Haslam & Turner, 1994). Theorists from this camp tend to avoid debate over SI” (whether or not social identity is a real entity on a par with chairs and clothes), although Tajfel(1981) was clear in emphasizing that social identity ‘is not a thing but a process’ (see also Turner, 1981a). The last version of social identity-as a matter of people’s descriptions-is, according to this social psychological view, a result of what happens as a consequence of SIP: useful for dependent measures of the mental state, perhaps, but not the ‘thing’ itself.

On the other hand, if we carried on following Edwards’ model, and dug into its antecedents, we would recognize that there is a long tradition elsewhere in the social sciences which is much happier with thinking of social identity as a description available for people to invoke and deploy in mundane interactions. Ethnomethodologists since Sacks (whose seminal lectures of the 1960s have been edited by Jefferson and are reproduced in Sacks, 1992) have used the notion of membership categorization devices to describe how social categories can operate in the weave of conversational interaction. This SId account of iden- t i ty is something that has its force as part of the sequencing of the participants’ talk, and its mental processing is not taken to be crucial for its understanding.

For present purposes we shall be maintaining a neutral stance towards the status of social identity as a mental state, although we come back to the question in the Discussion. Rather, we shall focus on questions concerning the identification and interpretation of social identities in research practice. This includes the general problem of knowing when a social identity is operative in a particular context, and also of questions concerning the conceptualization and analysis of social identities as flexible and contextually contingent.

The identrfiation of social identity: Theorists’ attribution vs. participants’ avowal

Ethnomethodological standing orders are that theorists are to rely not on their own interpretation and coding of what their participants are doing (‘being friendly’, ‘offering advice’ and so on) but to rely instead on how the participants themselves orient to each

Social identities i n t a l k 47 5

other: to use participants’ displays that they understand that one person is offering advice and the other is accepting it and so on (for more on this extremely sketchy formulation, see Sacks, 1992). This translates easily to questions of the deployment of categories of any kind (Edwards, 1991) and from then on to social identity as particular kinds of category.

The injunction here would be to stay agnostic about identities and restrain oneself from thinking that people are treating each other as this or that sort of person at all or, if they are, that the ‘sort of person’ they pick for themselves and each other is chosen from the array set out for them by the traditional vocabulary of the social scientist. As Sacks pointed out in one of the principal insights of the ethnomethodological vision, such vocabulary may be an analyst’s misleading fiction imposed by too eager an application of social theory to practical reality as the participants themselves dispose of it. Rather, to fol- low Sacks (see, for example, his analysis of ‘hotrodders’, 1992, pp. 169-174) one should let the participants decide the agenda and watch for social identities of any kind, be they chosen from the existing lexicon or made up on the spot. Always they will be indexical, sensible only when set against the local frame of reference and doing interactional work of one kind or another. Thus, for example, the identity of ‘hotrodder’ is set up by and for candidate hotrodders indifferent to any watching analysts’ more abstract categorization (deviant youth? pleasure seekers?) and meant for local contrast against (as it happens) ‘beatniks’ and ‘surfers’ (Sacks, 1992, p.173). One might go further and say that the identity avower might even confect a wholly nonce category just so that it is unique and unprecedented; think of what it might have meant, in the context of publicity interviews, for the US comedian Sammy Davis Jr to have claimed that he was a ‘one-eyed black Jewish cowboy’, or, in a psychotherapeutic context, for Winnicott’s patient to have referred to herself as ‘the piggle’.

But this is to get ahead of ourselves. Contrast the agnosticism above with research practice in social psychology, which ushally involves the attribution of particular, often stereotypical, social identities to research participants by the researcher. Even where participants are allowed to avow an identity it is, in practice, usually in restricted forms which produce an identity accountable to a visible or invisible authority in the person of the experimenter, a perennial if rather obscure figure in social psychological research on social identity (though see Reicher & Levine (1994) for an illustration of research which explicitly acknowledges the part played by the experimenter in the interaction). Where experimentation is defended (as it is, for example, by Turner, 198lb), a case can be made for its control over identity: who participants are is (officially) determined by the experimenter. This is the case, for example, in work employing the ‘minimal group’ experimental technique and in other laboratory studies in which the experimenter either explicitly divides participants into categories (see Lindeman & Koskela, 1994, for a recent example) or manipulates the environment in order to ensure the salience of a particular aspect of social identity.

When social identity theorists focus their theoretical lenses on more naturalistic situations they face the problem of having to identify if, and when, a particular aspect of social identity is salient to the actors involved. Generally, social identity theorists have adopted two types of strategy to deal with this problem. The first is simply to assume knowledge of the operation of particular social identities. Hence, for example, researchers simply assume that the social actors they observe are acting as Palestinians, as women, as French Canadians, and so forth (see Condor & Brown, 1988). This sort of practice stands in

476 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark Leuine

marked contrast to Tajfel’s (e.g. 1978) theoretical commitment to study social identity ‘subjectively’ (in terms of the understanding of social actors themselves) rather than ‘objectively’ (by imposing the researchers’ own frame of reference). For this reason, field researchers often attempt to check their assumptions concerning the operation of social identities by asking some of the social actors direct questions concerning the nature and strength of their group identification (see Kirchler, Palmonari & Pombeni, 1994, for a recent example).

A second strategy involves inferring the presence of social identification through an observation of its assumed effects. Social identity theorists often warrant knowledge of the salience of a particular aspect of social identity by pointing to phenomena such as in-group favouritism or social stereotyping (including self-stereotyping). But the pudding is not always so proven; a participant’s in-group favouritism (and so on) might, in principle, be set up by something quite different from social identification, and there is no self-evident guarantee that social identification always or even usually brings about in-group favouritism and the like. The danger of circular reasoning is a lurking problem.

The f ixibi l i ty and context dependence of social identzfiations

A second issue concerns context contingent flexibility in the use of self-categories. To start once again with an ethnomethodologically oriented SId account, the conception of social identity as a description deployed in the unpredictable run of interaction tends naturally towards emphasizing its flexibility. Once again, however, note that the fixity or volatility of any given identity x is taken to be a matter entirely for the participants to decide on; in some cases participants will use descriptions of identity x as if X were fixed, and in other cases they will treat x as mutable. Sometimes it will suit me to insist on close boundaries for ‘the English’, say, and sometimes not (see Condor, in press). As Edwards (1991) points out, the force of any description will be indexical, or dependent on its local reference points, so we must leave it to the participants to show how they decide the latitude to allow any given category label.

In social psychology, social identity theorists vary in their emphasis on the plasticity of social identifications. For example, in his most detailed discussion of social identification, Tajfel (1978), while acknowledging the situational flexibility of social identities, nevertheless preferred to emphasize their relatively enduring nature. In particular, in his consideration of social identifications as a motivating force for social change, Tajfel comes close to representing social identifications as relatively enduring over microtime. A good deal of research deriving from Tajfel’s account of intergroup relations tends to evidence an implicit assumption that social identifications represent relatively enduring (‘reliable’) aspects of self-perception on the part of individual participants. This is particularly apparent in research which attempts to measure and compare individuals in terms of the strength of their identification with a particular category, and to consider how these individual differences covary with phenomena such as in-group favouritism (e.g. Abrams & Emler, 1992; Bat-Chava, 1994; Condor, Brown & Williams, 1987).

In other contexts Tajfel placed more theoretical emphasis on the moment-to-moment plasticity of social identifications, emphasizing how: ‘the psychological existence of a group for its members is a complex sequence of appearances and disappearances, of loom- ing large and vanishing into thin air . . .’ Tajfel(1982, p. 485). This emphasis on the flexi-

Social identities in talk 47 7

ble, context-dependent nature of social identification has been taken up by Turner in his account of social identification in terms of self-categorization:

The model proposed by [self-categorization theory] is by no means static, fixed, global, reified. The opposite is the case: a fundamental idea is the rejection of self-categories as ‘absolutes’: the self is dynamic, relational, comparative, fluid, context-specific and variable. Self-categorizations are part of the process of relating to the social world, not ‘things’ (Turner et a/., 1987, p. 144).

As a consequence, a good deal of work on social identification now explicitly invokes SIP in foregrounding the issue of category ‘salience’-that is, the context dependence of self and social perception (e.g. Hogg & Turner, 1987; Oakes, 1987; Oakes, Turner & Haslam, 1991). An appreciation of the dynamic, relational and fluid nature of self and social perception might, of course, put into question the validity of research which attempts to ‘measure’ reliable individual differences in the strength of social identity. An appreciation of the radically context dependent nature of social identity and of social perception might also lead one to question a good deal of field research (which often assumes that the way in which respondents describe themselves to a researcher on a questionnaire has some bearing on their observed activity in other, rather different, situations).

An appreciation of social identifications as context specific and hence variable would also, paradoxically, lead us to question the ultimate utility of research techniques typically employed in studies of ‘salience’. Most of this research involves laboratory experimentation and the collection of data via self-report questionnaires. The way in which this research is conceptualized and the data interpreted involves bracketing the possibility of flexibility within the research context itself. The research setting, and the various actions which take place within it, is usually treated and described as if i t were a single, definable ‘context’, a ‘moment’ within which time can be assumed to have stood still, representing (to borrow a phrase from Turner et af . , 1994, p. 455) a ‘specific instance’. As a consequence, analysts assume that any aspect of social identity will be (or, with hindsight, has been) uniformly ‘salient’ or ‘not salient’ throughout the duration of an experiment. This overlooks the diachronic nature of the research procedure, and the possibility that, in the course of a single ‘piece’ of research, ‘contexts’ may shift and change. Even short questionnaires involve a complex series of conversational ‘moves’ between research participant and researcher. The posing of each particular question or the provision of each particular answer may shift the ‘context’ of the research interview in subtle ways (see Schegloff, 1988, for a treatment of this as a general conversational process, and Leudar & Antaki, 1776, for the implications for psychological research practice).

Social identity theorists often suggest that their approach may be eclectic in its choice of research methods (e.g. Hogg & McGarty, 1990). Nevertheless, they have hitherto been resistant to methods such as discourse analysis or conversation analysis which would allow an appreciation of the procedural aspects of social behaviour (for exceptions, see Reicher & Hopkins, in press; Widdicombe, 1993; Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1994). This is prob- ably due to a concern over the potential dangers of attempting to explain macrosocial phenomena in terms of microsocial (interpersonal) processes (an issue about which ethnomethodology is understandably sensitive; see, for example, Zimmerman & Boden, 1971, for a recent review). However, it seems to be the case that some aspects of social identity theory-most notably those requiring some form of diachronic analysis--cannot be explored adequately by the sole use of techniques which reduce the flow of human behaviour to synchronic snapshots.

47 8 Charles Antaki, Susan Condm and Mark h i n e

A consideration of the way in which social identities loom large and disappear into thin air in the course of a concrete social interaction might not only enable us to identih con- textual flexibility in social identities which are masked by current research procedures. It may also enable social identity theorists to adopt a more subtle and ‘social’ approach to the issue of ‘context’ itself. Although not a necessary adjunct of the social identity perspective, there has been a tendency for social identity researchers to treat ‘context’ as something existing ‘outside’ their participants. As Hogg and McGarty put it, ‘the social self-concept is context dependent in so far as specific social self-categorizations are brought into play (i.e. become the basis of perception and conduct) by the social field’ (1990, p. 13). A reliance on research procedures in which the experimenter sets up ‘the social field’ and then observes its effects upon participants’ activity has been accompanied by a reluctance to theorize the ways in which social actors themselves construct and recon- struct ‘the social field’ in the course of interaction. One notable exception, which significantly uses natural language data, may be found in Reicher’s work on arguments over social categorization (Reicher & Hopkins, in press).

Exploring social identities in conversation

Let us sum up the argument so far and point ourselves towards the analysis to come. No objection is made to the notion that it is sensible to talk about identity, but the question is asked: what is its ontological status? Psychologists treat it as being real, at least cogni- tively, that is, at the level of perception; others, wary of unverifiable mental entities, pre- fer to speak of it as description, existing, or subsisting, in its use. The common ground is that a person’s social identity is (at least) some membership, some tag or label which con- fers certain ready features or implies certain normative characteristics. The difference is that the cognitivist believes this membership to be a mental state (fixed or, perhaps, tran- sient, but nevertheless mental), while the ethnomethodologist takes i t to be a device for contrast against rival memberships for local transactions.

In what follows we shall be looking in detail at one very ordinary, run-of-the-mill interaction to make an exemplary case in favour of the latter position. We shall be looking at what the participants do, attending, in the ethnomethodological spirit of conversation analysis, to the sequential organization of their talk, keeping an eye out especially for how they propose, and respond to, orientations to social identity. Fuller descriptions of conversation analysis may be found elsewhere: in order of increasing specificity to the use we make of it here, see Heritage (1984) for the origins of the discipline of conversation analysis; Goodwin & Heritage (1990) for a review of its application to the human sciences; Edwards (in press) for its application to psychology; and Antaki (1994, chapter 10) and Widdicombe & Wooffitt (1994) for its application to identity.

For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that conversation analysis reads off what participants ‘do’ from seeing how it is they use and exploit the regularities of conversational interaction. These regularities are the background against which participants ration turn taking, organize what they say into structures (like adjacency pairs--questions and answers, assessments and agreements, and so o n - o r stories with introductions, narrative passages and closings), and how they manifest their positions through the prejh-ence organization of their utterances (unmarked for utterances that are normative in their local environment, or marked for ones that are non-normative). The rule of thumb throughout is the use of

480 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark Lmine

and deduce that Charly is ‘a doctor’. Here is an example of the kind of stretch of talk, right at the beginning of the interaction, that a content analysis might use as evidence for the identity ‘doctor’, even though the term itself is not mentioned by any of the participants.

8 JOEL 9 CHARLY

10 JOEL 1 1 CHARLY 12 JOEL 13 CHARLY 14 JOEL 15 CHARLY 16 JOEL 17 CHARLY

18 VALERY 19 JOEL

(have some more wine). [m] so (you see) i t came to the viva - - and they asked me something . chat they asked me about diarrhoea now diarrhoea obviously to you sounds very simple. (laughs.) - basically the shits you know I mean but

but in fact diarrhoea is really almost a postgraduate subject.

that’s a strange way ofputting i t isn’t i t r(1afdghs -)

well I knew quite a /of about diarrhoea and I was doing very u d l and then . then they . and I thought , (and) I knew why I knew I was . being vivaed really (for) I kneu, I’d ‘done pretty well and I knew I’d done you know a lot better than average - and . I thought I would have a chance of getting honours you see . and then I ran into one and then 1 ran into a . paediatrzrian , (it was) very very interesting the way the thing went- he said . the other chap said . you know have I had enough time there were three of them you see . and they said yes you have and I(’d) had about eight or nine minutes on diarrhoea which is quite a long tinre really. and I still hadn‘t finished . and I was still going quite strong (1 syll) . I really could have gone on the whole rtinre and i t would have been all right you know

(lar&r. )

(laughs - -)

(laughs - -)

L(/aughs -).

L(1au‘yhs- -)

The importance ~ recognizing that the talk is structured as a story

Any analysis which simply counted the appearance of medical words and phrases2 would miss the fact that the talk works to a very standard structure. It is set up as a story, con- forming, as do the others like i t in the first 200 turns of the interaction, to what Sacks shows is the general case in story telling (Sacks, 1974), and confirmed many times since (see, for example, Goodwin, 1984). The story is lawfully inserted into the interaction, coming at an allowable topic initiation point just after some conversational ‘time out’ (Joel verbally offering a drink and allowing a pause into which Charly can introduce something). Charly makes a connection with the preceding by the formulation so you see and introduces a topic which, because he casts i t as a report of a question (they asked me something . that-they asked me about diarrhoea) projects its own completion (namely, how the question was answered) which will now come as a story. The story duly appears in the standard format of being shifted to a different region of deictic reference, where other people, places and time become salient (Schiffrin, 1990). And, as again is usual in story telling, he gives the audience the key to how he means it to be appreciated right at the outset: it might have been a bad luck tale, a peculiarity, a triumph and so on; here the expressly scatological ‘shits’ in now diarrhoea t o you sounds very simple. basically the shits you know casts i t as an amusing story, and that projects or expects a jocular reception from the hearers.

’ And there are more and less sophisticated ways ofdoing so, ranging from the Twenty Sraternents Test through Q-method- ology and other ways oftinding patterns ofcovariance among lexical items ( f o r a review of which see Fielding & Lee, 1991).

Social identities in talk 479 the sequence of participants’ talk to understand the force of any one utterance-and any invocation of identity it may include-in the interaction.

In what follows, note that we shall be going through the interaction in (the closest we can get to) real time; we want to be able to trace how social identities ride the current and contribute to its swells and eddies.

The data

The data were taken from a corpus of natural English conversation collected by a team of linguists largely in 1970s and transcribed in detail onto a computer file (available now on CD-ROM, Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, 1991) and into a printed source (Svartvik & Quirk, 1980). We have simplified the transcription notation greatly (see Appendix for conventions) and numbered the turns for convenience. The particular extract we shall be looking at comes from an interaction between three people (conversation S.2.9 in the corpus), which we chose because it shows a particularly rich interweaving of identity work. The talk can be glossed as being between friends over drinks and included reference to two of the speakers’ social identities as-to put i t baldly for the moment, and with the benefit of hindsight-‘doctor’ and ‘linguist”.

Analysis

The reading we shall be suggesting is that the participants invoke their social identities within the framework of a conversation which develops from story recounting (of medical and academic anecdotes) into a quarrel (over various kinds of things to do with, or at least ostensibly to do with, medical practice). The point we shall be making throughout is that their identities are descriptions: they never just appear, they are always used; they only make sense as part of an interactional structure (like a story or an argument), and that they are highlyfixible. The participants use their identities as warrants or authority for a variety of claims they make and challenge, and the identities they invoke change as they are deployed to meet changing conversational demands.

Identities in the conversation’s earlier stages Although it is usually wrong arbitrarily to split any conversation into segments, i t will help our exposition of what is going on if we take the interaction in two phases. In the earlier talk, which makes up the bulk of the transcript, the conversation revolves around Charly’s recent medical qualification. There is much talk of medical syndromes, Charly’s success in his examinations, peculiarities of medical staff he has known, and so on. The profusion of medical terminology makes it look as if one could just do a,content analysis

’ Svartvik & Quirk (1980) describe the three speakers in this conversation as: ‘A: male doctor, age c 29’; ‘B: female sec- ondary school teacher, age c. 27’; and ‘a: male academic, age c. 27’. Textual evidence in the transcript (invitations to drinks and so on) suggests that ‘A’ is called Charly (thus spelt by the transcribers), and is the guest of ’B’ (Valery) and ‘a’ (Joel or Joey). We have kept the specific fint names partly to make the text more accessible, and also to avoid confusion between ‘A’ and ‘a’. Svartvik and Quirk used lower case letters to identify a speaker who was aware rhar the talk was being recorded, a variable which we don’t think affects the analytic issues here. While i t is always in principle possible that the single participant who knew of the recording might have guyed the proceedings in one way or another (and it is evident in other transcripts in the corpus that the recording is oriented to on at least some occasions) there is no obvious evidence of it in this interaction.


The audience meets that expectation to respond, as is again usually the case, with an explicit signal that they have recognized that there is a story about to start, and what kind of story it is, by laughter followed by a pause into which Charly can introduce the body of the story. H e finishes i t off in the conventional way of ending with a three-part list (Jefferson 1978, 1991) of summary formulations (1) I still hadn’tfinished; ( 2 ) I was still going quite strong; and ( 3 ) I really could have gone on the whole time. To continue with the pat- tern identified by Sacks and Jefferson, this is then capped with the punchline, and it would have been all right, and signed off with a terminator, you know. And, to signal their appreciation of the end of the tale and their appropriate understanding of it, the audience join in and sign off with laughter.

We have gone into that level of detail to make the point that here Charly is engaged in a certain structure of talk-a story-and that whatever he says here must be understood as being within that structure. Why is this important? Because i t is (we claim) crucial to understand what i t means that here, as in the other stories in this part of the conversation, although the speakers allude to the medical world, no one refers t o Charly as ‘a doctor’. This ready made social identity is one that is deferred until some 250 turns later in the conversation. This is, we think, significant and suggests that we too, as analysts, should avoid the term for the simple reason that identity is no good t o Charly in his present project and his fellow participants’ appreciation of it. His present project, as witnessed by the conversational evidence, is telling stories about recent medical examination success. To tell such stories is in fact to make manifest his inability to stand as ‘an (established) doctor’. Although a social scientist might be tempted (as the original researchers had been, as foot- note 1 shows) to categorize Charly as ‘a doctor’, the structure of the talk shows that that would be exactly wrong-at this stage of the conversation.

But what, more positively, can we say Charly is claiming about himself? The answer lies in further application of the same principle. He claims what is germane to the stories he is telling or, more precisely and socially, his identities emerge from the combination Ofthe stories he offers and his audience’s ratifiation ofthem And, because that combination of offer and appreciation is not static, neither are his identities. Compare the configuration of story and uptake in the ‘diarrhoea’ anecdote right at the start of the transcript with what happens in the following story, some hundred-plus turns later:

152 CHARLY ((STORY))-- you know I mean there’s a I think there’s a liniir to how much a [m] . a man can take [(laughs - -)

153 154 JOEL (laughs r- - - - -) 156 CHARLY L(laughs - -)

VALERY La man can rake yes (laughs - -)

155 VALERY I (hUghJ - -)

157+ JOEL 158

159 JOEL

161 162 VALERY yes 163 VALERY it does - 164 CHARLY really 165 JOEL

would you say you’re ambitious - CHARLY well as you can denote by what I’m saying at the moment at the moment

I’m not . you know r((i S ~ I I ) )

Lwell actually it sounds as though you are fucking ambitious 160 VALERY

CHARLY Lwell I . oh 1 see

you’ve It1 you you are ambitious enough to assess your chances -

482

166

Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark k i n e

CHARLY oh yes . oh yes I a m - - yes . [m] because I’d like to do general mdicine . I find it very very interesting - - it contains . a lot of the things I’d like it contains a lot of quite a lot of science - you see quite a lot of people who are ill - you know who are really ill . rather than just . and you can actually use diagnostic skills

D i f f e n t stories, diffeent irientities

There are a number of things about identity that we want this extract to demonstrate. First, compare the identity being promoted in this story with the identity in the earlier ones. If the appropriate label while Charly was engaged in his early story telling was ‘recently-qualified-but-cynical-medical-student’, then this later exchange very strongly suggests that the identity label should now be altered and extended to ‘recently-qualified- medical-student-with-aspirations-to-continue-in-his-career’; and if it is extended here, what can we expect in the next turn of the interaction, and the turn after that?

Second, notice that i t is a matter of the participants jointly arranging matters so that this is the salient identity: at turn 157, i t is Joel who introduces (into the jocular space left by the preceding laughter) the notion of ambition. This is presented as an assessment, and assessments routinely expect agreement. We see, however, that Charly meets it with a hedge (welf) and concession (at the moment I’m not) which mark a dispreferred response- a disagreement-and at 159 Joel keeps up the pressure for agreement with a further, now more emphatic, assessment vucking ambitious); Valery joins in at 163, and Joel repeats it again at 165. The expectation for an account is now trebly reinforced, and this is the context into which we must understand the identity that Charly now invokes in 1 6 L t h a t of the person who finds medicine very very interesting. This is, on the face of it, inconsistent with, or perhaps even contradictory to, the identity of the student manipulator of the sys- tem which was the punchline of the earlier stories.

The third thing we want to say here is to answer a criticism which will occur to an observing social identity theorist: surely, they might say, some of these labels are only very tenuously ‘social identities’? In what sense, they might specifically ask, can one speak of ‘ambitious’ (turn 157) as a social identity, rather than a personal trait? The answer, we think, is to apply the litmus paper test of membership: is it an ‘inference rich’ category, as Sacks puts it (Sacks, 1992, lecture 6)? Is there a list of normative attributes which go along with this label and whose implication is treated as significant by the participants? In this case, yes; if we look again at what happens around the time of the ascription of ‘ambitious’ we see that it is treated (by Charly, at least) as being in contrast to the identity Charly is making live through his parade of stories. That is to say, although ‘ambitious’ might have the lexical status of an adjectival description, it has, precisely because it is an adjective hearably inconsistent with the social identity Charly is claiming for himself, the force of a membership description. Charly treats i t as an attribute which belongs to a membership categorization device different from, and indeed antagonistic to, the ‘recently- qualified-but-cynical-medical-student’ his stories (so far) describe. If you like, Joel is claiming to find something in Charly’s list of ingredients which gives the lie to the prod- uct name that Charly is claiming for himself.

Of course, not all adjectives will have the effect of being membership signals; but we see the participants telling us that ‘ambitious’ does so here. Indeed, some use of adjectives and other descriptive formulations will be designed only to promote what is hearably non- (social) identification. Charly’s claim that he is ‘interested in medicine’ avoids a categor-

Social identities in talk 483 ization of what ‘kind of‘ person he is, and it is no accident that this comes just after Joel has ‘accused’ him of being (an) ‘ambitious’ (type of person). Charly’s reply looks designed to escape the clutches of any group attribution by ascribing his motivation to ‘interest’ rather than ‘membership’.

One could run the tape on to show still further stretches of talk where the joint pro- duction of stories provide, ascribe, or call for, still more variations of identity label. The very least we could conclude, even at this point, talking about one genre of conversational activity (the story), is that pre-given categories like ‘doctor’ may seriously underrepresent what goes on in identity talk. Charly has said a lot, but he hasn’t called himself a doctor. But that is a half-way stage of the interaction, where the participants’ matter in hand was story telling. Let us go on to the second phase of the conversation and the conversational- ists’ move from story telling to the no less rhetorical genre of arguing, and the consequent shifts in identity that come with it.

Invoking identities in argaing

The latter part of the conversation moves away from the story telling genre of the early part, and takes on a quizzical tone as it projects an uncertainty over Charly’s qualifications to say what he does. It is this quizzical tone (ifwe allow ourselves that shorthand), and the arguments that i t develops into, that gives us the key to understanding what identities are invoked not only by Charly but by the others in the interaction. It will help if we reproduce below the point at which this phase starts to be hearable. The description will be a bit laborious, because quite a lot is going on.

First, Charly, as part of formulating a punchline to a story which we will gloss as being about his place in the hierarchy of students, makes salient the intellectual requirements of medicine: 214 CHARLY so I Rnow I could be average but I couldn’t be very good - and I could never d o anything

new . I don’t think . cos my mind is just not capable of thinking - in terms in three- dimensional terms for a for a start .

This might be considered to be a standard depreciation which expects a standard disagreement as its response (Pomerantz, 1978) (e.g. ‘no, surely you must be good at that’). Joel’s response does indeed provide such a polite disagreement, and keeps the abstract reasoning issue live.

215 JOEL and and you you think chat [erl whatever may be causing a symptom - fair . in fairly abstract terms then -

By asserting that Charly does, or can, think . . . in fairIy abstract terns, Joel defuses Charly’s self-deprecation, as expected. What needs attention now is Joel’s claim (that Charly eval- uates ‘whatever may be causing the symptom . . . in abstract terms’). Charly responds like this:

216 CHARLY well some [pi) it’s very interesting what you’re saying (cos there’s) some friends of (m] there’s a friend of mine that wants to do surgery - now . he has the greatest difficulty with drugs because he can never really believe . that when somebody takes a drug that it’s actually going to do anything anywhere at all you see

L((4 to 5 sylls)) to what you’re saying - what he wants to do is cut them open and have a look you know

217 JOEL r(/augbJ - -) 218 CHARLY

484 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark Levine 219 JOEL r(laughJ -) 220 CHARLY L. and actually do it you know because he feels that really does work . he’s got immense

faith in surgery . which I find is slzghtly misplaced cos I don’t have that . I don’t have the same sort of faith in surgery - I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug - and

Charly’s anecdote about his friend comes at the point where what is expected is a response to Joel’s invitation to evaluate his claim that the investigation of causes of symptoms is an abstract practice. Two things set it up as being a rejection of the claim. One is its being marked as a dispreferred response (well. . . some peo- . . . it’s very interesting what you’re say- i n g . . . {anecdote)). The other is that the anecdote’s punchline-that is to say, the closing formulation inviting an appreciation by the audience (Sacks, 1974)-doesn’t cap or exag- gerate Joel’s evaluation (as Sacks, 1974, shows supportive anecdotes normally do). Rather, it hearably takes the talk off in a different direction, now concerning the distinction between faith in drugs and faith in surgery ( I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug).

However, a punchline needs itself to be ratified, and in turn 221 we see how Joel’s uptake of the punchline revives his original claim about abstraction.

220 221+ JOEL 222 CHARLY well- 223 JOEL it i s . 224

Joel’s restatement of a claim already unaccepted by the other party is conversationally non-normative and in this instance occasions an explicitly marked dispute assertion (‘it is abstract’); disagreement (‘well . . .’) and reassertion (‘it is’) which follows standard dispute marking (Antaki, 1994; Coulter, 1990).

This is a very significant crystallization of the proceedings. One thing we know about disputes like this is that they stay ‘live’ until they are resolved (by an explicit, unqualified agreement) or cancelled by the participants explicitly marking a moving on to some other topic (by a long pause and a ‘new topic’ device such as so . . .). Until then, we can expect Charly, Joel and Valery to orient to the dispute at hand, and this gives the background against which any mention of social identity categories must now be understood.

Joel picks up the mitigated compromise version of the assertion in Charly’s last turn (it doesn’tfeel so in my heart). Here we have the first invocation of Joel’s social identity. Joel argues that just because one (specifically a professional, still more specifically a linguist) feels something not to be abstract doesn’t mean that it is not so:

225+ JOEL 226 CHARLY oh [to me that’s) ( ( s~I I ) ) 227 JOEL

CHARLY (. . .) I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug - and but it’s a much more abstract thing to do really

CHARLY I suppose it is I don’tfind it so it’s nearer my heart therefore it’s less abstract .

no I I mean I don’t feel linguistics as being abstract but it definitely is abstract

Lbut finally I mean . the symptoms . are sentences of the language . which - people like Valery and and and myself respond to - - but - [erl that’s only a surface phenomenon really - [w w w] what’s going on there-is a very abstract thing and I think of i t in abstract . terms though they they they . they don’t appear to me as being abstract

and it seems to me that what you’re talking about is exactly-the same thing 228 CHARLY [m] 229 JOEL

How is Joel able simply to introduce his professional identity into the interaction? The answer is that i t is a feature of talk that when one membership categorization device is up and running, it allows other categories of the same type to appear in the subsequent talk

Social identities in talk 485

(Sacks, 1992, e.g. pp. 44 ff). Charly’s identity as (something like) ‘recently-qualified- medical-student-with-aspirations-to-continue-in-his-career’ is, we know, up and running; and that allows Joel and Valery to invoke something that is hearable as being in the same family of social identities. Joel uses that standing invitation to cast himself as a professional being able to draw on his own qualifications-here, by giving himself insider knowledge of what a linguist knows: I mean I don’t feel linguistic as being abstract but it definitely is abstract. He puts himself and Valery into the same membership category (people like Valety and myself). To do so is, of course, both to make common ground with Charly (as being part of that overarching membership category of qualified professional), but also to draw a distinction; they are in a different kind of profession, whose unique features might turn out to be usable in the interaction. So although it might be offered as a common-ground analogy, i t carries with i t the possibility of identity-conflict. Note here that this double function of group avowal, in which the speaker faces both ways at once, ought, theoretically, to be impossible in standard social psychological identity theory, where in-group avowal automatically implies discrimination from the out-group.

The second point to make on the basis of the extract above refers to the argumentative context which the talk at turns 220-224 had set up. Joel’s invocation of his professional social identity is not disinterested; i t is there as part of his response to the thesis anti- thesis structure which is currently in operation in the interaction. It gives him a position of authority which, as we see, supports a series of further claims. But, in its turn, it makes available to Charly his own counterpart professional status, as we see happen in the following stretch. At 27 1 the argument is restated in another standard three-part assertion (turn 27 l)/disputation (turn 272)/ratification (turn 273) sequence of dispute initiation. Joel queries Charly’s distinction between a cyst as a sign of illness and a symptom of it:

271+ 272+ 273+ 274

275

276 277 278 279-

JOEL CHARLY JOEL CHARLY

JOEL

VALERY CHARLY VALERY CHARLY

so you don’t treat the cyst as a symptom well oh no you treat it as a potential . (s) you treat it as a potential . symptom (( 1 to 2 sylls)) well then no no no I think you . (so) a symptom . a symptom is something something the patient complains about . I mean a sebaceous

Lbut I mean if if you [cr] if if you [tr] if you were to treat the cyst-as a symptom - you would find out what was causing the cyst . what was giving rise to the cyst - and

people will complain that it doesn’t look very nice they’ll want to)

[cry and cure Ldo you mean

(what was ever giving rise I ((4 to 6 sylls)) (no a Jynrptom is

a thing is a symptom of something else yes we don’t use [s) the same I mean in medicine a symptom is something the [kerm) patient complains of . the sign is something the doctor elicits

Now we have arrived at what would have looked to be, to someone searching for ‘the’ point at which identities emerge, the crux of the interaction-because this is thefirst point in the entire conversation at which the word ‘doctor’ appears. But notice how i t appears. As ever, i t appears in a strucrure: Charly speaks of ‘the doctor’ to support his claim about what is the case; what medical practice, and medical knowledge, is and, crucially, his use of the pronoun we allies him with that medical knowledge. So in one movement he is invoking medical authority (‘the doctor’) and allying himself with it-all for the ephemeral (but sanctionable) requirement of backing up a claim made accountable by another speaker.

From then on, we see a great deal more of Charly allying himself with the medical pro-

486 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark Levine

fession. The argumentative position which the interaction has swung him into defending is one that affords just such an in-group identity, and there are a number of ways in which he invokes it.

Our work in this paper is really over, if we have managed to persuade the reader that identities change as the interaction proceeds; so we only offer a couple of examples of the way Charly accomplishes in-groupness in the tail end of the interaction, when it becomes salient. Remember, though, that all this more-or-less ‘straight’ doctor talk is unleashed by, and has its force in, the argumentative context that the interaction has now set up.

Some examples of Charly ’s subsequent ‘doctor’ mmbersbip talk

A simple example of in-groupness accomplishment is to use some version of the trope ‘speaking as an X’: Charly uses this explicit invocation of his specific job title in the profession (as a boaseman like I will be soon), or to assert membership by pronominal reference, as here:

279+

and 302+

CHARLY yes we don’t use [sl the same I mean in medicine a symptom is something the [kerm] patient complains o f . the sign is something the

CHARLY (. . .) I mean we write down symptoms . signs you know I mean they’re they’re they’re so different .

Charly can and does explicitly draw a line between those competent and incompetent to give medical judgements bearing on the medical matter at hand. A good example appears right at the moment in which the argument is set up:

27 1 + JOEL 272+ 2 7 3 4 JOEL

For Joel, ‘you’ i t might indexically be ‘you, Charly (as doctor)’. For Charly, on the other hand, it seems to be the prescriptive didactic ‘you’ of the learner (you treat it as apotential symptom).

Charly uses medical terminology throughout the conversation but at this stage we know that the argumentative context gives a specifically authoritative edge to such terminology-that is to say, the participants themselves orient to a speaker’s competence in using such terms, as in this example:

356+

so you don’t treat the cyst as a symptom CHARLY well oh no you treat it as a potential . (s) you treat it as a potential . symptom

((1 to 2 sylls)) well then no no no I think you .

CHARLY (. . .) it’s looking. percussing . well it’s looking feeling. percussing auscultation . they’re the four things that a

Lauscultation what’s that - - oh I see - CHARLY listening - so you look at it and (. . .)

r(doccor) ((2 s y ~ ~ s ) ) 357 JOEL 358

Perhaps Charly’s clearest invocation of group identity comes at turns 340-341 : 340 JOEL

341+ 342 JOEL

your distinctions between sign and symptom . [wi] which I find fascinating ((1 to 2 sylls))

CHARLY it’s not my distinction [it’s it’s Lno . all right - - erm (. . .)

Here, still in the argumentative context where Charly is defending his authority to maintain his position, he makes a strong contrast between his personal, as opposed to his


professional, judgement. It’s not distinction in this context implies that i t is the distinction of the invisible community of medical people in whose voice he is speaking. In an exact reversal of his use of personal and group identity at turn 166 (see page 482), he is committed to group membership as a source of expertise, and is resisting Joel’s attribution to him of a merely ‘personal’ judgement about medical matters. It is a delicate juggling of medical personae, but i t is necessary if Charly wants to deploy the heavy guns of the medical establishment and also keep his part in the argument apparently disinterested.

Suniniary of the analysis

We ended with detailed examples of the kind of ‘doctor’ avowals which might, had we come to them directly, have led us carelessly to infer that Charly is, as a matter of established social identity, ‘a doctor’. But our long journey showed that this was just another way-station. Table 1 summarizes how, throughout the interaction, the identities change in response to what the participants set up as being the matter currently in hand.

We should quickly say that the convenience of a table like this is bought at the cosr of portraying the interaction as a series of fixed steps in which nothing else was going on but avowals and ascriptions of identity; but that is very far from the picture we want to paint. The identities emerge out of the business of the interaction, and contribute towards next business. At the start of the interaction, the business to which the participants oriented was ‘medical’ stories in such a way as ro support Charly’s identity as (what we might gloss as) a ‘successful-if-cynical-medical student’. This, on challenge from Joel, transmuted into (again, in shorthand) an identity with ‘interest in medicine’ as its salient feature. In both cases, i t was the structure of the interaction which supported-or required-these identity claims, and no doubt there was a great deal more going on besides.

When the talk turned to argument over the issue of whether abstract reasoning was required in prescribing drugs, Charly and Joel were set up on opposing sides. In pursu- ing his argumentative position, Joel invoked his own experience as a linguist to offer Charly a chance of a formulation that he might accept (that analogically, he is too close to

Table 1. How identities changed in the joint conversational structures of our sample interaction

Turns

Turns 9-1 50 Turns 157-1 59

Turn 166 Turn 216 Turns 221-224

Turns 225-229 Turns 27 1-365

Conversational structure

C tells stories, V and J appreciate J offersfimnidution in appreciation

of one of C’s stories C offers an account Self-deprecatory uiroimt Argument positions

Grounds for argument position Groirnds for argument claims

Identity promoted in that structure

C is ‘just qualified’

C is ‘ambitious’ C is ‘interested in medicine’ C is ‘not that good’ C is ‘abstract reasoner’ vs. ‘intuitive

J and C are ‘fellow professionals’ C is ‘a doctor’

medical craftsperson’

488 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark k i n e

the practice of prescribing drugs to see that it does, objectively, involve abstract reasoning). Joel’s identity of ‘linguist’-always allowable by Charly’s own use of his profession- was, again, afforded by the structural requirements of the talk at that point.

In both sections of the conversation, a simple counting of identity as represented by content would have been misleading; in all cases the force of what was said depended on its sequential position, and the identities shifted accordingly. Were a psychologist to have stopped the interaction at any one point, they would have been tempted to imagine that the identities on display were, like the slogan baked into a stick of Blackpool rock, uni- form throughout. In fact, the play of identities was more like the disposition of meat and fat in a salami sausage: differently patterned wherever you cut into it.

Discussion

What we were trying to do in this paper was to think of social identity as a resource which would emerge in people’s own avowals and ascriptions, rather than in the categories imposed by the psychologist. The impetus came from the ethnomethodological recom- mendation to be watchful, and to treat identity as a matter of people’s situated and interested descriptions of themselves and each other. To keep the impetus going we made use of Edwards’ (1994) analysis of ‘script’ descriptions, and Sacks’ notion of ‘membership categorization’ and the mechanisms of ‘membership categorization devices’ (Sacks, 1992, pp. 40-49, and elsewhere), to the particular case of a routine example of mundane social interaction. A conversational analysis allowed us to see people tailoring their own bespoke combinations of identities or using off-the-shelf categories (’recently-qualified-but-cynical-medical-student’ and ‘doctor’, for example) and mobilizing them flexibly-ven, on occasion, contradictorily-to support tactical positions as they came and went in ephemeral (but, of course, socially consequential) stories and arguments.

At the start of the paper we compared the notion of social identity as a matter of perceptual reality with the notion of it being a matter of description. Taking the latter as a guide we saw our participants deploying description in the routine case where social identity is something that bears on some other matter currently in hand and, as the interaction progressed, the participants’ social identity rapidly became the matter in hand itself. Joel (for example) made his identity as a qualified linguist bear on his commentary on Charly’s claims about medicine, in just the same way that someone might bring their membership of the Kennel Club to bear on one’s right to enter a dog show and so on. Such bringings-to-bear are briefly over and done, of course, but their accumulated record is what gives a person their (portfolio of) identities. Ephemeral as they might be, they become available for future invocation as instances of times when the person was (understood to be) a linguist, a Kennel Club member and so on. The speakers are doing three things at once: invoking social identities, negotiating what the features or boundaries of those identities are and accumulating a record of having those identities. They will be able, in the next round of their interactional history, to draw on having all been exposed to this conversational display of identities. But, once again, it will be up to them-and not the watching psychologist-to instantiate that ‘memory’ as their new local projects require, and to select (or confect) whatever version of the ‘successful student’, ‘ambitious careerist’ or ‘medical spokesperson’ (to name but three of the identities we have seen them juggle with) that suits their new circumstances.


What can we say about the ‘inconsistency’ of identity that this kind of analysis throws up? In the conversation we have been considering, the term ‘doctor’ occurs in contradictory ways, and this might seem queer to someone committed to a notion of identity as a fixed anchor. The matter can be resolved if we recall the ethnomethodologists’ insistence that there is no point in searching for the meaning of a word (like ‘doctor’) without taking into account its indexicality-the fact that it will always be used in some certain set of circumstances. As Edwards (1991) shows, the reading of a category label is localized, and the only reliable evidence one can have is in the way that the participants themselves manifest what is locally ‘live’.

All of this squares well with social psychological social identity theorists’ attempt to avoid psychological reductionism. We suspect that Tajfel would have approved of the rig- orous non-individualization of theory that has driven the analysis, and it is tempting to speculate what he might have had to say for and against the detailed work on routine talk that i t generates. We can see how the conversation considered here has provided an exemplary case study of the context dependence and potential for flexibility in social identities implicit in Tajfel. Not only are different identities invoked at different points of the conversation, but the same identity (in this case as a-person-with-a-medical-qualification) may take a variety of different forms depending upon the conversational context in which it is invoked. This is, of course, entirely in line with the developments of Tajfel’s theory in the claims of Turner and his associates ( e g . Turner et al., 1994). However, i t does suggest that there may be a danger in the historical reliance on laboratory studies which, as we noted earlier, often underestimate the plasticity of self-description, implicitly assum- ing that the ‘same’ identities are, like Blackpool rock, relatively enduring in microtime such that the ‘same’ identity can be assumed to be salient throughout the duration of any study. These sorts of issues are often discussed on a theoretical level ( e g . Brewer, 1991, 1993; Turner et al., 1987) but i t may take a detailed study of interaction to bring them out more fully than is possible in more traditional laboratory experiments.

Despite (what we see as) the clear advantages to the social identity theorist in doing something like we have done here, it might be that some will find one or other aspect of the ethnomethodological story unattractive. A social identity theorist is likely to inter- pret conversations such as the one we have been discussing in a rather different way to the conversation analyst. In particular, some social identity theorists might feel uneasy with an exclusive focus on ‘social identity’ as (pejoratively) a ‘floating’ description with no real referent. They might say that common sense (if nothing else) tells us that overt talk is no sure guarantee to what is really going on in an interaction. Identities may be ‘salient’ without being visibly avowed. In some circumstances, an interactant may not feel i t necessary to articulate a claim to a particular social identity (as may be the case, for example, with gender identity in a face-to-face encounter) or may symbolize their claims to iden- t i ty by non-verbal means (such as wearing a white coat). In some situations social identities may remain tacit for reasons of tact. And in some circumstances one might dissemble (a doctor may, for example, not admit his profession when asked ‘what do you do?’ at a party; a psychopath may claim to be a famous neurosurgeon).

In all of these cases, however (some social identity theorists would maintain) a particular identity is ‘salient’ to a social actor, even if it is not visible (or is not the one that is visible) on the level of SI“. A perceptual social identity theory is unfriendly to the ethnomethodological injunction because it can imagine, and feels an obligation to imagine,

490 Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark h i n e

cases where there are important things going on under the surface. Talk is regarded not as the thing itself, but as a sign (and not an entirely reliable sign) of identity, and that means that conversation analysis, while useful, may not provide the committed SIP social identity theorist with a congenial way forward.

The last two paragraphs above dwelt on one strand of implication of the argument in this paper: that its methods will be a source of unease for those convinced that there is real identity work beyond the reach of this kind of ‘talk’ analysis-who will point out, for example, that we have completely elided any worry about power and other institutional- ized asymmetries-and who feel that identity work is nevertheless capturable by traditional social psychological methods. The crux of the matter is what ontological status to ascribe identity in its manifestation in language; but that, the reader will see, is (the more general rendering 00 the point at which we came in. The debate is now a familiar one, taken up in social psychology usually by discourse analysts and their critics (see, for example, the exchange between Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 1990, and Abrams & Hogg, 1990). (This paper, of course, weighs in on the language side, though what it pro- motes is not discourse analysis (with its attendant element of cultural reading) but the closer-to-the-action conversation analysis.) There is no point trying here to resolve such a consequential debate, although we hope we have left the alternatives a little clearer.

To end more positively: the earlier discussion did, we think, build on ground shared with the social identity tradition. There is much in the ethnomethodological argument which chimes with the notion of agency and flexibility in Tajfel’s original formulation of social identity, traces of which have too long been stifled under the blanket of experimental control. Quite what ontological status that suggests we grant identity as it emerges from under the blanket is a matter that needs more work elsewhere; but, at the very least, what we have seen here does suggest a greater respect for social members’ own descriptions, and how they organize them in concert.

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Appendix

Transcription conventions

We have greatly simplified the notation in the original transcriptions, retaining only che following features and adapting their notation to a form less inconsistent than the original with Jefferson’s CA conventions (there are, nevertheless, differences in the notation of emphasis and pauses, and the use of brackets: see Atkinson & Heritage, 1984, pp ix-xvi).

italic

-

A [one speaker B Lanother speaker

A [one speaker B I another speaker C La third speaker

stressed syllable pause longer pause (and more dashes indicate still longer pauses) overlapping speech between two speakers

overlapping speech between chree speakers

A [one speaker two sets of overlapping speech B Lanother spea (ker between two pairs of speakers C (third speaker

(so then) [eberl ((1 to 2 sylls)) (laugh) (. . .)

transcriber’s guess at likely word(s) transcribed non-word note of unintelligible material, rendered in syllable length transcriber’s gloss on non-lexical material part of a turn not included in the extract used in this paper

antaki social identities in talk

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