Meetings as interactional achievements: A conversation analytic perspective

Joshua Raclaw and Cecilia E. Ford (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of the unique contributions of conversation analysis

(CA) to research on the science of meetings. We introduce CA as a sociological framework for

studying the structures and processes of talk and interaction, showing how this approach enriches

our understanding of human activity in meeting interaction. Following a sketch of CA theory and

method and the ways that basic interactional mechanisms are adapted to meetings, we review CA

research on face-to-face meetings, including practices for distributing turns at talk, the

interactional constitution of organizational identities, practices for displaying affect and building

relationships with team members, and interactional resources for decision-making in meetings.

Moving into current developments in CA and meetings, we detail one interactional strategy used

to manage disagreement during decision-making episodes in scientific peer review meetings.

This involves the use of “formulations,” discourse practices in which interactants summarize and

paraphrase the prior talk of other participants. We provide initial evidence of the use of

formulations in peer review meetings to collaboratively navigate interactional troubles, allowing

participants to work toward resolution of trouble, move ahead in the progression of meetings,

and to possibly introduce individual biases into meeting deliberations and decision-making.

Keywords: Conversation analysis; decision-making; formulations; peer review; assessments;

evaluations

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In J. A. Allen, N. Lehmann-Willenbrock, & S. G. Rogelberg (Eds.), The science of meetings at work: The Cambridge handbook of meeting science. New York, NY: Cambridge UP. _____________________________________________________________________________________________

1. Conversation Analysis and its relevance for meeting research

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a rigorous approach to documenting the shared practices humans

use to collaboratively shape interaction on a moment-to-moment basis. Originating in sociology,

at its theoretical core, CA understands mechanisms of interaction as dynamic and adaptable

methods used by participants for constructing social organization. In this chapter, we introduce

CA and its usefulness for supporting fine-grained accounts of the real-time, collaborative actions

through which participants construct meetings.

We begin by outlining CA’s fundamental goals. We then move to concrete examples of

CA findings, highlighting how meetings are formed through interactional means rather than

arising from exclusively predetermined rules and structures. In CA, meetings are viewed as

specific institutional forms adapted from the basic principles of “talk-in-interaction,” an

expression used to make explicit the CA focus on ordinary as well as institutional forms of

interaction. (The phrase “talk-in-interaction” is used in place of “conversation” as the object of

study, since the latter term often brings to mind only casual, ordinary communicative

encounters.) By contrast, CA has a longstanding tradition of looking at institutional interactions,

activities characterized by specialized practices that feature more goal-oriented constraints along

with division of participation by roles specialized for institutional purposes (Drew and Heritage,

1992). As is the norm for current research in CA, we include references to multimodality (i.e.,

non-verbal components of interaction) in our illustrations. For a more detailed coverage of

multimodality in meetings, see Asmuß (this volume). In illustrating CA applied to meetings, we

also introduce current research trends in CA for meetings, attending to the potential power

dynamics of what are known as “formulations,” revoicings or summative characterizations of

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prior talk. In discussing these formulations, we draw from our own project on scientific peer

review meetings.

In concluding the chapter, we briefly compare CA to related analytic approaches

represented in this volume. We see great potential for CA to be employed in mixed-method

research on meetings, complementing other methodologies. Indeed, such research is already

represented in the literature.

1.1 What is a meeting?

From a CA perspective, meetings are planned human encounters characterized by interactional

work to share and jointly shape a task-based group activity, held during an agreed upon and

bounded period of time. Whereas in ordinary interaction groups larger than three persons are

likely to systematically break into smaller group encounters (Egbert, 1997), a requirement for

both formal and informal meetings is that multiple parties maintain a single focus of activity.

These joint activities are typically guided by a single participant, a chairperson, who has

institutionally-granted special rights relative to other participants. Meetings occur in workplaces,

in inner circles of national government, in island villages (Duranti, 1994), through synchronous

video connection, and a range of other contexts. Thus, meetings are a ubiquitous form of human

activity, built through the shared capacities of groups to organize themselves in focused,

explicitly goal directed interaction. CA is concerned with the ways that multiple parties organize

the shift into and out of meeting structure, and understanding the participants’ practices for

maintaining that structure as a problem of social order.

1.2 Talk as Social Organization

Given CA’s uniqueness, some historical and theoretical background is required to adequately

introduce its contributions to study of meetings as occasions for the construction of specialized

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social orders. Conversation Analysis emerged in the mid-20th century through the work of

Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. Its developers sought to address what Goffman referred to as the

“neglected situation” (1964) in social theory and what Garfinkel (1960, 1967) pointed to as the

need for social theory to directly address how action and intersubjectivity are methodically

produced by social actors. Existing forms of sociology in the mid-20th century conceptualized

social structure as a separate, autonomous set of shared rules that both explain and determine

social action. CA, emerging from Garfinkel and Goffman’s separate critiques of social theory,

instead set out to study social order directly, examining the improvised but orderly social

achievement of interaction. CA’s focus is upon “how mutual understandings are achieved by

participants” (Drew & Heritage, 1992, p.14). Social ordering is understood as constituted through

documentable processes, administered by participants in interaction rather than determined by

normative rules or resulting from a static, preexisting system of social order. Thus, in place of a

priori specifications of action types, CA has documented the construction of social order on a

moment-to-moment basis in real-time encounters, what Goodwin (1990) has called “talk as

social organization.” CA developed as a method that, in its most fundamental form, relies on the

participants’ own actions, in situ, as primary evidence to support the analyst’s claims that a

specific action is meaningful and treated as real by the interactants. Thus, in analyzing social

action, rather than identifying and coding a priori social categories or even action types in a top-

down manner, the goal of CA is to discover the shared and recurrent mechanisms used by

members to create provisional and contingent (i.e., improvised and locally adapted) social orders.

Meetings, from this perspective, are not ordered from the outset but must be “talked into being”

(Heritage, 1984) through the moment-to-moment actions of participants.

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By taking seriously that social ordering, social categories, and social relations are

constantly (re)created in and through quotidian moments of human interaction, CA has

developed as a rigorous analytic enterprise. It is capable of accounting for the principles

interactants use to construct social categories and forms of action, and also the mechanisms we

use to affiliate with or resist categories and courses of action. What are the practices through

which participants construct and reconstruct “structures of social action” (Atkinson & Heritage,

1984)?1 While a research agenda responding to the question of how social structure is locally

managed may seem abstract and daunting, CA’s originators began with the simple task of taking

advantage of the growing availability of audio and, to some extent, film and video recording

technology. With the basic assumption that there had to be order in how interactants navigated

their social encounters, the originators of CA set to work observing, in as much detail as

possible, how people made conversation work.

1.3 Participants’ real-time actions as the source for analysts’ interpretations

Because we do not know, and the early developers of CA certainly did not know, which details

of interaction are socially consequential for the participants, the guiding principle for discovering

semiotic processes for social interaction in CA has been that “no order of detail in interaction can

be dismissed a priori as disorderly, accidental, or irrelevant” (Heritage, 1984, p. 241). This

demands not only access to recorded conversations, but also a transcription system that supports

fine-tuned attention to the details of that talk. Central to CA’s analytic process, then, is detailed

transcription, which has been elaborated over the years from an original system developed by

Jefferson (see appendix for key to symbols; also Hepburn & Bolden, 2012). With regard to the

iterative process of transcription and the role of transcripts in CA, we must underscore that

1 Note that in using the expression “structures of social action,” Atkinson and Heritage reference Talcott Parson’s notion of a more singular “structure of social action”, thus reflecting CA’s move from a broad top-down theoretical perspective to one that focuses on the details of the actions through which social structure is, in fact, constructed.

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transcripts are tools of analysis but never the primary data from which we work; the primary data

are found in the video and audio recordings. For further detail on CA principles for data

collection, see Asmuß (this volume). The fine-grained nature of CA’s analytic process is best

illustrated through examples, to which we now turn.

2. Practices for co-constructing interaction: moving from ordinary talk to a meeting event

The systems that interactants rely upon for co-constructing interaction are both predictable and

contingent (i.e., locally adapted and subject to local improvisation and adaptation). What

participants do to construct themselves as doing a meeting involves informal and formal

adaptations of the basic systems for human interaction. CA describes and explains the recurrent

and shared practices by which participants construct interaction. Central and core systems

include turn-taking, sequence organization (the building of actions across speakers and turns),

practices for agreement and disagreement, and interactional repair work (through which

participants address problems in hearing, speaking, or understanding). These systems are treated

in detail in a large number of publications, and excellent recent reviews are currently available

(see Sidnell & Stivers, 2012 for an overview), to which we refer the reader. In the present

section, we first look at a sampling of these fundamental systems, for which CA has produced

rigorous accounts. In order to draw attention to the relevance of these fundamental practices to

understanding meeting interactions, we highlight how the systems are adapted for the specialized

work done in such events. In section 3, we move to newer areas of CA inquiry into meetings,

reviewing in particular the “formulating” actions as a basis for enacting and resisting power and

hierarchy, and as a mechanism through which bias may enter into meetings tasked with

evaluation of students, employees, or peers.

2.1 Turn-taking and action sequencing in ordinary interaction

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Turn-taking, the production of action, sequence organization, the preference for agreement, and

other systems of interaction are so ubiquitous as to seem obvious and certainly taken for granted.

As a sociological method, CA demonstrates how these systematic practices are in fact skillful

social achievements, systematically performed by participants in local interactions. They

represent fundamental domains of social science, and CA foregrounds the fact that participants in

interaction are always in the process of (re)creating social order.

Turn-taking is among the systems revealed by the earliest CA research. Simple coding of

turn completion signals arriving at the ends of turns (Duncan & Fiske, 1977) would result in lag

times for processing before a next speaker begins, but evidence from recorded conversations

(Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) revealed that such delays clearly did social actions (e.g.,

hesitation, signs of disagreement, displays of trouble). Delays and overlaps are socially

consequential and are either avoided or are deployed to accomplish interactional ends

(interrupting, resisting, showing strong agreement). Thus, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974)

proposed that units of turn construction (turn constructional units, or TCUs, e.g., words,

phrases, clauses and associated prosodic trajectories that are recognizable before completion)

required the property of projectability. That is, these interactional units had to have properties in

their unfolding production that would allow recipients to anticipate points of completion during

the production of turns.

When more than two persons are interacting, participants must share a system for

negotiating who will speak next. This is accomplished through a component of the turn-taking

system known as turn allocation. Through a range of means, a current speaker may select the

next speaker, a next speaker may self-select, or, in the presence of a developing gap between

speakers, the same speaker may select to continue to speak. Apparent “mistakes” in the timing of

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next-speaker beginnings can be explained with reference to the principles of turn taking

themselves and to the complex but orderly principles of constructing joint courses of action or

sequences (see Schegloff, 1987; Stivers, 2012).

Before we discuss the specialized ways that meeting interactions are adaptations of more

generic practices for turn taking and sequence organization, we take a brief look at how these

systems play out in mundane, non-institutional interaction. The following span of talk is from a

casual conversation. Five friends in their early 30s are sharing crackers and cheese after going to

a movie together. Darel and Cindy, a heterosexual couple, have recently returned from a year in

Nepal, and their experiences with digestive parasites have been a theme in the current

conversation. As the excerpt below begins, Wendy asks the question, “what made you the

sickest?” Wilma’s questioning action projects an answer as the relevant response, and selects

both Cindy and Darel as possible next speakers, as both have just been talking about experiences

with contaminated food. The delay before Cindy responds (line 2) can be accounted for by this

local problem of turn allocation. However, Helen has reported just a bit before that she too had

visited Nepal:

(1) [AM 6:57]

1 Wilma: Well what made you the si:ckest.

2 (1.0)

3 Cindy: You could never i[dentify it.]

4 Helen: [Mm: ] You do:n’t know, yeah.=

5 Darell: =No I know, I’m pretty sure it was when- [ (0.8) ]

6 [((swallowing))]

7 to this thing (1.0) when a per- when a ol:d man reaches

8 seventy seven, they have this big ceremony

[STORY FOLLOWS]

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Much can be discovered about human interaction from what may at first, to an untrained

eye, look like a straightforward and uninteresting a bit of talk. However, from a CA perspective,

the talk in excerpt 1 is accomplished through a rich array of recurrent mechanisms of human

interaction. Though a full CA analysis is beyond our goals in this chapter, we will sketch some

key details as they illustrate the patterned complexity of accomplishing ordinary interaction.

Through questioning and topic introduction, Wilma's turn at line 1 initiates a foundational

sequence type, generic to human interaction: an adjacency pair, which in its most minimal form

involves an initiating action and a responsive action fitted to the relevancies introduced by the

first action (see Schegloff, 2007). Note that Helen, though not a participant to whom Wilma’s

question was directed, self-selects to speak at line 4. Helen first contribution to the talk overlaps

with Cindy’s turn, doing so with the token Mm: (Gardner, 1997), indicating Helen’s readiness to

respond. When Helen does produce a further response, now out of overlap, she does further

interactional work by appending yeah to the possible completion of her action of agreeing with

Cindy. By adding yeah, Helen does the socially consequential action of displaying that her

response is not to be taken as superseding Cindy’s response, but as a confirmation that Helen not

only heard Cindy’s turn but agrees with it. Negotiation of epistemic stance, that is, the relative

knowledgeability of the participants (Heritage, 2012), is at work here in Helen’s addition of

yeah. A knowledgeable stance is also implicated in Darel’s response (lines 5-8), in which he

strongly denies any agreement with the positions that Cindy and Helen have taken.

In contrast with the turn constructional practices of Cindy and Helen’s responses,

consisting of a minimal TCU, Darel uses the first TCU in his turn (“No I know”) to project

further elaboration. Given that Darel’s first TCU follows an action-projection pattern whereby an

account or correction is expected, other participants in the interaction are invited to pass on

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grammatical or even prosodic points of possible completion in Darel’s continuing turn, waiting

instead until what develops into a story arrives. This projection of a longer telling, a multi-unit

turn, and the shape it will take as it nears completion, guides the recipients as to how and when

it will be relevant for them to respond (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1974;

Jefferson, 1978).

By starting his response after Cindy and Heidi have already produced answers, and in

particular ones that display agreement with one another, Darel is now not responding to Wendy’s

question directly, but instead to Cindy and Heidi’s actions. What is the character of his action in

relation to what he is responding to? Darel produces unmitigated disagreement with his turn-

initial No, latched onto (placed slightly early in terms of the rhythm of Heidi's turn), and

followed by his emphatic I know (stress on I). CA research has firmly established a system of

preference organization, by which, in this local context and more generally, disagreement with

prior speakers is normatively shaped in such a manner as to avoid direct disagreement and to

instead support a general preference for social solidarity (Heritage, 1984). The curtness of form

in which Darel delivers his disagreement thus plays off of and contrasts with the norm of shaping

actions toward affiliation and social solidarity. That is, against the backdrop of the generic

preference for agreement, Darel’s unmitigated, emphatic disagreement stands out as enacting

stronger than normal disagreement. As his story continues, he demonstrates his profound

knowledge of the local culture and ceremonial practices of the people whose language he was

learning at the time.

We have just sketched some of the systematic ways that humans negotiate the

construction of our interrelational lives, the emergent social order we co-create and inhabit. From

this example and its analysis, we have access to some basics of ordinary interaction that could

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present problems for meeting interaction. For example, Wilma’s actions of speaking up without

being called upon and her pursuing a topic of her own interest are forms of group participation

that would disrupt typical meeting order. In meeting interaction, topics are not drawn from

anything that may present itself to an individual participant as worth pursuit and elaboration, nor

do all participants display equal rights to steer the direction of the focused interaction, which is

instead controlled by a chair and directed toward institutional goals.

How do we adjust foundational practices from more casual encounters to the more

formal, focused, goal-oriented events we construct and recognize as meetings? In the following

section, we begin to answer this question by examining interactions occurring in formal

administrative meetings held at a research university in the United States.

2.2 Co-constructing meetings: Negotiating of meeting order

Turn-taking and turn allocation have particular relevance to the question of how groups of

persons constitute themselves as moving into meetings and sustaining the single focus of activity

that meetings demand. Our analysis of excerpt 1 demonstrated aspects of the operation of turn-

taking in ordinary interaction: after a lull in the conversation (just before Wilma’s turn at line 1),

it is perfectly within the norms of turn-taking and action sequencing that Wilma self-selects to

take a turn and initiates a new course of action. Though she is just one of the participants in the

multi-party interaction, she needs no special rights or permission to speak up and to propose a

direction for the talk.

In stark contrast, during meetings one participant acts as chairperson, and is afforded

special rights to guide the flow of action for the group. In the speech exchange system of

meetings, other participants orient to the chair as the arbiter of speakership. Depending on the

(in)formality of a meeting, it is possible that persons other than the chair may take the floor

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unilaterally, but the basic turn taking system that operates in meetings is distinct, and performing

one’s role as chair or any other type of meeting participant is learned behavior, beyond what is

modeled and learned in ordinary interaction. For example, excerpt 2 below is taken from a

meeting among physicians with specialization in geriatrics. Ned, the chair, is completing a

response to a question by Jill regarding patient compliance with a drug regimen.2 Note how Beth

speaks up without being called upon or specifically recognized by Ned.

(2) [Medical]

1 Ned: and if you have a good calcium inta:ke, (.) you can be pretty

2 sure that bisphosphonate therapy's gonna work.

3 Jill: ºmmhm.º

4 (0.6)

5 → Beth: and that's true among our older:- patients too:, that it's rare

6 that I'll see a true decrease, as interpreted by the Ned on the

7 Dexa*,.hh if somebody is no:t-(.)>you know< still pretty darn

8 immobile. and smoking like a chimney.

*Dexa = bone density measurement device

At line 3, Jill, whose question Ned was answering, offers a minimal receipt token (mmhm), thus

closing the question-answer-receipt sequence. Beth then self-selects to speak, adding information

to what the chair has just reported. While speaking up without being called upon is typical in

ordinary interaction, within the specialized turn-taking system of meetings, such action takes on

special social-relational significance. By speaking up in this manner, from the non-chair position,

Beth claims special rights to speak on this topic, displaying her co-expert status with Ned

regarding patient compliance with the drug regimen under discussion.

How do people move from an ordinary turn-taking system to the controlled and

specialized participation organization of a meeting? As participants arrive at meeting rooms, they

2 Pseudonyms are used in all examples from meetings.

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do not sit at attention and wait for the chair to begin the official event. Indeed, just as in non-

institutional gathering (e.g., dinner parties and the like), upon arriving participants exchange

greetings and initiate casual talk, forming smaller exchanges as more people arrive. In order for

participants to construct themselves as members of a meeting, it is necessary for them to move

away from the ordinary operation of turn-taking and into a locally negotiated system

recognizable as meeting interaction. Thus, the participants shift away from co-present and

simultaneous exchanges to establish a meeting order, a shift that is neither instantaneous nor

unilateral but rather interactionally achieved.

Meeting leaders as well as other meeting participants must acquire the specialized

collaborative practices for moving from ordinary co-present group interaction to meeting

structure. An example of the shift from casual multiparty, simultaneous encounters to meeting

order can be seen in excerpt 3 below. Gwen is interacting with Clive, while Stephie is chatting

with Vivian (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Meeting participants (id. Gwen, Clive, Stephie, Vivian, Dan, Ellie)

In the excerpt below, the two columns at the start of the example (lines 2-9) represent the

separate exchanges; only parts of each are audible enough to be represented in the rough

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transcription of those lines. Other groups are in similar simultaneous small configurations of

interaction. The bolded area of the transcript highlights where Gwen shifts to an enactment of

being the meeting chair, while Stephie and Vivian (among others audible in the recording)

continue their smaller exchanges. They are not yet aligning with the chair’s move to meeting

order. Two simultaneous and distinct interactions are indicated in the transcript by a solid

vertical line shifting to a broken line as Gwen pursues the shift to meeting order.

Without going into great detail, let us note the practices that achieve the shift to meeting

order. After completing an exchange with Clive (lines 1-7), Gwen (lines 7-8) visibly disengages

with Clive and begins to scan the entire group, while assessing the attendance as “great.” At line

12, Gwen initiates her turn with alright, serving as what Boden, in her groundbreaking CA book

on meetings (1994), refers to a “standard topic transition marker.” Gwen’s alright is immediately

followed by an assessment of there being a quorum, an action that furthers the relevance of

moving into the meeting proper. She then moves to a more explicit call to order, “we’d better get

going” (line 13). It is not until Gwen’s turn from lines 16-18 that all the meeting participants are

either quiet, looking at agendas or at Gwen, or attending to the task Gwen has initiated:

distributing agendas and minutes. Thus, although the members of this meeting arrive with shared

knowledge that Gwen will be the chair, the shift to an official meeting participation structure

involves local and collaborative work. The move to meeting order clearly involves all

participants systematically bringing their ongoing ordinary interactions to completion and both

visibly and audibly (in this case by their silence) collaborating in enacting the specialized

interactional system that constitutes a meeting.

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The previous section outlined some of the structural features through which participants

constitute meetings. In the next section, we provide an overview of existing research in CA on

meetings, a portion of which has examined each of the interactional practices described above.

2.3 Research trends in CA studies of meeting interaction

CA has a longstanding research tradition of examining interaction in organizations and

institutions. Focusing on a diverse range of institutional settings, this literature has traditionally

involved three core areas of analysis: the organization of turns and sequences in institutional talk,

the interactional accomplishment of social actions and activities that are routinely conducted

within organizations and institutions, and the ways in which institutional identities are

constituted through talk and interaction. In recent reviews of CA research on meetings, Asmuß

and Svennevig (2009) and Svennevig (2012) note that work in CA has often prioritized

interactions between institutional representatives (e.g., news interviewers, doctors, judges,

teachers, emergency call service operators) and the various laypersons who employ their

services. By comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to social interaction occurring

among members of these organizations. CA research on meeting interaction addresses this gap.

Boden’s The Business of Talk (1994) was the first book-length application of the fine-

grained analytic power of CA to shed light on “structure-in-action” in organizations through

analyses of real-time meeting interaction. Boden devoted considerable scrutiny to how meetings

serve as “the interaction order of management, the occasioned expression of management-in-

action, that very social action through which institutions produce and reproduce themselves”

(81). Following Boden’s monograph, with its relevance not only to social science but also to the

concerns of institutions and organizations themselves, CA researchers began to attend in a

concentrated manner to workplace meetings as key sites for understanding the on-going social

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structuring of institutions. In this section, we provide a brief overview of the research in CA on

meetings that has emerged over the past 20 years. We follow this general review with a detailed

discussion of two areas of research in CA relevant to our own research: those studies examining

decision-making practices in meeting contexts, and those focused on meetings in which sorting

and evaluation of present and non-present parties is a primary task-focused activity.

In general terms, CA research on meetings can be divided into several topical categories.

A significant area of this research has examined structural components of face-to-face meetings.

Analysts have considered some of the varied resources available to chairpersons to move in and

out of meeting talk (Atkinson et al., 1978; Boden, 1994; Cuff & Sharrock, 1985; Deppermann et

al., 2010; Kangasharju & Nikko, 2009), interactional strategies for gaining turns (Ford, 2008;

Ford and Stickle, 2012; Markaki & Mondada, 2012; Mondada, 2007) or closing turns (Arminen,

2001), and practices for initiating and closing down topics of talk (Barnes, 2007; Button &

Casey, 1998/9; Ford, 2008; Svennevig, 2012b). Recent and much-needed research by Markman

(2009, 2010a, 2010b) has also examined how the interactional structures of meeting talk are

affected by the computer-mediated discourse environment of text-based virtual meetings.

Other research has focused on the constitution of interactional identities over the course

of meeting interactions. This work has attended primarily to strategies used by managers and

team leaders to construct themselves as leaders (Clifton, 2006; Nielsen, 1998, 2009; Schmitt,

2006; Svennevig, 2008, 2011) or for chairpersons to establish, in real-time, the interactional

relevance of their situational identity as “chair” (Barske, 2009; Pomerantz & Denvir, 2007;

Potter & Hepburn, 2010; Sandlund & Denk, 2007). Pomerantz and Denvir (2007) not only

examine how chairing is done in meeting contexts, but also demonstrate the relevance of a

chairperson’s position within the local hierarchy of an organization to the ways in which they

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enact the organizational role of chairing. Vöge (2010) also examines how a participant’s

seniority within an organization may influence their overall conduct in meetings. She shows how

the asymmetric production of laughter during a complaint works to enact hierarchy and seniority

as relevant aspects of meeting interaction.

A third area of CA research has examined how participants display affect and build

relationships in meeting contexts. For example, Kangasharju and Nikko (2009) analyze ways in

which humor and laughter are used by participants to construct team-oriented work settings,

display like-mindedness and mutual understanding with other team members, or reduce tension

in interactionally troublesome environments. Djordjilovic (2012a, 2012b) examines affect and

elements of relationship building in meeting talk, focusing on verbal and nonverbal strategies

used by participants to collaboratively co-construct a team identity.

Another crucial element of constructing relationships and maintaining social solidarity

among meeting teams entails the occasionally delicate production of agreement and

disagreement. McKinlay and McVittie (2006) and Osvaldsson (2004) examine how participants

use laughter, both as a stance-taking device and a form of topic control, in order to display their

agreement and disagreement with other participants. Kangasharju (1996, 2002) considers how

interactants manage conflict in multi-party meetings by displaying their affiliation, or forming

oppositional alliances, with other team members. Saft (2001, 2004) focuses on relationships and

the navigation of conflict in meetings, examining expressions of concession to statements of

opposition, and practices for taking and managing turns during argumentative episodes, during

university faculty meetings. The maintenance of relationships and social solidarity is also of

relevance to another routine activity: decision making. We turn now to this recurrent task in

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meetings. In the next section, we review key findings on how participants come to decisions in

the course of meeting interaction.

3. The impact of decision-making in meetings

Both formal and informal meetings regularly require that participants come to a joint decision

about some relevant state of affairs, and reaching agreement in these matters is treated by

interactants as a routine, task-oriented activity. As Huisman (2001) notes, however, it is a

difficult analytic task to pinpoint exactly what constitutes an arrival at a decision, or to show a

single point in the interaction where a decision has been made. Rather, decision-making is best

understood as a dynamic and emergent process, negotiated through the actions of multiple

participants in the moment-by-moment unfolding of talk. As Huisman suggests, participant

understandings of decisions may also be sensitive to the local context of a particular meeting,

affected by the norms of the organizational culture in which a decision is negotiated.

In this section, we examine the interactional resources available to participants for

coming to decisions in meetings. In particular, given our current research focus on bias in

meeting deliberations, we focus on the mechanisms and resources through which bias may be

introduced into the decision-making process. The section begins with an overview of work by

Huisman (2001) and Clifton (2006, 2009) that examines the subjective nature of how meeting

participants arrive at decisions. We then introduce our own developing research on joint

decision-making practices in scientific peer review meetings. Here, we examine one strategy

meeting participants employ to manage disagreements between grant reviewers and move toward

joint and apparently consensual decision-making.

3.1 Practices for making and arriving at decisions in meeting talk

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Both Huisman (2001) and Clifton (2009) use conversation analysis to investigate the structural

and intersubjective dimensions of coming to a decision in meetings. They frame their respective

discussions in response to organizational research that focuses on rationality in decision making,

an approach that Huisman and Clifton characterize as highly attentive to the cognitive dimension

of decisions but relatively inattentive to social and interactional components of decision making.

Both authors demonstrate the usefulness of CA as a complementary mode of analysis, one that

offers a lens for understanding the collaborative production of decision making as an in situ

accomplishment, focusing on the interactional practices by which decisions are arrived at and

ratified. The insights of both Huisman and Clifton point to a mechanism through which bias and

individual influence are at play in decision making, an area of focus in our own current research.

While acknowledging the ephemeral nature of decisions, Huisman (2001) operationalizes

them as “commitments to future action” enacted through a multi-part structure. This generally

entails the initial formulation, and subsequent assessment, of a possible future situation, action,

or event. Within CA, the term formulation (sometimes specified as a metalinguistic

formulation; Bolden, 2010) refers to an action that retrospectively characterizes or glosses what

a previous speaker has said. Heritage and Watson (1979) divide formulations into two types: gist

formulations, which provide a summary of what another speaker has said, and upshot

formulations, which draw out an unspoken implication from the original speaker’s words. An

example of a gist formulation is illustrated in excerpt 4 below, taken from an episode of talk in a

peer review meeting where the participants have been tasked with rating grant applications into

categories of “recommended,” “strongly recommended,” or “not recommended.” Neither the two

primary reviewers nor any member of the larger group of participants has actually reached a

decision regarding the funding of the grant in question at this point, yet the chair’s use of a gist

20

formulation at lines 1-2 allows her to introduce a candidate decision reflecting her own

understanding of the primary reviewers’ grant evaluations:

(4) PIR 12-20

01 CH: Okay so:- so what I’m hearing is: (.) is enthusiastic (.)

02 enthusiasm to keep this as a strongly recommend.

03 (1.8)

Rather than providing a neutral or objective summation of what other participants have said, the

chair's formulation involves a translational process (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970), allowing speakers

to inject their own interpretation of another’s words into the talk. Barnes (2007) shows that

formulations can have a range of interactional functions in meetings and other contexts: They

may provide for the potential relevance of closure of a current topic or ongoing action, for

example, or may elicit further talk from other participants on the current topic. Barnes also notes

that, while formulations may be produced by any participant in the university administration

meetings she examines, they are more frequently produced by meeting chairs. Even in cases

where other participants produce formulations of the prior talk, these must be ratified by the

chair to contribute towards the production of a final decision. Further research, to which we now

turn, confirms the role of formulations as powerful devices for chairpersons in particular as a

means of influence, as they propose their own positions as summative statements of apparently

consensual decisions in meetings.

In their discussions of the decision-making practices in meetings, both Huisman (2001)

and Clifton (2009) point to the subjective nature of formulations as providing specific

participants, and chairs in particular, with opportunities to exert an asymmetric level of influence

on decisions. For example, in her analysis of a teachers’ meeting at a Dutch high school,

Huisman shows how the chair’s choice of words in a gist formulation works to construct a

21

position taken up by some of the participants as an obvious choice. We highlight these terms in

italics in the transcript below. Prior to this excerpt, the meeting participants had been working

towards coming to a decision regarding whether they should continue to fill out work sheets used

to record student activities:

(5) [Huisman 2001:80] (translation from Dutch)

01 Chair: in that second round actually the more

02 or less concrete question has been asked

03 but do you think then that we:'d (0.8) better

04 abandon that obligation now

05 to uh fill out those work sheets

06 and (.) well the result was (naturally)

07 somehow to be expected

08 indeed was yet again- it was yet again the case

09 that the majority of the people said

10 that uh (1) ((coughing)) as far as they were concerned it

11 more or less w- more or less was allowed

12 but at the same time it also appeared

13 that a number of people came forward

14 who (said) "God" as uh ardent proponent

15 of this filling out

16 and u- ↑then it was about time

17 to (.) to talk about it some more

In Huisman’s analysis of the interaction, she demonstrates that the chair’s characterization of the

proponents of one side of this debate as “the majority of the people” (line 9) also allows him to

insert his own stance into the talk, as the chair implies that “the majority decides” should be the

basis for the decision. In addition to providing a general overview of some of the features of

decision-making in meeting talk, Huisman’s observations have particular relevance to our

22

current project on bias in peer review meetings. Specifically, Huisman argues for the

examination of formulations in decisions as an area through which bias may be introduced. Her

discussion shows that formulations in the decision-making process may privilege the opinions of

the chairpersons who so often employ them, leading to outcomes that may not equitably

represent the contrasting views among meeting participants.

Clifton (2009) further examines the subjective element of decision-making in meetings

by examining the interactional resources available to participants to influence others. Clifton’s

analysis accounts for the ways in which both higher-ranked individuals and their subordinates

within an organization can use interactional mechanisms to influence instances of decision-

making. Clifton presents four interactional resources for the doing of influence in meeting

contexts: producing formulations, co-authoring an in-progress action with another participant,

employing repair practices, or laughing to frame a prior contribution to the talk as problematic.

Each of these practices allows a participant to selectively highlight particular contributions as

relevant to the decision, while effectively erasing others from consideration. Though Clifton

shows how each of the four resources above are potentially available to all meeting participants,

he also notes that the chair’s institutionally-granted and locally co-constructed special rights to

produce formulations, and to announce decisions, provide them with a broader range of

resources for influencing decisions.

Though focused on the enactment of leadership rather than decision-making as such,

Clifton (2006) also examines episodes of talk where formulations are used to come to a decision

in meeting contexts. Clifton shows how higher-ranking participants in a company meeting

employ gist formulations to solidify their interpretation of the prior talk and have other

participants endorse this view themselves. His analysis focuses on the privileged position that

23

managers and chairs can enact when decisions are made, given their institutional rights to move

in and out of agenda topics and their frequent use of formulations as a means of closing down

topics. Such practices support chairs in having the “final say” in meetings, and empower them to

“do leadership” by transforming their own interpretation of a state of affairs into the

interpretation held by the group. Clifton argues that for another member of a meeting to disagree

with the chair’s formulation is interactionally problematic and difficult. This is the case for

several convergent reasons well established in CA research with regard to agreement,

disagreement, and sequence organization. Disagreement, in ordinary talk, is treated as delicate

and asserted with special care, and in the hierarchical organization of meetings disagreeing with

a higher ranking participant heightens the pressure for agreement. Additionally, since

formulations are sequentially positioned as summations of what has come before, a formulation

is to be understood as implicating previous speakers as “coauthors” of the formulation itself.

Given the rights and obligation for chairpersons to produce formulations, challenging them is

made further difficult as doing so may be understood as challenging the chair’s competence at

this task. Finally, insofar as formulations are relevant to the closure of the present topic, there is

only a limited space in the talk for other participants to even challenge a given formulation.

The studies by Huisman (2001) and Clifton (2006, 2009) described above examine how

formulations produced by meeting chairs may be used to exert an asymmetric level of influence

on the decisions reached by a team. However, they do not address how formulations produced by

non-chairing participants are managed, understood, and responded to in meeting talk. To begin to

answer this question, we draw from an initial analysis of decision-making practices in scientific

peer review meetings, the focus of our current research. Our data for this analysis is drawn from

3 hours of video-recorded interaction from a peer review meeting held at a North American

24

research university. The goal of the meeting is to reach final evaluative ratings of grant

applications and consequential recommendations for funding outcomes.

Though interaction-focused analyses have yet to examine the scientific peer review

process specifically, work in CA by Asmuß (2008), Mazeland and Berenst (2008), McKinlay and

McVittie (2006), and Ovsaldsson (2004) have examined meeting contexts where sorting and

evaluation practices are a focal activity. For example, Asmuß (2008) examines performance

appraisal meetings in which assessment is a task-oriented goal for participants. She insightfully

documents the ways in which supervisors articulate their critical feedback of the employee,

which may or may not display sensitivity to the dispreferred nature of these criticisms.

Osvaldsson (2004) also examines meetings in which higher-ranking individuals in an

organization produce assessments of a co-present party, focusing on multi-party assessment

meetings in Swedish youth detention homes. Osvaldsson shows how laughter is used in these

meetings by both the assessing party and the party being assessed to mitigate a sensitive or

problematic evaluation. Focusing on meetings involving the assessment of non-present parties,

Mazeland and Berenst (2008) examine teaching-team assessment meetings at Dutch high

schools. They demonstrate how the teachers’ use of categorization practices, when referring to

students in their class, are understood as entailing assessments of the students’ preparedness for

the higher-level or mid-level school programs. McKinlay and McVittie (2006) explore multi-

party discussions between members of the admissions group of an arts and crafts guild, who

meet to evaluate potential candidates for admission into the guild. McKinlay and McVittie

demonstrate how participants in these meetings, all experts in their respective areas of the fine

arts, employ a variety of topic control devices in order to avoid producing overtly stated

disagreements with another participant.

25

In our own research on assessment-focused meetings, we examine how participants in a

grants peer review meeting evaluate, sort, and collaboratively come to a consensus on

recommended funding outcomes. Given that formulations are mechanisms through which

influence has been shown operate when articulated by meeting chairs, we move to focus to

formulations by other participants. Our guiding questions are: How do non-chairing members of

the peer review committee do formulations and to what effect (i.e., how are non-chair

formulations received by chairs and others)? We examine these issues in the following section.

3.3 Formulations by third-party participants in peer review meetings

As described in the background provided for excerpt 4 above, the grants under review are scored

by two primary reviewers. In cases where these reviewers assign conflicting scores, they may

face difficulties in firmly declaring their endorsement or rejection of the grant, given the more

general interactional preference against disagreement. Our analysis shows how formulations that

reveal the gist or upshot of a reviewer’s grant rating offer a reviewer the opportunity to confirm

the formulation of their stance for or against the grant. In the case of divergent evaluations

between the two primary grant reviewers, formulations by third parties (chairs or others) are

opportunities for divergent reviewers to confirm their disagreement with another reviewer while

avoiding being implicated in directly disagreeing with the other reviewer. In other words, rather

than disagreeing with an evaluation just after its author has shared it, through the use of a

formulation a disagreeing reviewer is offered a more distant opportunity to confirm his stance, in

the context of agreeing with a third party. Though formulations may serve as resources for

speakers to introduce bias into decision-making, we focus here on formulations as mechanisms

for managing interactional trouble and for contributing to collaborative moves towards a final

grant decision.

26

Before proceeding with the analysis, some further background on the particulars of the

peer review meeting is necessary. Prior to the meeting each reviewer provides a numerical score

for the grant, based on the sum of various ratings criteria scored on a Likert scale. These criteria

range from the qualifications of the research team to the perceived innovation and scientific

merit of the proposed research project. The first agenda item for the current meeting entails

reporting and tabulating these numerical scores as well as the reviewer’s decision for

recommendation of the grant. The chair has written these reports on a whiteboard at the front of

the room, visible to all the reviewers throughout the course of the meeting. This visual

representation of these scores becomes relevant to the interaction, as participants direct their gaze

towards the whiteboard or otherwise reference it as a visual artefact used in the production of

action (see Asmuß, this volume). In the excerpt below, for example, the chair refers to the

whiteboard as a means of displaying evidence for a claim she makes. Here, the chair responds to

one of the primary reviewers for the grant being discussed (Mark), who has asked whether it

would be possible to table the discussion of the grant until later in the meeting. Mark’s rationale

for this suggestion is that, once several other grants have received their final scores, the group

might use these scores as a baseline for establishing a final decision on the current grant.

(6) PIR 12-20

64 MA: =Can we (do) this until we (find uh several)/(finally

65 settle) (there) and then compare this five or four and then

66 decide that uh ranking there? By priority ranking?

67 CH: But you’re not gonna be here for that part of the

68 conversation so I’m trying to get a temperature right now.

69 (1.4)

70 CH: [Um:: (0.3) so- cause we’re gon- we’re not gonna be able to

71 [((gazes at whiteboard list of proposals and scores))

72 fund everyone that’s up there.

27

At lines 67-68, the chair rejects Mark’s proposal by accounting for why a final decision on the

grant cannot wait, as Mark needs to leave the meeting early. At lines 70-72, the chair bolsters her

account for rejecting Mark's proposal. She asserts that waiting to see the final scores of other

grants will be of little help to the group, since there is still only a finite amount of grants that can

be funded.3 By directing her gaze toward the whiteboard at line 71 and referring to it again at

line 72, the chair draws on the visual representation of the number of grants the group can

approve funding for, lending credibility to her prior account.

In the excerpt above as well as those discussed below, the meeting participants are

discussing a grant submitted by Robins. Mark and Michael are the primary reviewers for this

grant. We can see the seating arrangements for the reviewers in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Participants in peer review meeting

As noted above in reference to excerpt 6, the primary reviewers have produced markedly

different evaluations of the grant. Mark has given it high marks, strongly recommending it and

3 Earlier in the meeting, the chair established that the dean approved funding for only around a third of the 15 grants represented on the board.

28

assigning it a perfect score of 100. Michael has recommended the grant as well, but his score is a

markedly lower 51.4 Given the task of the meeting participants to determine which grant

proposals are most deserving of funding, these scores do not lend themselves to a quick and

obvious funding decision. Indeed, the reviewers display an orientation to this mismatch between

their ratings at various points in the talk. For example, the discussion of the Robins grant first

begins with enthusiastic praise for the grant from Mark. Following Mark’s recommendation to

fund the grant at the full amount requested, the chair inquires about the identity of the second

reviewer, thereby selecting him to speak next:

(7) PIR 12-20

22 CH: And who’s the other one on Robins?

23 (1.0)

24 TA: (Uh)/(So) that's Michael?

25 MI: I was, yea:h.

26 (6.5)

27 MI: ((flipping through pages))

28 MI: [((moves right hand to forehead, rests knuckles on forehead, audible in-

29 out breath produced with this body movement))]

30 MI: [ .h h h h h h h ] I wasn’t all tha:t (.) impressed uh:: I

31 thought it was reasonable, (.) uh: it’s not very groundbreaking.

32 (0.2) <%It’s (.) more in the middle ,(1.0)/ but [I would recommend

33 [((shrug))

34 it. (Within certain)

As noted earlier, participants in ordinary and meeting talk generally display some degree

of interactional trouble when disagreeing with a co-present party. In a well-established analysis,

4 These numbers reflect some variation in how the reviewers assign numerical scores to each grant. Michael happens to score at a lower margin than most reviewers, assigning a score of 76 to another grant that he categorized as strongly recommended. Other grants, which received scores in the mid-40s range, were categorized by Michael as not recommended. This puts the Robins grant (with a score of 51) at the low end of the recommended grants.

29

Pomerantz (1984) shows how interactants routinely make use of silences and other practices for

delayed a response prior to producing a disagreeing turn, with the actual disagreement regularly

produced in an indirect way. We see this in the talk above as Michael does not immediately

respond to the chair’s query on the identity of the second reviewer (line 23). In fact, another

participant, Tao, provides the answer to the chair’s question (line 24), and the sequence thereby

leads to the selection of Michael as next speaker. At line 25, Michael provides the invited

confirmation of Tao’s prior action, showing that he is moving toward sharing his ranking.

However, in a further projection of possible disagreement, Michael introduces additional delay:

the significant silence at line 26. He simultaneously produces a series of embodied displays at

lines 27-29 and an audible in and out breath at line 30, interpretable as displaying difficulty,

preparing for a longer turn (more air needed), and/or expressing frustration.5 Given its sequential

context following Mark’s strongly positive assessment of the grant, along with his delays,

aspects of his gestures (noted in the transcript) and his audible in and out breaths, Michael’s

relatively weak and interpretably negative evaluation (lines 30-34) stands out as disagreeing with

Mark’s. Again, precisely in line with the more generic practices of doing disagreement in

interaction, Michael does not explicitly frame his rating of the grant as disagreeing with Mark.

Rather, Michael’s hesitant and faint delivery of a “recommend” as his ranking skirts around any

over disagreement, which, in a more stark delivery, could have been more directly delivered (as,

for example, “I can't agree with Mark's strongly recommend ranking”).

In the next few lines of talk following the initial grant assessments, the primary reviewers

do not reach a consensus on a final rating. This is likely because, as the previous excerpt

illustrates, disagreeing with a co-present party is generally a source of interactional trouble for

5 CA has established that, though we are always breathing, producing an audible in or out breath has interactional significance, as in the English metalanguage of “sighing” and “gasping.”

30

participants. Furthermore, Michael’s weak agreement to recommend, combined with his very

low score relative to Mark’s, has very indirectly complicated matters, as reflected in the

continued discussion. At this point, neither Michael nor Mark produces any talk to support

determination of a funding outcome; the participation of these primary reviewers is palpably

absent from the discussion. In situations such as these, where the primary reviewers have

expressed difficulty in reaching a decision themselves, gist or upshot formulations are

particularly useful resources for other participants to introduce their own versions of the

reviewers’ evaluations into the talk. That is, as relatively neutral parties with regard to the

apparently, though not explicit, disagreement between primary reviewers, the chair and other

participants can produce formulations to characterize one or the other position as more

persuasive. Significantly, through the apparent neutrality of encapsulating what has been

discussed into a formulation, the chair and other participants can offer solutions without directly

disagreeing with anyone present. The implicit disagreement, then, is collaboratively navigated

among the participants, as they work to avoid direct disagreement in their sequential in situ

social relations.

We see a number of such gist formulations in excerpt 8 below. Notably, this span of talk

follows the chair’s push for a decision, but Lauren (not one of the primary reviewers) produces a

divergent suggestion, which she then bolsters with a formulation (line 83-85). This is followed

by more overt disagreement than what the primary evaluators produced. The excerpt begins

shortly following the talk from Excerpt 6. The chair has just rejected Mark’s proposal to

temporarily table discussion of the grant (arrows highlight formulations):

(8) PIR 12-20

75 LA: Well some of these [maybe they’ll need a third re ↑view.

76 LA: [((shrug/head tilt))

31

77 (1.5)

78 CH: Pardon me?

79 LA: Maybe they need a third reviewer.

80 (1.8)

81 CH: What would a third reviewer help us (.) learn.

82 (1.0)/((LA gazes at whiteboard))

83 → LA: To: I mean- (1.2) to eh- since there’s a: (0.4) [split on whether

84 → LA: [((toward board))

85 → LA: this is a: (0.3) recom- like um: (1.0) sort of a maybe or a yes,

86 (0.4)

87 → CH: WELL I [wasn’t hearing that so does one of you make[want to make

88 LA: [( ) [Oh sorry

89 CH: [a proposal like ] absolutely yes fund this at all costs,=

90 → LA: [that’s what I (thought)]

91 CH: =(0.3) Or fund if there’s money available, or:

At line 75, Lauren proposes a course of action that is also hearable as an upshot formulation, as it

extracts an inference from the primary reviewers’ earlier talk: that Michael and Mark cannot

come to a decision themselves. The silence at line 77 projects the chair’s emerging disagreement

with this formulation, and at line 78 the chair responds by initiating repair on Lauren’s prior turn,

another regular mechanism for projecting disagreement (Sacks, 1987; Schegloff, 2007). That is,

the chair displays some problem in hearing or understanding what Lauren has said, an action that

is also hearable as challenging Lauren’s formulation of the talk thus far. Lauren responds at line

79 with a partial repeat of her earlier turn, and following another silence at line 80, the chair

produces a question that directly problematizes Lauren’s suggestion (“What would a third

reviewer help us (.) learn”).

By gazing at the whiteboard (lines 82 and 84), an action that visibly draws the record of

contrasting scores into the interaction, Lauren lends her authority to her forthcoming gist

32

formulation of the primary reviewers’ incompatible positions. Lauren simultaneously formulates

her understanding of the reviewers’ position toward the grant (lines 83-85); by her formulation,

there is a “split” in the review of the grant. However, Lauren's formulation is rejected at line 87,

with the chair producing her own contrasting formulation of the talk thus far (line 88). The chair

then selects Mark or Michael to speak next (line 89). In doing so, the chair does not display any

sensitivity to the trouble that both Mark and Michael face in producing a direct and definitive

assessment of the grant. Thus, she puts them on the spot to agree or disagree, the latter being the

dispreferred action they have until now avoided. Lauren, however, overlaps the chair’s talk, and

does so with a careful apology and a reference to what she understood. This provides explicit

recognition of the implicit, though only weakly and indirectly verbalized, disagreement between

reviewers.

Lauren points directly to the problem both reviewers face in responding, as she produces

another formulation immediately following the talk in excerpt 9 below:

(9) PIR 12-20

94 LA: I mean Mark I heard say that this was the best one that he::

95 (0.4) read right?=

96 MA: =(h(Ye[a.

97 LA: [I mean that [this was

98 MA: [At least in out of four/ ((4 fingers gesture)).

99 (0.3)

100 LA: That- okay so it’s in compariso[n so it’s no:t (.) all right.

101 MA: [oMm hmo

102 (0.6)

103 MA: (so ) It’s ( ) (such a small).

104 (1.0)

105 LA: So both people are lukewarm then?

33

106 (0.4)

107 LA: So you’re- you’re lukewarm then?

108 (0.2)

109 LA: Cause I: i- interpreted you as much more enthusiastic than

110 Michael.=

111 MA: =I- I’m- I’m very very (enthusiastic).

In contrast to her prior formulations, Lauren’s gist formulation at lines 94-95 directly

paraphrases what one of the reviewers said in their earlier talk. Notably, the formulation is

articulated with a tag question (“right?”) that invites Mark’s agreement. Such a move allows

Mark to confirm his assessment of the Robins grant without being heard as directly disagreeing

with Michael’s assessment. In fact, given the sequential organization of the turn, Mark is able to

display his assessment of the grant through agreement with Lauren’s prior turn (line 96) and thus

conform to the long-recognized, generic preference for agreement in conversation.

Mark’s turn extension at line 98 complicates his agreement with Lauren, as he clarifies

that the Robins grant was only the best out of the four grants he was assigned to as primary

reviewer. Lauren continues to engage in interpretive work in the talk that follows, producing

another gist formulation at line 100 (“okay so it’s in comparison so it’s no:t (.) all right”).

Following Mark claim of agreement with this formulation (line 101), Lauren produces a

formulation at line 105 that proposes that both participants may only feel “lukewarm” toward the

grant. Following the silence at line 106, which may project Mark or Michael’s rejection of

Lauren's most recent formulation, she specifically invites Mark to respond (line 107). Following

a brief silence, Lauren provides an alternative formulation for Mark to agree with: Here she

reports her original interpretation of Mark as being more enthusiastic than Michael about the

Robins grant (lines 109-110). Lauren’s alternative formulation again provides an opportunity for

Mark to directly articulate a positive assessment of the grant without being heard as disagreeing

34

with Michael. In opposition to the chair’s efforts to move toward a final decision in which

Michael and Mark produce clear (and in the chair’s formulation, negative) assessments of the

Robins grant (excerpt 8), Lauren’ formulations produced in excerpts 8 and 9 counter the chair’s

move toward closing the discussion (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). Instead, these formulations

invite the primary reviewers to explicate their divergent positions by agreeing with Lauren,

thereby avoiding direct disagreement with each other in the real-time development of the

sequence.

While the meeting talk in the excerpts above goes on to arrive at a resolution, we have

drawn on our initial analysis of this extended discussion to exemplify how formulations operate

both in attempts to encapsulate preceding talk and move toward resolution. The chair may have

good reason to bias her formulation toward quick resolution, while Lauren, as one not

responsible for moving the meeting along in a timely way, may use her formulation both to delay

resolution in the service of what she sees as accuracy in evaluating the grant. Through both the

chair’s and Lauren's formulations, sequential slots are opened into which the primary reviewers

may agree or disagree without directly addressing one another.

In the context of peer review and other meetings in which assessment is a focal activity,

the action of formulation, by the chair or by other participants, is drawn into service as an

interactional resource for navigating toward resolution and progress in the meeting agenda,

while working around the delicacy of direct disagreement between primary reviewers. In these

contexts, which may routinely occur in meetings where evaluations are a focal activity for the

participants, both gist and upshot formulations allow a third party participant to get the project of

sorting and evaluating back on track when the reviewers face difficulties in directly producing a

disagreeing assessment. In the case of the Robins grant discussion examined above, these types

35

of formulations ultimately allow the participants to reach a joint decision regarding the perceived

merit and fundability of the grant.

3.4 Summary: Mechanisms for decision making

In section 3, we reviewed existing work in CA on the ways in which decision-making is

conducted in meeting talk. This body of work has frequently examined the use of so-called

“formulations” by chairs and other participants, actions which allow the speaker to voice the talk

of another in ways that may reflect their own subjectivity and bias. We then presented a portion

of our current work, which examines how participants in scientific peer review meetings manage

episodes of disagreement between primary grant reviewers. The analysis showed how

formulations may be used by a third party participant to sidestep the production of direct

disagreement between primary reviewers. In these contexts, the use of formulations allows

participants other than primary grant reviewers to get the project of sorting and evaluating back

on track.

4 Concluding remarks

Our principal aim in this chapter has been to demonstrate some of the ways that CA allows us to

understand the complex interactional practices that go into making meetings work. As a

foundation, we introduced the historical development and major theoretical assumptions of CA,

as well as some of the core systems of interaction that it was developed to explain, such as turn

taking, the structuring of sequences of action, and the preference for agreement. We examined

how these structures operate in the types of mundane conversational practice that comprise our

everyday social lives, as well as some ways that these practices may be adapted to fit the local

interactional needs and activity-focused goals of meeting talk (such as providing meeting

chairpersons with primary rights to structure the interaction). Our discussion highlights that,

36

while these structures are normatively attended to in the course of meetings, they are not

absolute; speakers may resist and even flout interactional norms for meeting talk (as when a

participant speaks without being selected by the chair).

Thus, close-grained analysis of meeting talk shows that, though meeting rules exist as

adaptations of the practices of ordinary interaction (e.g., Robert’s Rules of Order), the existence

of such codes does not guarantee that they will be followed in any specific meeting or moment

therein. Individuals are always potential agents of change, and they may choose to align with the

structure or resist its construction through alternate practices. CA research on meetings thus

problematizes the taken-for-granted order of meetings by subjecting meeting interaction,

captured in real-time recordings, to close analysis. The method uncovers and documents

practices through which participants collaborate in establishing and maintaining meeting

structure.

CA provides, of course, only one avenue for the exploration of how individuals manage

themselves in meetings. CA is best categorized as one among a family of qualitative frameworks

for accounting for language and social interaction, a number of which are represented in the

current volume. Evidence of common origins for analysis of interaction can be found in a classic

early collection of such sociolinguistic research focused on moment-by-moment interaction,

Directions in Sociolinguistics (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972). Among the chapters in that volume

are ground-breaking contributions from folklore, linguistic anthropology and the ethnography of

communication, kinesics, and sociology (e.g., CA and research addressing micro and macro

connections). Each of the analytic frameworks with origins in this volume have taken unique

directions in the decades since, including emphasis on application (e.g. action implicative

discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics), intergroup relations (interactional

37

sociolinguistics), social criticism (critical discourse analysis), and linguistic inquiry (interactional

linguistics). Originators of these and other qualitative discourse analytic frameworks were in

intense dialogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s, sharing connections to the work of

Goffman, Garfinkel, Hymes, Gumperz, Kendon, and Austin. The later manifestations of

interaction research continue to draw from one another in terms of core transcription methods

and attention to fine-grained details that humans attend to organizing talk.

However, CA has maintained core theoretical commitments that distinguish it from

closely related methods. We have outlined those commitments to understanding interaction as a

fundamental realm of social ordering (section 1.2). CA’s initial motivation was to address social

organization as constructed through practices of real-time interaction. This required bracketing

out a priori social categories as assumed by mainstream social research (e.g., race, class, and

gender) and working to discover the practices and mechanisms that participants themselves treat

as meaningful and socially consequential. Thus, at its beginnings and at its theoretical and

methodological core, CA is a method for grounding sociology in the mundane but ubiquitous and

consequential practices of everyday human interaction. Nevertheless, CA practitioners have long

engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration, including drawing from quantification, ethnographic

methods and the like, and CA researchers have engaged in range of applied work (Antaki, 2011;

Richards & Seedhouse, 2005).

Among the approaches to meeting talk represented in this volume, CA is most distinct

from coding and counting methods to discourse and interactional behavior. In rigorous methods

such as Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis (IPA), categories of discourse and interaction are

operationalized and the discourse of meetings coded with respect to such categories. Findings

from counting and coding research, as Anssi Perakyla (2004) terms these approaches, can

38

certainly be drawn upon and informative of qualitative approaches such as CA. Likewise, there

is great promise for the qualitative findings of CA to inform and enrich hypotheses regarding

action sequencing as operationalized and quantified in IPA studies such as Kauffeld and

Lehmann-Willenbrock (2012), where sequence is precisely the focus.

As noted earlier, we understand there to be significant potential for CA to be employed in

mixed-method research on meetings. While such interdisciplinary and mixed method research

moves away from basic theoretical goals and methodological constraints of CA research, it is

hardly new to the field. CA has been applied in this manner in a number of excellent studies

alongside quantitative research (e.g. Clayman et al., 2012; Fox et al, 2009; Heritage & Clayman,

2013; Stivers, 2010; Stivers et al, 2009). In addition, interviewing and ethnographic methods

have been successfully combined with CA in numerous projects (e.g. Arminen, 2005; Ford,

2008; Goodwin, 1990, 2006; Griswold, 2007; Kyratzis, 2007; Maynard, 2003; Sidnell, 2005).

Our own on-going research on the structures of interaction in peer review meetings is just one

example of how mixed methods can allow us to better understand organizational processes. This

work is being conducted alongside one team of colleagues making use of corpus text analysis

and another conducting a randomized, controlled study using the methods of social psychology.

As one manifestation of CA in multi-method research, the initial analyses of peer review

meetings we presented in section 3 forms part of a 5-year multi-method project supported by the

US National Institutes of Health. The substantial support that this major funding agency has

committed to understanding meeting processes evidences the recognized value of research on

meetings, both CA and other approaches in the current volume.

39

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Figures

Figure 1: Meeting participants (id. Gwen, Clive, Stephie, Vivian, Dan, Ellie)

Figure 2: Participants in peer review meeting

48

Appendix: Transcription symbols

Symbol Interpretation

?: Uncertainty in identifying speaker

(.) A short, untimed pause

(0.3) A timed pause

(with) Possible hearing of a word

hh Audible outbreath

.hh Audible inbreath

wi(h)th Breathiness or laughter in production of a word

thi- Hyphen indicates a sound cut off

she Prominent stress, involving pitch, loudness and/or sound lengthening

SHE Louder than surrounding talk osheo Quieter than surrounding talk

she: Sound lengthening

>talk< Rapid pace relative to surrounding talk

<talk> Slower pace relative to surrounding talk

% talk % Talk enclosed by percentage signs indicate the chair typing notes

. Low falling intonation contour

? High rising intonation contour

, Intermediate intonation contours: level, slight rise, slight fall

[ Onset of overlapping talk

= Latching, rush into next turn or segment

((raises hand)) Gestures and other non-vocal actions

// [ . . . ] // Double slashes indicate that some portion of talk not included for

reasons of space or focus

49

Author Biographies

Joshua Raclaw is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Women’s Health Research and an

Honorary Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His

research is in conversation analysis (CA) and sociolinguistics, focused on different aspects of

linguistic and embodied practice among speakers of English. He is particularly interested in talk

and interaction in meetings, turn-initial particles in conversation and institutional talk, the use of

technology and new media in social interaction, and issues of language and gender in the United

States. Along with Lal Zimman and Jenny L. Davis, he is the editor of Queer Excursions:

Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (OUP). He is currently conducting

research on scientific peer review interaction.

Cecilia E. Ford is Professor of English and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She is an affiliate of the Language Institute, the programs in Gender and Women’s Studies and

Second Language Acquisition, and the Center for Women’s Health Research, and was a

founding member of the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute. Ford studies

language as an interactional phenomenon, drawing on conversation analysis (CA) to discover the

ways that humans construct, on a moment-by-moment basis, the order of their social lives—

including the emergent practices we call language. She is particularly fascinated by interaction

within and between turns at talk and how lexico-syntax, sound production, and physical

orientations (gesture, gaze, body position) are artfully and systematically integrated in human

interaction. She continues to learn within a network of formal and informal collaborators,

including Douglas Maynard, Junko Mori, and Joshua Raclaw at UW Madison, and her research

has long been interwoven with that Barbara Fox (University of Colorado) and Sandra Thompson

50

(UCSB). With her first publication, a study of language-based stereotyping in public schools,

Ford initiated a commitment to applied research, using sociolinguistic methods to address issues

relevant to language in society. Her research on meeting interaction was sparked by involvement

with the advancement of women in workplaces where they are underrepresented. She is currently

Principal Investigator on a study of scientific peer review interaction.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for comments and guidance from the editors of this volume and for

collaboration with Birte Asmuß as she wrote a “sister” chapter on conversation analysis and

meeting interaction. The research reported in this publication was supported by the National

Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number

R01GM111002. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily

represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

51