ABSTRACT
Research in conversation analysis (CA) uses recordings of naturally occurring interaction to uncover the language, practices and processes of reasoning by which people accomplish social actions and create the intelligible and recognizable orderliness of everyday life (see Sacks 1992; Hutchby and Wooffi tt 1998; ten Have 1999; Wooffi tt 2005). As Drew and Curl (this volume) explain, CA shows how patterns in talk reveal how participants produce and understand conduct in interaction, in real time. Drew and Curl (this volume) point to the range of aspects of interaction on which CA focuses, such as turn-taking, the organization of conversational sequences, the structure of turns at talk, the actions that participants undertake, repair (dealing with diffi culties in interaction), as well as prosodic and embodied details of interaction. In this chapter I contribute to an expanding direction for research in CA, interaction in institutions and workplaces (Drew and Heritage 1992; McHoul and Rapley 2001; Arminen 2005), and focus on an area where CA is well suited to advance discourse analysis: how talk for work is organized in time. Participants at work can time their relative turns at talk, moment-to-moment, in ways that realize the interests, demands, goals and constraints of the setting, and so to accomplish work acceptably. I will examine transcriptions from recordings of naturally occurring interaction from one specifi c collaborative work setting: the airline cockpit.
