ABSTRACT
In his book on telephone conversations, Hopper (1992) wrote, “As we examine telephone conversation’s details, the notion that people own topics recedes before the workings of interactive emergence” (p. 155). By interactive emergence Hopper meant that participants “manage” and “negotiate” topics collaboratively. This matter may be plain enough, even expected, in conversations between status equals, who can codetermine how the trajectory of a conversation’s topic may go. However, even in more restrictive circumstances where status and interactive dominance would be expected when, for example, a physician is talking to a patient,1 the phenomenon of interactive emergence shows its face. This is particularly true about the interpersonal delivery and receipt of “news,” including that which occurs in clinical settings. To paraphrase Maynard (1997), diagnostic news does not represent something fixed and existing objectively in the world except as doctors announce, patients respond, and the two parties co-establish the presence or absence of some medical condition as tidings of a particular kind.
