ABSTRACT
IN T H I S A R T I C L E , I show how an approach informed by conversationanalysis (CA) can provide an account of power as an integral feature of talkin-interaction. CA has placed great emphasis on examining how participants in interaction display their orientation to phenomena that analysts claim are relevant (Schegloff 1991). This has proved a highly successful platform for analysing talk in institutional settings (e.g., Drew and Heritage 1992). What I show is that this approach, through focusing on such issues as how participants orient to features of a setting by designing their turns in specialized ways (e.g., restricting themselves either to asking questions or to giving answers), can be used to address how power is produced through oriented-to features of talk. One way in which this might be shown is by looking for occasions when participants actually topicalize or formulate the power relations between themselves (in the sense intended in Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). However, this clearly does not happen very often. An alternative possibility is this: the very ways in which participants design their interaction can have the effect of placing them in a relationship where discourse strategies of greater or lesser power are differentially available to each of them. In this sense, power can be viewed as an ‘emergent feature’ of oriented-to discourse practices in given settings. It is that possibility that I want to explore in the case of calls to a British talk radio show.
