ABSTRACT
The chapter is the first of two chapters that make up Part III of this volume which examines contemporary developments in the studies of work program in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA). Although studies of work are primarily associated with ethnomethodology (EM), a significant line of work in conversation analysis (CA) has addressed the work done in institutional contexts such as law courts and medical establishments. This line of work takes its point of departure from a section of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's Simplest Systematics paper that discusses various speech exchange systems, such as debates, interrogations, or interviews, as specialised derivatives from the base turn-taking system of conversation. Institutional talk studies have attempted to show how these specialised forms of talk serve institutional functions. This chapter suggests that these studies of institutional talk display a “micro-functionalist” orientation, and exhibit analytic limitations in the way they deploy disciplinary expertise in CA to provide entry into the specialised practices found in specific organisational and occupational environments.
