Ilkka Arminen

We start this article from Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between propositional knowledge, ‘knowing-that’, and procedural knowledge, ‘knowing-how’, and investigate how participants in interaction display orientation to the latter in various settings. As the knowledge of how things are done, know-how can be analyzed in terms of its relevance and consequentiality for parties in interaction. Similarly, as participants adjust their actions and understandings according to their sense of what they know and assume others to know, their know-how and its distribution may form the basis for adjusting and reshaping their actions, forms of participation and identities. In this sense, we aim at opening an investigation of know-how, and its conventionalized form, expertise, in interaction. In as much as it forms a distinct domain, a new research object – expertise in interaction – is formulated. Methodological issues of how to study expertise in interaction are discussed. The data are in English and Finnish.

Conversation analytical methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of these changes reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology.

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment.

Two recent conversation analytical studies draw contrary conclusions from seemingly very similar materials. Hutchby and Barnett ‘show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk’. Arminen and Leinonen, however, state that landline and mobile calls differ systematically from each other. These incommensurate findings raise the question of why the comparisons between landline and mobile call openings have not been able to determine whether social and communicative practices are changing. It is suggested that auxiliary elements in CA allow the emergence of incompatible findings. The auxiliary assumptions enable authors to construct the phenomenon examined from their chosen perspective. Further, it will be shown that unquestioned assumptions materialize into theoretical notions that guide the research. CA studies seem to conceptualize the relationship between sequential order and sequence structure in different ways, which leads to different findings and results.

Ethnomethodology has been torn between scientific and "radical" aspirations insofar as it moves discoursive practices from resources to the topic of the study. Scientific ethnomethodology, such as conversation analysis, studies discoursive praxis as its topic and resource. Standard scientific criteria are accepted to assess the merits of its findings. "Radical" ethnomethodology addresses mundane reasoning exclusively as its topic without recourse to standardized science. I will show that insofar as "radical" ethnomethodology succeeds in bracketing everyday resources, it loses its phenomenon with the very technical skills it uses for this task. This reconsideration enables the development of ethnomethodological social science. Key Words: conversation analysis • discoursive praxis • ethnomethodology • radical ethnomethodology • social studies of science.