Richard Buttney's Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction addresses the centrality of ordinary talk as a key site in the construction of human sociality and social reality. He characterizes talk about problems as a linguistic abstraction from actions or events that call for solutions. Such discourses have regular patterns which people routinely deploy as they tell their troubles and seek solutions to problems. How people structure such talk and position themselves and others in it provides insight into how those people identify themselves socially and operate within moral systems. Problems do not exist independently of the ways in which people perceive and evaluate both the problem situation and themselves. People position themselves as good, blameless, likable, and so on through what Buttny calls a “microlevel rhetoric.” Examination of that rhetoric sheds light on the interests at stake, since positioning means casting oneself or another in terms of specific, often moral characterizations (dutiful, realistic, happy, etc.) which are in turn related to one's membership category (social role, ethnic identity, etc.). Buttny thus builds on work in ethnomethodology and conversational analysis to develop a particular set of methods for the analysis of trouble-telling. He focuses, as he puts it, on communicative practices, positionings and constructions: “How problems get interactionally formed and oriented to, and how interlocutors position themselves in the course of such problem talk” (p. 9, italics in original). Buttny examines three areas of trouble-telling: teens talking about being young parents, therapy talk among clients and their therapist, and talk among college students about race relations. The book is organized into eight chapters: an introduction (summarized above) and conclusion, and two main sections of three chapters each, the first focusing on talking about problems, the second on reported speech about race.

Chapter 1, “Ascribing problems and positionings in talking: Student teenage parent,” draws data from two segments of Frederick Wiseman's naturalistic 1994 documentary High School II. In the first segment, a teen father discusses his situation with friends over lunch; the second presents a meeting among a teen mother with her baby, her mother, her brother, and school officials and teachers. Buttny's central interest in the first segment is the microlevel rhetoric through which the central narrator positions himself with respect to how he became a father. The student father's “rhetoric of necessity” (Buttny's term) positions him as seeing and taking a course of moral necessity once the pregnancy was known; as his friends present less congruent perspectives on his past behavior, the narrator tries to find a coherent path through his conflicting category memberships by retelling his story and by variously avoiding and conceding to his peers' perspectives. The meeting segment brings in the role of the institutional representatives and the institutional issues and authority they bring to bear in their construction of the student mother's problem, in contrast with the formulation provided by her own mother: the girl's mother proposes a practical solution to an existing logistical problem, whereas the school representatives raise questions about problems that might arise.

The data for the next two chapters are drawn from videotapes of therapy sessions. Chapter 2, “Clients' and therapists' joint construction of the clients' problems,” explores therapist-client co-construction of client problems, the therapist's description of the clients' state of affairs or discussion of possibilities, and the clients' response. Again, Buttny pays particular attention to microlevel rhetoric, here of therapeutic reframings, always contingent on the clients' discursive production; the therapist persuades rather than dictates, offering, in Wittgenstein's sense, a new language game. A particular strategy for such work is explored in chapter 3, “Therapeutic humor in retelling the clients' tellings.” Here, Buttny examines the corpus of videotaped therapy sessions drawn from in chapter 2. He looks for the resources on which the therapist can draw to signal humor, he shows how humor is deployed to move clients in low-key ways toward more productive ascriptions, and he shows clients' responses to such strategy. An important point emerging from chapters 2 and 3 is that however authoritative the therapist's position may be, the therapist's job cannot be done simply by exercising power.

The next three chapters explore reported speech as a conversational resource, particularly for constructing “portraits” of contrastive selves, for summarizing, dramatizing, crediting or discrediting, and epitomizing (96–98). Data are drawn from audiotapes which black, white and Latino students made of themselves discussing interracial communication in scenes from the video Racism 101. Chapter 4, “Reported speech in talking race on campus,” takes up the asymmetric perceptions of racism routinely expressed among blacks and among whites: Where black students are more likely to see an institutional or social problem, white students are more likely to see individual acts and faults, and to view black perceptions of racism as overinterpretation. Black and white students use quoted speech to typify not only the incidents but also their own evaluative responses. The point is not just what is reported but how that reporting is deployed – as a single quote or a summary quote, as something said by fellow group members, or generically by outgroup members, or by a speaker in whom authority is invested – all means to move the narrative along. Reported speech provides “objective” evidence which can hold the original speaker accountable, and which can also function both to involve the hearers and to distance the reporter (120). It also evaluates and reflects the speaker's position, one social outcome of which is the reinforcement of the sense of racial distance and difference.

Chapter 5, “Demanding respect: The uses of reported speech in discursive constructions of interracial contact,” highlights a particular issue of a racially divided society, the imbalance of status and respect. In focus-group interviews as well as the self-taped data described above, African American students provide narratives about incidents of racial disrespect (such as being ignored or followed by salespeople). These are often incidents in which no action is overtly racist, and these are the kinds of incidents that whites are most likely to point to as overinterpreted, whereas African Americans see the difference between their own experience and what whites routinely encounter. Disrespect lies in that difference. In chapter 6, “Discursive constructions of racial boundaries and self-segregation on campus,” Buttny examines the emergence of boundaries in students' experience, and how they characterize, justify, and criticize them. In effect, this is about the performative dynamics of talk about race and the emergence of racial ideologies.

Key to Buttney's analysis throughout these chapters is the idea of positioning, through which participants align or contrast elements of their identity with each other and with the issue at hand. Central to this process is the establishment of who is, who is not, or who should be accountable or responsible for what happens in the interaction described. This approach demonstrates the dynamic emergence of social identities, an important contribution particularly to understanding race, an area where it is all too easy to treat identities as static and given. Another important contribution made by Buttny's analysis is his demonstration of the various functions of reported speech, such as summarizing, evaluating, and typifying. The book also makes the important point that what counts as problems is emergent, not simply given, and analysis of the discursive emergence of problems sheds useful light on the roles, experience, and social and moral perspective of the participants.

It must be left to the reader to make more explicit theoretical connections to notions of performativity and thence to culture theory. I would encourage readers to consider Buttny's data and analysis in relation to Silverstein's notion of creative indexicality and Bourdieu's notion of habitus, particularly the second section of the book, which is very much about diagnosing the racialization of habitus. An especially useful contribution of this book is its examination of the discursive construction of the “new racism,” in that it demonstrates how whites can tune out black social realities. Buttny thus sheds light on the discursive manifestation of various and subtle ways in which hegemony is re-created. It is especially important to contrast black and white characterizations of interaction and interpretations of their import, and to get a handle on what being black or white means in actors' particular experience. What race means has changed a great deal in the past half-century, but what has not changed is the unmarkedness of whiteness and the markedness of non-whiteness.