Robin Wooffitt aims to answer a question in his new book: “Analytically, what is the best way to understand everyday communicative activities?” (2). His answer: “Conversation analysis offers the most sophisticated and robust account of language in action” (2). The remainder of the book proceeds, then, not only as an introduction to Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discourse Analysis (DA) as approaches to the study of language and communication in the social sciences (specifically, sociology and European social psychology), but also as a polemic for CA as a methodology superior to DA. The book is marketed as an introductory textbook; thus, each chapter includes periodic bulleted section summaries, and the early introductory chapters conclude with suggestions for further reading. As a textbook, this volume seems best suited for graduate seminars in linguistics or sociology; it deals with theoretical and methodological disputes that go well beyond most undergraduate students' background knowledge or pedagogical needs. As a scholarly volume, it should attract attention from social scientists already engaged in research utilizing CA or DA, as well as those working with other methodologies who are interested in how CA and DA conceptualize and investigate discourse.
The book is organized into three sections. The first, comprising chaps. 1–4, introduces CA and DA as methodologies that emerged within the discipline of sociology. These chapters become progressively more detailed in their descriptions of CA and DA as methodologies. Chap. 1 focuses on the initial development of these approaches within sociology, describing Harvey Sacks's early research on telephone call openings and Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay's early research on sociology of science. Chap. 2 adds detail to this discussion, describing in depth one seminal study in CA and one in DA, showing the analytical moves that characterize each approach and summarizing findings that continue to influence these fields. This chapter concludes with summaries of more general research foci and methods that characterize CA and DA. Chap. 3 discusses more recent research trends in DA and CA, starting with DA's critique of traditional approaches to sociology and psychology and its increasing interest in ideology (both of which are covered in more detail later in the book). Another CA study, on interactions in news interviews, is also discussed in detail, showing how these findings extend those discussed in chap. 2. Finally, chap. 4 presents the similarities and differences between CA and DA, arguing that despite commonalities between these approaches to discourse, they are ultimately quite different from each other.
Although these chapters are intended to be introductory, they set the stage for Wooffitt's more polemical arguments later in the book. In chap. 2, DA is subject to the following unfavorable comparisons to CA: DA's transcription practices are less precise, its research terms less technical, and its procedures less formal. Throughout these chapters, Wooffitt positions the conversation analyst as an objective, technical, and disinterested observer who “reveals how participants' own interpretations … inform their conduct” rather than “interpret[ing] the significance or nature of conversational activities” (86–87; emphasis added), and “can see directly what is relevant to the participants” (64). A conversation analyst's claims are “data driven, not led by theory” (65). A discourse analyst, in contrast, practices “a craft skill which relies on the development of largely tacit expertise” (43), and may, for instance, “impute an ideological significance to utterances when their design may owe more to the particular turn-taking sequences which provide an immediate interaction context” (56). In sum, Wooffitt's introductory chapters portray CA as a methodologically sophisticated, highly technical method of analysis that provides virtually unmediated access to the processes of social interaction, whereas DA is less technical and more dependent on the researcher's intuition.
The next section of the book presents three intellectual developments in DA: rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, and critical studies. In these chapters, Wooffitt draws boundaries between all these areas, and between them and the broader field of DA. These chapters utilize these developments as a springboard for discussing how CA can enrich not only DA, but also other areas in the social sciences. Chap. 5, on rhetorical psychology, concerns studies of how speakers position their discourse as factual accounts. Wooffitt argues that DA, as opposed to rhetorical psychology, offers a superior analysis of such discourse because it is more closely aligned with CA. This chapter concludes with showing how CA, particularly Sacks's notion of “being ordinary,” can influence research in the fields of parapsychology, cognitive psychology, and psychiatry. Wooffitt is most persuasive in his discussion of psychiatry, showing how CA can bring to light the interactional features of discourse that allow clinicians to discriminate delusional from nondelusional accounts of extraordinary events. Discursive psychology, covered in chap. 6, fares the best among the intellectual trends in DA in Wooffitt's estimation because of its alignment with CA. This chapter also uses parapsychology to demonstrate CA's relevance to discursive psychology, showing how “parapsychological cognition” is demonstrated in a three-turn sequence in which the third turn contains attribution of information to a paranormal source. Although they are interesting examples of applications of CA, the discussions of parapsychology seem somewhat idiosyncratic. They distract from Wooffitt's argument for the value of CA as a research methodology in the social sciences and instead work to justify parapsychology as a legitimate area of research in the social sciences.
Chap. 7 introduces critical approaches in DA, distinguishing between CDA and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA). According to Wooffitt, CDA is in many respects incompatible with CA. CDA approaches discourse with a priori assumptions that power and ideology are manifest in discourse, whereas CA does not “begin with a conception of what kind of thing discourse is” (144). Indeed, CDA, with its political commitments and emancipatory goals, “obscures and diminishes the importance of the communicative competencies which people are using as they organize their talk collaboratively” (145). The differences between CDA and FDA are identified in their approaches to text, with CDA paying closer attention to linguistic details, and in their approaches to ideology, with CDA showing a stronger commitment to Marxist notions of class and domination. These chapters introduce their respective topics in an engaging and thorough manner. Scholars unfamiliar with these topics would be well served using these chapters as starting points. For a textbook, however, it perhaps would have been preferable to organize these chapters around particular textual objects and research questions, showing how each perspective might approach a text or address a research question. This arrangement would have had the advantage of engaging students in concrete issues, rather than attempting to involve (undergraduate) students at a more theoretical level. It also would have highlighted the interrelationships, rather than the fairly esoteric distinctions, between these areas of discourse studies.
The final two chapters are the most polemical. Here Wooffitt critiques DA as a methodology and attempts to show how CA can address traditional areas of research in the social sciences. After refuting specific criticisms of CA made by the discourse analysts Michael Billig and Margaret Wetherell, Wooffitt charges that DA offers an “impoverished view of human conduct” (179) in which human communicative competencies are reduced to two or maybe three discourses. Second, he argues that CDA fails to ground its claims adequately in empirical evidence. And third, Wooffitt argues that there is no systematic method for identifying discourses. These are serious charges, which discourse analysts need to consider. However, in making these charges, Wooffitt does not seem to consider the aims of DA – the kinds of data it may deal with besides interaction, or the research questions that it wishes to address that differ from those raised in CA. For example, criticizing DA's tendency to identify a small number of discourses in operation, Wooffitt asks, “Is this really all there is to say? … is that it?” (180). Here, Wooffitt addresses a straw man, as few if any discourse analysts set out to record exhaustively all that could be said about a particular text. Likewise, there are certainly critical discourse studies that make careful reference to their data to warrant their analytical claims, and discourse analysts are not without sophisticated ways of operationalizing their terms and outlining their methods, even if there is no single method for doing DA; it seems unusual to criticize a discipline for failing to have a single method by which all studies are conducted.
The book concludes with a consideration of how CA can address central issues in the field of sociology – specifically, power. Wooffitt describes how CA accounts for interactions in a marketplace, for turn-taking in talk radio, and for sexual harassment interactions. These examples vary in their effectiveness in showing how CA can address the role of power in society. Wooffitt's discussion of Ian Hutchby's studies of argumentative discourse on talk radio are the most effective, showing how CA can reveal unequal distribution of discursive resources that would not otherwise be apparent. The least effective is the discussion of CA in describing how sellers in a marketplace gain compliance by persuading potential buyers to purchase their goods. It is not clear from Wooffitt's discussion that CA adds very much substance to the rich literature on social influence that has been developed in the social sciences.
The book ends rather abruptly: There is no concluding chapter to summarize and reflect upon the book's arguments, which would have been an especially nice feature for a textbook. Thus, there is no reflection on whether there can be a détente between CA and DA, whether CA could fruitfully incorporate any insights from DA (rather than vice versa), or whether there are any kinds of discursive data or research questions for which a DA approach might be more appropriate than CA. Overall, the book offers good, comprehensive introductions to the development and methodologies of CA and DA and to intellectual trends in DA – and their relationships to CA. These should prove useful for graduate students and social scientists interested in learning about these approaches. Likewise, Wooffitt offers important critiques of DA that discourse analysts should certainly be aware of and address; however, it would have been preferable to have considered how CA and DA might be integrated and to have provided more guidance in how to choose between research approaches. An integrative approach to introducing CA and DA would have added to this volume's existing value both as a textbook and as a call for social scientists to attend carefully and systematically to language in their research.
