Aligning as a Team: Forms of Conjoined Participation in (Stepfamily) Interaction

Abstract

Prior research (Falk, 1979; Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner, 1987, 1993) has suggested that individuals participate as teams in interaction by aligning supportively with one another and by sharing turns at talk or speaking on behalf of the team. In this article, I explore more closely how participants "do" team talk by analyzing excerpts from two audiotaped stepfamily mealtime interactions. In the analysis, I identify three forms of participation that teams enact in these data. Team members (a) share turns, (b) alternate turns parallel in function, and (c) situate their conversational contributions within a shared "knowledge schema" (Tannen & Wallat, 1993). In this article, I add to work on teams in interaction by illustrating how teams form and function moment by moment, by identifying previously unidentified forms of team participation, and by demonstrating in what ways extrainteractional characteristics of interlocutors can serve as a basis for creating particular alignments at particular moments in conversation. In the analysis, I also identify stepfamilies as an ideal site for examining shifting alignments in conversation and discuss how teams relate to negotiating relationships in this context.