Designing the Recipient

Abstract

In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag question that treats the client as able to confirm the reformulated version despite their prior resistance to it; and (3) the dampening of the response requirement by continuing past the tag question, which would normally constitute a transition place for the advice recipient. We also discuss the tension between the contrasting projects of callers and call takers, which can lead to both delivery of advice and the resistance of that advice. In doing this we highlight the way in which advice may function as an element of broader institutional practices. In specifying these practices we draw upon analytic tools employed by conversation analysts, including various features of sequence organization (Schegloff 2007) and turn design (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The analysis is intended to contribute to three main areas of research: to the applied topic of managing advice resistance, to the growing literature on understanding institutional practices, and to broader concerns in conversation analytic and discursive psychological literature. These concerns include the status of the “psychological” in interaction and the specification of actions across turns and sequences of talk.