Legislating at the shopfloor level: Background knowledge and relevant context of parliamentary debates

Abstract

The issue of context has fuelled much debate in the social sciences, stretching from broad conceptions to narrow ones. It is our contention that ethnomethodology's unique adequacy requirement furnishes a sound solution, providing it is tamed with a conception of feasibility. Within parliaments, a distinction must be drawn between the dialogical site of parliamentary debates and their embedment within the broader dialogical network of public debates. On the dialogical site, parliamentary debates are organized in contextually dependent though institutionally constrained ways. Within dialogical networks, parliamentary debates are publicly and explicitly oriented to their social out-of-the-parliamentary-precinct dimension. The contribution first introduces the various ways in which the issue of context is tackled by the social sciences and re-specified by conversation analysis, arguing that a distinction must be drawn between background knowledge and context. Second, it turns to parliamentary contexts and argues that there is no context to hypothesise outside what is publicly available and empirically observable in the course of exchanges constituting and embodying parliamentary activities. Third, drawing from the empirical material of one specific parliamentary debate that took place in Syria on the issue of family and family law, it demonstrates that legislative activities within a Parliament are constrained by the MPs’ orientation to audiences, search for legislative relevance, and reference to, and use of, procedural rules.