Over the last several decades, in a wide variety of disciplines, there has been a massive “social turn” away from a focus on individual behavior (e.g., the behaviorism of the first half of the 20th century) and individual minds (e.g., the cognitivism of the middle part of the century) toward a focus on social and cultural interaction. Movements as disparate as ethnomethodology (Heritage, 1984) and conversational analysis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990), the ethnography of speaking (Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1974), discursive psychology (Harre & Gillett, 1994), sociohistorical psychology (Wertsch, 1998), situated cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991), anthropological psychology (Strauss & Quinn, 1997), cultural psychology (Cole, 1996), science and technology studies (Latour, 1991), modern composition theory (Bazerman, 1989), evolutionary psychology (Clark, 1997; Dawkins, 1982), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992), and sociocultural literacy studies (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1990/1996), among others, have all stressed the ways in which patterns of behavior, as well as cultures and institutions, are produced and reproduced as by-products of “on the spot,” moment-by-moment, adaptive human social interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32(1&2), 61–68 Copyright © 1999, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.