10 July 2008 conversation Analysis

Starting with a distraction: Mandela's 8 leadership rules from an article in Time:
Courage is not the absence of fear — it's inspiring others to move beyond it
Lead from the front — but don't leave your base behind
Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front
Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport
Keep your friends close — and your rivals even closer
Appearances matter — and remember to smile
Nothing is black or white
Quitting is leading too

Reading Wooffitt: you got the idea that utterances perform actions (Sacks)and the idea that utterances are not an objective representation of reality(Gilbert and Mulkay). Both lead to an interest in language. In comes Chomsky and argues that the spoken and the ideal are not the same and that we should look at competence rather than performance. This contradicts Sacks who saw great order in spoken language.

""there are other approaches to the study of discourse and communciation... discourse analysis... discursive physchology, rhetorical psychology, speech act theory, critical discourse analysis and Foucauldian forms of discourse analysis..." p. 1

The plot thickens: conversation analysis is related to ethnomethodology and both appear in a handbook of symbolic interactionism (remember I was interested in this a few days ago)... I can't imagine why... more questions...

The problem with the way you're meant to do research: making all decisions according to the research goal is that the goal itself is shaped by the decisions and one needs information to make decisions which a student of research does not have up front. This is why it's slow and tends to go wrong.