Practice as a Members’ Phenomenon

Abstract

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this article explores the relation between practice and activity; between recruitment practice and the ordinary activities of the job interview. Job interviews are recognizably and accountably different from other interview-formats, such as broadcast news or academic research interviews. Such differences are instantly hearable because ordinary activities are built systematically so as to reveal an orientation to ‘practice’, distinctive purposes, entitlements, presuppositions, identities and definitions of acceptable conduct. The article illustrates analytic procedures for recovering such orientations and thus for understanding how people embed and reveal practice, with and for one another, in interaction. It is argued that the practice-turn should not overlook the fact that practice is, in the first instance, a members’ phenomenon, something that members draw upon, monitor and orient to in real time interaction.

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