Paper abstracts (most recent first)
“All the News That’s Fit to Fix: Reportage and Mistakes at The New York Times” (working paper)
Certain occupations, organizations, and individuals may be more mistake-prone than others, but individual mistakes owe much to the proximate conditions of work—those surrounding the performance of particular tasks and the production of particular units of output. In journalism these conditions largely result from fluctuations in the amount of news to be covered and the premium placed on immediate coverage. This article analyzes twenty-six years of data on all articles published in The New York Times to identify factors affecting the likelihood of an article containing a mistake, as judged by whether it received a printed correction. As expected, it is found that an article is more likely to contain a mistake when the reporter recently changed desks, when his or her workload was especially heavy, and when the organization’s workload was especially heavy. More surprisingly, a mistake is also more likely the longer the reporter took to write the article, as well as when the reporter was more experienced and when the article was co-authored. While such mistakes are generally minor, they can be consequential for the people and groups mischaracterized, and analogous mistakes in other organizational settings can be tragic.*
Conversation is incrementally, progressively
produced subject to constraints that ensure linearity (one person
speaks at a
time) irrespective of the identities, motives, and conversational
resources of
those present. And yet, conversation is also receptive to influence
from—or
“permeation” by—external factors, such as attributes, formal status,
and
relationships. This article summarizes conversation-analytic work on
how
talk-in-interaction is produced, and then evaluates quantitative
research on
permeation in terms of the realism of its assumptions. Research on
rates is found
particularly wanting, though the robustness of its results presents a
challenge
to the claim that the meaning of an action is inextricably tied to its
local-sequential context. More theoretically adequate are modeling
approaches
that focus on transitions, sequences, and the local determinants of
discrete
events. However, these also frequently make unwarranted assumptions,
such as
that we can generalize from people who speak to those who do not, and
that what
someone does upon speaking can be considered separately from who speaks
in the
first place. A solution to the second problem is to model who gets
recruited
from the ranks of all potential speakers to perform a particular
conversational
action. The article concludes with directions for future research.
Doing Time in Space: Line-joining Rules and Resultant Morphologies
Waiting lines are spatial configurations of people
that store
information about time of arrival until it is recapitulated as order of
service. Someone joining a line has an interest in assuming a position
that
will be seen as recognizably “in line,” particularly by those arriving
later.
When physical constraints are few—such as in
(Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 68 no. 4 [2005]: 316-37)
Speaking involves “linearizing” a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular turn-construction junctures, and consequently to recurrent types of self-misrepresentation. These vulnerabilities can be exploited strategically when an interrupter responds to the truncated turn in a way that might not have been possible if the turn had run to completion: I refer to interruptions of this sort as “opportunistic.” I explore the connection between linearization and opportunistic interruptions using data from two institutional settings characterized by confrontational exchanges: Supreme Court oral arguments and Pentagon press briefings. The extracts illustrate how speakers open themselves to opportunistic interruptions through projection of incipient options, actions, reasons, consequences, opinions, and restrictions.
(Journal of Mathematical Sociology, vol. 29 no. 4 [2005]: 295-323)
Network ties are thought to be concurrent—one can ‘‘have’’ many friends at once, for instance—but their concrete enactment is largely serial and episodic, guided by priorities that steer a person from one encounter to the next. Further, dyadic encounters require that two people be simultaneously available to interact, creating the need for coordinated scheduling. Here I study the consequences of scheduling for network diffusion, using a computer simulation that interposes a scheduling process between a pre-existing network and instances of contagion. The pace and extent of diffusion are shown to depend upon the interaction of network topology, contagion rule (on first-contact versus at some threshold), and whether actors try to remedy past scheduling imperfections. Scheduling turns central actors into diffusion bottlenecks, but can also trigger early adoption by giving actors false readings on the status of their network alters. The implications of scheduling extend beyond diffusion, to other outcomes such as decision-making, as well as to network evolution.
“Taking Turns and Talking Ties: Networks and Conversational Interaction”
(American Journal of Sociology, vol. 110 no. 6 [2005]: 1561-97)
Conversational encounters are permeable to network effects but not entirely so, for conversation is internally structured by sequential constraints and dependencies that limit the latitude people have to act on their relational commitments. The author analyzes the effects of hierarchical (superior-subordinate) and horizontal (friendship and co-working) networks on "participation shifts"—transitions in the identities of speakers and targets (addressees) that occur from one speaking turn to the next—in meetings of 10 groups of managers. The results point to a range of relational obligations and entitlements, such as the obligation subordinates have to bolster superiors' control of the floor, and the way in which friendship and co-working ties get expressed through remarks made to third parties. The article is perhaps the first to link statistically network-analytic and conversation-analytic levels of analysis.
“Participation
Shifts:
Order and Differentiation in Group Conversation"
(Social Forces, vol. 81 no 4 [2003]: 1335-81)
Conversation is both rule-governed and a venue in which people are differentiated, in how they act and are acted toward. I propose a new framework for the analysis of conversational sequences that captures both aspects simultaneously, based on the concept of participation shift. This refers to the moment-by-moment shuffling of individuals between the “participation statuses” of speaker, target, and unaddressed recipient. An analysis of participation shifts in meetings of thirteen managerial groups reveals the operation of sequential rules that limit who can speak and be addressed in a given turn; several dimensions along which individuals are differentiated in terms of their participation shift involvements; and effects of conversational context on individuals’ sequential tendencies. The analysis bridges conversation-analytic concerns with the sequential production of talk and small-group researchers’ interest in conversational discrimination and points to several new lines of micro-sociological research.
“Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency”
(Sociological Theory, vol. 18 no. 3 [2000]: 369-82)
In conversation, actors face constraints on when they can speak, whom they can address, what they can say, and what they can safely expect from others by way of cooperation. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their idiosyncratic interests and objectives, success at which constitutes conversational agency. In principle, agency is made possible by the "looseness" of conversational constraints. This does not create a clear path for the advancement of personal ends, however, since options are always limited by the context, and success is always contingent upon the cooperation of others. Ultimately, the most agentic people are those who readily exploit imperfect options though this means abandoning the inflexible pursuit of pre-conceived objectives.
*Findings associated with unpublished papers are provisional, and subject to change.