Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 178, June 2021, Pages 68-82
Journal of Pragmatics

The ‘Other’ side of recruitment: Methods of assistance in social interaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The recruitment of assistance is ubiquitous in everyday social interaction.

  • Methods of assistance embody Other's recruitment in Self's course of action.

  • They include monitoring, offering assistance, and intervening, among others.

  • The methods orient to and manage a basic set of elemental organizational issues.

  • The methods of recruitment and assistance form a coherent organization of action.

Abstract

The recruitment of assistance is ubiquitous in everyday life and is central to the management of social cohesion and solidarity in social interaction. Although the concept of recruitment embraces not only the solicitation and elicitation of assistance but also its provision, because it emerged out of research on requesting, studies of recruitment have thus far focused on methods employed by Self that recruit the assistance of Other. The methods employed by Other – the diverse ways in which one person comes to help another – have yet to be fully examined. This article extends the analysis of recruitment to include methods of assistance employed by Other. Such methods attend and respond to Self's trouble, enact Other's participation in its remediation, and embody Other's recruitment into Self's course of action. The methods span from visible displays of attention and availability and methods that index or formulate Self's trouble, to those that articulate possible solutions or intervene directly into Self's course of action. It is argued that the methods of recruitment and assistance form a coherent social organization of alternative methods employed by Self and Other for the management of troubles, difficulties, and needs in the realization of practical courses of action.

Introduction

In our everyday lives, we routinely experience troubles, difficulties, or needs that disrupt or threaten to disrupt the practical courses of action in which we engage – a knife too dull to cut properly, a bag that won't open, an obstacle in our path. A great many of these we manage on our own: we sharpen the knife, we pry the bag open, we stop what we're doing to remove the obstacle. However, in the presence of others, who perceive our needs and respond with empathy and altruism, the recognition of our difficulty provides for their recruitment into our course of action. The management of the trouble thus becomes an interactional process, and its resolution an interactional achievement. The social organization of assistance is conceptualized as the co-operation of methods employed by Self, one who experiences a trouble, and those employed by Other(s) that provide assistance (Kendrick and Drew, 2016). Methods employed by Self that expose a trouble to public view and thereby create a systematic opportunity for Other(s) to provide assistance are methods of recruitment. While Kendrick and Drew (2016) identified, described, and compared methods that in effect recruit Other(s) to assist, we did not systematically investigate the methods employed by Other(s) that manifest or embody that recruitment. Such methods of assistance are the focus of this enquiry.

Despite the centrality of recruitment to the management of social cohesion and solidarity in social interaction (Kendrick and Drew, 2016), the provision of assistance as such has not been a major focus of research in CA.1 It has, however, been addressed in studies of social actions such as requesting, offering, and giving advice. These have identified practices through which assistance can be rendered and the sequential environments in which they are employed. While research on requesting has tended to define the action broadly (see Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014), some studies have focused in particular on requests that solicit or enlist assistance as a conditionally relevant response (e.g., Lindström, 2005; Zinken and Ogiermann, 2013). Research on offers of assistance has examined various linguistic forms that such offers can take (e.g., Curl, 2006; Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Keevallik, 2017), the benefactive stance that they display (Clayman and Heritage, 2014), and the visible bodily actions that accompany their production (Kärkkäinen and Keisanen, 2012). As we will see, a relevant alternative to offering assistance is giving advice (see Section 3.3.1). Studies of advice have largely but not exclusively focused on institutional interactions in which professionals provide advice to service users (e.g., Heritage and Sefi, 1992). In addition to the sequential organization and linguistic construction of advice, studies have explored the asymmetrical social relations indexed by advice, including implications of competence and incompetence on the part of the advice giver and receiver, respectively (e.g., Heritage and Sefi, 1992; Shaw and Hepburn, 2013; Heinemann and Steensig, 2017). In none of these studies, however, is assistance per se the central concern.

Rather than beginning with vernacular actions such as offers or requests and examining their implementation, research on the recruitment of assistance begins with a social organizational problem: how do participants in interaction recognize and resolve troubles that emerge in practical courses of action (Kendrick and Drew, 2016, p. 2)? Studies of recruitment have investigated various ways in which participants in social interaction solicit, elicit, and provide assistance (Floyd et al., 2014; Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Kendrick and Drew, 2016; Drew and Kendrick, 2018; Jansson et al., 2019; Floyd et al., 2020; Kendrick and Drew, in prep.). Kendrick and Drew (2016) identified a continuum of methods employed by one who experiences a trouble, difficulty, or need, Self, that have as a possible outcome or effect the recruitment of assistance by Other(s).2 The methods span from explicit requests, which establish a normative obligation for the provision of assistance, to embodied displays of trouble that occasion voluntary offers and projectable troubles that elicit anticipatory assistance. The recruitment of assistance is thus conceptualized as a social organizational problem for which participants have practiced solutions (Kendrick and Drew, 2016, p. 2; see Schegloff, 2006).

Recruitment in the technical sense is an outcome or effect – someone's having been recruited into another's course of action – that various methods can achieve. It should not be understood as an action or a class of actions per se. To do so would conflate analytically distinct actions and obscure systematic differences between methods of recruitment (see Kendrick and Drew, 2016, pp. 10–11; Kendrick, 2020, pp. 137–139). Recruitment thus provides an alternative to a classificatory conceptualization of social action (e.g., Searle (1976), concept of “directives”), not a reinstatement of it in a new guise. To borrow the language of speech act theory, recruitment is more akin to a perlocutionary effect (Austin, 1962) than a class of illocutionary force (Searle, 1976).

It is important to recognize that in its technical usage “recruitment” does not attribute intentions or motives to participants. In the vernacular sense, the word denotes a deliberate and intentional act to get someone to join an organization or cause. The technical usage, however, removes the attribution of intention but retains the outcome or effect, though an individual is recruited into a course of action, not a larger social unit. An embodied display of trouble, for example, provides an occasion for an offer of assistance whether the display was incidentally ‘given off’ as a byproduct of an instrumental action (e.g., searching for an object, see Drew and Kendrick, 2018) or whether it was intentionally ‘fishing for’ an offer (if indeed one can distinguish between the two empirically; see Haugh, 2017). In either case, a participant who takes the opportunity to offer assistance will have been recruited into the course of action. The intentions of the participants, insofar as they can be known, are beside the point.

Although the concept of recruitment embraces all methods that solicit, elicit, or provide assistance (Kendrick and Drew, 2016, p. 2), because it emerged out of research on requesting in social interaction (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Kendrick and Drew, 2014), studies of recruitment have thus far focused on methods employed by Self that recruit the assistance of Other. The methods employed by Other – the various ways in which one person comes to help another – have yet to be fully examined. In our analysis of methods of recruitment employed by Self, Kendrick and Drew (2016) identified three methods of assistance. It was shown that Other can (i) provide assistance in response to a request, (ii) offer it after a report, alert, or embodied display of trouble, or (iii) anticipate and preempt a projectable trouble. The methods employed by Other thus included both self-initiated assistance (via requests) and other-initiated assistance (via offers and preemptions). While the methods of recruitment employed by Self were identified, described, and systematically compared, the methods of assistance employed by Other did not receive the same scrutiny.

In this article, I extend the analysis of recruitment developed by Kendrick and Drew (2016) to include the methods of assistance employed by Other – the linguistic and embodied practices that manifest Other's recruitment into Self's course of action upon recognition of a trouble, difficulty, or need. The analysis examines cases of other-initiated assistance, that is, methods of assistance through which Other initiates an action or course of action that has as a possible outcome the management or resolution of Self's trouble and systematically relevant alternatives to them. I first document the methods of assistance that occur in everyday social interaction, which span from embodied displays of attention and availability to interventions into courses of actions and moves to preempt troubles before they occur. I then argue that the methods of assistance, together with the methods of recruitment, form a coherent social organization of alternative methods employed by Self and Other for the management of troubles, difficulties, and needs in the progressive realization of practical courses of action.

Section snippets

Data and collection

The data for the study came from two video corpora: the Language and Social Interaction Archive (Wingard, 2010) and a set of recordings made by Giovanni Rossi in 2011. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. The recordings capture mundane interactions in English among friends, family, and colleagues across a range of social settings (but not including service encounters). The study was based on a collection of over 500 cases in which participants encountered evident troubles,

Embodied displays of attention and availability

To begin, let us consider methods employed by Other that display attention to Self's trouble and indicate an availability to assist. Such methods do not constitute assistance per se in that they do not have as possible outcomes the management or resolution of the trouble; but they are nonetheless integral to the organization of assistance. Embodied displays of attention and availability occupy the same environments as other methods and indeed routinely serve as alternatives and preliminaries to

Discussion

If a co-present Other recognizes a trouble, difficulty, or need in the realization of Self's course of action, they can select from a set of alternative methods to provide assistance. The application of such methods embodies Other's recruitment into Self's course of action as the management of Self's trouble becomes an interactional process in which Self and Other co-operate to achieve a resolution. The methods of assistance identified in this article orient to and manage a basic set of

Declaration of competing interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article has benefited from an ongoing collaboration with Paul Drew (Drew and Kendrick, 2018; Kendrick and Drew, 2014, 2016, in prep.) whose insights have informed and shaped substantive parts of the analysis. This study was first presented to Lorenza Mondada's research group at the University of Basel in April 2019.

Kobin H. Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. His research uses conversation analysis to investigate basic organizations of social interaction such as turn-taking, action-sequencing, and repair. A recent line of research, conducted with Paul Drew, has examined the organization of assistance in interaction and identified linguistic and embodied methods by which participants recruit assistance.

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    Kobin H. Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. His research uses conversation analysis to investigate basic organizations of social interaction such as turn-taking, action-sequencing, and repair. A recent line of research, conducted with Paul Drew, has examined the organization of assistance in interaction and identified linguistic and embodied methods by which participants recruit assistance.

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