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This paper takes up the current discussion and disagreement among ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts concerning how conversation analysis should address questions of "social structure." It also discusses the question of whether conversation analysis can address questions concerning the organisation of "work" as developed in the "studies of work" program of ethnomethodologists. Five different types of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies are delineated in order to show that, although they differ in problem selection and formulation, methodological preference and foci, they are not incompatible but complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of the "total institution" is both useful and, in many respects, well defined. It delineates a distinctive set of organizations that are both part of and separate from modern societies, a "social hybrid, part residential community, part formal organization." Total institutions are distinctive and have much in common because, as Goffman points out, they depart from the basic social arrangements in modem western society, that the individual tends to sleep, play and work in different places with different co-participants, under different authorities and without an overall rational plan. The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of these barriers ordinarily separating those various spheres of life. These features are incompatible with the basic institutions of modern western democratic societies which tend to exhibit "fragmentation and separation." In particular there is a tension often amounting to incompatibility between total institutions and the way in which work and family life are normally organized.

The article describes the process of topic nomination for news announcements. A systematic feature of topic organization is that topics flow from one to another, and this means that a distinct beginning of a topic may not be readily apparent. Topic nomination itself, may also be used to start a topic by organizing a topic beginning in sequential environments where topic does not flow out of a prior topic. Three sequence types are examined that may be used to organize a topic beginning. Topic initial elicitors are used to elicit a possible topic initial, and itemized news enquiries and news announcements are able to introduce a topic, which in the former case is oriented to recipient's news and in the latter, to speaker's news. Sensitivities that have been observed for topic initial elicitors and itemized news enquiries are also displayed by news announcements. For all three of the sequences the sensitivity revolves around the determination of whether the elaboration of news is produced voluntarily or is elicited.

This discussion will attempt to exploit a distinction to be drawn between contingent and a priori structures of illocutionary actions in the service of formulating a response to the following problem namely, extent of claims for the conventionality of any given, identified sequential arrangement of utterances arising in natural conversational interaction depend upon statistical arguments. Given that there are indefinitely many conversations going on in the world, justifications for serious analytical claims for the "naturalness" or "organizational priority" of specific sequential arrangements. The article propose that two major sorts of analytical findings advanced within the sequential analysis of discourse need to be brought into clearer focus. One type of finding is concerned with the specification of empirically contingent organizations of utterances for vernacularly-defined sequence-types such as "request sequences," "trouble sequences," "complaint sequences" and the like. These findings characteristically take the shape of exhibiting a local orderliness to inter-utterance relations without strong claims for distributive scope across a set. On the other hand, by far the strongest arguments have been advanced for the more abstract structures which may be evident in materials of a vast variety and which do not appear to be restricted in their occurrence to vernacularly-defined sequence-types of any specific sort.