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This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the author in this paper is to examine patterns of collaboration more systematically by analyzing 45 multi-party arguments out of a total of 75 that were gleaned from videotapes of unsupervised reading groups in a first-grade classroom. Fifty-four children from eight groups in three classrooms of one elementary school participated in the study. The subjects were Caucasian, native speakers of English and from middle class American families. This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, one have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon.

The paper focuses on a particular type of recipient action, the vocal responses made by recipients in the midst of extended talk by another speaker. After analyzing an example, it could be noted that, the brief recipient vocalizations that occur during ongoing talk might in fact be divided into different classes. When the behavior of participants toward them is examined in empirical data this possibility is supported. Though assessments and continuers occur in roughly the same environment, that is, in the midst of extended talk by another speaker, the detailed sequential treatment each receives reveals that they are in fact being treated as different types of phenomena. Once assessments and continuers are focused on as distinguishable phenomena it becomes clear that they differ from each other not just in the details of their sequential placement within an extended turn, but in other significant ways as well. Alternative types of action are available to recipients for constructing responses in the midst of another's extended talk. Though the responses themselves are typically brief, the presence of alternatives that can be placed in a variety of sequential positions provides recipients with resources that enable them to participate in speaker's emerging talk in a differentiated fashion, something which has consequences for speaker's actions as well.