"On Doing Being Ordinary" & "Professional Vision"

The purpose of this research is to examine the degree and kind of relationship between Sacks's "On Doing Being Ordinary" and Goodwin's "Professional Vision." The plan of the research will be to set forth the fundamental design of each work, and then to discuss the extent of resonance between their themes and the work of Harold Garfinkel regarding ethnomethodology.

In "On Doing Being Ordinary," Sacks appears to be making the case that the structure of communication in informal, ordinary conversations can be applied as well to more formal, social speech. However, there are elements of communications strategy that are given more systematic expression in formal, as opposed to ordinary, settings. The vicissitudes of ordinary discourse are such that less systematic ways of communication are involved. Further, the communication strategies appear to involve certain unexpressed assumptions about the scope and limit of overt communication, so that interpersonal processes of thought are at least as important as interpersonal processes of speech. One can therefore look at the results of communications efforts and perhaps duplicate them scientifically. However, this does not necessarily mean that these efforts can be predicted for all cases. Thus, competitive strategies for communication, such as overlapping the other speaker or presuming or anticipating the other's thoughts. On the other hand, the fact that presumption, overlapping, anticipation, and the like can be described indicates t

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iltering the events visible on the tape through a police coding scheme, as articulated by an expert who instructed the jury how to see the body movements of the victim in terms of that system" (1994, p. 616). The relevant point is that a coding scheme creates a method of perception and understanding, taken from a professional discipline's perspective, and applied to, or given authority in, a more general social perspective. That is, general perception is filtered through a particular "expert frame of reference" (p. 617), with the result that, in the first trial, that defense's frame of reference becomes the general frame of reference. Another result is that reality is transformed because the jury is "viewing and understanding in a particular way the events visible on the tape" (p. 617). In the second trial, the prosecution also offered a frame of reference or "interpretive framework" (p. 617), asserting its validity so that the jury would view and understand the events visible on the tape from its perspective. The question of the social context in which communication takes place is important in the work of both Sacks and Goodwin. In other words, the social context provides a platform in which emotional, psychological, and intellec

Category: Psychology - "