Aceptado: 05/12/2013 The objective of this study is to show how conversation analysis, a sociological discipline, approaches the study of social institutions. Social institutions are conceived as the crystallization of members’ communicative, interactional practices. Two institutional domains—psychiatric interviews and broadcast news interviews —and a specific interactional practice—‘formulatio...

Virtual project teams are spontaneous group configurations that endeavor to overcome spatial and temporal restrictions in bringing together distant experts to create just-in-time knowledge sharing coalitions. Due to their time-constrained nature and anonymity among members, we argue for team goal commitment as a more pertinent factor driving task performance. We then hypothesize that members’ p...

Social roboticists design their robots to function as social agents in interaction with humans and other robots. Although we do not deny that the robot's design features are crucial for attaining this aim, we point to the relevance of spatial organization and coordination between the robot and the humans who interact with it. We recover these interactions through an observational study of a soc...

This paper examines the phenomenon of interdisciplinary collaboration to critically appraise the widespread idea that working together requires the integration of knowledge. We build both on the concepts of common ground/grounding and interactional/contributory expertise to analyze in two case studies how common ground evolves in practice. We find that building common ground is a continuous pro...

Mobile phone use in cars is a highly debated issue. Legislation and policy discussions flourish in many countries and coincide with an increased effort in design of new in-car technologies. The studies which influence policy and design decisions use experimental approaches and are based on a cognitive perspective. In this paper, we discuss why this is a problematic approach. Further, we provide...

This paper explores durational aspects of pauses, gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking. Distributions of pause, gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented, and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed. The results are related to publishe...

Therapeutic work with the client's present moment experience in existential therapy was studied by means of conversation analysis. Using publicly available video recordings of therapy sessions as data, an existential therapist's practice of guiding a client into immediacy, or refocusing the talk on a client's immediate experience, was described and compared with a therapist's corresponding acti...

Responding to the privacy challenges of pervasive technologies such as social network sites, regulators propose that privacy protections be built into all phases of the software development lifecycle. The proposed solution, privacy-by-design, has been difficult to implement in practice. Therefore, we propose obscurityby-design, an evidence-based, flexible set of principles designers can conside...