Misaligned Adjacency Pairs: Failures by Interdisciplinary Scientific Teams to Achieve Mutually Recognizable Meanings

• In Event: 3152 - Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Talk, Dance, Adjacency and Non-adjacency

Abstract

Informatics and information systems have become intrinsic to scientific work, such that scientists and their technical counterparts increasingly collaborate on interdisciplinary teams. One challenge such teams face is that even when training and working commitments are similar, there can be rather spectacular failures to achieve mutually understood objects, meaning, and talk. Typically such failures are blamed on differences in training, knowledge, and/or motivation; an approach that assumes shared conceptual objects – boundary objects – that can cross various domains of expertise, are the key to successful communication. But such objects can also depend on cooperative interactional work. Based on audio/video data and ethnographic fieldwork with two interdisciplinary groups, we argue that communication success and failure on these teams are closely tied to cooperative situated orders of interaction. The failures we found were serious, comprising “Misaligned Topics”, “Misaligned Adjacency Pairs”, and “Meaningless Objects,” in weirdly fragmented sequences characterized by irritation and anger, which were not well understood by participants. Insofar as these problems involve situated interactional processes, and not just scientific differences, they have interactional remedies. Using Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, we redirect attention toward the role played by failures to mutually orient cooperative orders of interaction in producing communication failure.

Author

• Donald A. Everhart, UCSD