Bvitish Journal of Socia( Psychology ( 1 996), 3 5 , 473-492 0 1996 The British Psychological Society

Prznted in Gredt Britain

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SP0435

Social identities in talk: Speakers own orientations

Charles Antaki
Discourse and Rhetorir Group, Department of Social Sciences, University of Loughborough, Loughborough LEI I j T U , U K

Susan Condor and Mark Levine

Department of Psychology. University of Lanraster, U K

What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers identities are much more subtle than simple pre-given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have seen a participant using, or being attributed with, only one identity; but we show that speakers use, and attribute each other with, a variety of different identities as their business progresses. In so doing, the speakers can be seen not only to avow contradictory identities but also to invoke both group distinctiveness and similarity-and neither of these strategies are easy to square with social psychological theories of identity. We put what we find in this particular case study into the debate between, on the one hand, ethnomethodological preference for working from participants own orientations to identity and, on the other hand, social psychological research practices which tend to privilege analytically given social categories. At the very least, we argue, the social psychological approach can be enriched by attending more to identity as a matter of situated description and less as a matter of perceptuo-cognitive processing.

In this paper we shall explore social identity as a resource deployed in conversational contexts. The claim that identities are mobilized as a resource in ordinary life is familiar in many sorts of constructionist and phenomenologically inspired thinking, perhaps especially ethnomethodology, and is breaking into social psychology through the work of discourse analysts such as Edwards (especially Edwards, 1991; and Edwards & Potter, 1992). This sort of perspective is also apparent in embryonic form in the social identity approaches, both as set out by Tajfel (e.g. 1978) and as later developed by Turner and his associates (e.g. Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987; Turner, Oakes, Haslam & McGarty, 1994).

Social identity To speak of someonessocial identity is to speak, at the very least, of what attaches to them in virtue of their membership of a category, usually a category constituted by social consensus or imposition. From this reasonably neutral baseline social theorists range them* Requests for reprints.

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selves along a spread of ontological claims about what social identity is. The kind of range we mean is neatly set out by Edwards (1994) in his work on scripts. Edwards ranges script theorists assumptions about descriptions along a (seemingly) natural progression, from scripts as a matter of how the world is, through being a matter of how it is perceived and along to being a matter of how it is described. If identities are (at least) descriptions, we can borrow that way of thinking here. So we can set out theorists claims for social identity thus: that it is a feature of the objective world (SIworldor SI); as a or feature of perception and cognition (SIFrception SIP); and as a feature of how people describe themselves (SIdescription S I ~ ) . or Which of these ontological claims is held by psychologists? Social psychologys most commonly cited definition of social identity is doubtless that part of an individuals selfconcept which derives from his [sic] knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership (Tajfel, 1978, p. 63). This mental-state (SIP) notion of social identity has been familiar in European social psychology for the past 20 years and has inspired an enormous body of research (for reviews, see Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Hogg & Abrams, 1988).These accounts treat social identity as a matter of perceptuo-cognitive reality whose effects are nevertheless as palpable as anything objective (see e.g. Oakes, Haslam & Turner, 1994). Theorists from this camp tend to avoid debate over SI (whether or not social identity is a real entity on a par with chairs and clothes), although Tajfel(1981) was clear in emphasizing that social identity is not a thing but a process (see also Turner, 1981a).The last version of social identity-as a matter of peoples descriptions-is, according to this social psychological view, a result of what happens as a consequence of SIP: useful for dependent measures of the mental state, perhaps, but not the thing itself. On the other hand, if we carried on following Edwards model, and dug into its antecedents, we would recognize that there is a long tradition elsewhere in the social sciences which is much happier with thinking of social identity as a description available for people to invoke and deploy in mundane interactions. Ethnomethodologists since Sacks (whose seminal lectures of the 1960s have been edited by Jefferson and are reproduced in Sacks, 1992) have used the notion of membership categorization devices to describe how social categories can operate in the weave of conversational interaction. This SId account of identity is something that has its force as part of the sequencing of the participants talk, and its mental processing is not taken to be crucial for its understanding. For present purposes we shall be maintaining a neutral stance towards the status of social identity as a mental state, although we come back to the question in the Discussion. Rather, we shall focus on questions concerning the identification and interpretation of social identities in research practice. This includes the general problem of knowing when a social identity is operative in a particular context, and also of questions concerning the conceptualization and analysis of social identities as flexible and contextually contingent.
The identrfiation o social identity: Theorists attribution vs. participants avowal f

Ethnomethodological standing orders are that theorists are to rely not on their own interpretation and coding of what their participants are doing (being friendly, offering advice and so on) but to rely instead on how the participants themselves orient to each

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other: to use participants displays that they understand that one person is offering advice and the other is accepting it and so on (for more on this extremely sketchy formulation, see Sacks, 1992).This translates easily to questions of the deployment of categories of any kind (Edwards, 1991)and from then on to social identity as particular kinds of category. The injunction here would be to stay agnostic about identities and restrain oneself from thinking that people are treating each other as this or that sort of person at all or, if they are, that the sort of person they pick for themselves and each other is chosen from the array set out for them by the traditional vocabulary of the social scientist. As Sacks pointed out in one of the principal insights of the ethnomethodological vision, such vocabulary may be an analysts misleading fiction imposed by too eager an application of social theory to practical reality as the participants themselves dispose of it. Rather, to follow Sacks (see, for example, his analysis of hotrodders, 1992, pp. 169-174) one should let the participants decide the agenda and watch for social identities of any kind, be they chosen from the existing lexicon or made up on the spot. Always they will be indexical, sensible only when set against the local frame of reference and doing interactional work of one kind or another. Thus, for example, the identity of hotrodder is set up by and for candidate hotrodders indifferent to any watching analysts more abstract categorization (deviant youth? pleasure seekers?) and meant for local contrast against (as it happens) beatniks and surfers(Sacks, 1992,p.173). One might go further and say that the identity avower might even confect a wholly nonce category just so that it is unique and unprecedented; think of what it might have meant, in the context of publicity interviews, for the US comedian Sammy Davis Jr to have claimed that he was a one-eyed black Jewish cowboy, or, in a psychotherapeutic context, for Winnicotts patient to have referred to herself as the piggle. But this is to get ahead of ourselves. Contrast the agnosticism above with research practice in social psychology, which ushally involves the attribution of particular, often stereotypical, social identities to research participants by the researcher. Even where participants are allowed to avow an identity it is, in practice, usually in restricted forms which produce an identity accountable to a visible or invisible authority in the person of the experimenter, a perennial if rather obscure figure in social psychological research on social identity (though see Reicher & Levine (1994) for an illustration of research which explicitly acknowledges the part played by the experimenter in the interaction). Where experimentation is defended (as it is, for example, by Turner, 198lb), a case can be made for its control over identity: who participants are is (officially) determined by the experimenter. This is the case, for example, in work employing the minimal group experimental technique and in other laboratory studies in which the experimenter either explicitly divides participants into categories (see Lindeman & Koskela, 1994, for a recent example) or manipulates the environment in order to ensure the salience of a particular aspect of social identity. When social identity theorists focus their theoretical lenses on more naturalistic situations they face the problem of having to identify if, and when, a particular aspect of social identity is salient to the actors involved. Generally, social identity theorists have adopted two types of strategy to deal with this problem. The first is simply to assume knowledge of the operation of particular social identities. Hence, for example, researchers simply assume that the social actors they observe are acting as Palestinians, as women, as French Canadians, and so forth (see Condor & Brown, 1988). This sort of practice stands in

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marked contrast to Tajfels (e.g. 1978) theoretical commitment to study social identity subjectively (in terms of the understanding of social actors themselves) rather than objectively (by imposing the researchers own frame of reference). For this reason, field researchers often attempt to check their assumptions concerning the operation of social identities by asking some of the social actors direct questions concerning the nature and strength of their group identification (see Kirchler, Palmonari & Pombeni, 1994, for a recent example). A second strategy involves inferring the presence of social identification through an observation of its assumed effects. Social identity theorists often warrant knowledge of the salience of a particular aspect of social identity by pointing to phenomena such as in-group favouritism or social stereotyping (including self-stereotyping). But the pudding is not always so proven; a participants in-group favouritism (and so on) might, in principle, be set up by something quite different from social identification, and there is no self-evident guarantee that social identification always or even usually brings about in-group favouritism and the like. The danger of circular reasoning is a lurking problem. Thefixibility and context dependence o social identzfiations f A second issue concerns context contingent flexibility in the use of self-categories. To start once again with an ethnomethodologically oriented SId account, the conception of social identity as a description deployed in the unpredictable run of interaction tends naturally towards emphasizing its flexibility. Once again, however, note that the fixity or volatility of any given identity x is taken to be a matter entirely for the participants to decide on; in some cases participants will use descriptions of identity x as if X were fixed, and in other cases they will treat x as mutable. Sometimes it will suit me to insist on close boundaries for the English, say, and sometimes not (see Condor, in press). As Edwards (1991)points out, the force of any description will be indexical, or dependent on its local reference points, so we must leave it to the participants to show how they decide the latitude to allow any given category label. In social psychology, social identity theorists vary in their emphasis on the plasticity of social identifications. For example, in his most detailed discussion of social identification, Tajfel (1978), while acknowledging the situational flexibility of social identities, nevertheless preferred to emphasize their relatively enduring nature. In particular, in his consideration of social identifications as a motivating force for social change, Tajfel comes close to representing social identifications as relatively enduring over microtime. A good deal of research deriving from Tajfels account of intergroup relations tends to evidence an implicit assumption that social identifications represent relatively enduring (reliable) aspects of self-perception on the part of individual participants. This is particularly apparent in research which attempts to measure and compare individuals in terms of the strength of their identification with a particular category, and to consider how these individual differences covary with phenomena such as in-group favouritism (e.g. Abrams & Emler, 1992; Bat-Chava, 1994; Condor, Brown & Williams, 1987). In other contexts Tajfel placed more theoretical emphasis on the moment-to-moment plasticity of social identifications, emphasizing how: the psychological existence of a group for its members is a complex sequence of appearances and disappearances, of looming large and vanishing into thin air . . . Tajfel(1982, p. 485).This emphasis on the flexi-

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ble, context-dependent nature of social identification has been taken up by Turner in his account of social identification in terms of self-categorization:
The model proposed by [self-categorization theory] is by no means static, fixed, global, reified. The opposite is the case: a fundamental idea is the rejection of self-categories as absolutes: the self is dynamic, relational, comparative, fluid, context-specific and variable. Self-categorizationsare part of the process of relating to the social world, not things(Turner et a/., 1987, p. 144).

As a consequence, a good deal of work on social identification now explicitly invokes SIP in foregrounding the issue of category salience-that is, the context dependence of self and social perception (e.g. Hogg & Turner, 1987; Oakes, 1987; Oakes, Turner & Haslam, 1991).An appreciation of the dynamic, relational and fluid nature of self and social perception might, of course, put into question the validity of research which attempts to measure reliable individual differences in the strength of social identity. An appreciation of the radically context dependent nature of social identity and of social perception might also lead one to question a good deal of field research (which often assumes that the way in which respondents describe themselves to a researcher on a questionnaire has some bearing on their observed activity in other, rather different, situations). An appreciation of social identifications as context specific and hence variable would also, paradoxically, lead us to question the ultimate utility of research techniques typically employed in studies of salience. Most of this research involves laboratory experimentation and the collection of data via self-report questionnaires. The way in which this research is conceptualized and the data interpreted involves bracketing the possibility of flexibility within the research context itself. The research setting, and the various actions which take place within it, is usually treated and described as if it were a single, definable context, a moment within which time can be assumed to have stood still, representing (to borrow a phrase from Turner et a f . , 1994, p. 455) a specific instance. As a consequence, analysts assume that any aspect of social identity will be (or, with hindsight, has been) uniformly salient or not salient throughout the duration of an experiment. This overlooks the diachronic nature of the research procedure, and the possibility that, in the course of a single piece of research, contexts may shift and change. Even short questionnaires involve a complex series of conversational moves between research participant and researcher. The posing of each particular question or the provision of each particular answer may shift the context of the research interview in subtle ways (see Schegloff, 1988, for a treatment of this as a general conversational process, and Leudar & Antaki, 1776, for the implications for psychological research practice). Social identity theorists often suggest that their approach may be eclectic in its choice of research methods (e.g. Hogg & McGarty, 1990). Nevertheless, they have hitherto been resistant to methods such as discourse analysis or conversation analysis which would allow an appreciation of the procedural aspects of social behaviour (for exceptions, see Reicher & Hopkins, in press; Widdicombe, 1993; Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1994). This is probably due to a concern over the potential dangers of attempting to explain macrosocial phenomena in terms of microsocial (interpersonal) processes (an issue about which ethnomethodology is understandably sensitive; see, for example, Zimmerman & Boden, 1971, for a recent review). However, it seems to be the case that some aspects of social identity theory-most notably those requiring some form of diachronic analysis--cannot be explored adequately by the sole use of techniques which reduce the flow of human behaviour to synchronic snapshots.

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A consideration of the way in which social identities loom large and disappear into thin air in the course of a concrete social interaction might not only enable us to identih contextual flexibility in social identities which are masked by current research procedures. It may also enable social identity theorists to adopt a more subtle and social approach to the issue of context itself. Although not a necessary adjunct of the social identity perspective, there has been a tendency for social identity researchers to treat context as something existing outside their participants. As Hogg and McGarty put it, the social self-concept is context dependent in so far as specific social self-categorizations are brought into play (i.e. become the basis of perception and conduct) by the social field (1990, p. 13). A reliance on research procedures in which the experimenter sets up the social field and then observes its effects upon participants activity has been accompanied by a reluctance to theorize the ways in which social actors themselves construct and reconstruct the social field in the course of interaction. One notable exception, which significantly uses natural language data, may be found in Reichers work on arguments over social categorization (Reicher & Hopkins, in press).
Exploring social identities in conversation
Let us sum up the argument so far and point ourselves towards the analysis to come. No objection is made to the notion that it is sensible to talk about identity, but the question is asked: what is its ontological status? Psychologists treat it as being real, at least cognitively, that is, at the level of perception; others, wary of unverifiable mental entities, prefer to speak of it as description, existing, or subsisting, in its use. The common ground is that a persons social identity is (at least) some membership, some tag or label which confers certain ready features or implies certain normative characteristics. The difference is that the cognitivist believes this membership to be a mental state (fixed or, perhaps, transient, but nevertheless mental), while the ethnomethodologist takes i t to be a device for contrast against rival memberships for local transactions. In what follows we shall be looking in detail at one very ordinary, run-of-the-mill interaction to make an exemplary case in favour of the latter position. We shall be looking at what the participants do, attending, in the ethnomethodological spirit of conversation analysis, to the sequential organization of their talk, keeping an eye out especially for how they propose, and respond to, orientations to social identity. Fuller descriptions of conversation analysis may be found elsewhere: in order of increasing specificity to the use we make of it here, see Heritage (1984) for the origins of the discipline of conversation analysis; Goodwin & Heritage (1990) for a review of its application to the human sciences; Edwards (in press) for its application to psychology; and Antaki (1994, chapter 10) and Widdicombe & Wooffitt (1994) for its application to identity. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that conversation analysis reads off what participants do from seeing how it is they use and exploit the regularities of conversational interaction. These regularities are the background against which participants ration turn taking, organize what they say into structures (like adjacency pairs--questions and answers, assessments and agreements, and so o n - o r stories with introductions, narrative passages and closings), and how they manifest their positions through the prejh-ence organization of their utterances (unmarked for utterances that are normative in their local environment, or marked for ones that are non-normative). The rule of thumb throughout is the use of

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and deduce that Charly is a doctor. Here is an example of the kind of stretch of talk, right at the beginning of the interaction, that a content analysis might use as evidence for the identity doctor, even though the term itself is not mentioned by any of the participants.
8 JOEL

9 CHARLY
10 JOEL 1 1 CHARLY 12 JOEL 13 CHARLY 14 JOEL 15 CHARLY 16 JOEL 17 CHARLY

(have some more wine). [m] so (you see) it came to the viva -- and they asked me something . chat they asked me about diarrhoea now diarrhoea obviously to you sounds very simple.
(laughs.) -

basically the shits you know I mean but

(laughs - -)
but in fact diarrhoea is really almost a postgraduate subject. (laughs - -) thats a strange way ofputting i t isnt it r(1afdghs-)
L(/aughs -).

18

VALERY

19 JOEL

well I knew quite a /of about diarrhoea and I was doing very u d l and then . then they . and I thought , (and) I knew why I knew I was . being vivaed really (for) I kneu, Id done pretty well and I knew Id done you know a lot better than average - and . I thought I would have a chance of getting honours you see . and then I ran into one and then 1 ran into a . paediatrzrian , (it was) very very interesting the way the thing went- he said . the other chap said . you know have I had enough time there were three of them you see . and they said yes you have and I(d) had about eight or nine minutes on diarrhoea which is quite a long tinre really. and I still hadnt finished . and I was still going quite strong (1 syll) . I really could have gone on the whole rtinre and i t would have been all right you know L(1auyhs- -) (lar&r. )

The importance

recognizing that the talk is structured as a story

Any analysis which simply counted the appearance of medical words and phrases2 would miss the fact that the talk works to a very standard structure. It is set up as a story, conforming, as do the others like it in the first 200 turns of the interaction, to what Sacks shows is the general case in story telling (Sacks, 1974), and confirmed many times since (see, for example, Goodwin, 1984). The story is lawfully inserted into the interaction, coming at an allowable topic initiation point just after some conversational time out (Joel verbally offering a drink and allowing a pause into which Charly can introduce something). Charly makes a connection with the preceding by the formulation so you see and introduces a topic which, because he casts it as a report of a question (they asked me something . that-they asked me about diarrhoea) projects its own completion (namely, how the question was answered) which will now come as a story. The story duly appears in the standard format of being shifted to a different region of deictic reference, where other people, places and time become salient (Schiffrin, 1990). And, as again is usual in story telling, he gives the audience the key to how he means it to be appreciated right at the outset: it might have been a bad luck tale, a peculiarity, a triumph and so on; here the expressly scatological shitsin now diarrhoea t o you sounds very simple. basically the shits you know casts it as an amusing story, and that projects or expects a jocular reception from the hearers.
And there are more and less sophisticated ways ofdoing so, ranging from the Twenty Sraternents Test through Q-methodology and other ways oftinding patterns ofcovariance among lexical items ( f o r a review of which see Fielding & Lee, 1991).

Social identities in talk 479 the sequence of participants talk to understand the force of any one utterance-and any invocation of identity it may include-in the interaction. In what follows, note that we shall be going through the interaction in (the closest we can get to) real time; we want to be able to trace how social identities ride the current and contribute to its swells and eddies.

The data
The data were taken from a corpus of natural English conversation collected by a team of linguists largely in 1970s and transcribed in detail onto a computer file (available now on CD-ROM, Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, 1991) and into a printed source (Svartvik & Quirk, 1980). We have simplified the transcription notation greatly (see Appendix for conventions) and numbered the turns for convenience. The particular extract we shall be looking at comes from an interaction between three people (conversation S.2.9 in the corpus), which we chose because it shows a particularly rich interweaving of identity work. The talk can be glossed as being between friends over drinks and included reference to two of the speakers social identities as-to put i t baldly for the moment, and with the benefit of hindsight-doctor and linguist. Analysis The reading we shall be suggesting is that the participants invoke their social identities within the framework of a conversation which develops from story recounting (of medical and academic anecdotes) into a quarrel (over various kinds of things to do with, or at least ostensibly to do with, medical practice). The point we shall be making throughout is that their identities are descriptions: they never just appear, they are always used; they only make sense as part of an interactional structure (like a story or an argument), and that they are highlyfixible. The participants use their identities as warrants or authority for a variety of claims they make and challenge, and the identities they invoke change as they are deployed to meet changing conversational demands. Identities in the conversations earlier stages Although it is usually wrong arbitrarily to split any conversation into segments, i t will help our exposition of what is going on if we take the interaction in two phases. In the earlier talk, which makes up the bulk of the transcript, the conversation revolves around Charlys recent medical qualification. There is much talk of medical syndromes, Charlys success in his examinations, peculiarities of medical staff he has known, and so on. The profusion of medical terminology makes it look as if one could just do a,content analysis
Svartvik & Quirk (1980) describe the three speakers in this conversation as: A: male doctor, age c 29; B: female secondary school teacher, age c. 27; and a: male academic, age c. 27. Textual evidence in the transcript (invitations to drinks and so on) suggests that A is called Charly (thus spelt by the transcribers), and is the guest of B (Valery) and a (Joel or Joey). We have kept the specific fint names partly to make the text more accessible, and also to avoid confusion between A and a. Svartvik and Quirk used lower case letters to identify a speaker who w s aware rhar the talk was being recorded, a a variable which we dont think affects the analytic issues here. While i t is always in principle possible that the single participant who knew of the recording might have guyed the proceedings in one way or another (and it is evident in other transcripts in the corpus that the recording is oriented to on at least some occasions) there is no obvious evidence of it in this interaction.

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The audience meets that expectation to respond, as is again usually the case, with an explicit signal that they have recognized that there is a story about to start, and what kind of story it is, by laughter followed by a pause into which Charly can introduce the body of the story. H e finishes it off in the conventional way of ending with a three-part list (Jefferson 1978, 1991) of summary formulations (1) I still hadntfinished; ( 2 ) I was still going quite strong;and ( 3 ) I really could have gone on the whole time. To continue with the pattern identified by Sacks and Jefferson, this is then capped with the punchline, and it would have been all right, and signed off with a terminator, you know. And, to signal their appreciation of the end of the tale and their appropriate understanding of it, the audience join in and sign off with laughter. W e have gone into that level of detail to make the point that here Charly is engaged in a certain structure of talk-a story-and that whatever he says here must be understood as being within that structure. Why is this important? Because i t is (we claim) crucial to understand what i t means that here, as in the other stories in this part of the conversation, although the speakers allude to the medical world, no one refers t o Charly as a doctor. This ready made social identity is one that is deferred until some 250 turns later in the conversation. This is, we think, significant and suggests that we too, as analysts, should avoid the term for the simple reason that identity is no good t o Charly in his present project and his fellow participants appreciation of it. His present project, as witnessed by the conversational evidence, is telling stories about recent medical examination success. To tell such stories is in fact to make manifest his inability to stand as an (established) doctor. Although a social scientist might be tempted (as the original researchers had been, as footnote 1 shows) to categorize Charly as a doctor, the structure of the talk shows that that would be exactly wrong-at this stage of the conversation. But what, more positively, can we say Charly is claiming about himself? The answer lies in further application of the same principle. He claims what is germane to the stories he is telling or, more precisely and socially, his identities emerge from the combination Ofthe stories he offers and his audiences ratifiation ofthem And, because that combination of offer and appreciation is not static, neither are his identities. Compare the configuration of story and uptake in the diarrhoea anecdote right at the start of the transcript with what happens in the following story, some hundred-plus turns later:
152

CHARLY ((STORY))-you know I mean theres a I think theres a liniir to how much a [m] . a man can take [(laughs - -) VALERY La man can rake yes (laughs - -) 153 (laughs - - - -) 154 JOEL 155 VALERY I (hUghJ --) 156 CHARLY L(laughs - -) 157+ JOEL would you say youre ambitious 158 CHARLY well as you can denote by what Im saying at the moment at the moment Im not . you know r((i S ~ I I ) ) 159 JOEL Lwell actually it sounds as though you are fucking ambitious 160 VALERY 161 CHARLY Lwell I . oh 1 see 162 VALERY yes 163 VALERY i t does 164 CHARLY really 165 JOEL youve It1 you you are ambitious enough to assess your chances -

r-

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CHARLY oh yes . oh yes I a m -- yes . [m] because Id like to do general mdicine . I find it very very interesting -- it contains . a lot of the things Id like it contains a lot of quite a lot of science -you see quite a lot of people who are ill - you know who are really ill .
rather than just . and you can actually use diagnostic skills

D i f f e n t stories, diffeent irientities There are a number of things about identity that we want this extract to demonstrate. First, compare the identity being promoted in this story with the identity in the earlier ones. If the appropriate label while Charly was engaged in his early story telling was recently-qualified-but-cynical-medical-student, this later exchange very strongly then suggests that the identity label should now be altered and extended to recently-qualifiedmedical-student-with-aspirations-to-continue-in-his-career; if it is extended here, and what can we expect in the next turn of the interaction, and the turn after that? Second, notice that i t is a matter of the participants jointly arranging matters so that this is the salient identity: at turn 157, i t is Joel who introduces (into the jocular space left by the preceding laughter) the notion of ambition. This is presented as an assessment, and assessments routinely expect agreement. We see, however, that Charly meets it with a hedge (welf) and concession (at the moment Im not) which mark a dispreferred responsea disagreement-and at 159Joel keeps up the pressure for agreement with a further, now more emphatic, assessment vucking ambitious); Valery joins in at 163, and Joel repeats it again at 165. The expectation for an account is now trebly reinforced, and this is the context into which we must understand the identity that Charly now invokes in 1 6 L t h a t of the person who finds medicine very very interesting. This is, on the face of it, inconsistent with, or perhaps even contradictory to, the identity of the student manipulator of the system which was the punchline of the earlier stories. The third thing we want to say here is to answer a criticism which will occur to an observing social identity theorist: surely, they might say, some of these labels are only very tenuously social identities? In what sense, they might specifically ask, can one speak of ambitious (turn 157) as a social identity, rather than a personal trait? The answer, we think, is to apply the litmus paper test of membership: is it an inference rich category, as Sacks puts it (Sacks, 1992, lecture 6)? Is there a list of normative attributes which go along with this label and whose implication is treated as significant by the participants? In this case, yes; if we look again at what happens around the time of the ascription of ambitious we see that it is treated (by Charly, at least) as being in contrast to the identity Charly is making live through his parade of stories. That is to say, although ambitious might have the lexical status of an adjectival description, it has, precisely because it is an adjective hearably inconsistent with the social identity Charly is claiming for himself, the force of a membership description. Charly treats i t as an attribute which belongs to a membership categorization device different from, and indeed antagonistic to, the recentlyqualified-but-cynical-medical-student his stories (so far) describe. If you like, Joel is claiming to find something in Charlys list of ingredients which gives the lie to the product name that Charly is claiming for himself. Of course, not all adjectives will have the effect of being membership signals; but we see the participants telling us that ambitiousdoes so here. Indeed, some use of adjectives and other descriptive formulations will be designed only to promote what is hearably non(social) identification. Charlys claim that he is interested in medicine avoids a categor-

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ization of what kind of person he is, and it is no accident that this comes just after Joel has accused him of being (an) ambitious (type of person). Charlys reply looks designed to escape the clutches of any group attribution by ascribing his motivation to interest rather than membership. One could run the tape on to show still further stretches of talk where the joint production of stories provide, ascribe, or call for, still more variations of identity label. The very least we could conclude, even at this point, talking about one genre of conversational activity (the story), is that pre-given categories like doctor may seriously underrepresent what goes on in identity talk. Charly has said a lot, but he hasnt called himself a doctor. But that is a half-way stage of the interaction, where the participants matter in hand was story telling. Let us go on to the second phase of the conversation and the conversationalists move from story telling to the no less rhetorical genre of arguing, and the consequent shifts in identity that come with it.

Invoking identities in argaing

The latter part of the conversation moves away from the story telling genre of the early part, and takes on a quizzical tone as it projects an uncertainty over Charlys qualifications to say what he does. It is this quizzical tone (ifwe allow ourselves that shorthand), and the arguments that i t develops into, that gives us the key to understanding what identities are invoked not only by Charly but by the others in the interaction. It will help if we reproduce below the point at which this phase starts to be hearable. The description will be a bit laborious, because quite a lot is going on. First, Charly, as part of formulating a punchline to a story which we will gloss as being about his place in the hierarchy of students, makes salient the intellectual requirements of medicine:
214 CHARLY so I Rnow I could be average but I couldnt be very good - and I could never d o anything new . I dont think . cos my mind is just not capable of thinking - in terms in threedimensional terms for a for a start .

This might be considered to be a standard depreciation which expects a standard disagreement as its response (Pomerantz, 1978) (e.g. no, surely you must be good at that). Joels response does indeed provide such a polite disagreement, and keeps the abstract reasoning issue live.
215 JOEL and and you you think chat [erl whatever may be causing a symptom - fair . in fairly abstract terms then -

By asserting that Charly does, or can, think . . . infairIy abstract terns, Joel defuses Charlys self-deprecation, as expected. What needs attention now is Joels claim (that Charly evaluates whatever may be causing the symptom . . . in abstract terms). Charly responds like this:
216 CHARLY well some [pi) its very interesting what youre saying (cos theres) some friends of (m] theres a friend of mine that wants to do surgery - now . he has the greatest difficulty with drugs because he can never really believe . that when somebody takes a drug that its actually going to do anything anywhere at all you see r(/augbJ - -) L((4 to 5 sylls)) to what youre saying - what he wants to do is cut them open and have a look you know

217 JOEL 218 CHARLY

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219 JOEL 220 CHARLY

Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark Levine

r(laughJ -) L. and actually do it you know because he feels that really does work . hes got immense faith in surgery . which I find is slzghtly misplaced cos I dont have that . I dont have the same sort of faith in surgery - I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug - and

Charlys anecdote about his friend comes at the point where what is expected is a response to Joels invitation to evaluate his claim that the investigation of causes of symptoms is an abstract practice. Two things set it up as being a rejection of the claim. One is its being marked as a dispreferred response (well. . . some peo- . . . its very interesting what youre sayi n g . . . {anecdote)). The other is that the anecdotes punchline-that is to say, the closing formulation inviting an appreciation by the audience (Sacks, 1974)-doesnt cap or exaggerate Joels evaluation (as Sacks, 1974, shows supportive anecdotes normally do). Rather, it hearably takes the talk off in a different direction, now concerning the distinction between faith in drugs and faith in surgery ( I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug). However, a punchline needs itself to be ratified, and in turn 221 we see how Joels uptake of the punchline revives his original claim about abstraction.
220 CHARLY 221+ JOEL 222 CHARLY 223 JOEL 224 CHARLY
(. . .) I have a lot more faith . in giving somebody a drug - and but its a much more abstract thing to do really wellit i s . I suppose it is I dontfind it so its nearer my heart therefore its less abstract .

Joels restatement of a claim already unaccepted by the other party is conversationally non-normative and in this instance occasions an explicitly marked dispute assertion (it is abstract); disagreement (well . . .) and reassertion (it is) which follows standard dispute marking (Antaki, 1994; Coulter, 1990). This is a very significant crystallization of the proceedings. One thing we know about disputes like this is that they stay liveuntil they are resolved (by an explicit, unqualified agreement) or cancelled by the participants explicitly marking a moving on to some other topic (by a long pause and a new topic device such as so . . .). Until then, we can expect Charly, Joel and Valery to orient to the dispute at hand, and this gives the background against which any mention of social identity categories must now be understood. Joel picks up the mitigated compromise version of the assertion in Charlys last turn (it doesntfeel so in my heart). Here we have the first invocation of Joels social identity. Joel argues that just because one (specifically a professional, still more specifically a linguist) feels something not to be abstract doesnt mean that it is not so:
no I I mean I dont feel linguistics as being abstract but it definitely is abstract 225+ JOEL CHARLY oh [to me thats) ( ( s ~ I I ) ) 226 Lbut finally I mean . the symptoms . are sentences of the language . which 227 JOEL people like Valery and and and myself respond to -- but - [erl thats only a surface phenomenon really - [w w w] whats going on there-is a very abstract thing and I think of i t in abstract . terms though they they they . they dont appear to me as being abstract 228 CHARLY [m] and it seems to me that what youre talking about is exactly-the same thing 229 JOEL

How is Joel able simply to introduce his professional identity into the interaction? The answer is that i t is a feature of talk that when one membership categorization device is up and running, it allows other categories of the same type to appear in the subsequent talk

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485

(Sacks, 1992, e.g. pp. 44 ff). Charlys identity as (something like) recently-qualifiedmedical-student-with-aspirations-to-continue-in-his-career we know, up and runis, ning; and that allows Joel and Valery to invoke something that is hearable as being in the same family of social identities. Joel uses that standing invitation to cast himself as a professional being able to draw on his own qualifications-here, by giving himself insider knowledge of what a linguist knows: I mean I dont feel linguistic as being abstract but it definitely is abstract. H e puts himself and Valery into the same membership category (people like Valety and myself). To do so is, of course, both to make common ground with Charly (as being part of that overarching membership category of qualified professional), but also to draw a distinction; they are in a different kind of profession, whose unique features might turn out to be usable in the interaction. So although it might be offered as a common-ground analogy, it carries with it the possibility of identity-conflict. Note here that this double function of group avowal, in which the speaker faces both ways at once, ought, theoretically, to be impossible in standard social psychological identity theory, where in-group avowal automatically implies discrimination from the out-group. The second point to make on the basis of the extract above refers to the argumentative context which the talk at turns 220-224 had set up. Joels invocation of his professional social identity is not disinterested; i t is there as part of his response to the thesis antithesis structure which is currently in operation in the interaction. It gives him a position of authority which, as we see, supports a series of further claims. But, in its turn, it makes available to Charly his own counterpart professional status, as we see happen in the following stretch. At 27 1 the argument is restated in another standard three-part assertion (turn 27 l)/disputation (turn 272)/ratification (turn 273) sequence of dispute initiation. Joel queries Charlys distinction between a cyst as a sign of illness and a symptom of it:
271+ 272+ 273+ 274 JOEL CHARLY JOEL CHARLY
so you dont treat the cyst as a symptom well oh no you treat it as a potential . (s) you treat it as a potential . symptom (( 1 to 2 sylls)) well then no no no I think you . (so) a symptom . a symptom is something something the patient complains about . I people will complain that it doesnt look very nice mean a sebaceous theyll want to) Lbut I mean if if you [cr] if if you [tr] if you were to treat the cyst-asa symptom - you would find out what was causing the cyst . what was giving rise to the cyst - and

275

JOEL

276 277 278 279-

VALERY CHARLY VALERY CHARLY

[cry and cure Ldo you mean

I ((4 to 6 sylls))

(what was ever giving rise

(no a Jynrptom is a thing is a symptom of something else yes we dont use [s) the same I mean in medicine a symptom is something the [kerm) patient complains o f . the sign is something the doctor elicits

Now we have arrived at what would have looked to be, to someone searching for the point at which identities emerge, the crux of the interaction-because this is thefirst point in the entire conversation at which the word doctorappears. But notice how it appears. As ever, i t appears in a strucrure: Charly speaks of the doctor to support his claim about what is the case; what medical practice, and medical knowledge, is and, crucially, his use of the pronoun we allies him with that medical knowledge. So in one movement he is invoking medical authority (the doctor) and allying himself with it-all for the ephemeral (but sanctionable) requirement of backing up a claim made accountable by another speaker. From then on, we see a great deal more of Charly allying himself with the medical pro-

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fession. The argumentative position which the interaction has swung him into defending is one that affords just such an in-group identity, and there are a number of ways in which he invokes it. Our work in this paper is really over, if we have managed to persuade the reader that identities change as the interaction proceeds; so we only offer a couple of examples of the way Charly accomplishes in-groupness in the tail end of the interaction, when it becomes salient. Remember, though, that all this more-or-less straightdoctor talk is unleashed by, and has its force in, the argumentative context that the interaction has now set up.

Some examples of Charly s subsequent doctor mmbersbip talk

A simple example of in-groupness accomplishment is to use some version of the trope speaking as an X: Charly uses this explicit invocation of his specific job title in the profession (as a boaseman like I will be soon), or to assert membership by pronominal reference, as here:
279+
and 302+

CHARLY yes we dont use [sl the same I mean in medicine a symptom is something the [kerm] patient complains o f . the sign is something the CHARLY (. . .) I mean we write down symptoms . signs you know I mean theyre theyre theyre so different .

Charly can and does explicitly draw a line between those competent and incompetent to give medical judgements bearing on the medical matter at hand. A good example appears right at the moment in which the argument is set up:
271 + JOEL
272+ 2734
so you dont treat the cyst as a symptom CHARLY well oh no you treat it as a potential . (s) you treat it as a potential . symptom JOEL ((1 to 2 sylls)) well then no no no I think you .

For Joel, you it might indexically be you, Charly (as doctor). For Charly, on the other hand, it seems to be the prescriptive didactic youof the learner (you treat it as apotential symptom). Charly uses medical terminology throughout the conversation but at this stage we know that the argumentative context gives a specifically authoritative edge to such terminology-that is to say, the participants themselves orient to a speakers competence in using such terms, as in this example:
356+ 357
358

. .) its looking. percussing . well its looking feeling. percussing auscultation . theyre the four things that a r(doccor) ((2 s y ~ ~ s ) ) Lauscultation whats that - - oh I see JOEL CHARLY listening - so you look at it and (. . .)
CHARLY
(.

Perhaps Charlys clearest invocation of group identity comes at turns 340-341 :

340 341+ 342 your distinctions between sign and symptom . [wi] which I find fascinating ((1 to 2 sylls)) CHARLY its not my distinction [its its Lno . all right - -erm (. . .) JOEL

JOEL

Here, still in the argumentative context where Charly is defending his authority to maintain his position, he makes a strong contrast between his personal, as opposed to his

Social identities in talk

487

professional, judgement. Its not distinction in this context implies that it is the distinction of the invisible community of medical people in whose voice he is speaking. In an exact reversal of his use of personal and group identity at turn 166 (see page 482), he is committed to group membership as a source of expertise, and is resisting Joels attribution to him of a merely personal judgement about medical matters. It is a delicate juggling of medical personae, but it is necessary if Charly wants to deploy the heavy guns of the medical establishment and also keep his part in the argument apparently disinterested.

Suniniary of the analysis

We ended with detailed examples of the kind of doctor avowals which might, had we come to them directly, have led us carelessly to infer that Charly is, as a matter of established social identity, a doctor. But our long journey showed that this was just another way-station. Table 1 summarizes how, throughout the interaction, the identities change in response to what the participants set up as being the matter currently in hand. We should quickly say that the convenience of a table like this is bought at the cosr of portraying the interaction as a series of fixed steps in which nothing else was going on but avowals and ascriptions of identity; but that is very far from the picture we want to paint. The identities emerge out of the business of the interaction, and contribute towards next business. At the start of the interaction, the business to which the participants oriented was medicalstories in such a way as ro support Charlys identity as (what we might gloss as) a successful-if-cynical-medical student. This, on challenge from Joel, transmuted into (again, in shorthand) an identity with interest in medicine as its salient feature. In both cases, i t was the structure of the interaction which supported-or required-these identity claims, and no doubt there was a great deal more going on besides. When the talk turned to argument over the issue of whether abstract reasoning was required in prescribing drugs, Charly and Joel were set up on opposing sides. In pursuing his argumentative position, Joel invoked his own experience as a linguist to offer Charly a chance of a formulation that he might accept (that analogically, he is too close to

Table 1. How identities changed in the joint conversational structures of our sample interaction
Turns Turns 9-1 5 0 Turns 157-1 5 9 Turn 166 Turn 216 Turns 221-224 Turns 225-229 Turns 27 1-365 Conversational structure C tells stories, V and J appreciate J offersfimnidution in appreciation of one of Cs stories C offers an account Self-deprecatory uiroimt Argument positions Grounds for argument position Groirnds for argument claims Identity promoted in that structure C is just qualified is ambitious is interested in medicine is not that good is abstract reasoner vs. intuitive medical craftsperson J and C are fellow professionals C is a doctor C C C C

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Charles Antaki, Susan Condor and Mark k i n e

the practice of prescribing drugs to see that it does, objectively, involve abstract reasoning). Joels identity of linguist-always allowable by Charlysown use of his professionwas, again, afforded by the structural requirements of the talk at that point. In both sections of the conversation, a simple counting of identity as represented by content would have been misleading; in all cases the force of what was said depended on its sequential position, and the identities shifted accordingly. Were a psychologist to have stopped the interaction at any one point, they would have been tempted to imagine that the identities on display were, like the slogan baked into a stick of Blackpool rock, uniform throughout. In fact, the play of identities was more like the disposition of meat and fat in a salami sausage: differently patterned wherever you cut into it.

Discussion
What we were trying to do in this paper was to think of social identity as a resource which would emerge in peoples own avowals and ascriptions, rather than in the categories imposed by the psychologist. The impetus came from the ethnomethodological recommendation to be watchful, and to treat identity as a matter of peoples situated and interested descriptions of themselves and each other. To keep the impetus going we made use of Edwards (1994)analysis of scriptdescriptions, and Sacks notion of membership categorization and the mechanisms of membership categorization devices (Sacks, 1992,pp. 40-49, and elsewhere), to the particular case of a routine example of mundane social interaction. A conversational analysis allowed us to see people tailoring their own bespoke combinations of identities or using off-the-shelf categories (recently-qualified-but-cynical-medical-student and doctor, for example) and mobilizing them flexibly-ven, on occasion, contradictorily-to support tactical positions as they came and went in ephemeral (but, of course, socially consequential) stories and arguments. At the start of the paper we compared the notion of social identity as a matter of perceptual reality with the notion of it being a matter of description. Taking the latter as a guide we saw our participants deploying description in the routine case where social identity is something that bears on some other matter currently in hand and, as the interaction progressed, the participants social identity rapidly became the matter in hand itself. Joel (for example) made his identity as a qualified linguist bear on his commentary on Charlys claims about medicine, in just the same way that someone might bring their membership of the Kennel Club to bear on ones right to enter a dog show and so on. Such bringings-to-bear are briefly over and done, of course, but their accumulated record is what gives a person their (portfolio of) identities. Ephemeral as they might be, they become available for future invocation as instances of times when the person was (understood to be) a linguist, a Kennel Club member and so on. The speakers are doing three things at once: invoking social identities, negotiating what the features or boundaries of those identities are and accumulating a record of having those identities. They will be able, in the next round of their interactional history, to draw on having all been exposed to this conversational display of identities. But, once again, it will be up to them-and not the watching psychologist-to instantiate that memory as their new local projects require, and to select (or confect) whatever version of the successful student, ambitious careerist or medical spokesperson(to name but three of the identities we have seen them juggle with) that suits their new circumstances.

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489

What can we say about the inconsistency of identity that this kind of analysis throws up? In the conversation we have been considering, the term doctor occurs in contradictory ways, and this might seem queer to someone committed to a notion of identity as a fixed anchor. The matter can be resolved if we recall the ethnomethodologists insistence that there is no point in searching for the meaning of a word (like doctor)without taking into account its indexicality-the fact that it will always be used in some certain set of circumstances. As Edwards (1991) shows, the reading of a category label is localized, and the only reliable evidence one can have is in the way that the participants themselves manifest what is locally live. All of this squares well with social psychological social identity theorists attempt to avoid psychological reductionism. We suspect that Tajfel would have approved of the rigorous non-individualization of theory that has driven the analysis, and it is tempting to speculate what he might have had to say for and against the detailed work on routine talk that it generates. We can see how the conversation considered here has provided an exemplary case study of the context dependence and potential for flexibility in social identities implicit in Tajfel. Not only are different identities invoked at different points of the conversation, but the same identity (in this case as a-person-with-a-medical-qualification) may take a variety of different forms depending upon the conversational context in which it is invoked. This is, of course, entirely in line with the developments of Tajfels theory in the claims of Turner and his associates ( e g . Turner et al., 1994). However, i t does suggest that there may be a danger in the historical reliance on laboratory studies which, as we noted earlier, often underestimate the plasticity of self-description, implicitly assuming that the same identities are, like Blackpool rock, relatively enduring in microtime such that the same identity can be assumed to be salient throughout the duration of any study. These sorts of issues are often discussed on a theoretical level ( e g . Brewer, 1991, 1993; Turner et al., 1987) but i t may take a detailed study of interaction to bring them out more fully than is possible in more traditional laboratory experiments. Despite (what we see as) the clear advantages to the social identity theorist in doing something like we have done here, it might be that some will find one or other aspect of the ethnomethodological story unattractive. A social identity theorist is likely to interpret conversations such as the one we have been discussing in a rather different way to the conversation analyst. In particular, some social identity theorists might feel uneasy with an exclusive focus on social identity as (pejoratively) a floating description with no real referent. They might say that common sense (if nothing else) tells us that overt talk is no sure guarantee to what is really going on in an interaction. Identities may be salient without being visibly avowed. In some circumstances, an interactant may not feel i t necessary to articulate a claim to a particular social identity (as may be the case, for example, with gender identity in a face-to-face encounter) or may symbolize their claims to identity by non-verbal means (such as wearing a white coat). In some situations social identities may remain tacit for reasons of tact. And in some circumstances one might dissemble (a doctor may, for example, not admit his profession when asked what do you do? at a party; a psychopath may claim to be a famous neurosurgeon). In all of these cases, however (some social identity theorists would maintain) a particular identity is salient to a social actor, even if it is not visible (or is not the one that is visible) on the level of SI. A perceptual social identity theory is unfriendly to the ethnomethodological injunction because it can imagine, and feels an obligation to imagine,

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cases where there are important things going on under the surface. Talk is regarded not as the thing itself, but as a sign (and not an entirely reliable sign) of identity, and that means that conversation analysis, while useful, may not provide the committed SIP social identity theorist with a congenial way forward. The last two paragraphs above dwelt on one strand of implication of the argument in this paper: that its methods will be a source of unease for those convinced that there is real identity work beyond the reach of this kind of talk analysis-who will point out, for example, that we have completely elided any worry about power and other institutionalized asymmetries-and who feel that identity work is nevertheless capturable by traditional social psychological methods. The crux of the matter is what ontological status to ascribe identity in its manifestation in language; but that, the reader will see, is (the more general rendering 00 the point at which we came in. The debate is now a familiar one, taken up in social psychology usually by discourse analysts and their critics (see, for example, the exchange between Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 1990, and Abrams & Hogg, 1990). (This paper, of course, weighs in on the language side, though what it promotes is not discourse analysis (with its attendant element of cultural reading) but the closer-to-the-action conversation analysis.) There is no point trying here to resolve such a consequential debate, although we hope we have left the alternatives a little clearer. To end more positively: the earlier discussion did, we think, build on ground shared with the social identity tradition. There is much in the ethnomethodological argument which chimes with the notion of agency and flexibility in Tajfels original formulation of social identity, traces of which have too long been stifled under the blanket of experimental control. Quite what ontological status that suggests we grant identity as it emerges from under the blanket is a matter that needs more work elsewhere; but, at the very least, what we have seen here does suggest a greater respect for social members own descriptions, and how they organize them in concert. References
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Received 4 January 1995; revised version received S April 199s

Appendix
Transcription conventions
We have greatly simplified the notation in the original transcriptions, retaining only che following features and adapting their notation to a form less inconsistent than the original with Jeffersons CA conventions (there are, nevertheless, differences in the notation of emphasis and pauses, and the use of brackets: see Atkinson & Heritage, 1984, pp ix-xvi). italic
-

A [one speaker B Lanother speaker B I another speaker C La third speaker A [one speaker B Lanother spea C
(so then) [eberl ((1 to 2 sylls))

stressed syllable pause longer pause (and more dashes indicate still longer pauses) overlapping speech between two speakers overlapping speech between chree speakers two sets of overlapping speech (ker between two pairs of speakers (third speaker transcribers guess at likely word(s) transcribed non-word note of unintelligible material, rendered in syllable length transcribers gloss on non-lexical material part of a turn not included in the extract used in this paper

A [one speaker

(laugh)
(. . .)