In this study the social actions pertaining to speaking for someone else and being spoken for are studied in an educational setting, namely a seminar meeting for undergraduates. The data on which this study is based consist of a total of five hours of video-recorded seminar meetings at a Swedish university.

The first part of the study focuses on three sequences in which the above mentioned social actions are central for the participants. Through CA-techniques the actions are described and examined from the participants’ perspective. When speaking for more people than oneself, the speaker runs the risk of facing objections from the co-speaker(s) present. He/she/they may not accept being spoken for, and this may be put forward as a disagreement at which point the premises of the previous turn(s) may be renegotiated.

In the second part of the study, these social actions are connected to ‘identity’. This is seen as something that is continually achieved in interaction, rather than something that is ‘reflected’ in discourse. Hence, speaking for more people than oneself can be seen as an action which ascribes cospeaker(s) an identity. The analysis shows that the disagreement sequences presented in the first part of the article function as a forum in which a specific student identity can be put on display. The disagreement is used as a resource for the students to position themselves and take on an identity as the good students.

This paper examines how participants interactionally display and construct their different orientationstowards an ongoing activity. On an overarching level, they participate in the same activity,but on a local level it can be demonstrated that they exercise activities with different goals. I referto their diverse orientations as different perspectives on the ongoing activity. The analytic emphasisis placed on how participants’ perspectives are interactionally accomplished.

The two sequences analyzed in this paper are extracted from video recordings of Swedish universitytutorials. Through close analysis of the interaction, it is demonstrated that the request forscientific terms is used as a resource for the teacher to direct the scope of the interaction. Moreover,this action demonstrates how the teacher’s perspective expresses a preferred focus on an abstract‘scientific’ level. The teacher’s perspective diverges from several students’ perspectives, which inturn demonstrates different orientations towards the ongoing activity.

From an educational point of view the study provides us with a deeper understanding of howstudents and teachers may perceive and treat the same activity in the classroom in diverging ways.In a wider context, the study also gives us insights into how different individuals interactionallyconstruct their different understandings of the same context.

In the present paper, we report findings from a study of performance appraisal interviews between middle managers and employees. The study is based on analysis of video uptake of authentic performance appraisal interviews, and through detailed examination of participant conduct and orientation, we point to structural mechanisms and institutional norms which limit the possibilities for employees to raise topics connected to negative experiences of stress in performance appraisal talk. It is argued that norms concerning ideal employeeship are shaped by a partly hidden curriculum in the organization which in turn is talked into being in the performance appraisal interviews. The study concludes that empirical attention to the social interplay in performance appraisal interactions reveal how participant conduct aligns or disaligns with institutional and social underpinnings of workplace ideals.

This paper examines how a standardized question is launched and received in a corpus of performance appraisal interviews, with a focus on how pre-formulated questions are translated into interaction. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate that the same question becomes many different actions in practice. Prefaces as well as prosodic and lexical alterations make relevant different responses, and as such, the question can be recruited to initiate diverse interactional projects such as assessments and other socially delicate activities. As a consequence, goals of uniformity and standardization may be subverted. The interactional adaptations further evidence the strength of recipient design as reformulations also result in more fitted and personalized answers. Our study contributes to the understanding of standardization versus interactionalization, and points to the strong interrelationship between question design and the fitting of response options.

How ‘inner’ processes are invoked in talk-in-interaction has been a topic for conversation analysts ever since Sacks identified ‘private thought’ as a phenomenon. This paper provides an overview of the social actions organized by use of the Swedish verb “känna” – which translates as ‘feel’ – in data from university tutorials. In this exploratory study, “känna” is not treated as a linguistic item specific to Swedish, but rather as a language-transcendent social action, referred to as ‘feel’. Three main functions are distinguished:

(1) The teacher animates the students in hypothetical but probable scenarios, in which he ascribes them different feelings. These episodes show clear pedagogical features. (2) ‘Feel’ operates as a hedging device when epistemic claims are made. Its subjective quality diminishes or eliminates potential risks of accountability. (3) ‘Feel’ is deployed in questions and formulations concerning the ongoing interaction. The teacher constructs questions eliciting progress reports with ‘feel’, whereas the students deploy ‘feel’ to formulate complaints, reflections and assessments. These formulations concern their ongoing project, which all the other participants have (varying) epistemic access to.

In sum, ‘feel’ serves as an interactional device that allows the speaker to create an interactional space in which accountability and responsibility can be negotiated.