Discursive Psychology and the “New Racism”

461DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE “NEW RACISM”Human Studies 26: 461–491, 2003.© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Discursive Psychology and the “New Racism”

KEVIN McKENZIEUniversity of Cyprus, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, P.O. Box 20537,CY-1678, Nicosia, Cyprus (E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent socialpsychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examineexamples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist politicalactivism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the ex-pense of and in preference to the work of examining participants’ own formulations of thosesame activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursivepsychology which seeks to the explore how participants’ talk is responsively oriented to fore-closing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a wayfor speakers to account for their own and others’ activities within the controversy which thatsame body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical con-text of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities wherebyspeakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some inde-pendent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episodeof talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-culturalcontact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the con-flicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement asWestern expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials,the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakersin the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they areengaged.

1. Introduction

This paper is concerned to explore research about racism and the psychologyof racist activity. In particular, it explores the theoretical and methodologicalimplications of a range of analytic work which takes as its topic discoursereferred to variously with the terms new racism (Barker, 1981), symbolic rac-ism (Kinder and Sears, 1981), aversion racism (Gaertner and Dovidio, 1986),and modern racism (McConahay, 1986) (see also Gilroy, 1987 and relateddiscussions in Gabriel, 1994, pp. 184–194; Solomos and Back, 1996). Thiswork will be contrasted with efforts in the ethnomethodological tradition ofresearch, especially as these have been extended within recent developmentsin discursive psychology (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992, 1993).

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As we will see, a great deal of work in the new racism paradigm attempts tomake use of the analytic techniques employed by ethnomethodologically-informed work. Nevertheless it often overlooks the more essential questionof how racism itself features as an accountable matter in everyday talk. Thatis, new racism research overlooks the more fundamental sociological ques-tion of how what-it-is-that-counts-as-racism is itself the accomplishment ofcomplex, situated negotiations between speakers in mundane social settings.In turn, this leads it to overlook the range of interactionally consequentialbusiness that participants pursue in the course of negotiating the relevance ofracism to the events and circumstances they discuss. In seeking to adjudicateupon the negotiations which constitute participants’ own business, new rac-ism research often misconstrues the work which that topicalization itself ac-complishes in the circumstances where it occurs.

1.1. Ethnomethodology’s Approach to Mundane Social Theorization

One aspect of ethnomethodological work that distinguishes it from other para-digms in the social sciences is its principled insistence upon the distinctionbetween participant and analyst concerns. This particular feature was origi-nally made explicit in the work of Garfinkel and his colleagues starting in thelate 1950s and early 1960s as a way of setting itself off from the then-domi-nant, Parsonian paradigm in sociology.1 This latter school of sociologicalfunctionalism was concerned to uncover the norms and values that were pre-sumed to determine social behavior across a range of different settings. Amongother things, the objective was to identify mechanisms of socialization thatinculcated the expectations and sense-making apparatuses with which mun-dane social actors perceived their relations with the world and each other. Incontrast, Garfinkel set out to explore how such explanatory conventions werethemselves an integral part of the interactional resources that social actorsassembled in seeking to justify their actions on any particular given occasion.Rather than assuming from the outset that norms and values somehow de-termine social behavior, Garfinkel instead took a step back, as it were, fromthis analytic stance and began to explore how participants themselves workto make sense of their behavior as normatively constrained. Especially rel-evant in this regard was the way that speakers account for their own and oth-ers’ activities in explanatory terms which invoke social categories (Sacks,1972, 1974, 1992).

So, for example, in examining talk where jury members deliberated upontheir decisions with reference to a set of norms regarding what constitutes ad-equate veridical reasoning, Garfinkel was not concerned with whether thosemembers’ actions were determined by the norms of decision making whichthey invoked, but rather with how assembling of such norms was itself em-

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ployed to accomplish the situated work of rendering their decisions meaningfulto and for one another in the setting of the deliberative proceedings (seeGarfinkel, 1967, pp. 104–115 and related discussion in Heritage, 1984, pp.4–5). Here, the issue is that of how normativity is imminently accomplishedin (rather than independently determinative of) the situated activity where itsrelevance is provided for. Rather than taking normativity as an essential pre-condition for social action, then, Garfinkel’s concern was to explore how theissue of what either is or is not normative itself features in the mundane ac-counting practices by which social actors make sense of their world.

It was this concern with people’s own sense-making methodology – or theirethnomethodology, as Garfinkel (1974) glossed it – that lead him to explorethe ways in which social reality is an accomplishment of the situated socialpractices by which actors formulate their sense of meaning. In contrast, Par-sons’ functionalist approach failed to make this distinction between the ana-lytic concerns of participants and those of sociological theory in its explorationof those settings where the question of norms-and-values feature for partici-pants. Participant actions were thus regarded as determined by processes ofwhich social actors themselves were largely unaware. It is in this sense thatParsonian functionalism was seen to regard mundane social actors as “cul-tural dopes” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 68). More importantly, however, by seekingto reveal the transcendent norms of behavior, such analyses neglected to con-sider the situated business that social actors work to accomplish in and throughtheir assembling of explanatory accounts. What do speakers make relevant inaccounting for some activity or event? What is at stake for them in the cir-cumstances where they do so? How, if at all, might that be consequential tothe situated circumstances in which norms are invoked? These are all ques-tions that define the project of ethnomethodological inquiry.

1.2. Discursive Psychology as an Extension of Ethnomethodology

More recently, this approach to the mundane explanations of social actors hasbeen extended in the work of discursive psychology, a project which sets outto investigate everyday accounts of psychological processes and mental struc-tures (Edwards and Potter, 1992, 1993). Within such research, psychologicalexplanations are considered for how they feature in speakers’ accounts of theirown and others’ activities, and with how such explanations are employed tomake available a range of inferences in various circumstances of social ac-countability. For instance, talk about the nature of emotion has been exploredfor the way that differences in emotional state are theorized as a way of man-aging the blameworthiness that various parties have for, say, the failure of anintimate relationship (Edwards, 1997, pp. 170–201). Similarly, claim makingabout one’s own cognitive-perceptual (in)abilities has been examined for the

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way that attribution of attitude, knowledge states, memory, etc. is directedtoward either foreclosing or else occasioning a particular inference on the partof some interlocutor(s) regarding the social accountability of specific actions(Buttny, 1993; Edwards, 1997; Middleton and Edwards, 1990).

This and a range of related research emphasizes the way that psychologi-cal explanations feature as a means by which social actors make sense ofvarious circumstances and events, thereby attending to the accountable na-ture of their own and others’ behavior. The analytic concern is not that of ei-ther warranting or sanctioning the distinction between professional and “lay”or “folk” models of psychology (Keesing, 1987), but of considering how theseand related claims feature as a part of the everyday business of conductingsocial interaction. The hallmark of such research, like that of the ethno-methodological tradition of investigation to which it is a contribution, is itsinsistence on the principle of analytic indifference to the questions that speakersraise as their own concern (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). A rather succinctdefinition of what this means is provided by Lynch (1993, p. 190) in his com-parison relating ethnomethodology to more conventional modes of analysisemployed in the social sciences (the latter of which he refers to with the termconstructive analysis):

By remaining indifferent to the aims and achievements of constructiveanalysis, ethnomethodologists try to characterize the organized uses of in-dexical expressions, including the various lay and professional uses of for-mulations. Inevitably, ethnomethodologists engage in formulating, if onlyto formulate the work of doing formulating, but unlike constructive ana-lysts, they “topicalize” the relationship between formulations and activitiesin other than truth-conditional terms. That is, they do no treat formulationsexclusively as true or false statements; instead, they investigate how theyact as pragmatic moves in temporal orders of action.

Discursive psychology’s related insistence on remaining indifferent to thetruth-conditional aspects of speaker claims concerning psychological realityis not, as some have mistakenly assumed (Burman and Parker, 1993; Burmanet al., 1996; Parker, 1990, 1998), a plea for some form of behaviorist psychol-ogy grounded in the demands of empirical purism (see Edwards and Potter,1992, p. 100). Instead, it is a principled effort to give serious analytic atten-tion to the interactional business that speakers themselves set out to accom-plish in and through the formulation of categories which invoke psychologicalexplanations. Discursive psychology neither accepts nor rejects the claims ofthe speakers who employ such psychological accounts. Rather, it adopts anagnostic stance with regard to the content of those accounts,2 opting to ex-plore the interactional business that participants undertake in the claim mak-ing activity itself.


2. The Spectre of Racism

It follows on from this that discursively oriented, psychological research whichexplores the issue of racism is concerned to consider the work that speakersundertake in talk where the definition of racism is at issue. A discursive psy-chological investigation of talk about racism would thus explore how speak-ers take up the issue of what constitutes racist activity or racially discriminatorybehavior as well as what is at stake for speakers when and where such a defi-nition is at issue in their talk. In contrast, a great deal of research that exam-ines such talk, often incorporates a set of assumptions about the nature ofracism into its analysis. Further, those assumptions are often implicitly invokedas a way of rendering a judgement on the adequacy of speaker claims. Para-doxically, such work brings to bear a presumption of what racism consists ofin an analysis of talk where it is precisely that issue which is the object ofnegotiation for the participants themselves. From the outset, then, such researchprecludes considering the occasioned basis on which various definitional cri-teria of racism feature for participants.

2.1. Hidden Thoughts and Meanings: On the Real and the Apparent

This failure to take seriously the situated, interactional business that talk aboutracism is employed to accomplish is seen in analyses of at least two differentsorts.3 In the first of these, the analyst’s implicit assumptions are made avail-able in claims concerning a set of underling mental structures which are stipu-lated to determine participants’ perceptions and representations of the socialreality to which they (those participants) refer in their talk. For example, workof the sort which purports to examine “the denial of racism” proceeds on theassumption that racist motivation is involved in talk where racism gets takenup as a topic of discussion by participants themselves. This is especially sowhere assumptions concerning the accountable nature of racism are maderelevant as a way for speakers to foreclose the potential for their own contri-butions to be construed as racially motivated (van Dijk, 1984, 1987, 1991,1993a; Kleiner, 1998a, 1998b). For example, in the distinction he draws be-tween the real and the apparent, van Dijk (1987, p. 91, emphasis added) in-troduces the assumptions upon which this sort of analysis depends:

One of the most stereotypical moves used in prejudicial talk is ApparentDenial, which usually contains a general denial of (one’s own) negativeopinions about ethnic groups, followed by a negative opinion: “I am not aracist, but . . .,” or “I have nothing against foreigners, but . . . .” [. . .] Wecall this Apparent Denial because it is not a real denial of what was said,but only a denial of possible inferences the recipient may make, as well asa statement that is inconsistent with what is actually stated in previous ornext assertions.

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What is particularly interesting about these remarks is the ambivalent way inwhich they pose the issue of speaker orientation in the talk. Here the authorgives analytic consideration to the interactional work that the speaker under-takes to resist the imputation of racism. That is, he acknowledges the actionorientation of the talk by pointing out how that talk is designed to foreclosethe negative inferences with which it might be met (“possible inferences therecipient may make”). Once having done this, however, he then proceeds tointerpret that work as confirmation of the very sort of inferences it is designedto foreclose. In other words, the speaker’s efforts to resist a reading of his orher own intent are simply dismissed as disingenuous, and the basis of thatdismissal is the analyst’s own reading of the second part of the remark (“but. . .”) upon which the first part (“I’m not a racist”) is a participant gloss. Thespeaker’s gloss is thus simply rejected as inconsistent with what the analysthimself assumes the meaning of the talk in the second part to be (i.e., “whatis actually stated”). Note also that this involves eliding the distinction betweendenying the negative character of one’s evaluation – referred to as “a generaldenial of (one’s own) negative opinions” – and denying the basis for that evalu-ation. In other words (and in spite of van Dijk’s reading to the contrary), thequoted remarks do not constitute a denial by the speaker of his or her ownnegatively evaluative opinion. Rather, they constitute a denial that that nega-tive opinion has its basis in racist discrimination. This is quite a subtle dis-tinction. However, eliding that distinction is crucial to the author’s ownanalysis of the talk. Such a reading not only neglects to provide any princi-pled criteria with which to arrive at the analytic conclusions that it does (otherthan the analyst’s own arbitrary predilection, see Potter and Wetherell, 1988),but it also fails to give due consideration to how such a response is itself oc-casioned in and on the circumstances of the talk.

What those circumstances might consist of is not made explicitly availablewith the rather brief extract of data that the author provides. However, it seemsfairly evident that the data was researcher-prompted. In other words, the talkwas generated in an investigative setting the business of which was to explorethe very definitional issues which the speaker’s own remarks there address.The tension between the real and the apparent which the author points out isthus itself an effect of an interactional encounter which is designed to gener-ate that tension.4 In van Dijk’s reading, this very feature of the analysis is it-self obscured through an appeal to social constraints on what is or is not deemedacceptable to articulate explicitly. The idea is that rather than articulate his/her racism overtly, the speaker modulates the expression of his/her underly-ing beliefs in deference to independent constraints on what is socially accept-able to say (see also related analyses in van Dijk, 1984, 1987, 1991, 1993a).There are a number of problems raised by just such an analytic approach. Theserelate both to the nature of conversational interaction as inherently dialogic(Gardiner, 1992; Holquist, 1990; Morson and Emerson, 1990), and to the way


that the conclusions are circularly related so as to inform the analytic groundsfrom which they are drawn (see Potter and Litton, 1985 for a related critiqueof work in social representation theory). Quite apart from these difficulties,however, for an ethnomethodologically-informed analysis, this approach isproblematic because it fails to explicate the different ways that such concerns(over the real-apparent tension) feature for the participants themselves.

In more recent work addressed to the question of ideological representa-tion, van Dijk (1998) further develops his approach with an appeal to: (1)mental structure, (2) social constraint, and (3) discursive representation. Here,he argues for a multidisciplinary theory relating the three modes of analysiswithin a single, integrated model:

[A] theory of ideology first of all needs to be multidisciplinary. [. . .] [M]yapproach will therefore be located in the conceptual and disciplinary tri-angle that relates cognition, society, and discourse. There are worse sitesof inquiry when dealing with the notion of ideology. First, even among thosewho deny it, ideologies are at least implicitly taken as some kind of ‘sys-tem of ideas’, and hence belong to the symbolic field of thought and be-lief, that is, to what psychologists call ‘cognition’. Second, ideologies areundoubtedly social, and often (though not always) associated with groupinterests, conflicts or struggle. [. . .] And third, many contemporary ap-proaches to ideology associate (or even identify) the concept with languageuse or discourse, if only to account for the way ideologies are typicallyexpressed and reproduced in society. [. . .] Having staked out this very broadand multidisciplinary field of inquiry, it is my contention that precisely thecomplex relationships involved here – namely, those between cognition,society and discourse – are needed in an explicit theory of ideology. (vanDijk, 1998, p. 5, italics in original)

My own research on talk about cross-cultural contact has been concerned toexamine precisely how speakers themselves address the relationships that vanDijk stipulates as a part of his own eclectic approach (McKenzie, 1998). Weshall have occasion to examine an episode of talk from that research below.As we shall see there, speakers work to manage the tension between their en-titlement to warrant the claims they make and the potentially damaging infer-ences which that entitlement raises for their own moral accountability throughan appeal to the relationships between just such analytic components. In otherwords, speakers address themselves to the same theoretical concerns (regard-ing the nature of prejudice) and employ the same analytic categories (relatingto mental structure, social groups, etc.) that van Dijk stipulates in his modelof ideology. Further, they do so in order to attend to the situated business ofrendering cross-cultural contact meaningful to an investigative undertakingwhich has that precise task as its concern. Rather than attempting to accountfor their use of those analytic resources as independently motivated, anethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology seeks to respecify the

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questions involved, by working to explicate how such theoretical constructsfeature as resources in the sense-making practices of participants.

2.2. Discourse and Anti-Cognitivist Social Psychology

The previous section was concerned to address the psychological assumptionsimplicitly made available in an ideological approach to the psychology ofracism. A second approach to the analysis of talk about racism that we willconsider here is one which seriously attempts to redress the analytic reduc-tion of social action to underlying mental representation. In some respects,this work has an advantage over the sort of integrated or eclectic approachdiscussed above because where that model invokes each of the constituentanalytic components (the mental, social and discursive) to explain each of theothers at various points in its analysis, research of the second kind sets out tocounter such reductionist explanations.5 In particular, it is concerned to redressefforts that reduce the analysis of social action to underlying mental structures(see also Gergen, 1985, 1989; Parker, 1989; Parker and Shotter, 1990). Thissort of analysis thus shares ethnomethodology’s and discursive psychology’sconcern with the action orientation of participants.

There is a quite subtle but crucially significant difference here, however,because this body of work (unlike discursive psychology) elides the distinc-tion between the responsive orientation of speakers in the circumstances ofthe talk with that of situation external social structure, glossed under the ru-bric of context. Often the appeal to such structure is articulated in terms ofracism. For instance, in a recent programmatic statement addressing theseissues, Nick Hopkins and his colleagues critically examine research in socialcognition for how it obscures the social and material basis of racism throughits claims to identify certain mental structures underlying novel expressionsof racial prejudice (Hopkins et al., 1997, pp. 310, 311, 312, italics added):

[T]here is a real sense in which the new racism’s account of the psycho-logical dynamics of racism functions as a counter-argument to those whowould combat racism through transforming social structure. [. . .] If thepractical effect of the ‘new racism’ is the way in which its account of thedynamics of racism counters analyses which identify the role of power inthe construction and dissemination of racialized understandings of socialproblems, any commonality between it and contemporary social psychol-ogy must raise questions about the degree to which our discipline is ableto act as a critique. [. . .] [A]s ‘race’ is not a natural category but ratherracialized categories are socially constructed, we need a social psychologywhich focuses upon the social processes through which categories are con-structed (and racialized). And such a social psychology must pay properregard to action and social practice. Simply put, the effective categoriza-tion of people is not ‘just’ a matter of mental representation or classifica-


tion (Jenkins, 1994). Rather, it entails action interventions into, and indeedconstitutes, other people’s experience of the world and their place in it(Jenkins, 1994; Keith, 1993; Reicher, 1993). Thus we need a study of powerrelations and social practices which affect who is able to act on the basisof their category constructions and so make them heard and count for oth-ers.

The authors are concerned to reveal how mainstream social psychologicalresearch (especially work in social cognition) marginalizes alternative ac-counts of racism that emphasize the interactional, social and (by extension)material conditions that they take as an instance of racist exclusion and injus-tice. Of interest here, however, is the way that these authors have replaced theone form of reductionism (to cognitive-perceptual processes) with anotherwhich they gloss with the phrase “power relations and social practices”. Inother words, like the analysis of the first sort, such research privileges its ownexplanatory account of actions (glossed in terms of power relations). How-ever, in place of the psychological, they instead employ assumptions concern-ing the social as the analytic presupposition informing their examination ofthe talk that they consider. Their chief objection to research in social cogni-tion would seem, therefore, to be that it privileges an analysis of the mental atthe expense of the social.

Hopkins et al. go on to develop the implications of this in their analysis oftalk produced in an interview with a representative of an (unidentified) Eng-lish metropolitan police force (transcript reproduced in Hopkins et al. [1997,p. 320] as extract 8). Here, the speaker sets out to account for his work as apolice public relations agent, or “police-school liaison (PSL) officer”, and todiscuss the controversy surrounding his attendant role at promoting the po-lice’s profile among the community of Afro-Caribbean students at state-sup-ported secondary schools:6

And there is a small minority who have no intention of sort of conformingto the standards that we have in our society, who are very, very anti-police.And who, in their, who, I think are totally racist in their attitudes. They’retotally sort of anti-white as well. They take their resentment out on what-ever form of authority they can see, which in the case of the police is thenatural outlet for their anger really, I mean, the police are on the streets andit is the only authority that is visible to them and sort of represents, youknow, sort of, what the country stands for, so they sort of take it out on thepolice. And it is very, very, difficult to get through to that sort of person. Imean they are so biased and so ‘anti’ and we can try reasoning with thembut you know they sort of just verbally attack you all the time and do notwant to listen to what you have to say.

Hopkins et al. go on to analyze this talk as expressive of an effort to renderracial discrimination accountable through an appropriation of its original criti-cal force (ibid., p. 320):

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According to this construction, the charge of police racism is but an ele-ment of a more generally intolerant refusal to conform ‘to the standards thatwe have in our society’. Indeed the accusations about police racism aredoubly delegitimated. On the one hand their charge is but a specific instanceof a general ‘anti-white’ prejudice from those that ‘are totally racist in theirattitudes’. On the other, because the police symbolize ‘what the countrystands for’, they are specially singled out as targets and are ‘the natural outletfor their anger’. Again, this category construction means that the charge ofpolice racism is construed as saying nothing about police racism and eve-rything about the problematic nature of their presence. And in doing so,Lloyd [interviewee pseudonym] is clearly reproducing key elements of the‘new racism’. Culture is defined in relation to ‘race’ and cultural differenceconstrued as problematic. Further, the racialized other is construed as hav-ing no respect for ‘our’ way of life and ‘the standards that we have in oursociety’, and the charge of racism turned around. (cf. Barker, 1981; Billiget al., 1988)

Let us take up some of the points that the authors raise here. It seems fairlyplausible on the basis of the talk they consider that both racial discriminationand in particular racism-as-an-accountable-matter get taken up as participantconcerns. Furthermore, it seems obvious that the speaker (the PSL officer) isindeed making the accountable nature of racism relevant in this context as away of explaining (and, by implication, finding fault with) the argumentativeposition of those who are opposed to the presence of police in schools. Whatis not so clear, however, is that he is eluding or otherwise working to evadethe charge of police racism in the way that the Hopkins et al. suggest. To besure, it is possible to relate the PSL officer’s remarks to institutional racismin precisely the way that Hopkins et al. do. Alternatively, however, one couldjust as easily argue that police racism indeed does exist without that fact un-dermining the account that the PSL officer provides for opposition to policepresence. In other words, just because the police are overwhelmingly racist(the argument might go), that still does not account for why there is opposi-tion to police presence on the part of Afro-Caribbean community members.Police racism could be seen as incidental to such opposition.7 In the talkHopkins et al. consider, however, the officer’s remarks do not explicitly ad-dress either of these concerns. That is, he neither denies nor argues in supportof the view that institutional racism exists among the police.8 What he doesinstead is to argue that racism is a principle motivating factor behind opposi-tion by members of the Afro-Caribbean community to police presence inschools. Note how Hopkins et al.’s analysis ignores this deconstructive workon the part of the speaker, except perhaps insofar as it contributes to their ownobjective of rendering social psychology into a “discipline [which] is able toact as a critique” (ibid., p. 311, quoted above).

Note here that it is not so much for reasons of what the speaker says as muchas what he does not say that Hopkins et al. read his remarks as working to


exclude the interpretation of police racism.9 This particular approach to talk,in which the unrealized argumentative potential of conversational contribu-tions are incorporated into the analysis, is one that involves a sort of negativeanalytic which looks to the unspoken to account for what is said. Hopkins etal. themselves formulate this heuristic in their remarks concerning argumen-tative context, or context of controversy (ibid., p. 321):

[T]he wider implication of our analysis is that categories are constructedin and through language and must be analysed as arguments against alterna-tives (cf. Billig, 1985, 1987). Indeed, they must be located in the contextof controversy and analysed for the work that they do in such controver-sies (e.g., as arguments about the justice of certain forms of policing).

From the perspective of an ethnomethodological approach like discursivepsychology, what is problematic about this way of analysing talk is that itleaves unanswered the question of exactly how one is to decide upon what itis that is not said, which renders that which is said meaningful. In other words,there is a potentially infinite range of concerns which the speaker did notaddress but which nevertheless could have been made relevant for an inter-pretation of the topic under discussion. How is an analyst to decide upon whichinterpretation from among this infinite set the speaker’s remarks are workingto exclude?

For ethnomethodology and discursive psychology, questions of this sort areposed in reference to the relevances provided for by participants of the then-present circumstances of the conversation. Here, the issue is not which of theaccounts the analyst finds more appealing on independent grounds, nor is itwhich can be made the more convincing on subsequent consideration (as inan analysis of the sort Hopkins et al. formulate). Rather, it is a matter of whichaccount the speaker him- or herself orients to as relevant in the actual circum-stances of the conversation itself (Edwards, 1997, p. 100; Schegloff, 1999).Note too that this is not the same thing as attempting to exclude from analyticconsideration the concerns that speakers work to make inferentially available.Ethnomethodological analyses provide for such implicitly available assump-tions in work to show how inferences are oriented to by participants as dis-played in the details of their talk. The upshot here is that analytic conclusionswould need to appeal to what is demonstrably made relevant by participantsof the encounter itself, and not by others in some setting independent of thatencounter. (Even where some not then-current situation-setting is providedfor by speakers themselves, an analysis of same must show how that situa-tion-external reference is made germane by the participants in the then-cur-rent situation where its relevance is provided for). For the analyst of that talksubsequently to choose one from among an infinite set of possible relevancieswhich could have been made available in the setting is not the same thing as

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showing how it is that participants go about doing that in the setting underanalysis.

Returning to the analysis that Hopkins et al. provide in their approach tothe PSL officer’s talk, their own reading necessarily takes on a somewhatconvoluted form since the speaker’s efforts to attend to concerns with racismare themselves interpreted in terms that Hopkins et al. develop independentlyof those provided for by that speaker in the setting of the interview. Thus, wherethe PSL officer quite explicitly does orient to racism as a relevant concern inmaking sense of the tensions between the police and the Afro-Caribbean com-munity of students in the schools that he visits, Hopkins et al. set about to trans-form that orientation into something else, to make out of the PSL officer’sefforts a manifestation of his underlying motivation in terms which he him-self does not addresses (but, as mentioned before, could have addressed asincidental to an understanding of racism on the part of the Afro-Caribbeancommunity). Hopkins et al. thus transform the police officer’s explanation andits conspicuous object of reference into their own object of reference, one thathappens to implicate their speaker-subject in the demands for accountabilitywhich they seek to promote.

To push the point further here, the gloss that Hopkins et al. attach to thecontext of controversy (viz. “arguments about the justice of certain forms ofpolicing,” ibid.) is one which assumes that the substance of that controversyinheres in the injustice of police activity. It takes as given the illegitimate natureof police intervention and provides for that assumption as a backdrop againstwhich that talk is rendered meaningful. A more plausible reading in referenceto the details of the PSL officer’s talk would approach the relevant contro-versy as involving the legitimacy of implicit accusations of racism as themselvesnecessarily resistant to counter-argument and as motivated by subversive in-terests on the part of those wishing to escape responsibility for upholding thelaw. In other words, the context of controversy provided for by the PSL of-ficer here inheres in whether the school-goers to whom he refers merely bandythe accusation of police racism about in order to detract from their own reluc-tance to fulfil other, quite different demands for social accountability. Here,subversion – that is, the duplicitous representation of activities and events –itself features as a concern that the speaker takes up in his own situated analysis(see Edwards, 1997, pp. 96–100). An ethnomethodologically-informed analy-sis will set out to examine not only how duplicity is imputed to speakers, butalso how the analytic practices by which this is accomplished themselvesfeature as a part of mundane sense-making intrinsic to the setting under in-vestigation.

Again, these observations here are not an attempt to weigh in on either sideof just this question regarding whose racism is appropriately made relevantfor an account of the tensions that both Hopkins et al. and the PSL officer takeas their topic. Instead, it is a plea to examine the details of how just such a


question gets taken up by participants themselves. What is at stake for thespeakers in the conversational circumstances in and through which the prob-lematic nature of an account’s vested interest features as an object of their ownsituated analysis (see Edwards 1995, pp. 332–335; Potter 1996, pp. 124–132)?How are the various “sides” of an argument themselves made to feature as apart of the business of making sense of the activities in which speakers areinvolved (especially where those activities involve accounting for speakerbehavior in other situations to which the talk refers)? It is the failure to distin-guish between the different analytic levels entailed in these questions thatethnomethodologically-informed research finds so problematic in the workof “new racism” and similarly “critical” modes of analysis (see van Dijk,1993b, 1994, as well as related discussion in Potter et al., 1990).

3. Making Sense of Cross-Cultural Contact

In what follows, I want to explore further how ethnomethodology and dis-cursive psychology would approach talk where racism is at issue by turningto another example of interaction. This is taken from a social science inter-view that was originally conducted as part of a project to explore everydayunderstanding of cross-cultural contact in talk among British and Americanresidents of the Middle East (McKenzie, 1998). In the conversational encoun-ter represented here below, a young British couple in their early to mid-twen-ties relate their observations of racism encountered while living in the ArabianGulf country of Kuwait (interviewer contribution is indicated with abbrevia-tion ‘Int,’ otherwise pseudonyms are employed throughout, see Appendixbelow for full details of transcription conventions employed):

1 Jim And plu:s: >especially for a Bri:t< colonialism comes into i:t uh because you2 are treated lik:e: you’re so much better than: your fellow workers >be they3 Indian Thai Filipino what↑ev↓er<a:n:d [↑so:-]4 Sarita [°That’s going to make] a noise5 on the tape,° ((refers to Jim’s fidgeting))6 (1.0)7 Jim I suppo::se lots of people do: start to feel that they ↑a↓:re themselves better8 than thei:r Indian workmates or whatever.9 (1.0)

10 Sarita I think it- it also makes a lot of people more racist. Because you could come11 from a- a background in wherever u::h and- and be quite ↑hap↓py having lived

12 in- a lot of your life with >whatever< different races. Because most countries-13 >most Western countries< now have got a mix of >many different races<. But14 you come out here and all the sudden you’re put on this uh- this pedestal15 “beCAUSE YOU ARE WHITE OR WHATEVER”. A:nd u:m even someone16 who probably wasn’t racist before because he hears everyone else say “Oh17 bloody Arabs” or “Bloody Indians or whatever” he’ll start t- to behave that way

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18 as well. And you can end up being a racist person when you started off not19 being so at all. Because everyone else says “Well all Arabs are stupid so: they20 must-” y’know that sort of thing. You start to believe it. And ↑al↓so u:[:h]21 because-22 Jim [It’s true.] (smiley voice)23 Int @@ .hh hh24 (0.2)25 Sarita and also maybe that because you have a certain way of living and uh you’ve-26 eh you’ve always been accustomed to the other races in your country having27 the same sort of way of ↑li↓fe. But you come here and the Arabs and the28 Indians here really are ↑dif↓ferent. They think differently, they do everything29 differently, so you jus:t assume that they’re ↑stu↓pid because they don’t do30 things the way ↑you ↓do.31 (0.5)32 Int °Mm hm.°33 (0.5)34 Jim In fact I had a ↑friend of ↓mine who worked in university, u::m hh he:35 reckon:ed >I don’t know what he feels now (about- he’s still in the) country<36 [but-]37 Sarita [Who,] Lyle?38 (.)39 Jim >Yeah, Lyle.< When he first came ou::t after the first year or so he thought40 Kuwait was more racist than South Africa was, or more segregated.41 Sarita Yeah, he (should-) lived in South Af@ri@ca@ as well.42 (.)43 Jim Yeah. Than South Africa was.44 Int In:: what way. I don’t understand. I mean-45 (0.5)46 Sarita It’s the ↑way every↓thing’s natio↑na↓lity in this country.47 (0.5)48 Jim Yeah.49 Sarita The minute you meet someone the first thing they want to know is where50 you’re from. They’ll always:- they’ll always ask you that, it’s like the second51 question they ask you. Whereas: somewhere else >certainly in England< they52 don’t even bother to ask you. They just take you for what you ↑a↓:re. In this53 country they have to know, and that changes their enti:re perspective on- on54 YOU and what you’re like, so if you say “Well I’m from England”, Okay.55 That’s good. If you say “Well I’m from PhilipPINES” it’s a completely different56 attitude, they’ll change the way they react towards you. A:nd it’s that sort of57 society where everything depends on: where you’re- where you’re from.58 Int Who changes their attitude. Who are you talking about. (I mean)-59 Sarita I’d say mainly it’s u:m- oh I’ve always had this with uh- with probably Arabs60 and Kuwaitis. They always want to know where you’re from.

There are a number of different features about this talk that we might com-ment upon. Perhaps the most prevalent aspect to notice from the outset is howthe speakers are oriented in their undertaking to the doing of an investigativeinterview which has as its concern the defining of racism in the Middle Eastas well as the determining of how that definition is relevant for an understand-


ing of their own interpersonal relations in the region. The production or ac-complishing of this conversational encounter as just so oriented is the out-come of concerted work on their part (Edwards, 1997, pp. 84–113). Like Poe’spurloined letter (see Muller and Richardson, 1988), this is almost so obviousas to escape notice, but here the encounter is patently not about their marriage,their sense of job satisfaction, the weather, the physical environment in whichthey live, or any of an infinite number of other topics which they might haveaddressed in accounting for their experience of living in the region. Instead,it is about racism. So pervasive is the concern for racism to their discussionthat it would be easy here to assume that the relevance of racism is the au-tonomous precedent or premise that determines the understanding of cross-cultural contact they formulate, rather than to regard the establishing of thatprecedent as an achievement of interactional work in the then-present momentof the encounter. Indeed, it is this very feature where a disjunction is intro-duced between the object and the work-of-its-objectification that makes theobject of reference seem conspicuously non-contingent, “natural,” “real,”“factual” (Potter, 1996; Smith, 1978); rather than a construction, an effect oftalk, an interactional accomplishment.

The speakers’ orientation to racism as relevant for an understanding of therelations that they consider does not exist along or outside of the business ofpursuing a social science investigation into those relations. Rather, it consti-tutes that business (Schegloff, 1991, 1992). The investigation is imminentlyaccomplished in that orientation, with the paradoxical gesture by which theregard for the relevance of racism to the social relations that it is employed todecipher is formulated as distinct, as different, as separated by an interpellativemoment in which the terms of ontological dichotomy are made available. Ina great deal of conventional social sciences research, the failure ultimately toreduce one term into its opposite is often regarded as an aberration – as a prob-lematic to be resolved in a subsequent analysis of the participants’ own failedefforts, rather than as a situated accomplishment, as the purpose or design ofthe interaction. Thus, the objective of a conventional social science analysisto the questions that Jim and Sarita raise would likely entail privileging oneof their explanations at the expense of the other. In this way, the productiveambivalence in their account would be missed. Jim and Sarita would be con-strued either as racists or not, rather than both depending on the argumenta-tive trajectory either such construal makes available at a given place in theirtalk. For a reworked social science (such as ethnomethodology), however, thefailure to privilege either explanation is explored for how it features as a wayto provide for the intelligibility which the reduction of any one term into itsopposite makes possible.

In the encounter with Sarita and Jim, this involves the situated managementof conflicting demands for accountability such that the speakers concurrentlyattend to a set of different assumptions which, though mutually incompatible,

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nevertheless simultaneously inform the sense-making by which the topic ofdiscussion is rendered meaningful (Billig et al., 1988). For instance, considerhow the speakers manage the ambivalent nature of their identity status in re-lation to its significance for enhancing the credibility of their contributions tothe investigative encounter. Specifically, by providing for the relevance of theirown status as expatriate residents of the region, speakers broker their entitle-ment to comment on the circumstances which they describe since, as expa-triates impacted by the effects of social contagion, they “own” the relatedknowledge (Sharrock, 1974). This is not merely a matter of their possessingfirst-hand experience as a warrant for their specific claims (though ofcourse that is involved as well, see Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz,1988; Hammersley, 1992); but is related more to the specific claims they makeabout social contagion and their own experience of having adopted a racistoutlook as a result of their having lived in a racist environment (see esp. Sarita’sremarks in lines 10–30). After all, who best to know about the reprehensiblenature of racism than a racist him- or herself? Who best in a position to under-stand the limiting effects of a racist perspective on one’s social perceptions thanone who has adopted just such a viewpoint (see McKenzie and van Teeffelen,1993)? The very demands for accountability in which the speakers are poten-tially implicated as a corollary of their expatriate identity are here transmutedto provide for their entitlement in further warranting anti-racist claims.

At the same time, this transmutation of the social into the individual (lines18–21) is also extended in the opposite direction as well. Specifically, wherethe speakers might otherwise be held blameworthy for their racist outlook(described as such by them, line 10), they are exonerated from responsibilitysince, being the product of social influence, racism is beyond their individualcontrol.10 The social explanation here abrogates the need for an individualaccounting. Thus, speakers can provide for their status as racists and have thatstatus enhance their entitlement to comment upon the nature of racism with-out this, however, implicating them in the moral demands for accountabilityto anti-racism that would otherwise be entailed. This dual movement in whichracism is made relevant to the interview encounter is a function of the com-peting demands for accountability by which the investigative setting is con-stituted.

Note also how this ambivalence works in a very subtle way to insure thecredibility of the initial gesture whereby the interviewees attend to the topicof their discussion. That is, if Sarita and Jim were to be held individually re-sponsible for their racism, this could potentially undermine their contributionto the overall business of the encounter that they also paradoxically pursue(i.e., the business of formulating an account of cross-cultural contact whichis necessarily informed by the demands for a tolerance of difference). That is,their contribution could be undermined on the basis of duplicity, on the basisthat underlying their expression of cultural sensitivity (lines 28–30) is “really”


a desire to obscure their racist sentiments. Put another way, the intervieweesare working here to manage the dilemma between the competing demands tobe sensitive to cultural difference without reducing others to racist stereotypes.The working-up of their own status as actors affected by a racist social envi-ronment is a way in which they are able to negotiate between these otherwisemutually exclusive gestures without denying the validity of either. The prob-lem for them here is to provide for their own forthrightness and sinceritywithout that effort itself being regarded as duplicitous, and without referencesto cultural variation necessarily being construed as prejudicially reductionist.By broaching an explanation in terms of social contagion, they are able toformulate a description of cultural variation which nevertheless eschews theuse of stereotypes. In this way, the speakers are able to extend the terms whichrender racism meaningful through the back-and-forth translation of the di-chotomy between social and individual, between the very premises by whichthe notion of cultural difference is initially rendered meaningful.

Understanding the situated work that the speakers do in the way that I havejust described renders the contributions of the participants with an entirely dif-ferent significance than they might otherwise have. This extends to variousother moments in the encounter as well. For instance, the contrastive exam-ple of the South African regime that Jim relates in order to bolster his assess-ment of Kuwaiti racism (lines 34–41) need not be seen as contrived to detractfrom or obscure his own underlying racism. Rather, the Kuwaiti racism ofwhich he speaks can be regarded as incidental to his own racism. This is soeven when we acknowledge that his anecdote is formulated in such a way asto insulate it from further scrutiny, given that it is rendered as a third-partyaccount (that of a “friend”, see Potter 1996, ch. 5, esp. pp. 134–135). The ques-tion here is not whether his conversational contributions are rhetorically de-signed to foreclose possible negative inferences. Rather, the pressing analyticconcern here is how we will regard that orientation when we encounter it:whether it is to be seen within the modern analytic idiom as evasive or whetherinstead it is to be seen as adequate to the purposes of the participants as pro-vided for in their own account. In terms of this particular encounter, the prob-lematic of these speakers is again to display an orientation to the relevance ofracism for an understanding of Western involvement in the Middle East whilealso attending to the reflexive implications which the activity of so doing raisesfor them in a setting where they are potentially implicated in the negative in-ferences it raises.

Yet another way that this is accomplished here is through the speakers’reflexive commentary on their own activities. Specifically, consider theironizing remarks that Jim and the interviewer engage in with their shared asideto Sarita’s first lengthy contribution. Here Jim’s affirmation of the third-partyassessment which Sarita works up in support of her formulation of expatriateracism is responded to with affiliative laughter on the part of the interviewer.

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18 Sarita start t- to behave that way as well. And you can end up being a racist person19 when you started off not being so at all. Because everyone else says “Well all20 Arabs are stupid so: they must-” y’know that sort of thing. You start to believe21 it. And ↑al↓so u:[:h] because-22 Jim [It’s true.] (smiley voice)23 Int @@ .hh hh

Again, considering this talk in the terms I have been developing means thatrather than see this exchange as an expression of Jim’s and the interviewer’sgenuine sentiments (which are otherwise obscured in contradictory statementsmade elsewhere), its significance could be taken to lie in the more subtle andcomplicated work by which Jim is oriented to the potential for Sarita’s third-party rendition (of what everyone else says) itself to be construed as motivated.In other words, his remarks are directed to making conspicuous the constructednature of Sarita’s anecdotal account (and its orientation in providing the war-rant for her claims), and to foreclosing the potential accusation of duplicitythrough the intrusive breach of the spurious aside. In turn, the interviewer’sresponsive laugh token could also be seen as an acknowledgement of preciselysuch a ironizing gesture, a sort of assurance that Sarita’s contribution will notsubsequently be described in his analytic write-up as a mere contrivance de-signed to hide her true racist feelings. Stated differently, the issue here is howto understand this interlude. Rather than seeing it as the crude and direct ex-pression of racist sentiment on the part of the speakers, it can instead be regardedas a carefully managed intrusion that is reflexively oriented to limiting the in-terpretative parameters that are applicable in the encounter. With this momen-tary interlude, the speakers are able to manage the very complicated interactionalbusiness of the situation at hand. Thus, not only do they attend to the demandsfor accountability to assumptions concerning racism as well as their own epis-temological warrant to comment thereupon, but they also work reflexively toforeclose the potential for that work itself to be construed as motivated throughan act of self-referential parody.11 Such is the subtlety of managing the tensionsof accountability in an investigative endeavour of this sort, where participantsface the risk of having their contributions understood in terms that are alien tothe understandings they work to provide for within the encounter itself.

Another aspect of this talk that relates to the concerns Hopkins et al. raiseis that entailed by the contribution recorded at lines 49–60, in which Saritaelaborates on the racist nature of the social environment. If nowhere else, hereat least it would appear is an example of talk that expresses the “new racism”since it seems fairly obvious how the charge of racism levelled against “Ar-abs and Kuwaitis” (lines 59–60) is “really” just a matter of blaming the vic-tim, a sort of pre-emptive retaliatory strike designed to head-off the accusationof racism potentially directed at the speaker herself. An alternative reading,however, would again be one that sees these remarks as oriented to extendingthe demands for an anti-racism to domains where they are not otherwise taken


to be relevant. This is not just a question of turning the accusation of racismaround, but rather of further extending it in such a way that what-is-taken-to-constitute-racism gets defined in terms that simultaneously attend to the de-mands for an awareness of and sensitivity to cultural difference. Rather thanregarding this as a matter of merely paying lip-service to such demands, andof dealing with them so that the speakers can then get on with the real businessof placing the blame for racism back on the victims, an ethnomethodologicalapproach would see this as a matter of their attending to a range of otherwiseconflicting and mutually exclusive premises by which the notion of racism isrendered meaningful in the first place. Here in this setting, this means formu-lating an account in which both the social and the individual (structure andagency) are mutually elaborative in a way that forestalls the accusation ofindividual blame while nevertheless attending to the accountable nature ofracism as a social phenomenon. Put another way, it is not that these devicesare not oriented to resisting the accusation of racism. Rather, they are so ori-ented in the very specific context where racism has already been renderedintelligible through reference to a particular understanding of the structure-agency dichotomy in which structure is seen to determine agency.12

A final point of comparison with Hopkins et al. worth noting here is thevariable way that attention to matters of national identity is made relevant inthe analysis of action that these speakers formulate. Consider, for example,how Sarita approaches the regard for national origin as an instance of racistdiscrimination. That is, the distinguishing of individuals on the basis of na-tional identity is seen as an instance of racist behavior.

49 Sarita The minute you meet someone the first thing they want to know is where50 you’re from. They’ll always:- they’ll always ask you that, it’s like the second51 question they ask you. Whereas: somewhere else >certainly in England< they52 don’t even bother to ask you. They just take you for what you ↑a↓:re. In this53 country they have to know, and that changes their enti:re perspective on- on54 YOU and what you’re like, so if you say “Well I’m from England”, Okay.55 That’s good. If you say “Well I’m from PhilipPINES” it’s a completely different56 attitude, they’ll change the way they react towards you. A:nd it’s that sort of57 society where everything depends on: where you’re- where you’re from.

Note the contrast between this and the work that Hopkins et al. (1997, p. 319)do to make the details of birth, education and place of residence accountablyrelevant in determining national identity:

[H]e [the PSL officer] represents black people born, educated and living inBritain as “West Indians” and ascribes to them a set of cultural values andpractices that sharply differentiate them from people “over here”. Further,not only do black people constitute an alien other whose way of life is nodifferent from that “over there”, but their cultural difference is used to ex-onerate the police from the charge of racism.

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As Hopkins et al. point out, the PSL officer’s gloss (“West Indians”) ignorescritical details concerning birthplace and country of upbringing in assigning –or, in this case, failing to assign – national identity. The suggestion here is thatthis failure to make the proper connection between such details and nationalidentity constitutes an expression of racism. In contrast, for Sarita, exactly theopposite is the case: it is attention to national identity in the first instance(however determined) that constitutes racist discrimination. The point here isthat what gets regarded as an instance of racism is itself contingent on theinteractional work that is pursued in the specific circumstances of the analy-sis. Sarita’s interpretation of attention to national origin contributes to heroverall depiction of social contagion as an account of racism. Likewise,Hopkins et al.’s approach to the question of how birth, details of residence,etc. are made relevant in determining national identity here contributes to theirinverse reading of the PSL officer’s talk as directed to foreclosing the accusa-tion of institutional racism.13 Thus, we can see that broaching the implicitdistinction between the social and the individual (structure and agency) in-volves a directional component where the one is seen to originate in the other,the social in the individual (where the PSL officer “exonerates” the social bodyfrom accountability) or else the individual in the social (where Sarita abne-gates individual responsibility for social action). Instead of attempting todetermine the direction of origin, we note how the dichotomy is a resourcewhereby accountability is managed through the specific formulation of thisdirectional orientation. The modern assumption of a distinction between thetwo is the background against which the formulation of that problematic isrendered meaningful in the first instance.

Note again how this way of analysing the talk contrasts markedly with, say,the approach that van Dijk develops in his account of ideology discussedabove. Where there he seeks to explore how the mental, the social and thediscursive are interrelated, here we can see how that interrelationship itselfgets taken up (in part, at least) as the concern of the participants themselves.Thus, where van Dijk works to develop an account of talk in terms of sharedsocial influence and common group interest (often as distinguished from in-dividual, personal interest; see van Dijk, 1998, ch. 3, pp. 28–52), it is just suchan account which is employed by these speakers to manage the tricky situ-ated business of the interview setting where attending to the demand of theircategory entitlement is potentially in conflict with that of working to condemnracist discrimination. This is a feature of the talk which is simply missed inan analysis of the sort that looks to substantiate such a distinction rather thanexamining how that distinction features as a part of the situated interactionalbusiness of participants.

All of these features of the talk we have examined here indicate that thequestion of racism, of the definition of racism and of that definition’s relevancefor an understanding of circumstances to which some speakers may or may


not themselves be a party are complex matters of impending relevance to thosespeakers themselves in the circumstances of their talk. Instead of seeking toadjudicate upon the issue which those speakers raise there, my objective hasbeen to demonstrate that a far more interesting and insightful approach is onewhich explores how the adjudication of this (or, for that matter, any other) issueby speakers is a situated accomplishment.

4. Discussion

Having examined the example of talk reproduced in the previous section, weare perhaps now in a better position to return to the issue of the social psy-chological study of racism with which we began this paper (and which, tovarying degrees, both van Dijk and Hopkins et al. direct their own contribu-tions). One of the things we have seen in considering how racism features asa topic of talk is that the failure to distinguish between analyst and participantconcerns is a significant difference between ethnomethodological analyses andthose with which they have been contrasted. From an ethnomethodologicalperspective, one of the most serious shortcoming of this latter work is that itoverlooks the sense-making practices by which the notion of racism is ren-dered meaningful to and for participants in circumstances where it features astheir own expressed concern. This is a serious oversight given the definitionalobjective and charge of a social psychology to investigate social actors’ un-derstanding of their own and others’ interactional relationships.

For the participants whose talk we considered in the previous section, theissue was not one of whether racism is itself defensible. Instead, it was an issueof deciding upon what particular circumstances and events constitute racistbehavior. Thus, for those speakers, the work they pursued was to establish thenature of the activities they discussed as an instance of racism. Moreover, wesaw that the potential for their own behavior itself to be construed as racistwas paradoxically employed in the service of formulating specific activities(like attention to national identity) as accountably racist. Throughout, racismwas seen to feature as an accountable matter, and speakers proceeded in theinteractional business which they pursued with that assumption pervasivelybeing made relevant to their talk.

It might be tempting to say that by exploring these participant concerns,we overlook the more obvious point. Specifically, we would be overlookinghow the speakers work to obscure their racist intentions, thereby reproducingelements of the “new racism” in much the same way that Hopkins et al. claimwith regard to the PSL officer. After all, is it not readily apparent how the chargeof racism levelled against “Arabs and Kuwaitis” (lines 59–60) merely servesto distract from the speaker’s own racist intentions? But how are we to know?On what basis are we to decide whether the events that Sarita and Jim refer to

482 KEVIN MCKENZIE

are accurately depicted by them or are, instead, distorted versions of the events,formulated thus in order to hide their own true opinion? Put another way, ifthe individuals to whom Sarita and Jim refer are indeed motivated by racismwhen distinguishing between different people on the basis their national iden-tities, then an analysis which attributes those speaker claims to an effort atobscuring racism would be completely misdirected. But, if we were to assumethat this were the case, then how would we recognise a charge of racism whichwas not turned around, one which was genuine? On what basis would we beable to distinguish between the two?

As I have tried to argue above, we do not need to answer such questionsprecisely because they are questions that the speakers themselves do not ad-dress. While such questions may appear for us to have immediate and compel-ling relevance to the talk under scrutiny, this is not the same thing as showingthat they have the same relevance for the participants here in this setting. Whatan ethnomethodological approach calls for in an investigation of the concernswhich speakers actually do address. So, for instance, what van Dijk might taketo be a “denial” of racism here is talk which is itself oriented to accomplish-ing some rather complicated interactional business. That business has to dowith ratifying the moral demands of anti-racism in the setting of the talk’sproduction. This is because it is precisely there in the circumstances of thattalk that the speaker’s remarks have the potential to be construed as an en-dorsement of sentiments with which that speaker does not agree. Where vanDijk’s analysis would look to the speaker’s intentions to account for that ex-pression of anti-racism, ethnomethodology looks to the conflicting demandsinherent in the occasion of the talk for such an account.

Why would we need to look anywhere else other than in the demands ofthe setting to account for the talk that takes place there? In other words, whatis to be gained by the sort of analysis which looks outside (beyond, beneathor above) the demands of the setting to account for the talk which constitutesthat setting? Presumably, if I understand the claims of the new racism approach,one thing to be gained is that we would be able to uncover the source of rac-ism. We could gain insight into factors which would otherwise be obscured.For instance, we could reveal how asymmetrical power relations are system-atically obfuscated in accounts, or how cognitive structures influence or de-termine some speakers’ perceptions of the social realities which they describe(or any combination of these factors). If this is the case, then, why not seek todevelop the methodological resources with which to contest the validity ofsuch accounts.

The answer that ethnomethodology gives is that by doing so, we neglect toconsider the more fundamental order of business concerning what it is thatparticipants themselves work to accomplish when and where they provide forsuch analytic resources. In other words, we lose sight of how the mundanetheorization of social action is itself oriented to the accomplishment of


interactionally consequential business (like attributing blame, justifying ac-tions, etc.) precisely because we seek to intervene upon the questions thatspeakers raise. This prevents us from examining what it is those speakersactually do in those settings because our intervention there constitutes anotherand entirely different order of business than the investigation of the setting.

On the whole, then, we can see that ethnomethodology works to respecifythe domain of inquiry in the analysis of talk. In so doing, it seeks to exploreareas of activity which are otherwise entirely overlooked. These areas arenothing less than the situated business which social actors themselves pursue.14

That business can be quite complicated, to be sure. As I have tried to argue inmy analysis above, speakers are oriented in their remarks to foreclosing thepotential to be found accountable as racist. Yet I have also tried to show howattending to the accountable nature of racial discrimination is itself a constitu-tive feature of the situated undertaking in which cultural difference is renderedmeaningful to begin with. In other words, sensitivity to cultural difference andthe resistance to racial discrimination are mutually co-implicative. They aretwo gestures by which the meaning of cross-cultural contact is rendered avail-able. By seeking to adjudicate between these two gestures – to mitigate thedilemmatic tension between them – we overlook the more fundamental issueof how it is that that tension provides for the sense of cross-cultural contact inthe first place (Latour, 1993). Managing and sustaining the tension betweenthe two gestures, it would seem, is the business of the participants in the talkconsidered in the previous section – not simply the “denial” or “turning around”of the charge of racism.

5. Conclusion

This paper has been an attempt to articulate some of the key differences be-tween ethnomethodologically-informed approaches to talk-in-interaction andother approaches which also employ talk as an object of analysis. One of theprincipal differences that distinguishes such schools are the respective under-standings of the phenomenon under investigation. For ethnomethodologically-informed work, talk is regarded as the sole analytic object with the emphasisbeing on how conversations are activities wherein participants ongoingly workto manage complex and often contradictory demands for accountability. Thosedemands, in turn, are seen as imminent to the situated circumstances of theconversational setting.

We reviewed two selected examples of analysis to contrast with ethno-methodology. These examples were chosen because they are quite direct intheir claims to develop a “critical” approach with the view of having a posi-tive effect in reversing (or, at least, contesting) social injustice and oppres-sion. I pointed out that this same concern for social justice is itself taken up

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by participants as a part of their own efforts to establish the matter of whatsuch injustice consists in, of how it is manifest, of what details of activity it isconstituted by. In this regard, both the critical approaches to such talk and theparticipants of that talk share the same concerns to redress social wrong. Thedifference is in whose activity each of the respective parties looks to elabo-rate its critical claims.

I also pointed out that ethnomethodologically-informed research (includ-ing, especially, discursive psychology) seeks to respecify traditional domainsof inquiry such that the practice of analysis itself is examined. This was con-trasted with critical approaches which regard talk as a vehicle for some otherindependent feature (such as structural racism, some cognitive mechanism,etc.) which is said to manifest itself in (or “interface” with) the activity of talk.Because such approaches regard talk as heuristic tools with which to gainaccess to some independent domain, they forego exploring how that gaining-of-access is itself the work of participants. In considering this work, I notedthat like ethnomethodological research, such work too stresses the action ori-entation of talk. However only ethnomethodological approaches look exclu-sively to the then-present activities of participants as providing for the relevantconcerns with which to understand those activities.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following individuals for their useful comments onearlier drafts of this paper: Teun van Dijk, Mary Horton-Salway, HowardMortley, Jean-Francois Prunet and Margaret Wetherell. Thanks is also due toanonymous journal referees for their valuable input.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

The transcription of talk that appears above is based on the well-known set of conventionsinitially developed by Jefferson (1985; see also Sacks et al., 1974), and extended by Du Bois(1991; Du Bois et al., 1993). Included among these conventions in the extracts above are thefollowing:

pause timing between turns-at-talk (1.0)in tenths of second, indicated insingle parentheses

full stop indicates completion it also makes a lot of peopleintonation more racist.

comma indicates continuing intona- they do everything differently,tion

underlining indicates additional even someone who probably wasn’tstress racist before


prolongation of sound indicated I suppo::se lots of people do:with colon(s) start to feel

false starts indicated with a he’ll start t- to behave that waydash followed by a single space

quotation as a presentational because he hears everyone else sayfeature “Oh bloody Arabs” or “Bloody

Indians or whatever”

arrows precede marked rise or fall assume that they’re ↑stu↓pidin intonation

talk delivered with an increase >certainly in England< they don’tin speed indicated with inward even botherpointing guillemot

audible inhalation .hh

audible exhalation hh

syllable of laughter @

whispered passage quieter than °That’s going to make a noise onsurrounding talk the tape°

ALL CAPS indicate passage that you’re put on this pedestal beCAUSEis louder than surrounding talk YOU ARE WHITE OR WHATEVER.

speaker overlap indicated with Sarita u:[:h] because-square brackets Jim [It’s true.]

non-overlapping, contiguous talk Jim Yeah.between speaker turns indicated Sarita The minute you meetwith no line space

doubtful or uncertain transcrip- Who are you talking about. (I mean)-tion in single parentheses

editorial comment in double ((refers to Jim’s fidgeting))parentheses, italicized

Notes

1. For a review of these developments in the history of sociological inquiry, see Garfinkel,1952, 1967, 2001; Heritage, 1984; Hilbert, 1992, 1995; Schegloff, 1991, 1992; Sharrockand Anderson, 1986.

2. Though see the remarks in Edwards (1997, p. 95) concerning the subtle distinction be-tween a position that is agnostic on the ontological question of the psychological domainand one that exclusively regards reference to the mental as merely another form of talk(where he cites Coulter [1989] and Rorty [1980] as examples of this latter position). Potterand Edwards (in press) address this in greater detail in their response to Jeff Coulter’s(1999) recent critique of discursive psychology, and work there to distinguish their projectfrom the body of analyses with which Coulter confuses them.

486 KEVIN MCKENZIE

3. I have referred to both of these under the broad rubric of new racism research because,like the related work cited in the introduction above, they share an approach to the ex-pression of an anti-racist argumentative position as concealing racist intent under a novelor “new” guise. I will confine my discussion here to these specific examples of work whichseek to analyze talk-in-interaction, though the general point I will make could be extendedto related work, including that which employs other analytic heuristics such as the ex-amination of statistical findings generated from questionnaire responses, etc. (see Potterand Wetherell, 1987).

4. Schegloff (1998) makes a similar point in his response to Wetherell’s (1998) recent cri-tique of conversation analysis. Similarly, Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) develop thepoint at considerable length in their investigation of the language of youth subcultures.Providing a detailed examination of the accounts produced in interviews with punks, goths,hippies, rockers, etc., they explore how speakers reflexively attend to the significance oftheir own contributions to the interviews in which they take part for the analytic findingsto be generated by the investigation. For related discussions from different domains ofresearch, see Atkinson and Silverman, 1997; Brannigan, 1997; Hester and Francis, 1994;Osborne and Rose, 1999.

5. A comparison along these lines is somewhat complicated by the fact that van Dijk statesexplicitly that his approach is one which sets out to avoid reductionism of precisely thissort (see esp. 1998, pp. 10, 26). From the perspective of an analysis which looks to thesituated demands of the interactional setting to account for the talk, however, such claimsmerely beg the question. Rather than an account which avoids reductionism (through anappeal suggestive of analytic triangulation), this might instead be seen to constitute athreefold proliferation of reductionist explanatory resources, resulting in the potentialfor no less than six reductionist accounts of talk-in-interaction.

6. Hopkins et al. describe that controversy as “especially heated because of black youths’experiences of police racism . . . with PSL’s critics arguing that it [the public relationscampaign] brings police racism into the school environment . . .” (1997, p. 313). Noticethat such a description entails a range of analytic presuppositions regarding the nature ofthe investigative object. That is, implicit in their description is the assumption: (1) thatwe know beforehand what it is that racism consists of (versus, its definition being acontentious matter of some concern to the participants), and (2) that the professionalactivities of the interviewee, the PSL officer, are ones that constitute an instance of rac-ism (versus this contention being a matter for negotiation in the talk under considera-tion).

7. Along these lines, it might even actually support the speaker’s version of opposition topolice presence for him to argue that there exists police racism and to provide evidenceof its prevalence since doing so would potentially foreclose the inferential trajectory thatHopkins et al. pursue in their analysis (in which the contribution is taken to imply eva-sion on the speaker’s part). In the following section, we shall have occasion to considertalk where this is precisely the kind of argumentative work that speakers undertake.

8. Indeed, Hopkins et al. themselves remark upon how “the charge of police racism is con-strued [by the PSL officer] as saying nothing about police racism” (ibid.).

9. One could, of course, reason that it is the inexplicit nature of the inferential aspect ofsuch talk that renders its racist character so insidious (and therefore dangerous). This is,of course, essentially the analytic position by which the new racism paradigm of researchis characterized. Billig (1991, pp. 107–121) and others (Shotter and Billig, 1998) arguealong similar lines and it is principally this feature that distinguishes their project ofrhetorical psychology from the more ethnomethodologically-informed project of discur-sive psychology.


10. Along these lines, Mulkay notes how “it is precisely the symbolic separation of humourfrom the realm of serious action that enables social actors to use humour for seriouspurposes” (1988, p. 1; quoted in Edwards and Potter, 1992, p. 113).

11. There is nothing, for instance, to preclude the argument that “Kuwaitis and Arabs” areas much the victims of social contagion as are the speakers themselves. Elsewhere(McKenzie, 2000), I touch on how this argument features in talk about cross-culturalcontact where accounts of acculturation are employed to exonerate individual blame ofcultural Others referred to in a narrative (with remarks such as “but she can’t help her-self, I mean she’s been raised that way”). Similarly, Garfinkel (1967) takes up the issueof how individual action is rendered meaningful with reference to structural constraintin his discussion of bureaucratic record keeping. The opposite tack, of course, would beto hold structural constraint accountable to individual implementation – as, for example,where one is accused of “hiding behind the rules,” or of implementing bureaucratic policyin ways that manipulate individual action.

12. Another interesting thing about this talk is how Sarita’s characterization of the contras-tive case of England here is formulated in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of itsbeing interrogated or otherwise undermined through the vocal speed-up in delivery, itseffect being to introduce the point as an aside which is beyond the main argument beingmade regarding the case of Kuwaiti racism (“somewhere else >certainly in England< theydon’t even bother to ask you,” lines 51–52). The business she is about here is, of course,to make attention to national difference accountable as an instance of racism, and not toopen-up for scrutiny the question of relative difference. The contrast is thus made rel-evant only insofar as it contributes to her main point, and that delicate foreclosure workis attended to in the subtle details of delivery.

13. This same point has been made elsewhere, of course. For instance, in a previous issue ofthis same journal, Scott Harris (2000) develops a similar theme regarding the in situconstitution of meaning in his discussion of theorists working in the phenomenologicaland pragmatic traditions of philosophy. The implications of their work are clearly reso-nant with the concerns of ethnomethodology’s program, as Harris himself points out. Oneof the ways that ethnomethodology’s program departs from that philosophical tradition,however, is in its development of the methodological implications for exploring partici-pant business. Unfortunately, Harris fails to carry through on this aspect in his discus-sion. Thus, where he raises the question of how equality features as a participant concern(and where, like me, he calls for analytic attention to how this takes place), he neverthe-less ends up looking to an independent source to decide the question of what constitutesequality (grounding it in the claims of Dewey), all as a way to provide a rationale for hisown research. Harris’ ultimate concern in this article would seem to be that of appropri-ating participant constructions of equality (or inequality) in order to employ them inpursuing the same issue which they (those participants) do on different and independentgrounds. This begs the very question Harris himself raises regarding the in situ determi-nation of the phenomena at issue (equality). As a procedural method it entails abandon-ing ethnomethodology’s approach of analytic indifference at just the moment when thatapproach promises to yield insights into how social phenomena are produced (Garfinkel,1967, 1974, 2001; Bogen and Lynch, 1990; Lynch, 1993). Harris’ efforts to situate ana-lytic findings in relation to Dewey’s philosophy (no matter how compelling on othergrounds) constitutes an a postiori appropriation of ethnomethodology’s procedures inorder to privilege a potentially competing definition of the matter under consideration inthe talk being investigated, much in the way that I have argued Hopkins et al. do in theiranalysis of the PSL officer’s talk.

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