Talk and Social Structure is an up-to-date and provocative survey of current developments combining the complementary fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The book provides a distinctive debate that relates these innovative areas to important issues in the social sciences.
Including contributions from many of the world leaders in these fields, the book offers both new theoretical depth and an extensive range of empirical studies that focus on the reflexive relation of everyday talk and social structure. Contributors include Emanuel A. Schegloff, John Heritage, Thomas P. Wilson, Hugh Mehan, Douglas W. Maynard, George Psathas, Paul ten Have, Robert Hopper, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Graham Button, and David Greatbatch, with a thematic chapter from the editors. Through the use of many examples, they demonstrate that studies of talk are important in their own right, while also having fundamental theoretical significance for social analysis.

""NowHere is a fascinating collection of essays, led off by an introduction of shrewd, comprehensive readings of space-time problems in the thought of the leading theorists of modernity and late (post) modernity."--George E. Marcus, Rice University

""NowHere represents one of the liveliest and most original attempts to rethink modernity on the contemporary scene. The focus on real time and real place generates a sense of intensity and urgency that is rare in social science writing."--Sherry B. Ortner, University of Michigan

"Look what Friedland, Boden, and their fellow authors have put into this space: it's about time! . . . They establish the inadequacy of the vacant temporal and spatial geometries most social science adopts unthinkingly, point the way to reflection on time and space as rich, dynamic, interacting media, and have a lot of fun along the way."--Charles Tilly, New School for Social Research

"Modernity is indeed the spatio-temporality of the 'now here.' It is the empty time and space of the disciplines and technology as well as the lived time-space of being in the world. This book is a panoramic and sustained investigation of the 'chronoscape' of "la condition moderne--from the negative space of the painter's tableau, to the proximate immediacy of face-to-face communication, to the eschatological time of Judaic myth. All of this is itself located in the concrete rhythm and place of the contemporary city, the workday, the family, the mass media. This book is essential in order to grasp the spatio-temporal recasting of thought in the social and cultural sciences."--Scott Lash, Lancaster University