Using conversation analysis to explore the nature of argument, asymmetry, and power on talk radio, this book focuses on the interplay between the structures of talk in interaction and the structures of participation on talk radio. In the process, it demonstrates how conversation analysis may be used to account for power as a feature of institutional discourse.
To address a number of key issues in the study of institutional communication and conflict talk, a case study of a British talk radio show is presented, stimulating some penetrating questions:
* What is distinctive about interaction on talk radio?
* What is the basis of the communicative asymmetries between hosts and callers?
* How are their arguments constructed, and in what ways does the setting enable and constrain the production of conflict talk?
These questions are answered through the detailed study of conversational phenomena, informed by a critical concern for the relationship between talk and social structure.
This book will be of interest to a wide readership consisting of academics, advanced undergraduates, and postgraduate students in a range of courses in sociology, linguistics, media/communication/cultural studies, anthropology, and popular culture.

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. Children, Technology and Culture looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology:
*children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships
*the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family
*the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects
*the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology
_ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two.

Increasingly children are being seen as competent social agents in their own right, rather than as inchoate versions of adults. This poses questions for how we understand the social worlds of pre-adolescent children and their relationships with each other, as well as adults.
This volume explores children's relationships from a variety of theoretical and methodological standpoint, through the use of a wide range of empirical data. A practical application of the children's social competence model, it focuses on children's social interactions, as opposed to what children's social competence means from the adult perspective of researchers and policy makers. It looks at the ways in which children are allowed, by adults, to be socially competent.

A text which addresses the relationship between childhood, competence and the social arenas of action in which children live their lives. Taking issue with the view that children are merely apprentice adults, the contributors develop a picture of children as competent, sophisticated social agents, focusing on the contexts which both enable and constrain that competence.

Using conversation analysis to explore the nature of argument, asymmetry, and power on talk radio, this book focuses on the interplay between the structures of talk in interaction and the structures of participation on talk radio. In the process, it demonstrates how conversation analysis may be used to account for power as a feature of institutional discourse.
To address a number of key issues in the study of institutional communication and conflict talk, a case study of a British talk radio show is presented, stimulating some penetrating questions:
* What is distinctive about interaction on talk radio?
* What is the basis of the communicative asymmetries between hosts and callers?
* How are their arguments constructed, and in what ways does the setting enable and constrain the production of conflict talk?
These questions are answered through the detailed study of conversational phenomena, informed by a critical concern for the relationship between talk and social structure.
This book will be of interest to a wide readership consisting of academics, advanced undergraduates, and postgraduate students in a range of courses in sociology, linguistics, media/communication/cultural studies, anthropology, and popular culture.

The landscape of broadcast news media is constantly changing, partly under the influence of changing technology but also due to changes in the social role of television journalism. The Political Interview: Broadcast Talk in the Interactional Combat Zone takes a sociological and linguistic approach to examining these changes, focusing on the discourse practices that are associated with them. Tracing contemporary developments in the ways that interviews with politicians are conducted in a range of televised formats, Ian Hutchby analyzes increasing tendencies towards conflictual interactions that may fundamentally impact the nature of political communication and the role of news interviews in the democratic process. Training the sharp analytical lens of conversation analysis on the actual discourse of live broadcast news, Hutchby's book is both timely-addressing academic and populist concerns about infotainment, dumbing down, and political mistrust among the electorate-and relevant to a range of specialists in sociolinguistics, communication studies, political studies, journalism and media studies, and sociology.

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. Children, Technology and Culture looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology:
*children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships
*the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family
*the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects
*the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology
_ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two.