The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions

Abstract

This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despite the original declaration, non-speech turn-taking systems have evaded close scrutiny for the past four decades. By turning our attention to such a system here, this study makes two contributions: firstly, to the sociology of turn-organized activities (through a comparison of the central features of turn-taking for conversation with pool skating) and, secondly, to the study of how bodily actions can accomplish pre-beginnings (since in pool skate sessions, this is the place to settle the matter of turn allocation in order to avoid overlaps in riding).

We would like to extend our thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments and their willingness to revisit the manuscript after a major overhaul. We would also like to thank Lorenza Mondada, Jean Wong, and all of the skaters that made this analysis possible.

ORCID

Jonas Ivarsson

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3402-525X

Christian Greiffenhagen

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7544-9246

Notes

¹ The material was recorded at a private facility. The research was thus carried out by invitation of the owners, and the participants have agreed to our use of the images.

² Due to differences in visual quality between the recordings, we are only showing images from the second session in the analyses.

³ For ease of comparison we will keep the numbering used by SSJ and we have quoted the original formulation in square brackets.

⁴ The time for each frame is given in the format of “hh:mm:ss.s,” i.e. hours (where necessary), minutes, seconds, and fractions of a second. All times are relative to the start of the session/recording.

⁵ This is defined by his footedness, i.e., preference for riding in the “regular stance,” which means that the left foot goes first.

⁶ The trucks are the two parts that connect the wooden deck to the wheels.