Self-Help in Calls for Help With Problem Neighbors

Abstract

In telephone calls to United Kingdom mediation centers for disputing neighbors, participants deal with clients' prior efforts at resolving the problem. Where no such efforts are mentioned in initial complaint narratives, there follows a typical sequence of actions. On the evident completion of the complaint, mediators (M) ask whether efforts have been made to speak with the problem neighbor. Clients and M treat the question not only as information seeking but as normatively accountable, orienting to this by various kinds of “dispreference” marking, speech perturbation in M's question turn, and by the elicitation and provision of accounts. Accounts claim various kinds of inability, difficulty, strong probability of failure, or reasons to be fearful of the consequences. It is generally at this point that M provides a description of what the mediation service can offer given that mediation will involve precisely what the client has just accounted for as problematical—talking to the neighbor.

Notes

Relevant to that are the familiar moral-political categories of people such as welfare scroungers, beggars, the unemployed, asylum seekers, and so on. In Britain, one is nolonger entitled to unemployment benefit by being unemployed. The category is “job-seeker,” and it is called the “job-seeker's allowance.” So, again, help is conditional on efforts to help oneself.

This research is part of the authors' Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (UK) funded project RES–148–25–0010, “Identities in neighbour discourse: Community, conflict and exclusion.”

The omission of definite articles in this turn is standard in the speaker's Yorkshire, England dialect.

“Doesn't even go to school” again uses the historic present tense, generalizing the boy's truancy as regular and persistent, a “dispositional” feature of his actions: See Edwards (1994, 1995, 2006) on this and other “scripting devices” by which the recurrent nature of events and actions is formulated.

Possible completion is a conversation analytic term generally used of turn constructional units (TCUs; see Note 6) or of turns, but here we use it of an extended sequence such as a complaint narrative whose completion, like stories in general, often require some kind of marking as to when they are done (cf. Sacks, 1992, on telling stories).

TCU is turn constructional unit, the term in conversation analysis for what turns are made from and what minimal complete turns can consist of, which is any word or combination of words that can perform a recognizably complete action or response.

It is possible that C's repairable “I don'-” (Extract 3, line 5) was a start on the “I don't know” that she went on to say; but at the point of its production, “I don'-” is cut off and “I da:ren't” then inserted in its place.