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Conflict as interactional accomplishment in Japanese: Arguments in university faculty meetings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

SCOTT SAFT
SCOTT SAFT
Affiliation:
Hawai‘i Tokai International College, 2241 Kapiolani Blvd, Honolulu, HI 96826, ssaft@tokai.edu
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Abstract

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.I want to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms that were of tremendous help in revising this article. I also would like to thank Jack Bilmes, Dina R. Yoshimi, Jane Hill, and Yumiko Ohara for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Takehiro Goto, Masaaki Hattori, Dai Kamimaru, and Toshiki Sato in gathering and transcribing the data. I alone am responsible for any errors which may remain.

Keywords

Conflictargumentconversation analysisJapaneseturn-taking.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 549 - 584
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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