This article respecifies and develops Parsons's sick role theory, focusing on the postulate that the sick person must 'want' to get well. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology to study how the psychological term 'want' is used in high-stake, multi-professional meetings with sickness benefit claimants in Sweden, the article shows how establishing that one 'wants' to get well requires extensive interactional work. In the examined meetings, the sick person's 'want' formulations make explicit the relationship between 'wants' and illness or inabilities, thus allowing for motivational character to be established without committing to its implications, and without appearing strategic or biased. By contrast, professional parties in the meetings invoke the sick person's 'wants' either to hold them accountable, or for establishing a desired course of recovery, confirming the centrality of such 'wants' in this setting as well as the risks associated with expressing them. The article suggests that analysing psychological matters as they are oriented to by participants renders sick role theory relevant for a wide range of settings and respecifies criticism of the model.

An inherent part of the general understanding of illness is that it is incapacitating, making those who are ill unable to do things that they would normally do. Staying at home from work is a common consequence, and what 'ill' people do while at home then becomes accountable. This article explores online discourse about the kinds of activities people engage in when on sick leave. It employs a discursive psychological framework for analysis, drawing heavily on conversation analysis. A Swedish internet forum thread on sick leave is examined, focusing on how the participants describe and account for the things they do when staying home from work due to illness. The analysis suggests that the participants' accounts of their activities delicately manage the legitimacy of their sick leave. In examining how this is done in practice, the analysis makes visible the balancing act between being ill enough to stay home from work and well enough for other activities. In the context of recent debates in Sweden and elsewhere about the legitimacy of sick leave in different situations, the analysis of how legitimacy is actually negotiated is an important concern, making visible the moral work of being on sick leave.

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Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*

This paper uses Discursive Psychology (DP) to investigate formulations of worry as an interactional resource. DP conceptualizes emotion as something people display or formulate in interaction with other people, and draws on conversation analysis (CA) to examine its social functions across settings. Data consist of 366 recorded phone calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's customer service for housing allowancea benefit targeting financially vulnerable youth and families. The article examines how clients' worry is formulated (e.g., 'I'm really worried now'), what functions such formulations serve, and how they are responded to. In line with the broader DP goal of uncovering how institutions are characterized by psychological business, the study shows how worry is linked to lack of knowledge, building worry as warranted and as warranting further institutional activity (or not). Speakers thus treat worry as morally and institutionally constrained. The analysis shows how orientations to worry in the context of state welfare customer service both corresponds and contrasts with what research on worry formulations in other institutional settings has found. This highlights the way that psychology is locally specific and bound up with institutionality, and reinforces the need for close empirical analysis of psychology-relevant matters across settings.