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All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social relations are seen as being anchored in three orders-epistemic order, deontic order, and emotional order-each of which, we argue, also pertains to action recognition. This framework allows us to account for common ambiguities in action recognition and to describe relationship negotiations involving a complex interface between knowledge, power, and emotion.

This study analyses joint decisions. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings in a workplace context as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I investigate what is needed for a proposal to get turned into a joint decision: How do people negotiate the outcome of the decision-making processes in terms of whether they indeed comprise new decisions and whether these decisions are really joint ones? This study identifies three essential components in arriving at joint decisions (access, agreement, commitment), and discusses two other possible outcomes of decision-making processes – non-decisions and unilateral decisions – as being a direct result of the deployment of the same components. These observations help explain the exact mechanisms involved in approving and rejecting proposals in joint decision-making settings, as well as the ways in which people may negotiate their rights and obligations to participate in decision-making processes.

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The notion of "deontic rights"-the capacity of an individual to determine action-is described as a tool to analyze human power plays in the turn-by-turn unfolding of social interaction. Drawing on various bodies of literature, the paper portrays the organization of the adjacency-pair sequence as the key locus of negotiation over deontic rights. How such negotiations happen in practice is also considered. Two deontic patterns instantiating themselves in sequential relations-deontic congruence and deontic incongruence-are discussed. Negotiations of deontic rights are suggested to take place specifically in and through three different forms of deontic incongruence, each of which involves a subtle mismatch between the claims of deontic rights of the first speaker and the recipient's treatment of these claims. These implicit power plays easily escape the eye and are therefore difficult to reflect upon and counteract by the participants themselves, which makes a thorough understanding of these mechanisms important.KEYWORDS authority, conversation analysis, deontics, power, sequentialityThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

What makes possible the co-creation of meaningful action? In this paper, we go in search of an answer to this question by combining insights from interactional sociology and enaction. Both research schools investigate social interactions as such, and conceptualize their organization in terms of autonomy. We ask what it could mean for an interaction to be autonomous, and discuss the structures and processes that contribute to and are maintained in the so-called interaction order. We also discuss the role played by individual vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of social interaction processes in the co-creation of meaningful action. Finally, we outline some implications of this interdisciplinary fraternization for the empirical study of social understanding, in particular in social neuroscience and psychology, pointing out the need for studies based on dynamic systems approaches on origins and references of coordination, and experimental designs to help understand human co-presence.

Joint planning consists of people making proposals for future actions and events, and others accepting or rejecting these proposals. While proposals convey their speakers' judgments of some ideas as feasible, however, in anticipation of and in an attempt to pre-empt the recipients' rejection of their proposals, the speakers may begin to express doubt with the feasibility of their proposals. It is such ''post-proposal displays of uncertainty,'' and their interactional corollaries, that this paper focuses on. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings as data, and conversation analysis as a method, I describe three ways for the recipients to respond to post-proposal displays of uncertainty: the recipients may (1) overcome, (2) confirm, or (3) dispel their co-participants' doubts. Even if the outcome of the proposal, in each case, is its abandonment, the analysis points out to important differences in how these response options treat the first speakers' ''proximal deontic claims'' --that is, their implicit assertions of rights to control the participants' local interactional agenda. The paper concludes by discussing the idea of proximal deontics with reference to other related notions.

We studied behavioral matching during joint decision making. Drawing on motion-capture and voice data from 12 dyads, we analyzed bodysway and pitch-register matching during sequential transitions and continuations, with and without mutual visibility. Body sway was matched most strongly during sequential transitions in the conditions of mutual visibility. Pitch-register matching was higher during sequential transitions than continuations only when the participants could not see each other. These results suggest that both body sway and pitch register are used to manage sequential transitions, while mutual visibility influences the relative weights of these two resources. The conversational data are in Finnish with English translation.