This article reports some (video-recorded) instances of `visual culture' in action, namely the use of a new software tool designed for the visualization of scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth in a classroom context. By considering whether or how far conversation analysis (CA) can be extended from natural conversation to cases of collaborative work in front of a computer, the article addresses the methodological question of how to study instances of visual communication. We take as an exemplar the phenomenon of remedial action and discuss how Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks's (1977) canonical study of repair in ordinary conversation can be used to highlight aspects of `visual repair' (the identification and remedying of items on the screen). Our attempts to apply the original CA model of repair of ordinary conversation highlight the differences of this setting, which constitutes an example of collaborative work.

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This article is intended to reinstate, in at least a prefatory way, some ethnomethodological (EM) considerations concerning trust. The idea of constitutive practices — as it was taken up in Garfinkel’s sociology — turned on trust as a background condition for mutually intelligible action. Starting with a consideration of Garfinkel’s 1963 study of trust, the article critically considers some formal analytic alternates to his approach. The aspects of trust that are ‘elusive’ to the formal-analytic approach are shown to result from its allusive treatment by formal analysis. In Garfinkel’s hands trust is not elusive. The critique of formal analytic studies builds on Garfinkel’s writings and certain strands of analytic and ordinary language philosophy. These sources ground the author’s suggestion that the study of trust be taken up again, albeit along respecified analytic lines. Examples are given, both of an EM and conversation-analytic (CA) kind.

ROM THE early phases of European sociology in its modern incarnation, there has been a debate in the discipline over the role of psychology and the 'mental' phenomena that purportedly fall within its domain. The debate focuses the place of psychology in the understanding or explanation of human conduct.There have been some broadly accepted terms to this debate, which has been cast in terms of a set of binary conceptual oppositions such as 'individual'-'society', 'subjectivity'-'objectivity', 'agency'-'structure', 'psychological'-'social' and so on. These oppositions are still preserved, largely uncritically, and this has tended to ossify the debate (Sharrock and Watson, 1988). Over the years, this ossification has taken on a bureaucratic incarnation, given that the conceptual oppositions in which it is rooted have come to gain expression in departmental divisions between disciplinesnotably those of sociology and psychology.There have been three major modes of this debate -'cognitivism', 'mentalism' and 'psychologism'. Though these are not synonymous, they do overlap and share many other relations. 'Cognitivism' is most usually associated with a computational-representationalist theory of mind. 'Mentalism' is the view that people behave on the basis of various states or processes involved in the 'workings of the mind'. 'Psychologism' is perhaps more straightforwardly construed as the tendency to reduce social phenomena to postulated individual properties or attributes of mind, where the 'typical individual' may be the point of reference. When proponents of psychology counterpose their arguments partially or totally against those of sociology, these three positions tend to operate together.The fact that debates between psychology and sociology have been cast in terms of the binary conceptual oppositions leaves a potential 'problem space' within which fall this introductory article and the following

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