Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations

Abstract

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.

Accounting for the right to assign a task in meeting interaction

“…This complements and substantiates previous findings on the primacy of deontic status over stance (cf. Heritage, 2012;Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2014). It further contributes to specifying how institutional roles and relations are reflected and constructed in interaction.…”

“…In our analysis we refer to concepts of deontic stance and status (Stevanovic, 2011;Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2014). As described in the introduction to the special issue (Stevanovic and Svennevig, 2015), deontic stance refers to interactional displays of authority in certain domains of action relative to a co-participant.…”

“…The job descriptions of certain institutional positions such as managers include the right to assign tasks to subordinates. Thus, persons occupying certain institutional roles have a deontic status (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2014) that can be used as a resource in interaction, providing for the legitimacy of requesting certain services from their co-workers. In such cases, task assignment is not followed by an account.…”

Third-party turns and shared knowledge: Supports and challenges to disabled people in social care and research settings

“…While this may be done in the interests of progressivity, or 'getting the business done' (Stivers 2001;Stivers and Robinson 2006;Svennevig 2010), nevertheless the epistemic status of a speaker (Heritage 2012) can be affected by the stance taken in the talk, and in this case particularly when a turn is usurped by a third party. As Stevanovic et al (2014) demonstrate, people regularly make sense of each other's utterances by 'categorizing that person' in a specific way, and thus to understand the way in which some disabled people routinely lose their own right to speak entails a consideration of the relationships of power and knowledge which are displayed in talk.…”

Proceedings of ACL 2017, Student Research Workshop

“…6 The deontic stance refers to speakers' orientation toward their relative primacy/subordination in terms of their rights to decide future events. See (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2014) dations such as "You have to take some fever medicine.". Proposals are such as "Why don't you take some cough syrup?".…”