Participation framework

The notion of participation framework is a useful one to bring to this analysis. In the words of Goffman:

The relation of any member of a social gathering to an utterance is his

“participation status” relative to the utterance, and that of all persons in the gathering the “participation framework” for that moment of speech. The same two terms can be employed when the point of reference is shifted from a given particular speaker to something wider: all the activity in the situation itself

(page 137) (Goffman 1981a).

103 This concept extends the notion of talk in a social gathering beyond that of

‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ to one which allows for there to be official (or ratified) participants and unofficial (non-ratified) participants, addressed and un-addressed recipients, overhearers and bystanders. In an interaction between two people, the addressed recipient is the person to whom a speaker directs his visual attention and to whom the speaker expects to hand over the speaking role. When three or more people are present, it is often through the direction of gaze that a speaker will mark out the addressed recipient from unaddressed recipients. Hearers are likely to take their cue from these kinds of performances in deciding when and how to respond in the interaction, as all parties monitor each others’ activity.

An overhearer is someone who is able to hear and follow talk which is occurring in a social gathering although they are not in the role of official (or ratified) participant. If this is something which has been deliberately engineered (by the overhearer), then we would recognise this as an act of eavesdropping, but often one can find oneself in a position of overhearing without any deliberate intention to eavesdrop. I will illustrate this phenomenon with an example from my field work.

I spent many hours observing the workings of a practice administrative office, in which there were several members of staff working at the same time, often engaged in different kinds of administrative activity. I usually arranged to shadow one member of staff at a time (for example, an administrator who was summarising a patient’s record) but it was understood that I was interested in the office activity more generally, and it was usual for staff to talk with each other periodically about office business, and for me to engage in (usually more limited) talk with the office workers when it felt appropriate. I was a ratified participant – both in my immediate interaction with the summariser and my more general interaction within the office.

However, on one occasion a member of the practice staff came into the office and struck up a side conversation with one of the administrators in the far corner of the room. They huddled together and spoke in hushed voices – an

104 indicator to me (and to other people in the office) that this talk was not designed for general hearership. I was not a ratified participant in this particular interaction, but despite the hushed tones I heard their talk clearly as an overhearer. Arguably the role of ethnographer is an unusual one, but this example illustrates how – through no intention of my own – my status as ratified participant changed (at least with respect to this talk) to one of non-ratified overhearer.

Bystanders are people who are not ratified participants, but who are within visual or aural range of the talk, and who can be perceived by the official participants to have some access to the encounter, even if this access is only minimal (Goffman 1981a). For example, when a receptionist is talking with a patient across a reception desk, the interaction may be accessible at a minimal level to patients who have already taken their seats in the waiting room, and who are now bystanders. Receptionists are likely to take account of this in their interactions over the front desk. For example, social talk about the weather is conducted differently from an exchange about a patient’s repeat medication and this is at least in part because they take account of the wider social situation and the presence of bystanders.

We can see that Goffman’s distinctions between ratified and non-ratified participation are sometimes ambiguous and one may maintain several roles across different participation frameworks at any point in time. Social participants – as moral subjects – must make considered judgements about the status of any knowledge which is gleaned as a non ratified participant in interaction, but the fact remains that one can never ‘un-hear’ that which is heard, even when this arises unintentionally. In the special case of the research endeavour, the ethnographer must make deliberate ethical judgements about which talk is reportable and which talk is not, based on a consideration of one’s ethical commitments to the research process and the research participants.

The participation framework between clinician and patient in the consultation changes when the EPR is incorporated – a situation which arguably (and I draw on Goffman’s terminology here) ‘breaches the dyadic limits of talk’ (Goffman

105 1981a). In my work I have been prompted to consider how and to what extent the EPR disrupts our usual understandings of the participation framework, or how it contributes to constituting ‘new’ participation frameworks. Goffman is careful to point out that the management of any encounter relies heavily on visual cues as well as spoken or auditory cues, especially when there are more than two participants involved, in which case it is often visual cues which serve to accomplish the distinction between official recipients as “addressed” or

“unaddressed” recipients, for example.