ABSTRACT
A respecification of multidisciplinary social work practice within settings described as meetings requires an examination of conversational interaction in terms of the methodological framework discussed in the previous chapter. Furthermore, it necessitates an examination of naturally occurring, conversational interaction within relevantly achieved social contexts. The examination of conversational interaction is, in one sense, representative of the linguistic turn within sociology. It is an acknowledgement of the way in which concepts such as exchanging information, communicating and meaning are primarily discursive phenomena. The structural account of processes within system based models of team work represent a mode of theorising which 'misses the interactional what' of the phenomena that it seeks to describe. Furthermore, within the field of multidisciplinary teamwork the interactional and conversational dimensions of teamwork demand examination. However, in order to initiate the examination of the linguistic and interactional credentials and characteristics of teamwork I will begin this chapter by making some basic observations about the interactional organisation of team meeting settings. Consequently, I do not want to address the meeting as an institutional structure or parameter within which conversational interaction takes place. For to do so would be to implicitly accept the notion that talk-in-meetings is informed or shaped by such a configuration; rather than viewing such interactional orders as endogenous, situated accomplishments. However, in order to examine the way in which such accomplishments, tasks and senses of order are achieved I wish to apply the principles of a reconsidered model of MCA to the analysis of talk recorded and represented in the transcribed data. This will, initially, involve a concern with category and sequence in team members talk-in-interaction. However, in later stages of this book I will develop analyses of multidisciplinary team meeting talk that encompass the various dimensions of this form of analysis (as it relates to specific cases and practices) outlined in the previous chapter.
