Suchman (1987) has recently drawn attention to the situated nature of human social action and its implications for the design of interactive computer systems. In particular, she has highlighted the shortcomings of globally managing human computer dialogues by matching user actions to some idealised plan for carrying out a task. In this paper we outline a scheme for the local management of dialogues based on the findings of conversation analysis. The scheme makes available a variety of communicative resources to both user and system, including the ability to give and take turns at talk, to initiate and carry out repair work, and to continue or change the topic of conversation. An implementation of the scheme in a welfare rights Advice System is described.