Positioning and Interpretative Repertoires: Conversation Analysis and Post-Structuralism in Dialogue

Abstract

This article focuses on Schegloff's (1997) comments on critical discourse analysis and evaluates their force in relation to the analysis of a segment of a group discussion with three young white middle-class men concerning an episode in one of the participant's recent sexual history. The post-structuralist-influenced writings of Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 1987) are presented as an alternative analytic frame for the same data. The analysis examines the contextualization of the event which is the topic of the conversation and the positioning taken up and offered to the young man involved, drawing on the analytic concepts of interpretative repertoire and ideological dilemma. A critique of the post-structuralist concept of subject positions is developed and also of the methodological prescriptions Schegloff proposes for critical discourse analysis. The implications for critical discursive research in social psychology are discussed.