From Small Talk to Microaggression : A History of Scale.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lempert, Michael.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Conversation analysis.

Scaling (Social sciences).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (387 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction. In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences. Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: How Scale Broke the World

PART I Fine-Grained Analysis

Introduction

2 The Chattering Unconscious and the Tells of Talk

3 The First Five Minutes

4 The First Five Seconds

PART II Small Groups

5 Rigorously, Manageably Small

6 Interaction Recorders

7 Interaction as a Liberal Technology

PART III Micropolitics

8 The Interpersonal Gets Political

9 Interruption-and Male Supremacy

10 Tempest in the Transcript

11 Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226832494

022683249X

OCLC:

1472149212