Knowledge, emotion and power in social partnership: A turn to partners’ context

© The Author(s) 2018. Departing from the social partnership field’s structural, static view of context, this study takes on a situated, emergent view to explore how the partnership process unfolds. Applying ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis to partners’ meeting talk, we discover that three interactional orders – epistemic, emotional and deontic rights and obligations – are crucial resources for how partners construct and transform their context. We advance the field by first demonstrating how knowledge, emotion, and power – corresponding to the three orders – are not contextual elements that determine the partnership process but are rather ongoing accomplishments that play a ‘doubly contextual’ role in how the process unfolds; they shape context and are also shaped by it. Second, we expose the precarious interfaces of knowledge, emotion and power and show that at such interfaces, interactional trouble unfolds processually through partners disattending, superimposing and equivocating certain rights and obligations. We conclude with reflections on what this study means for reimagining social partnerships.

Publication year:2018

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BOF-publication weight:3

CSS-citation score:1

Authors from:Higher Education

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