A critique of the adjacency pair dogma

Abstract

Abstract Drawing inspiration from key authors such as Weick, Taylor and Van Every, Greimas, Goffman, Sbisà, and Tsui, we propose to explore what we call the basic organizing unit, in other words, the minimal form that a sequence of action must take in order to claim a certain degree of organizationality. In order to empirically test this proposition, we purposively analyze interactions taking place outside of a classical organizational context, i.e., street hypnosis sessions. What interests us is not only how these sessions are organized, but also how they organize themselves. Our aim, therefore, is to identify key moments when a certain organizationality seems to express itself, an organizationality that we propose to detect through the identification of these basic organizing units. This leads us to show that the adjacency pair model, which has been historically defined as a fundamental unit of conversational organization should, in fact, be replaced by our triadic model of interaction.