Deontic Authority in Interaction: The right to announce, propose and decide

Drawing on video-recorded church workplace meeting as data, and conversation analysis as a method, we examine how participants orient to “deontic authority”—power to decide about courses of actions—while discussing their joint work tasks. The paper works with two classes of utterances: (1) initiating actions—assertions and proposals—that describe speaker’s plans for future events, and (2) responsive actions that, besides acquiescing in or resisting these plans, acquiesce in or resist also the first speakers’ ways of distributing the deontic rights between the participants. The paper describes negotiation of the relative distribution of deontic rights in cases, in which the plans per se are acquiesced in by the second speaker. Deontic congruence involves that the second speaker aligns with the deontic rights allocated to her by the first speaker. Deontic incongruence, on the other hand, involves that the second speaker resists the suggested distribution of epistemic rights. The paper introduces the concept of deontic authority for empirical interaction research and, by using this notion as an analytic tool, increases our understanding of authority, legitimacy, acquiescence and social relations.