Participation within multiparty conversation: Responses to indirect complaints about a co-present participant

Throughout his work Goffman highlighted the limitations of the ‘speaker’-‘hearer’ model for understanding how persons participate in social situations. In his influential late article Footing he decomposed the role of speaker and hearer into a set of production and reception roles, which for the reception roles included distinctions between addressed and unaddressed participants as well as overhearers and bystanders. In this chapter, Wilkinson et al. build on the insights of Goffman and of others who developed his insights into participation. They do this by focusing on how participants within multiparty conversation organize their participation in situ through the production of actions which can make a response, and hence participation, relevant and expectable from one or more other participants. Analysing one type of action – an indirect complaint about a co-present participant – they provide evidence that participants treat such a complaint as making a response relevant from the complainee (complained-about person) despite that person not being addressed, and they show how this can have implications for the participation of both the complainee and other participants. As such, they highlight how the production of actions within multiparty conversation can provide expectations and opportunities concerning how participants may endogenously organise their participation together.