M Stevanovic
Biographic Data
| ID | 995 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Stevanovic |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Stevanovic |
| SIGNATURE | STEVANOVIC M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0429-1672 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 392 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Hermeneutic injustice and troubling experiences of interactional inequality
Social interaction is pervaded by troubling experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and injustice, yet people’s attempts to account for such experiences often encounter difficulties. In this article, we review findings from conversation analytic and discursive psychological research to illuminate these challenges. We summarize the findings regarding (1) the conditions under which troubling experiences of interactional inequality occur; (2…
Perceived personality
Emancipatory Potential of Naming
To address interactionally troublesome exchanges (e.g., bullying, discrimination, or harassment) in the workplace, giving a name to negative personal experiences is crucial. Drawing on discussions of hermeneutical injustice, we explore the emancipatory potential of naming in post‐hoc tellings of these experiences, with particular attention to accountability and face‐work in naming practices. Our analysis of interviews with church employees illust…
The team members were very tolerant”
Speakers may resort to different inferences and expectations in intercultural encounters. These expectations are influenced by speakers’ socialization processes in speech communities and networks, as well as by the local interactional demands and power dynamics in the communicative situation. While interactional sociolinguistic studies have unveiled intercultural mismatches in how contextualization asymmetries operate in the here-and-now of inter…
Accounting for experiences of inattention
This paper explores how a self-proclaimed narcissist narrates experiences of inattention – moments when others appear indifferent toward him. Drawing on narrative discourse analysis, we examine three segments from a collection of narratives that concern social encounters categorized as complete ignorance, blunt disregard, and uneven recognition. The narrator describes the experiences by utilizing the interpretative repertoires of downplaying and …
What does a test say about the mind? Personality tests as discursive objects in recruitment interviews
In this article, we examine how recruiters and applicants talk about personality tests, reflecting presuppositions about personality and its accessibility. Using video-recorded data from 21 Finnish job interviews, we show how the personality test functions as a discursive object for managing stakes in the recruitment process. When applicants referred to the test after receiving positive evaluations, they emphasized its ability to reveal their per…
Requests for concrete actions in interaction
In this study, we examine how support workers produce requests for concrete actions and, in this way, manage client participation in mental health rehabilitation. Drawing on Finnish rehabilitation group meetings as data and on conversation analysis, we examine how support workers design their requests for concrete action from clients, how clients respond, and how support workers deal with clients’ responses. The results reveal that support worker…
Recognition in interaction
In the current paper we aim to combine the theoretical ideas of recognition theory to conversation analytical, empirical observations. We ask what recognition theories can give to conversation analysis, and vice versa. We operate on a model of recognition that consists of three different modes: respect, esteem, and love/care, and which distinguishes the levels of conversational actions and the attitudes of recognition manifested in such actions. …
Interculturality and decision making
Current times call for continuous communication across countries, negotiations on several levels, and the creation of international relationships based on dialogue and participation. Those ideals are often pursued in intercultural communication contexts and written about, as a desideratum, in the Intercultural Communication literature. However, how can this be achieved concretely? In this article, we analyze how decisions are taken by newly found…
Voicing experiences of ageist nonrecognition in performance appraisal interaction
A growing line of research aims to give voice to employees’ experiences of ageism at work. This article complements this body of research by demonstrating how voicing experiences of ageism, and hence counteracting organisational ignorance towards ageism, can be a complex discursive endeavour. Ageist experiences can be based on subtle interactional exchanges at the workplace, including other workers’ nonrecognition (e.g. ostracism). We suggest tha…
A different perspective on epistemics and deontics
Thus far, few studies have investigated the evaluative points narrators may convey through the sequential features of reported exchanges in their stories. In this article, we conduct a micro-oriented narrative analysis on how epistemic and deontic status-stance relations are depicted by narrators in sequences of reported turns. We thus uncover how hierarchies and potential transgressions between the characters in the storyworld are “shown” rather…
Peer support for accepting distressing reality
Peer-based interventions are increasingly used for delivering mental health services to help people with an illness re-examine their situation and accept their illness as part of their life story. The role of the peer supporter in these interventions, known as experts-by-experience (EbE), is situated between mutual peer support and semi-professional service delivery, and they face the challenge of balancing an asymmetric, professional relationshi…
Social Divisions in Accounts of Discrimination
In the performing arts, discrimination is a widely recognized issue occurring in relation to multiple social divisions. Through a qualitative analysis of personal stories of discrimination, we investigate the relationship between intersectional categories emerging in the telling and orientation of performing artists. Discrimination is tied to gatekeeping practices that are of varying significance to the artists depending on the power relationship…
University teaching development workshops as sites of joint decision-making
This study analyzed interactional practices in the strategic development of teaching at a research university in Finland. Drawing on a novel combination of conversation analysis and cultural discourse analysis, the study investigated how participants negotiate decision-making power and authority when developing new interdisciplinary teaching in workshop groups. Specific attention was paid to the participants' ways of making and responding to each…
Accountability and interactional inequality
In the existing sociological literature, the notion of accountability is seen both as a tool of sense-making (intelligibility side of accountability) and as a way of maintaining larger social order (normativity side of accountability). This paper points to drastically different ways of treating an interactional violation, depending on the precise framework within which the accountabilities associated with the violation are interpreted. The normat…
Conversation analysis and power
Conversation Analysis (CA) tends to adopt an ambivalent attitude to the concept of power. The concept is fundamental in sociology but secondary or even disregarded in CA. A closer look at research and the conceptual foundations of CA however demonstrate significant contributions to theories of power. In this paper we aim to demonstrate and discuss these contributions, however, also arguing for an expansion of the CA approach in dialogue with soci…
Beyond Utterances
Practices of creativity and compliance intersect in interaction when directing local dances remotely for people living with dementia and their carers in institutional settings. This ethnomethodological study focused on how artistic mechanisms are understood and structured by participants in response to on-screen instruction. Video data were collected from two long-term care facilities in Canada and Finland in a pilot study of a dance program that…
Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal
Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a do…
Sexual consent as an interactional achievement
Sexual consent is advocated around the world to reduce sexual assault. The widespread affirmative consent model emphasizes a need for unambiguous consent. In this paper, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how ambiguities in the initiations of sexual activities are routinely solved to achieve consent. Drawing on conversation analytic research on joint decision-making, and a dataset of 80 cases of sexual initiation in contemporary TV-series…
Prosodic linking in apology sequences in Finnish elementary school mediations
In this article, we analyze pupils' prosodic realizations of the apology sequence anteeksi-saat anteeksi “I apologize-apology accepted”, focusing on pitch, rhythm, and loudness. Drawing on teacher-led mediations in which teachers settle pupils’ peer conflicts in Finnish elementary schools as data, and conversation analysis as a method, we examine how the participants' orientation to the interaction of the mediation episode as unproblematic (i.e. …
On the Ideals of Interaction and Why and How They Fail
Challenges of client participation in the co-development of social and health care services
Client participation is not only about deciding on one's own treatment, but it may also be conceived more generally as the right of the client to influence the planning and development of social and health care services. In this paper, we examine participants' rights to control and influence action in workshops in which social and health care professionals and clients co-develop the social and health care services provided by their municipality. …
Challenges of trust in atypical interaction
All effective communication is based on the participants trusting that they share their basic orientations to the world – that is, they have a common ground. In this paper, however, we examine situations in which such trust is lacking. Drawing on conversation–analytic methodology and on 30 hours of video data featuring persons with dementia and their caregivers in a Swedish-language daycare center in Finland, we consider some of the social conseq…
Making Food Decisions Together
We used a novel interdisciplinary experimental paradigm where two types of dyads—15 dyads with one depressed and one non-depressed participant and 15 dyads with two non-depressed participants—engaged in a series of food-decision-making tasks. We examined how different communicative events during the decision-making process were reflected in the affective responses of the interacting participants, as indicated in their skin conductance (SC) respon…
Participants’ Deontic Rights and Action Formation
Deontic Authority in Interaction
Someone's “deontic authority” is their right to determine others' future actions. It can be acquiesced to or resisted. This article introduces, more systematically than before, the concept to close examination of talk-in-interaction. Drawing on video recordings of planning meetings as data and on conversation analysis as a method, we examine two classes of utterances: (a) first speakers' suggestions for future events and (b) second speakers' resp…
Three orders in the organization of human action
All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social rel…
Introduction
Social deontics
The notion of “deontic rights”—the capacity of an individual to determine action—is described as a tool to analyze human power plays in the turn‐by‐turn unfolding of social interaction. Drawing on various bodies of literature, the paper portrays the organization of the adjacency‐pair sequence as the key locus of negotiation over deontic rights. How such negotiations happen in practice is also considered. Two deontic patterns instantiating themsel…
Displays of uncertainty and proximal deontic claims
On the hierarchy of interactional resources
Establishing joint decisions in a dyad
This study analyses joint decisions. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings in a workplace context as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I investigate what is needed for a proposal to get turned into a joint decision: How do people negotiate the outcome of the decision-making processes in terms of whether they indeed comprise new decisions and whether these decisions are really joint ones? This study identifies three essential c…
Prosodic salience and the emergence of new decisions
Nods, vocal continuers, and the perception of empathy in storytelling
In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display alignment with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey affiliation with the storytellers’ affective stance. In this paper, we elaborate these insights on the basis of a qu…
Sharing the Emotional Load
In conversational storytelling, the recipients are expected to show affiliation with the emotional stance displayed by the storytellers. We investigated emotional arousal-related autonomic nervous system responses in tellers and recipients of conversational stories. The data consist of 20 recordings of 45- to 60-minute dyadic conversations between female university and polytechnic students. Conversations were videotaped and analyzed by means of c…
Deontic authority and the maintenance of lay and expert identities during joint decision making
Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic aut…
Singing in interaction
Drawing on a database of 26 hours of video-recorded Finnish conversations from three different settings – everyday conversations among family and friends, instrumental lessons and church workplace meetings – we consider the ways in which singing can be used as an interactional resource to enact the three basic communicative motives of humans: requesting, informing, and sharing. Singing has the potential to initiate joint activities, which allows …
Experiential expertise in the co-development of social and health-care services
Increasing client involvement in the development of social and health-care services has resulted in clients being invited to present their experiential knowledge in service co-development groups. Nevertheless, research has shown that their opportunities to really contribute to actual decision-making are limited. This article investigates how client representatives initiate turns-at-talk in the decision-making context and the way in which professi…
Sequentiality, Mutual Visibility, and Behavioral Matching
We studied behavioral matching during joint decision making. Drawing on motion-capture and voice data from 12 dyads, we analyzed body-sway and pitch-register matching during sequential transitions and continuations, with and without mutual visibility. Body sway was matched most strongly during sequential transitions in the conditions of mutual visibility. Pitch-register matching was higher during sequential transitions than continuations only whe…
Interculturality and decision making
Current times call for continuous communication across countries, negotiations on several levels, and the creation of international relationships based on dialogue and participation. Those ideals are often pursued in intercultural communication contexts and written about, as a desideratum, in the Intercultural Communication literature. However, how can this be achieved concretely? In this article, we analyze how decisions are taken by newly found…
Prosody and grammar of other-repetitions in Finnish
We examine how other-repetitions in Finnish are used for repairing interactional problems in hearing and understanding and for registering what another has just said, describing how prosody and grammar interact in accomplishing these goals. In the repair-initiating repetitions, the pitch contours build a continuum of different degrees of falling pitch from moderate to steep, the latter being associated with some type of an affective stance. In th…
Voicing experiences of ageist nonrecognition in performance appraisal interaction
A growing line of research aims to give voice to employees’ experiences of ageism at work. This article complements this body of research by demonstrating how voicing experiences of ageism, and hence counteracting organisational ignorance towards ageism, can be a complex discursive endeavour. Ageist experiences can be based on subtle interactional exchanges at the workplace, including other workers’ nonrecognition (e.g. ostracism). We suggest tha…
Social Divisions in Accounts of Discrimination
In the performing arts, discrimination is a widely recognized issue occurring in relation to multiple social divisions. Through a qualitative analysis of personal stories of discrimination, we investigate the relationship between intersectional categories emerging in the telling and orientation of performing artists. Discrimination is tied to gatekeeping practices that are of varying significance to the artists depending on the power relationship…
Conversation analysis and power
Conversation Analysis (CA) tends to adopt an ambivalent attitude to the concept of power. The concept is fundamental in sociology but secondary or even disregarded in CA. A closer look at research and the conceptual foundations of CA however demonstrate significant contributions to theories of power. In this paper we aim to demonstrate and discuss these contributions, however, also arguing for an expansion of the CA approach in dialogue with soci…
Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal
Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a do…
The Recognition and Interactional Management of Face Threats
Erving Goffman has argued that the threat of losing one's face is an omnirelevant concern that penetrates all actions in encounters. However, studies have shown that compared with neurotypical individuals, persons diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder can be less preoccupied with how others perceive them and thus possibly less concerned of face in interaction. Drawing on a data set of Finnish quasinatural conversations, we use the means of conv…
Accountability and interactional inequality
In the existing sociological literature, the notion of accountability is seen both as a tool of sense-making (intelligibility side of accountability) and as a way of maintaining larger social order (normativity side of accountability). This paper points to drastically different ways of treating an interactional violation, depending on the precise framework within which the accountabilities associated with the violation are interpreted. The normat…
Prosodic linking in apology sequences in Finnish elementary school mediations
In this article, we analyze pupils' prosodic realizations of the apology sequence anteeksi-saat anteeksi “I apologize-apology accepted”, focusing on pitch, rhythm, and loudness. Drawing on teacher-led mediations in which teachers settle pupils’ peer conflicts in Finnish elementary schools as data, and conversation analysis as a method, we examine how the participants' orientation to the interaction of the mediation episode as unproblematic (i.e. …
Apologizing in Elementary School Peer Conflict Mediation
We analyze apologizing as part of the institutional agenda of school mediation in Finland. When primary school teachers intervene to mediate a dispute, the children orient to apologizing as a ritualized, expected, and recognizable action that resolves the matter. Teachers build, step by step, a sequence that, when preconditions are met, results in the parties involved in the dispute producing the uniquely explicit apology exchange “I apologize”—“…
Discursive contestation in mental health rehabilitation
In our society, work is generally considered central to citizenship and individual well‐being. However, paid employment is often out of reach for individuals with mental illness. The Clubhouse model is a community‐based rehabilitation programme that therefore offers people with mental illness the possibility to enjoy some social advantages of work. However, the status of the day‐to‐day Clubhouse activities as “work” is a matter of discursive cont…
Deontic Authority in Interaction
Someone's “deontic authority” is their right to determine others' future actions. It can be acquiesced to or resisted. This article introduces, more systematically than before, the concept to close examination of talk-in-interaction. Drawing on video recordings of planning meetings as data and on conversation analysis as a method, we examine two classes of utterances: (a) first speakers' suggestions for future events and (b) second speakers' resp…
Prosodic salience and the emergence of new decisions
Establishing joint decisions in a dyad
This study analyses joint decisions. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings in a workplace context as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I investigate what is needed for a proposal to get turned into a joint decision: How do people negotiate the outcome of the decision-making processes in terms of whether they indeed comprise new decisions and whether these decisions are really joint ones? This study identifies three essential c…
Managing participation in interaction
Interactional encounters call for participants to maintain joint involvement in the activity at hand. However, when interactional problems emerge, participants may seek to redefine the current participation framework to ensure the intelligibility of the situation as a whole. This paper describes one interactional resource to accomplish such a shift: humming. Drawing on data consisting of 32 instances of humming from three different settings, and …
Singing in interaction
Drawing on a database of 26 hours of video-recorded Finnish conversations from three different settings – everyday conversations among family and friends, instrumental lessons and church workplace meetings – we consider the ways in which singing can be used as an interactional resource to enact the three basic communicative motives of humans: requesting, informing, and sharing. Singing has the potential to initiate joint activities, which allows …
Three orders in the organization of human action
All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social rel…
Sharing the Emotional Load
In conversational storytelling, the recipients are expected to show affiliation with the emotional stance displayed by the storytellers. We investigated emotional arousal-related autonomic nervous system responses in tellers and recipients of conversational stories. The data consist of 20 recordings of 45- to 60-minute dyadic conversations between female university and polytechnic students. Conversations were videotaped and analyzed by means of c…
Introduction
Displays of uncertainty and proximal deontic claims
On the hierarchy of interactional resources
Conversation-analytic data session as a pedagogical institution
Sequentiality, Mutual Visibility, and Behavioral Matching
We studied behavioral matching during joint decision making. Drawing on motion-capture and voice data from 12 dyads, we analyzed body-sway and pitch-register matching during sequential transitions and continuations, with and without mutual visibility. Body sway was matched most strongly during sequential transitions in the conditions of mutual visibility. Pitch-register matching was higher during sequential transitions than continuations only whe…
Affiliation and Dominance in Female and Male Dyads
Drawing on sixteen 45-min-long dyadic same-sex conversations between unacquainted females or males, we used the joystick method by Sadler et al. (J Pers Soc Psychol 97:1005–1020. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016232 , 2009) to rate the moment-to-moment levels of affiliation and dominance during the first and last 10 min of these conversations. Besides comparing the behavioral patterns in female and male dyads, we drew on the pre- and post-conversatio…
Social deontics
The notion of “deontic rights”—the capacity of an individual to determine action—is described as a tool to analyze human power plays in the turn‐by‐turn unfolding of social interaction. Drawing on various bodies of literature, the paper portrays the organization of the adjacency‐pair sequence as the key locus of negotiation over deontic rights. How such negotiations happen in practice is also considered. Two deontic patterns instantiating themsel…
Nods, vocal continuers, and the perception of empathy in storytelling
In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display alignment with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey affiliation with the storytellers’ affective stance. In this paper, we elaborate these insights on the basis of a qu…
Being Heard, Exerting Influence, or Knowing How to Play the Game? Expectations of Client Involvement among Social and Health Care Professionals and Clients
Contemporary social and health care services exhibit a significant movement toward increasing client involvement in their own care and in the development of services. This major cultural change represents a marked shift in the client's role from a passive patient to an active empowered agent. We draw on interaction-oriented focus group research and conversation analysis to study workshop conversations in which social and health care clients and p…
Tensions and Paradoxes of Stigma
Mental illness remains as one of the most stigmatizing conditions in contemporary western societies. This study sheds light on how mental health professionals and rehabilitants perceive stigmatization. The qualitative study is based on stimulated focus group interviews conducted in five Finnish mental health rehabilitation centers that follow the Clubhouse model. The findings were analyzed through inductive content analysis. Both the mental healt…
Prosody and grammar of other-repetitions in Finnish
We examine how other-repetitions in Finnish are used for repairing interactional problems in hearing and understanding and for registering what another has just said, describing how prosody and grammar interact in accomplishing these goals. In the repair-initiating repetitions, the pitch contours build a continuum of different degrees of falling pitch from moderate to steep, the latter being associated with some type of an affective stance. In th…
Three Multimodal Action Packages in Responses to Proposals During Joint Decision-Making
Joint decision-making is a thoroughly collaborative interactional endeavor. To construct the outcome of the decision-making sequence as a “joint” one necessitates that the participants constantly negotiate their shared activity, not only with reference to the content of the decisions to be made, but also with reference to whether, when, and upon what exactly decisions are to be made in the first place. In this paper, I draw on a dataset of video-…
The Psychophysiological Experience of Solving Moral Dilemmas Together
Dyads with a depressed and a non-depressed participant ( N = 15) and two non-depressed participants ( N = 15) discussed a moral dilemma, during which the participants’ gaze direction and skin conductance (SC) were measured. Partner gazing occurred most frequently when a speaker took a strong stance toward saving a person in the dilemma, depressed participants however looking at their co-participants less often than non-depressed participants. The…
Monitoring and evaluating body knowledge
This paper examines music instrument teachers’ instructive use of noun metaphors and metonymies of behaviors related to the playing and handling of a musical instrument. Drawing on 10 video-recorded 30–40 min-long instrument lessons as data, and conversation analysis as a method, the paper examines the temporal location of these figurative turns (i.e., instruction turns including a noun metaphor or metonymy) within the instructional activities an…
Self-Disclosure and Non-Communication
People who are recovering from a mental illness often have difficulties finding and maintaining employment. One of the main reasons for these difficulties is the negative label, or stigma, attached to mental illnesses. People who possess stigmatizing characteristics may use compensatory stigma management strategies to reduce discrimination. Due to mental illnesses' invisible characteristics, information control is an important stigma management s…
Discursive contestation in mental health rehabilitation
In our society, work is generally considered central to citizenship and individual well‐being. However, paid employment is often out of reach for individuals with mental illness. The Clubhouse model is a community‐based rehabilitation programme that therefore offers people with mental illness the possibility to enjoy some social advantages of work. However, the status of the day‐to‐day Clubhouse activities as “work” is a matter of discursive cont…
Expressing thinking in institutional interaction
This paper focuses on the stancetaking formats used to express personal thoughts, namely Finnish mä aattelen/aattelin ‘I think/thought’, mä mietin ‘I think/wonder’, and mun mielestä/musta ‘I think/in my opinion’. We study how these first-person formats are used in mental health rehabilitation group meetings, which aim to promote joint decision-making. In particular, we analyze whether the institutional asymmetry between support workers and client…
The Recognition and Interactional Management of Face Threats
Erving Goffman has argued that the threat of losing one's face is an omnirelevant concern that penetrates all actions in encounters. However, studies have shown that compared with neurotypical individuals, persons diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder can be less preoccupied with how others perceive them and thus possibly less concerned of face in interaction. Drawing on a data set of Finnish quasinatural conversations, we use the means of conv…
Psychology (49 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (44 works) · Social Psychology (41 works) · Conversation (31 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Communication (24 works) · Conversation analysis (22 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (21 works) · Sociology (21 works)