A Chalfoun
Biographic Data
| ID | 71898 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Chalfoun |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Chalfoun |
| SIGNATURE | CHALFOUN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9056-8908 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
When requests are not articulated: Accountability and social action ascription
This study examines actions that are not directly articulated by speakers but are nonetheless oriented to by participants. Specifically, we examine situations in which a speaker is launching a request project, approaching a request indirectly, with a preliminary, or with further “upstream work,” but without ever making an actual request. Prior literature has argued that indirectness and preliminaries afford speakers with deniability and thus allo…
The Limits of Cooperation Inside the Christian Right: James Robison, James T. Draper, Jr., and the Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the defining events in the alignment of US evangelicals with the Republican Party. Lacking information about internal decision-making processes, existing studies have tended to exaggerate the cohesiveness of the activist network that ultimately captured the denomination. This paper takes a micro-historical approach to trace how movement leaders responded when one of t…
Differentiating Regulative and Constitutive Normativity: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel and the Sticky Problem of Meaning
In everyday life, individuals regularly confront novel situations which demand their attention and response. In such situations, they routinely deploy portable norms to select between appropriate and inappropriate next actions. Yet, these norms do not seem to determine the conditions of their own application. How then are we able to act in an orderly and mutually intelligible manner? This paper examines two attempts to answer this question, neith…
Picking Winners? Candidate Selection and Representatives’ Performance in the Southern Baptist Conservative Movement
Movements frequently seek to exert influence by securing official positions for supporters within target organizations (whether legislatures, state bureaucracies, or private entities). However, reliance on representatives leaves movements vulnerable. Prior to selection, prospective representatives may exaggerate alignment with activists. Once in place, representatives are susceptible to cooptive pressures to moderate movement objectives. Using th…
The Magic Word? Face-Work and the Functions of Please in Everyday Requests
Expressions of politeness such as please are prominent elements of interactional conduct that are explicitly targeted in early socialization and are subject to cultural expectations around socially desirable behavior. Yet their specific interactional functions remain poorly understood. Using conversation analysis supplemented with systematic coding, this study investigates when and where interactants use please in everyday requests. We find that …
Incurable Optimism about Getting What We Want: Anticipating Success in Everyday Requests
Shifting responsibility onto coparticipants: Disaffiliative accounts in request sequences
Accounts-verbal explanations for conduct-are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing or challenging a coparticipant’s behavi…
To err is human but to persist is diabolical: Toward a theory of interactional policing
Social interaction is organized around norms and preferences that guide our construction of actions and our interpretation of those of others, creating a reflexive moral order. Sociological theory suggests two possibilities for the type of moral order that underlies the policing of interactional norm and preference violations: a morality that focuses on the nature of violations themselves and a morality that focuses on the positioning of actors a…
Biblical authority in interaction: How do evangelicals use the Bible
Evangelicals are characterized by biblicism, the belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that it is authoritative in the lives of Christians. Scholars studying religion have identified a wide gap between what evangelicals say they believe about the Bible and how scripture is actually used in their communities. However, researchers have yet to describe the micro-interactional deployment of the Bible in evangelical talk. This paper ad…
When God Calls: Temporality in Southern Baptist Calls to Missions
Researchers studying religious experience have identified callings as a particularly salient context in which believers describe God's presence. They have noted standard elements that make up call narratives, along with variation in how recipients articulate both the vertical call, God's intervention in the believer's life, and the horizontal call, the community's response. However, how these standard elements are combined to produce culturally r…
Ambiguities in Action Ascription
In everyday interactions with one another, speakers not only say things but also do things like offer, complain, reject, and compliment. Through observation, it is possible to see that much of the time people unproblematically understand what others are doing. Research on conversation has further documented how speakers' word choice, prosody, grammar, and gesture all help others to recognize what actions they are performing. In this study, we rel…
To err is human but to persist is diabolical: Toward a theory of interactional policing
Social interaction is organized around norms and preferences that guide our construction of actions and our interpretation of those of others, creating a reflexive moral order. Sociological theory suggests two possibilities for the type of moral order that underlies the policing of interactional norm and preference violations: a morality that focuses on the nature of violations themselves and a morality that focuses on the positioning of actors a…
Ambiguities in Action Ascription
In everyday interactions with one another, speakers not only say things but also do things like offer, complain, reject, and compliment. Through observation, it is possible to see that much of the time people unproblematically understand what others are doing. Research on conversation has further documented how speakers' word choice, prosody, grammar, and gesture all help others to recognize what actions they are performing. In this study, we rel…
The Magic Word? Face-Work and the Functions of Please in Everyday Requests
Expressions of politeness such as please are prominent elements of interactional conduct that are explicitly targeted in early socialization and are subject to cultural expectations around socially desirable behavior. Yet their specific interactional functions remain poorly understood. Using conversation analysis supplemented with systematic coding, this study investigates when and where interactants use please in everyday requests. We find that …
Biblical authority in interaction: How do evangelicals use the Bible
Evangelicals are characterized by biblicism, the belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that it is authoritative in the lives of Christians. Scholars studying religion have identified a wide gap between what evangelicals say they believe about the Bible and how scripture is actually used in their communities. However, researchers have yet to describe the micro-interactional deployment of the Bible in evangelical talk. This paper ad…
When God Calls: Temporality in Southern Baptist Calls to Missions
Researchers studying religious experience have identified callings as a particularly salient context in which believers describe God's presence. They have noted standard elements that make up call narratives, along with variation in how recipients articulate both the vertical call, God's intervention in the believer's life, and the horizontal call, the community's response. However, how these standard elements are combined to produce culturally r…
Ambiguities in Action Ascription
In everyday interactions with one another, speakers not only say things but also do things like offer, complain, reject, and compliment. Through observation, it is possible to see that much of the time people unproblematically understand what others are doing. Research on conversation has further documented how speakers' word choice, prosody, grammar, and gesture all help others to recognize what actions they are performing. In this study, we rel…
To err is human but to persist is diabolical: Toward a theory of interactional policing
Social interaction is organized around norms and preferences that guide our construction of actions and our interpretation of those of others, creating a reflexive moral order. Sociological theory suggests two possibilities for the type of moral order that underlies the policing of interactional norm and preference violations: a morality that focuses on the nature of violations themselves and a morality that focuses on the positioning of actors a…
Picking Winners? Candidate Selection and Representatives’ Performance in the Southern Baptist Conservative Movement
Movements frequently seek to exert influence by securing official positions for supporters within target organizations (whether legislatures, state bureaucracies, or private entities). However, reliance on representatives leaves movements vulnerable. Prior to selection, prospective representatives may exaggerate alignment with activists. Once in place, representatives are susceptible to cooptive pressures to moderate movement objectives. Using th…
The Magic Word? Face-Work and the Functions of Please in Everyday Requests
Expressions of politeness such as please are prominent elements of interactional conduct that are explicitly targeted in early socialization and are subject to cultural expectations around socially desirable behavior. Yet their specific interactional functions remain poorly understood. Using conversation analysis supplemented with systematic coding, this study investigates when and where interactants use please in everyday requests. We find that …
Incurable Optimism about Getting What We Want: Anticipating Success in Everyday Requests
Shifting responsibility onto coparticipants: Disaffiliative accounts in request sequences
Accounts-verbal explanations for conduct-are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing or challenging a coparticipant’s behavi…
When requests are not articulated: Accountability and social action ascription
This study examines actions that are not directly articulated by speakers but are nonetheless oriented to by participants. Specifically, we examine situations in which a speaker is launching a request project, approaching a request indirectly, with a preliminary, or with further “upstream work,” but without ever making an actual request. Prior literature has argued that indirectness and preliminaries afford speakers with deniability and thus allo…
The Limits of Cooperation Inside the Christian Right: James Robison, James T. Draper, Jr., and the Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the defining events in the alignment of US evangelicals with the Republican Party. Lacking information about internal decision-making processes, existing studies have tended to exaggerate the cohesiveness of the activist network that ultimately captured the denomination. This paper takes a micro-historical approach to trace how movement leaders responded when one of t…
Differentiating Regulative and Constitutive Normativity: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel and the Sticky Problem of Meaning
In everyday life, individuals regularly confront novel situations which demand their attention and response. In such situations, they routinely deploy portable norms to select between appropriate and inappropriate next actions. Yet, these norms do not seem to determine the conditions of their own application. How then are we able to act in an orderly and mutually intelligible manner? This paper examines two attempts to answer this question, neith…
Sociology (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Communication (3 works) · Conversation (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works)