In:Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and withholding in institutional interaction
Edited by Fabienne H.G. Chevalier and John Moore
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 255] 2015
► pp. 271–304
Responses to indirect complaints as restricted activities in Therapeutic Community meetings
Published online: 27 March 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.255.09pin
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.255.09pin
In this chapter I investigate how the staff members of a mental health therapeutic community in Italy avoid displays of affiliation in response to residents’ indirect (or third party) complaints. I show how this restriction can be embodied in different practices: ignoring a resident’s turn carrying a possible complaint, avoiding attending the complaint-components of a resident’s turn, and disaffiliating with a resident’s complaint. I also discuss a deviant case in which affiliation is produced and is later treated by the staff members as a problematic stance to be produced following a resident’s complaint. I argue that through a restriction on affiliation the staff members implement the institutionally-relevant identity of intermediaries, whose task is to encourage the residents’ compliance to the decisions of absent third parties.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Caronia, Letizia, Federica Ranzani, Vittoria Colla, Silvia Demozzi & Giulia Benericetti
Pino, Marco
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