1.Introduction

Participation is a major element of a happy and fulfilling life. It is both a key ingredient in tackling the challenges faced by present-day society (e.g., Brodie et al. 2009Brodie, Ellie, Eddie Cowling, Nina Nissen, Angela E. Paine, Véronique Jochum, and Diane Warburton 2009 Understanding Participation: A Literature Review. National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Retrieved from http://​www​.sp​.gov​.tr​/upload​/Sayfa​/47​/files​/Pathways​-literature​-review​-final​-version​.pdf; Parker 2007Parker, Sophia 2007 “Participation: A New Operating System for Public Services?” In Participation Nation: Reconnecting Citizens to the Public Realm, edited by Stella Creasy, 103–112. London: Involve.) and a crucial building block in the development of a healthy sense of self (Corrigan et al. 1999Corrigan, Patrick W., Dale Faber, Fadwa Rashid, and Matthew Leary 1999 “The Construct Validity of Empowerment among Consumers of Mental Health Services.” Schizophrenia Research 38 (1): 77–84. ; Kirby and Keon 2006Kirby, Michael J. L., and Wilbert J. Keon 2006 Out of the Shadows at Last. Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada. Final Report of the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Senate of Canada, Ottawa.). It is known that the active participation of mental health clients in their own lives and care increases their levels of empowerment and enhances their satisfaction with their treatments and overall levels of health (Corrigan et al. 1999Corrigan, Patrick W., Dale Faber, Fadwa Rashid, and Matthew Leary 1999 “The Construct Validity of Empowerment among Consumers of Mental Health Services.” Schizophrenia Research 38 (1): 77–84. ; Hibbard and Greene 2013Hibbard, Judith H., and Jessica Greene 2013 “What the Evidence Shows about Patient Activation: Better Health Outcomes and Care Experiences; Fewer Data on Costs.” Health Affairs 32 (2): 207–214. ; Kirby and Keon 2006Kirby, Michael J. L., and Wilbert J. Keon 2006 Out of the Shadows at Last. Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada. Final Report of the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Senate of Canada, Ottawa.). Current international mental health policy recommendations thus emphasize the importance of client participation (Hibbard and Greene 2013Hibbard, Judith H., and Jessica Greene 2013 “What the Evidence Shows about Patient Activation: Better Health Outcomes and Care Experiences; Fewer Data on Costs.” Health Affairs 32 (2): 207–214. ; Royal College of Psychiatrists Social Inclusion Scoping Group 2009Royal College of Psychiatrists Social Inclusion Scoping Group 2009 Mental Health and Social Inclusion. Making Psychiatry and Mental Health Services Fit for the 21st Century. Position statement. Retrieved from https://​www​.rcpsych​.ac​.uk​/pdf​/PS01​_2009x​.pdf; WHO 2010WHO – Europe 2010 “User Empowerment in Mental Health – A Statement by the WHO Regional Office for Europe.” Retrieved from http://​www​.euro​.who​.int​/_​_data​/assets​/pdf​_file​/0020​/113834​/E93430​.pdf). Participation brings not only social recognition but also awareness of one’s social worth as a person who has something to say on common matters. Notably, however, participation as a goal is something that can only be constituted intersubjectively through interactions with other people. The primordial site of life in which participation is realized is therefore the face-to-face real-time interaction between individuals. Our aim in this paper is to examine concrete interactional practices – requests for concrete tasks – that are used to encourage participation in the context of mental health rehabilitation. Our data are from community meetings in Finland, and the language used is Finnish.

Clubhouse communities, the rehabilitation context in which we gathered our data, consider participation in daily tasks, in particular, an essential means of facilitating client recovery. These communities are non-governmental membership organizations that offer individuals with mental illnesses community-based psychosocial rehabilitation. The organization of the communal life is informed by the so-called recovery approach, which focuses on enhancing self-determination among clients and control over their own lives (e.g., Anthony 2007Anthony, William A. 2007 Toward a Vision of Recovery: For Mental Health and Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services. Boston: Boston University Press.; Bensing 2000Bensing, Jozien 2000 “Bridging the Gap: The Separate Worlds of Evidence-Based Medicine and Patient-Centered Medicine.” Patient Education and Counseling 39 (1): 17–25. ; Goossensen, Ziljstra and Koopmanschap 2007Goossensen, Anne, Paula Zijlstra, and Marc Koopmanschap 2007 “Measuring Shared Decision Making Processes in Psychiatry: Skills versus Patient Satisfaction.” Patient Education and Counseling 67 (1): 50–56. ). In this model, the relationship between a professional and a client is understood as one of equals–a cooperative endeavor in which responsibilities are shared equally. Professional interventions are focused on facilitating client participation and the resumption of decision-making in all areas of life (Framework for Recovery-Oriented Practice 2011Framework for Recovery-Oriented Practice 2011 “Health, Drugs and Regions Division, Victorian Government Department of Health, Melbourne.” Retrieved 25.2.2018 from www​.health​.vic​.gov​.au​/mentalhealth). In Clubhouses, the activities of the community are built around a work-ordered day, which is planned and implemented together with clients and support workers (Hänninen 2012Hänninen, Esko 2012 Choices for Recovery: Community-Based Rehabilitation and the Clubhouse Model as Means to Mental Health Reforms. THL-raportteja, 50/2012. Tampere: Tampere University Print Oy.). The work-ordered day consists of daily activities, such as grocery shopping, editing the membership magazine, and administration – all activities that relate to the maintenance and development of the Clubhouse community and give clients better opportunities for participation (Clubhouse International 2018Clubhouse International 2018 http://​clubhouse​-intl​.org). The distribution of daily tasks between professionals and clients is thus the most critical site, in which the preconditions for clients to participate in communal life are established.

However, previous research has suggested that providing opportunities for clients to participate may be challenging to realize in practice (Royal College of Psychiatrists Social Inclusion Scoping Group 2009Royal College of Psychiatrists Social Inclusion Scoping Group 2009 Mental Health and Social Inclusion. Making Psychiatry and Mental Health Services Fit for the 21st Century. Position statement. Retrieved from https://​www​.rcpsych​.ac​.uk​/pdf​/PS01​_2009x​.pdf). Potential barriers to increased participation relate to the range of required skills and the attitudes of professionals, the working conditions, the organizational culture and resources, and whether the clients are willing or have the capacity to participate actively (Hickey and Kipping 1998Hickey, Gary, and Cheryl Kipping 1998 “Exploring the Concept of User Involvement in Mental Health through a Participation Continuum.” Journal of Clinical Nursing 7 (1): 83–88. ). Earlier research on joint decision-making, for example, has shown that some clients express a preference for professionals to make decisions about their care, even when the professionals try to engage them in joint decision-making (De las Cuevas et al. 2012De las Cuevas, Carlos, Amado Rivero-Santana, Lilisbeth Perestelo-Pérez, Jeanette Pérez-Ramos, and Pedro Serrano-Aguilar 2012 “Attitudes Toward Concordance in Psychiatry: A Comparative, Cross-Sectional Study of Psychiatric Patients and Mental Health Professionals.” BMC Psychiatry 12, 53. ; Elstad and Eide 2009Elstad, Toril A., and Arne H. Eide 2009 “User Participation in Community Mental Health Services: Exploring the Experiences of Users and Professionals.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Science 23 (4): 674–681. ). However, these studies have not examined the precise ways in which the challenges of client participation manifest themselves in the moment-by-moment unfolding of the interactions between clients and professionals and how professionals seek to address such challenges. In this study, we examine how professionals and clients carry out interactional sequences of requests and responses to negotiate responsibility for carrying out everyday tasks within the Clubhouse community. Here, we focus specifically on clients’ responses involving both compliance and reluctance and on how support workers deal with these client responses. In line with our previous study (Stevanovic et al. 2022Stevanovic, Melisa, Taina Valkeapää, Elina Weiste, and Camilla Lindholm 2022 “Joint Decision Making in a Mental Health Rehabilitation Community: The Impact of Support Workers’ Proposal Design on Client Responsiveness.” Counselling Psychology Quarterly 35 (1): 129–154. ), we define client participation as verbal and nonverbal responsiveness to support workers’ requests. Non-participation by clients would involve no identifiable verbal or nonverbal client engagement with the support workers’ requests, followed by the same or another support worker taking the turn.

2.Request as social action

Making requests is a crucial part of everyday social interaction. First, the traditional speech act approach (Austin 1962Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.; Searle 1969Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 1976Searle, John R. 1976 “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.” Language in Society 5 (1): 1–23. ) focused on unraveling the conditions in which requests are understood as such. A successful performance of a request necessitates that: (1) the propositional content of the utterance refers to a future action to be carried out by the recipient; (2) the recipient is able to carry out the action and the speaker knows it, but on his or her own record, the recipient would normally not do so; (3) the speaker genuinely wants that the recipient carries out the requested action; and (4) the utterance is recognizable as an attempt to get the recipient to carry out the action (Searle 1969Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 66). Second, from the perspective of Brown and Levinson’s (1987 [1978])Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 [1978] Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. highly influential theory of politeness, requests are a prime example of the so-called “face-threatening acts,” which interfere with the recipient’s freedom of choice with respect to his or her future actions. For this reason, requests are generally considered to require the use of mitigation through, for example, the utilization of modal verb constructions. Third, the variation in people’s request forms has been a focus of attention, specifically in the works of early sociolinguists (e.g., Ervin-Tripp 1976Ervin-Tripp, Susan 1976 “Is Sybil There? The Structure of Some American English Directives.” Language in Society 5 (1): 25–66. ), who sought to account for the use of different request forms with reference to background variables, such as social rank and status. Finally, the field of conversation analysis has recently witnessed an increasing interest in the study of request form selection, in which participants’ own orientations to their rights and obligations and to the contingencies of the situation play a central role (e.g., Curl and Drew 2008Curl, Traci S., and Paul Drew 2008 “Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (2): 129–153. ; Heinemann 2006Heinemann, Trine 2006 “ ‘Will You or Can’t You?’: Displaying Entitlement in Interrogative Requests.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1081–1104. ; Rossi 2015Rossi, Giovanni 2015 “The Request System in Italian Interaction.” PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen.). In this study, we draw on insights from all these traditions. Our main methodological approach is conversation analysis.

3.Compliance, resistance, and reluctance

In the Clubhouse context, negotiations about carrying out concrete actions are typically launched by support workers, who request clients to carry out specific tasks. In mundane conversations, requests may typically be expressed with reference to the beneficial effects of the requested action for the speaker (Clayman and Heritage 2014Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage 2014 “Benefactors and Beneficiaries: Benefactive Status and Stance in the Management of Offers and Requests.” In Requesting in Social Interaction, edited by Paul Drew, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 51–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Couper-Kuhlen 2014Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2014 “What Does Grammar Tell Us about Action?” Pragmatics 24 (3): 623–647.). However, the situation is different at the Clubhouse, where the requested actions typically serve a collective purpose. In addition, active participation in Clubhouse activities is assumed to be advantageous for clients in terms of their recovery – an assumption that might take precedence in how support workers design their request turns.

Sequences of requests and their responses may be clarified with reference to the notion of preference organization, which is one of the key concepts in conversation analysis. Its significance resides in its concern with how the mutual understanding and intelligibility of action depend on the ways in which actions are formatted and responded to. Generally, initiating actions invoke expectations for responsive actions, while some responsive actions are considered more “preferred” than others. What is essential here is that, according to empirical studies, preferred responsive actions tend to be performed more straightforwardly and faster than dispreferred ones, which are typically produced indirectly, with hesitations and delays (Bilmes 1988Bilmes, Jack 1988 “The Concept of Preference in Conversation Analysis.” Language in Society 17: 161–181. ; Davidson 1984Davidson, Judy A. 1984 “Subsequent Versions of Invitations, Offers, Requests, and Proposals Dealing with Potential or Actual Rejection.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 102–128. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.; Pomerantz 1984Pomerantz, Anita 1984 “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.; Schegloff 2007Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 58–96). It has therefore been suggested that preference organization fosters social solidarity, the delayed positioning not only mitigating the force of a dispreferred response but also facilitating the avoidance of such a response altogether (Clayman 2002Clayman, Steven E. 2002 “Sequence and Solidarity.” In Advances in Group Processes: Group Cohesion, Trust, and Solidarity, edited by Shane R. Thye, and Edward J. Lawler, 229–253. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. , 235). However, to determine what is a preferred responsive action and what is not is not always straightforward. For example, displays of agreement and compliance are typically seen as preferred responsive actions (Sacks 1987 [1973]Sacks, Harvey 1987 [1973] “On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organisation, edited by Graham Button, and J. R. E. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. ); however, this is not the case, for example, in disputes (Kotthoff 1993Kotthoff, Helga 1993 “Disagreement and Concession in Disputes: On the Context Sensitivity of Preference Structures.” Language in Society 22 (2): 193–216. ) or as a response to self-deprecation (Pomerantz 1984Pomerantz, Anita 1984 “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.). All in all, what in each case is a preferred response to an utterance is not always a straightforward question, and this may also hold for requests.

Instead of resorting to dispreferred responsive actions, second speakers have more subtle means of resisting some aspects of the initiating actions of first speakers. Instead of accepting all the implied assumptions underlying the first speaker’s turn, second speakers may deal with the turn in their own terms (see, e.g., Heritage and Raymond 2012Heritage, John, and Geoffrey T. Raymond 2012 “Navigating Epistemic Landscapes: Acquiescence, Agency and Resistance in Responses to Polar Questions.” In Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives, edited by Jan P. de Ruiter, 179–192. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ; Stivers 2005Stivers, Tanya 2005 “Parent Resistance to Physicians’ Treatment Recommendations: One Resource for Initiating a Negotiation of the Treatment Decision.” Health Communication 18 (1): 41–74. ; Stivers and Hayashi 2010Stivers, Tanya, and Makoto Hayashi 2010 “Transformative Answers: One Way to Resist a Question’s Constraints.” Language in Society 39 (1): 1–25. ; Waring 2007Waring, Hansun Z. 2007 “Complex Advice Acceptance as a Resource for Managing Asymmetries.” Text & Talk 27 (1): 107–137. ). Even while complying de facto with first speakers’ requests for action, recipients may verbally or physically frame their (complying) actions as autonomously determined independent doings by, for example, verbally announcing their actions and furnishing these announcements with cues of self-evidence (Kent 2012Kent, Alexandra 2012 “Compliance, Resistance and Incipient Compliance When Responding to Directives.” Discourse Studies 14 (6): 711–770. ; Stevanovic and Monzoni 2016Stevanovic, Melisa, and Chiara Monzoni 2016 “On the Hierarchy of Interactional Resources: Embodied and Verbal Behavior in the Management of Joint Activities with Material Objects.” Journal of Pragmatics 103: 15–32. ; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012Stevanovic, Melisa, and Anssi Peräkylä 2012 “Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose and Decide.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (3): 297–321. ). Furthermore, when declining a request, second speakers may commonly seek to negotiate the implied assumptions of ability and willingness encoded in the linguistic design of the request turn. Thus, if the request has targeted the recipient’s willingness to do something, a reluctant recipient is likely to refer to his or her inability to comply rather than to state his or her unwillingness to do so (Hollin and Pilnick 2018Hollin, Gregory, and Alison Pilnick 2018 “The Categorisation of Resistance: Interpreting Failure to Follow a Proposed Line of Action in the Diagnosis of Autism amongst Young Adults.” Sociology of Health & Illness 40 (7): 1215–1232. ).

With reference to Sacks’s technical description of preference, Bilmes (1988)Bilmes, Jack 1988 “The Concept of Preference in Conversation Analysis.” Language in Society 17: 161–181. argued that a preferred response is neither indicated nor contraindicated by the presence of displays of reluctance. This view is connected to Schegloff’s (2007Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 62) account of alternative groundings of preference–that is, making a distinction between preference at the level of action and preference at the level of turn design. A preferred response can be delivered with markers of dispreference in order to express reluctant compliance. The recipient therefore may produce expressions that conventionally indicate such a response. Something like this may happen in classroom interactions, such as when thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students were shown to display reluctance to engage in peer evaluation, even if this had clearly been called for by the teacher (Cromdal, Tholander and Aronsson 2007Cromdal, Jakob, Michael Tholander, and Karin Aronsson 2007 “ ‘Doing Reluctance’: Managing Delivery of Assessments in Peer Evaluation.” In Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction, edited by Sally Wiggins, and Alexa Hepburn, 203–223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ).

In the context of psychosocial rehabilitation and interventions to increase clients’ sense of social inclusion, the question of how professional support workers may best overcome a client’s reluctance to participate in joint endeavors has become a major issue (e.g., Cowan and Presbury 2000Cowan, Eric W., and Jack H. Presbury 2000 “Meeting Client Resistance and Reactance with Reverence.” Journal of Counseling & Development 78 (4): 411–419. ; Newman 1994Newman, Cory F. 1994 “Understanding Client Resistance: Methods for Enhancing Motivation to Change.” Cognitive and Behavioral Practice 1 (1): 47–69. ). It is therefore highly important to gain a deeper understanding of how reluctance is displayed, as observed at the turn-by-turn unfolding of naturally occurring interactional encounters between mental health professionals and their clients. This is the question on which this paper purports to shed light.

Our study of the support workers’ requests and the clients’ ways of responding to them focuses on the following questions:

1. What kinds of request forms do support workers use?

2. How do clients respond to support workers’ requests?

Concepts such as willingness, capability, preference, and reluctance in task management are addressed in the analysis of request sequences.

4.Data and methods

The data analyzed in this study comes from one Finnish Clubhouse. Within the Finnish healthcare system, Clubhouses complement governmental services by providing opportunities for individuals with mental illness to build long-term relationships that may support them in their recovery, as well as in obtaining employment, education, and housing. Membership is open to anyone with a history of mental illness, and a specific diagnosis is not required. All these operational principles and guidelines are documented in the Clubhouse Standards (Clubhouse International 2018Clubhouse International 2018 http://​clubhouse​-intl​.org).

The data consist of a set of twenty-nine weekly rehabilitation group meetings that took place during an 11-month period, from September 2016 to August 2017. The aim of these meetings was to help clients develop the skills and confidence needed in working life. The group discussed work, practiced work-related skills, and made decisions related to the Clubhouse’s transition work program–a vocational rehabilitation program aimed at helping members gain skills needed in the labor market. There were between two and ten clients and between one and three support workers in each meeting. The meetings were chaired by the support workers. The duration of the meetings varied between thirty and sixty minutes.

The data were subjected to conversation analysis (CA; Heritage 1984Heritage, John 1984 Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.; Schegloff 2007Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). In this data-driven and micro-analytic method, discourse is regarded as a collective production in which meaning is constructed in cooperation between conversationalists through dynamic processes of interaction. Previous CA work on mental health has described how participants sustain and renew different psychiatric institutions (e.g., psychotherapy, psychiatric consultations, counseling) and ideologies of professionals (e.g., psychoanalysis or cognitive psychotherapy) (Peräkylä 2013Peräkylä, Anssi 2013 “Conversation Analysis in Psychotherapy.” In Handbook of Conversation Analysis, edited by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 551–574. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ) in and through their conversational practices. In this paper, we draw on this institutional line of CA research.

The data analysis process consisted of various phases. During the first phase, we collected all instances of proposals made by the support workers and clients and of turns in which the support workers categorized a previous contribution made by a client as a “proposal.” After a preliminary analysis, we decided to limit our focus in this study to sequences in which the support workers made requests for immediate action (Steensig and Heinemann 2014Steensig, Jakob, and Trine Heinemann 2014 “The Social and Moral Work of Modal Constructions in Granting Remote Requests.” In Requesting in Social Interaction, edited by Paul Drew, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 141–166. John Benjamins. ). This limited the collection to a total of 41 turns. The requests mainly concerned taking notes, searching for information, and presenting things to the group. All turns requesting concrete actions from clients and their responses were analyzed for their verbal and embodied features in accordance with the CA method.

Our data collection involved requests in the forms of polar interrogatives (N = 29), declaratives (N = 6), and imperatives (N = 6) (see Hakulinen et al. 2004Hakulinen, Auli, Maria Vilkuna, Riitta Korhonen, Vesa Koivisto, Tarja-Riitta Heinonen, and Irja Alho 2004 Iso suomen kielioppi [Descriptive grammar of Finnish]. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Online version (2008), http://​scripta​.kotus​.fi​/visk., § 1645, 1689; Raevaara 2017Raevaara, Liisa 2017 “Adjusting the Design of Directives to the Activity Environment. Imperatives in Finnish Cooking Club Interaction.” In Imperative Turns at Talk: The Design of Directives in Action, edited by Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 381–410. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. ). The focus in this paper is on polar interrogatives, which are formed in Finnish using the question particle -kO (or -ks, -k in spoken language). The particle is attached to the predicate verb, which may but does not have to be a modal auxiliary (cf. Kangasniemi 1992Kangasniemi, Heikki 1992 Modal Expressions in Finnish. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society (SKS). on modality in Finnish). In our data, a modal auxiliary verb was used in twenty-eight requests. The most frequent one was haluta (“want”), which was used in sixteen requests. Other verbs occurring in the collection were voida (“can,” five), viitsiä (“mind,” four), pitää (“must,” two), ehtiä (“have time to,” one), and osata (“know how to,” one).

The data were transcribed according to conversation-analytic conventions (Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson 1996Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel. A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson eds. 1996 Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 461–465). In the data extracts presented in this paper, translations from the Finnish video-recorded data into English were performed by the researchers and proofread by an English native speaker. Each utterance was translated into English and is accompanied by an interlinear gloss that follows the Leipzig Glossing rules (see Lehmann 1982Lehmann, Christian 1982 “Directions for Interlinear Morphemic Translations.” Folia Linguistica 16 (1–4): 199–224. ; Leipzig Glossing Rules 2020Leipzig Glossing Rules 2020 “Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-by-Morpheme Glosses.” Max Planck Institute, Department of Linguistics. Online: https://​www​.eva​.mpg​.de​/lingua​/resources​/glossing​-rules​.php). The transcription symbols and glossing abbreviations are listed at the end of this paper.

5.Ethical considerations

Participation in the study was voluntary. The Board of Clubhouse Directors approved the study. The clients and the support workers received both written and spoken information about the study, its aims, and their rights as participants, and signed a participant consent form. Personal and identifiable items were changed in the transcripts. In this paper, support workers are referred to by numbers (SW1, SW2, and SW3) and each client by a pseudonym.

6.Results

In this section, we will show how the support workers’ requests and the clients’ ways of responding to them center specifically on the choice between verbs indicating willingness and possibility. In what follows, we will initially present requests followed by client compliance (6.1). Thereafter, we will consider requests followed by client resistance (6.2).

7.Discussion

Our results highlight several main areas for discussion. What is noteworthy in our data on Clubhouse meetings is that the support workers commonly used verbs referring to willingness in their requests, whereas the clients tended to express compliance and resistance with regard to possibility. The support workers’ strong orientation toward willingness and voluntariness seems to be connected to the Clubhouse ideologies of low threshold, voluntary participation, and low hierarchy. When tasks are offered through requests that emphasize willingness, a lack of aspiration becomes a valid reason to refuse, whereas mere interest is presented as a valid reason to take on the task (see also Harjunpää 2021Harjunpää, Katariina 2021 “Brokering Co-participants’ Volition in Request and Offer Sequences.” In Intersubjectivity in Action, edited by Jan Lindström, Ritva Laury, Anssi Peräkylä, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 135–159. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). However, the clients in our data referred to their ability or inability in their responses. The clients’ capabilities were not questioned in sequences involving requests for concrete action, and the demands of the tasks were presented as low and easily achievable. This kind of conduct may be connected to the sensitive nature of mental health problems, which may have an effect on how capable clients perceive themselves as being (Hänninen 2012Hänninen, Esko 2012 Choices for Recovery: Community-Based Rehabilitation and the Clubhouse Model as Means to Mental Health Reforms. THL-raportteja, 50/2012. Tampere: Tampere University Print Oy.). Moreover, an orientation toward willingness seems to be one way of evoking a sense of responsibility among clients to contribute to group activities in an indirect manner.

Indeed, the clients seemed to orient to the underlying assumption of social responsibility rather than their own personal preferences. Whether they accepted the tasks or refused them, they resorted to the modality of possibility instead of willingness: they stated whether they could or could not perform the requested actions. This is how requests are ritually responded to in conversation (Couper-Kuhlen and Etelämäki 2015Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Marja Etelämäki 2015 “Nominated Actions and Their Targeted Agents in Finnish Conversational Directives.” Journal of Pragmatics 78: 7–24. ; Kangasniemi 1998). Whereas expressing unwillingness to take on a task in a group situation could be regarded as face-threatening, expressing explicit desire to perform a mundane task would also be somewhat unexpected. Even in the context of Clubhouse rehabilitation, given that clients are there to find empowerment through work, the kinds of chores requested in our data were perhaps not primarily seen as individual opportunities to develop skills but as things that needed to be done for the group to function. In other words, the support workers seemed to try to avoid putting pressure on clients by orienting toward willingness, whereas the clients determinedly shifted the focus away from their personal preferences and possible gains and instead displayed cooperation. This discrepancy in orientation toward task delegation gives reason to wonder whether the support workers’ emphasis on willingness encourages clients to participate in practice or, on the contrary, whether it makes it more embarrassing to volunteer or to refuse. Nevertheless, the way the support workers in our data handled client reluctance shows the kind of sensitivity that is indisputably beneficial.

Displays of reluctance are intertwined with the organization of preference in intriguing ways. As a response to a question about the recipient’s willingness, a structurally preferred responsive action might well be an affirmative answer that does not alter the terms of the request in any way. Sometimes, however, such a response could be socially problematic. As Bilmes (1988)Bilmes, Jack 1988 “The Concept of Preference in Conversation Analysis.” Language in Society 17: 161–181. argued, displays of reluctance are sometimes an essential part of what Goffman referred to as the ritual dimension of interaction. This ritual dimension may become specifically critical when a response has a multifaceted audience toward which the recipient might feel accountable. Situations in which a teacher requests teenagers to engage in peer evaluation (Cromdal, Tholander and Aronsson 2007Cromdal, Jakob, Michael Tholander, and Karin Aronsson 2007 “ ‘Doing Reluctance’: Managing Delivery of Assessments in Peer Evaluation.” In Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction, edited by Sally Wiggins, and Alexa Hepburn, 203–223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ) are a prime example of such socially dilemmatic contexts, although our data suggest that analogous dilemmas might also exist in community-based mental health rehabilitation. Inasmuch as a support worker indeed wants to successfully request a concrete action from the client, it might be worth reviewing what Searle (1969)Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. saw as the preconditions for a successful performance of a request. Two of these preconditions seem to be particularly relevant here. As discussed at the beginning of this paper, these preconditions include the speaker conveying (a) his or her own willingness to have the recipient carry out the requested action and (b) certainty that the recipient is capable of carrying out the action. In contrast, Searle said nothing about the recipient’s willingness in this regard. It is thus possible that, in our data, the support workers’ focus on the recipient’s willingness as part of their request design is inherently problematic precisely because it circumvents and thus possibly undermines both of these essential preconditions of successful requests.

Then again, we also acknowledge that the level of pressure that the support workers in our data exerted on the Clubhouse clients was carefully adjusted to meet the demands of the sensitive context of mental health rehabilitation. To the extent that requests are about constraining the recipient’s freedom of choice with respect to his or her future actions, it is understandable that the support workers exhibited heightened sensitivity not to impose their will on the clients (on the notion of imposition, see Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978]Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 [1978] Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). Furthermore, one could argue for the existence of an insurmountable a priori power asymmetry between the clients and support workers (cf. Ervin-Tripp 1976Ervin-Tripp, Susan 1976 “Is Sybil There? The Structure of Some American English Directives.” Language in Society 5 (1): 25–66. ), which might make it practically impossible for the clients to resist the support workers’ requests if they were designed in more conventional ways. In other words, the rights of the clients to say “no” to the requests may need to be specifically guarded by the support workers–even if this happens at the cost of successful task delegation.

In the end, it is worth pointing out that by taking on mundane tasks, clients can show their capability and skills to support workers and the whole group, and this may have positive consequences for them later in other Clubhouse activities. For example, active participation may result in transition employment. Therefore, the clients’ displays of reluctance to carry out these tasks produce a dilemma for support workers. According to the recovery model and Clubhouse International Standards (Clubhouse International 2018Clubhouse International 2018 http://​clubhouse​-intl​.org), a key operational principle is to increase client participation by providing opportunities to take on responsibilities for all aspects related to running the Clubhouse. Another key principle enshrined in the standards is respect for client self-determination. Accordingly, support workers have to find a balance between supporting members in engaging in joint activities and respecting their clients’ manifestations of non-participation and resistance. Our results shed light on how this balancing is accomplished in the turn-by-turn unfolding of interactions.