Multiactivity in Social Interaction
Beyond multitasking
Editors
| University of Oulu
| University of Oulu
| University of Basel
| University of Southern Denmark
Doing more than one thing at the same time – a phenomenon that is often called ‘multitasking’ – is characteristic to many situations in everyday and professional life. Although we all experience it, its real time features remain understudied. Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking offers a fresh view to the phenomenon by presenting studies that explore how two or more activities can be related and made co-relevant as people interact with one another. The studies build on the basis that multiactivity is a social, verbal and embodied phenomenon. They investigate multiactivity by using video recordings of real-life interactions from a range of different contexts, such as medical settings, office workplaces and car driving. With the companion collection Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. A close appreciation of how people use language and interact for and during multiactivity will not only interest researchers in language and social interaction, communication studies and discourse analysis, but will be very valuable for scholars in cognitive sciences, psychology and sociology.
[Not in series, 187] 2014. vii, 289 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements
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vii
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PART 1. Introduction
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3–32
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33–76
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PART 2. The organisation of multiactivity
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79–108
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109–134
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PART 3. Interruption and resumption of activities in multiactivity situations
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137–166
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167–190
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191–223
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PART 4. Multiple involvements and participation frameworks
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227–246
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247–282
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Person index
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283–284
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Subject index
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285–289
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“This important collection takes research on collective human action from the singular interaction to the interaction of interactions. Through a series of careful studies it shows people to be artful jugglers of their courses of action. Artful because people are able to suspend, accelerate, reverse, interrupt and adjust the actions that they have up in the air. Scholars of cognition, sociology and linguistic will delight in the findings and surprises delivered by this book.”
Eric Laurier, University of Edinburgh
“A truly groundbreaking book that thoroughly rethinks the notion of multitasking as a real world phenomenon. Studying moments of multiactivity based on video recordings of a range of real life situations, its different chapters significantly further our understanding of the precise ways in which participants, in their daily lives, manage doing more than one thing at a time.”
Mathias Broth, Linköping University
“This path-breaking collection of papers is a major step into a new era of studies of situated and embodied social interaction. Rather than looking at talk only, or single activities among participants, the authors describe how interactional multiactivities – when participants do more than one thing at the same time – are combined and coordinated in different ways in situations with multiple demands. Some papers go on to identify general types of multiactivities, with regard to sequentiality, dominant vs subordinated constituent activities, etc. At the same time, readers are ushered into sophisticated video-based analyses of interaction that look at the full multimodal (linguistic and bodily) complexity of these multiactivities in their physical and social circumstances. The authors have established themselves as leading experts in this new area of interaction studies.”
Per Linell, Linköping University & Göteborg University
“Though the practices whereby participants manage multiple courses of concurrent action have received occasional attention in the CA literature, this volume brings together a diverse collection of studies that richly illustrate the delicate organizational details of this pervasive phenomenon.”
Timothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University
“[A] beneficial reading for a wide readership and especially those interested in human communication research.”
Chen Zeyuan, Jiangxi Agricultural University, P.R. China, in Discourse Studies, Vol. 18:2 (2016), pp. 228-230
Cited by
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2017. New and recent publications.
Gesture 16:3 ► pp. 480 ff.
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2015.
In Temporality in Interaction [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 27],
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Hofstetter, Emily
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Hofstetter, Emily & Leelo Keevallik
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In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ],
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Kamunen, Antti
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Lerner, Gene H. & Geoffrey Raymond
2017.
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2014.
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2018.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Communication Studies
Interaction Studies
Psychology
BIC Subject: JMJ – Occupational & industrial psychology
BISAC Subject: PSY031000 – PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology