The interactional form of professional dominance

Abstract

Studies of ‘the interactional form of professional dominance’ portray particular conversational phenomena, such as interruptions and specific types of questions, as effective means by which doctors inhibit patients from getting the floor. Such strategies, however, depend on the patient's cooperation and, hence, cannot assure the doctor's dominance. In this paper it is argued that the Freidsonian concept of ‘professional dominance’ does not in the first place refer to the asymmetrical distribution of interactional tasks but rather to the asymmetrical distribution of specialised professional knowledge. Hence an ‘interactional form of professional dominance’ should not be sought in the doctor's strategies for controlling turns but rather in the unequal distribution of the parties' access to each other's objectives. The question is then how this asymmetry of access can be ‘discovered’ in conversational data. It is argued that this can be done (only) by an analysis of how episodes of the interaction function in the process of professional assessment as a whole. Copyright © 1994, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved