In chapter 3 of my _Talking Science_ there is a fair bit of discussion of
how authority works and is invoked indirectly in classroom dialogue, some
of it may be useful. There is also a literature on doctor-patient
interviews and one on gatekeeper-applicant interviews. I think the
classroom case may be closest to what you are looking for.
It is interesting of course how we decide what the relevant time scale is.
One scale is how long it takes a completable script or activity-type to
play out, another is the time-scale over which, say, authority relations,
or responses to them, change, for individuals. I think this scale may be
the more critical one if what you are looking at is how people learn to
operate in activities where there is a dominant authority relations, esp.
if they are new to its specific forms.
The 'script' or institutionalized system of expectations about role
relations and behaviors in some activity setting can also be regarded as an
abstraction from a set of 'intertexts' or other occasions that illustrate
its salient features (are prototypical in some respect), so that instead of
an in-the-head representation (which does not seem to be how people really
behave), we can look at how people reference and use these event-texts or
event-narratives, which ones are called on when, etc. as a system of
practices that materially embodies the ways we constrain ourselves and
others to act as if we were following some ideal representation. This makes
the norms and expectations representatable as systems of action of exactly
the same kind as those of the activity proper, one system
(semiotic-interactional) and not two (interactional vs. cognitive).
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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