Thesis-2001-Nikander.pdf (7.69 MB)
Age in action: membership work and stage of life categories in talk
thesis
posted on 2017-03-23, 15:10 authored by Pirjo H. NikanderThis thesis is an analysis on the discursive practices through which people make
sense of and manage their membership in a particular age category. The data
comprise of a corpus of over 800 pages of transcribed talk from interviews with
Finnish men and women, all close to their 50th birthday. Throughout the analysis of
these accounts I will be addressing wider methodological and thematic issues and
debates in discursive social psychology. These include arguments about how
identities, the membership or non-membership in particular categories, are managed
m talk; the analytic possibilities and relevance of discursively mapping people's
membership and categorisation work in interactlon; and more specifically, the
interactive processes through which participants in an interview situation display,
apply, and mobilise notions and descriptions of age and ageing. The analytic focus is
firmly on participants' communicative and interpretative sense making: on the tacit
reasoning practices, and on the lands of interactional business achieved by age
categorisation in action. The wider empirical focus throughout is on how people use
categorisations and self-descriptions to accomplish certain kinds of interactional
work.
In the analysis of the interview data, empirically grounded observations are made
(i) On how people orient to and display the factual nature of the human life
course as a progression, and how overlap in between age categories is
managed
(11) On the discursive practices through which membership m an age category
is either warranted or resisted
(Ill) On the discursive formulations of personal change and continuity, and
(iv) On the moral nature of age description
The analytic and theoretical contributions from this work are of immediate interest
to both discursive and ageing research. The work shows the benefits of discursive
theorising and analysis for understanding arguments and descriptions about age.
Simultaneously it makes a contribution to the existing literature on identity and
categorisation in talk and interaction.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Publisher
© Pirjo H. NikanderPublisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2001Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.Language
- en