Observing England’s cricket team in the face of defeat

The late great Erving Goffman’s studies of the minutiae of everyday life inspired thousands of researchers from the 1960s onwards and his books reached a much wider audience than most academics can ever dream of.

But, with the notable exception of two of his graduate students (Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff) who founded conversation analysis, few other sociologists ever managed to emulate the perceptiveness of Goffman's observations about the workings of everyday social interaction.

When he was a visiting professor at Manchester University in the early 1970s, someone asked him how he managed to come up with so many astute observations. His reply was along the lines of:

“By not looking at the people everyone is focused on in any particular situation but by concentrating on watching the behavior of the ones that no one else is looking at.”

I had a go at following his advice at Headingley on Sunday during the dying moments of the test match against Australia, and have some rather worrying observations to report about the England cricket team.

While everyone in the crowd was watching tail end batsmen Broad and Swann showing the main batsmen how they should have dealt with the Australian bowling, I turned my binoculars away from the pitch towards the balcony where the rest of the England team were sitting, fully expecting to see a collection of depressed and dejected faces.

Given their dismal failures over the previous two days, what surprised me was to see so much chatting, grinning and laughing going on. From a distance, the atmosphere among them looked far more casual, jovial and relaxed than seemed appropriate in such dire circumstances.

But what really shocked me was their apparent lack of interest in or support for the temporary successes of their colleagues out on the pitch: when the crowd cheered and applauded, the rest of the team could hardly be bothered to join in.

What, I wondered, does that tell us about the team spirit of the current England squad?

Then, not long after Australia had won the match, we went for a walk around the back of the stadium, and stumbled across some supporting evidence for a comment in Derek Pringle’s report on the match in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, where he said:

‘A positive report on Andrew Flintoff would obviously be a good start but the process should have begun the moment they lost their last wicket yesterday, 33 balls after lunch, but didn’t. Instead of marching out onto the field to shake the Australians’ hands in public, all but the departing batsmen remained inside the dressing-room area leaving Strauss, their captain, to face the boos when he attended the post-match presentation’ [my italics].

It wasn’t just that the rest of the team had stayed hidden inside the pavilion, as Pringle noted, but they'd made an instant and hasty retreat. By the time we reached the players’ car park less than an hour after the game finished, the stewards told us that most of England team (except for Prior who was still massaging his ego by signing a few autographs) had already driven off – not in a team bus, but individually in their own cars.

Again, the same question arises: what does this tell us about England’s team spirit, let alone their management’s view of the urgent need for an extended team meeting?

Instead of biting that particular bullet there and then, England’s cricket leadership has apparently instructed the failures to go back to their counties and prepare for victory – which strikes me as worryingly reminiscent of former Liberal Party leader David Steel’s instruction to his members to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.”

England cricket fans can only hope for a bit more luck than the Liberals had in 1987, as recent performances suggest that 'luck' is the only chance left for regaining the Ashes.

Derek Draper breaks a basic rule of conversation

This year is the 35th anniversary of the publication of a foundational paper that established conversation analysis as a new and serious force across several disciplines in the area of language and social interaction. *

The paper is a defining analysis of how turn-taking works in everyday conversation, central to which is the most basic rule of all, namely ‘one speaker at a time’ – a rule so basic that we even have words in our language – ‘interruption’ and ‘interjection’ – for referring to breaches of it (i.e. speaking while someone else is speaking).

The fact that there are such words in our vocabulary means that the ‘one at a time’ rule must get broken quite often in conversations, as indeed it does.

But the point is that if you make a regular habit of speaking while someone else is speaking, you’re taking quite a risk because it involves, in effect, putting your reputation on the line - for the simple reason that others will not only notice what you’re doing but will also use such behaviour as evidence for coming to negative conclusions about your character and personality. That’s why we often hear complaints about someone being ‘pushy’, ‘domineering’, ‘hogging the conversation’, ‘never letting anyone get a word in edgeways’, ‘liking the sound of their own voice’, etc.

Having just got back from a skiing holiday, I was reminded about this while trying to catch up on the ‘Smeargate’ affair, which included watching Andrew Neill interviewing Derek Draper and Paul Staines.

Try watching the edited sequence below (or the whole interview HERE) and ask yourself three questions:

1. How many times does Mr Draper break the 'one at a time' rule?
2. What impression of him as a person is conveyed by Mr Draper’s repeated breaches of the rule?
3. How often have you seen an interviewer appeal to the ‘one at a time’ rule to restore normal turn-taking, as Neill does when he finally intervenes with “will you shut up for a minute and let him answer” ?

And, as an incidental footnote (given the Berkeley shirt worn by Mr Staines and his reason for wearing it) all three authors of this seminal paper really did have PhDs from the University of California, two of them from the Berkeley campus, where Sacks and Schegloff were supervised by the late great Erving Goffman.

* A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation by: Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Language, Vol. 50, No. 4. (1974), pp. 696-735.

Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says

Long ago, I heard one of the founders of conversation analysis (and I can’t remember whether it was Emanuel Schegloff or Gail Jefferson) talking about ‘pre-delicate hitches’ – a rather cumbersome piece of jargon for referring to a fairly common occurrence in conversation.

‘Hitches’ are things like ‘uh-’ and ‘um-, restarts of a word, or slight pauses, and the observation was that these are regularly found at those points in a conversation where the speaker is leading towards a word or a topic that they know is rather ‘delicate’ (e.g. a swear word, obscenity or potentially controversial news, gossip, etc.).

The general argument was that such ‘hitches’ are used to give advance notice that we’re about to say something that we know is rather ‘delicate’ – and know that others might find ‘delicate’ too.

I was therefore fascinated to notice that there were at least ten ‘pre-delicate hitches’ in the first four sentences of Gordon Brown’s comments about the scandal of the Home Secretary’s expenses claim for a blue movie watched by her husband – which you can check out by following the transcript below (hitches in bold) while watching the video HERE.

(P.S. Since posting this, I've realised that you can't actually read the transcript at the same time as watching the video, so keen anoraks will have to copy it on to another file and/or print it out).

BROWN:

"This is- this is very much a-a personal matter (pause) uh- for- for Jacqui.
"She’s made her uh- apology.
"Her husband has made it uh- clear that he is- he is apologised `(sic).
"Uh I-I think that the best thing is that Jacqui Smith gets- gets on with her work as- which is what she wants to do."

What these hitches suggest is that Mr Brown is finding the whole episode much more delicate than he’s letting on in the words that he actually uses.

(If you found this of any interest, you might also like to inspect my explanation of his claim to 'have saved the world' gaffe in December).