The present collection adds to a growing range of studies that report on recent research into naturally occurring social action and interaction undertaken from a conversation analytic perspective. Foreshadowed by the investigative initiatives of Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman into the organization of everyday conduct, this perspective was extensively articulated in Harvey Sacks's privately circulated lectures and developed into a distinctive research literature in association with his collaborators, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.

The central goal of conversation analytic research is the description and explication of the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction. At its most basic, this objective is one of describing the procedures by which conversationalists produce their own behavior and understand and deal with the behavior of others. A basic assumption throughout is Garfinkel's (1967:1) proposal that these activities – producing conduct and understanding and dealing with it – are accomplished as the accountable products of common sets of procedures.

This objective and its underlying assumption provide a basic means of analysis. Specifically, analysis can be generated out of matters observable in the data of interaction. The analyst is thus not required to speculate upon what the interactants hypothetically or imaginably understood, or the procedures or constraints to which they could conceivably have been oriented. Instead, analysis can emerge from observation of the conduct of the participants. Schegloff and Sacks have summarized the assumptions that guide this form of research, and the analytic resource thus provided: