Much of the daily work of professional organizations is accomplished via interaction between representatives of those institutions and laypeople. Scholars of talk in institutional settings have argued that lay-professional interaction is often assumed mistakenly to operate as a neutral conduit for professionals to gain information relevant to their work. I use the case of doctor-patient interaction to examine how patient compliance with diabetes treatment is assessed in interaction. Despite the abundance of research on patient compliance, the approaches to this work show a conceptual uniformity stemming from the notion that noncompliance is a matter of individually based, essential behaviors. Using conversation analysis, I draw attention to the ways in which compliance is produced jointly in and through institutional talk. As a result, I seek to elaborate two extant literatures: interdisciplinary research on patient compliance as an aspect of health behavior, and social psychological literature on attitudes and behavior.
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