A Gradient of More and Less Demanding Impositions: Reflections on the Special Issue on Resistance

Abstract

People resist various kinds of imposition, which can be ranged along a gradient—impositions from those heavily entitled to make them, along to those where the matter is more balanced, to where the imposed-upon person is the one who has the greater rights. The articles in this Special Issue cover the whole range, from the police officer issuing bald imperatives, through to a tutor trying to help a student with their essay. In one case the resistor is may have little room for maneuver without incurring cost; in the other, the resistor will be given more latitude. The signal characteristic of the analysis throughout is a very close attention to the actual exchange of talks between the two parties: it is there that conversation analysis reveals the intricacy with which imposition is attempted and resistance succeeds or fails.

When we hear the word “resistance,” examples will quickly come to mind: a victim resisting an attack in the street, civilians resisting occupying troops in war, and so on. Resistance at first blush seems to be a matter of defense against the physical threat, but of course, reflection reminds us that not all impositions are violent. We resist persuasion, suggestions, blandishments, and a parade of other attempts to get us to do things, trivial or consequential—all done in talk, within the polite boundaries of everyday society, and, unless we’re unlucky, with no physical threats anywhere in sight. One person wants the encounter to be of a certain sort and go in a certain way, and the other person demurs and puts up a verbal barrier.

As a working sketch of what resistance of that kind looks like, authors of the introduction to this Special Issue say: “there is one aspect that … forms of resistance share: they all entail participants (temporarily) endorsing suspending their cooperation in the joint ‘definition of the situation’” (Humă et al., 2023/this issue, p. xx). It's a familiar experience, shared by all—you try to get in the way of what the other person wants you to do, and make them see things differently. Or, as Flint and Rhys in their article put it, in technical conversation-analytic language: “resistance [here] typically refers to an interactional move that displaces a sequentially relevant or normatively expected next action” (Flint & Rhys, 2023/this issue, p xx). That is the line on resistance that the contributors to the Special Issue are taking, and they do it soberly and painstakingly. They want to map out how it is that people design their talk, at the most minute level, so as not to do what another person wants them to.

A note, here, for readers coming from a social psychological background: they might hear a faint echo of what social psychologists call the study of “persuasion.” Experimentalists have spent a long time bringing Greek rhetoric up-to-date: using modern techniques to chart the things in arguments and messages (usually in made-up text) that persuade people to change their attitudes (usually, as measured on a questionnaire). It is what Edwards (1997) calls the “factors and variables” method: changing one thing or another to see its effect on some output. Here, the experimentalist will change some aspect of a message—its provenance, its length, its vividness, and so on—to see how much it changes the recipient's expressed views. So, it looks as if social psychology, if it shows what makes persuasion work, might also tell us how it doesn’t; and in that sense, perhaps, how people resist. Much has been discovered about the persuasiveness of kinds of arguments and texts (advertising campaigns, blogs, newspaper articles, etc.), but there are two reasons why all that literature may be of limited use here. For one thing, the persuader's failure to persuade may not be the same as the resister's success in resisting. Perhaps more fundamentally, though, for all one might learn about rhetoric in rather bloodless textual argumentation or broadcast messages, it seems distant from actual impositions in encounters with real and immediate consequences.

The picture that you will see in these pages is, as (Raymond et al., 2023/this issue) and, more explicitly and firmly, Humă and Stokoe (2023/2023/this issue) insist, very different: what is being studied and analyzed is always something in a real encounter, and usually involves some kind of action—physical action, perhaps in the case of the police talking down the person from a bridge, or a parent getting a child to do their homework; or conversational action, for example in a call-taker trying to move the caller on to the next phase of the call, or a tutor try to persuade a student of the benefits of accurate quotation. No doubt there is some mental processing going on, but it's not of interest to the people involved—and, in any case, there is no easy way of getting to it from what is actually happening in public view, where all the action is.

The matters being addressed here, then, are all episodes of resistance in the real world, with real consequences. The range is wide: being shepherded along the stages of a help-line call (Benwell & Rhys, 2023/this issue); being made to answer an interviewer's tricky question (Hepburn et al., 2023/this issue); being asked to get on with your homework (Flint & Rhys, 2023/this issue); being sold something on the phone (Humă & Stokoe, 2023/2023/this issue); getting advice from a tutor (West); answering police questions (Raymond et al., 2023/2023/this issue); even, in the most arresting article in the collection, being persuaded not to jump from a bridge (in Sikveland & Stokoe, 2023/this issue). What the authors uncover is not a fixed pattern. There is no universal linguistic formula for resistance, as Humă et al. point out in their introduction. But there are identifiable conversational resources that the resisters can use to swerve the threat or to confront it. Some are microscopic—the slight pause, the in-breath—some are matters of choosing the right word, and some are subtle strategies played out over a number of conversational turns. Each is in response to an imposition of some kind, and each changes the course of the talk—or tries to. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not.

A Gradient of Imposition

Just as it doesn’t make much sense to look for a universal way of resisting, it's worth saying that of course there isn’t a universal way of imposing. The list above could equally be unpacked to see what it is that the imposer (if we can call them that) is trying to get the imposed to do. That turns out to be a bit more straightforward, as it often turns on things like questions or instructions. The imposer seems to claim more rights to speak plainly than the resister; that is part of the imposition. For example, we see the call-taker in Benwell and Rhys's (2023/this issue) study of complaints to the NHS being firm about where they want the conversation to go: “you’re complaining about the nurse's attitude … ((lists the caller's complaints)) … what's your date of birth, sir?” The parent in Flint and Rhys issues an unequivocal threat about homework: “if you haven’t gotten one page done in ten minutes ˚you'll go-˚ ((downstairs and finish it))”; and the police officer in Raymond et al. (2023/this issue) is entitled to be blunter still: “OUTside right now. Right now.” It seems to be that only in very sensitive situations will the imposer tread more warily. Sikveland et al. have devoted a lot of work researching emergency services’ engagement with people in crisis (see e.g., Sikveland & Stokoe, 2020), but you can see the indirectness and delicacy in some of their extracts here—for example, “We're not here because of your mom. We're here to help you.”

One useful way to survey the articles in the Special Issue, then, is not to start with the resistance, but with who and what is being resisted: we can range episodes along the degree of latitude that one person has to impose their wishes on another person (their “deontic authority, to use a term that Stevanovic and Peräkylä (2012) introduced to conversation analysis from moral philosophy”). At one end, a task being carried out by someone in their institutional role (like a police officer or parent) may allow bald imperatives; at the other end, where the interaction is meant to benefit the recipient (like a tutor helping a student), the balance is more equal, and more delicate maneuvering may be in order. We shall see that this has consequences for what the resister can do and how they can do it.

Low-Entitlement Demands

Reading through the papers in this collection, it seems that one thing that makes an imposition delicate is the degree to which the encounter is (or is meant to be) working in the interests of the recipient, rather than the imposer. There are three such examples in the articles: police officers trying to help a person in distress; a tutor trying to help a student write better essays; and a help-line call-taker recording a complaint against the health service. Given that (ostensibly at least) the encounter is for the benefit of the recipient, then, presumably, they ought to have more say in how the episode goes—and more right to resist if it doesn’t go their way. We can start with the most dramatic of the situations studied in this collection: Sikvekand and Stokoe on the emergency services’ handling the case of a person in crisis, threatening suicide.

Sikvekand and Stokoe observe that the negotiator is there on sufferance: they “… offer help to someone who has not asked them for it, and therefore have no interactional rights or access to knowing what that help might be.” Indeed it turns out that the police offering “help” soon after they get there doesn’t work. The recipient's moral entitlements (if we can put it that way) are so strong that such help can simply be swatted aside. So we see such examples as the negotiator offering “my job is to sit here and talk to you and try and help”—and the recipient stonewalling in reply: “You ca:n’t. I’m dying tonight (real soon).” Because the situation has come about and rests on, the person in distress's “definition of the situation” (going back to the observation made by Raymond et al., this volume), what counts as help and not-help is their call. So the negotiators have to find a basis to overcome well-grounded resistance. Sikveland and Stokoe find that they do it in two ways: by avoiding the term altogether, and finding some other locution for what they’re generally trying to do; and by soliciting from the recipient something concrete that they can then promise to “sort out.” As the authors say, these are empirical discoveries: only by dint of getting recordings of these encounters can one get at what works. A motif for the collection as a whole.

The low entitlement in the situation that Benwell and Rhys study is not quite so weak. Their data is from call-takers on a national health complaint line who are, in principle, offering a service to callers who want to make a complaint about their treatment. The helpline is there, ostensibly at least, for the benefit of the caller rather than the call-taker; so, as with the police and the person in distress, the caller ought to call the shots. Nevertheless, the call-taker has their own project: to get details to fill in their computer form, go through the necessary phases, and to do it within a certain time. So although we see some degree of delicacy and deferral to the patient's worries, we also see them trying to move the conversation along. This is resisted when the caller has more to say, and what Benwell and Rhys successfully show is that the caller is adept at spotting up-coming transitions in the encounter, and doing things to prevent their stories from being derailed. It might be as brusque as overlapping the call-taker's talk with “anyway I’ve not finished my story,” or as carefully crafted as withholding assent to the call-taker's proposal to close the conversation, and coming in with something not fitted to what they had said, and simply re-issuing their complaint.

In Marion West's article, the beneficiary this time is a student: a college tutor is trying to show them how to improve their essay. Their projects are apparently aligned, and the tone throughout is benign rather than hectoring, and what's being advised isn’t much of an imposition; yet still, here, there will be things said that are unwelcome for one reason or another. What West highlights is a worry about expertise that comes up a various points. For example, the tutor advises that the student needs to check that they have an odd-looking quotation right; the student bridles at the implied criticism, and resists by claiming, “mm that's a direct quotation I think.” The matter is who can claim to be right—who has epistemic authority, as Heritage and Raymond have it (2005)—and the student asserts priority (mitigated slightly by the I think) with the emphatic term direct, implying no mediation and therefore no chance of error (on their part). As West says, the tussle between prompting tutor and resisting student is “the struggle between what it means to teach, and what it means to learn” (West, 2023/this issue, p. xx). What it offers to the general collection of articles in the special issue is the reminder that experience and entitlement are sensitive domains, and that knowledge and expertise is something that can be attributed and resisted just as anything apparently more urgent and challenging.

More Balanced Entitlements

Sometimes it's less obvious whose interests are meant to be served, and indeed it may become a matter of some conflict. This is clearest in Humă and Stokoe's study of business-to-business cold calls, in which the caller claims to be offering a service or product of benefit to the person being called. Sometimes, of course, this is no imposition, and the call is either welcome or at least tolerable. What the caller wants is at worst towards the nuisance end of things, rather than anything more critical; and, unlike every other situation reported in this these articles, if things get unbearable, the recipient has the comparatively easy avenue of resistance open to them: they can simply put the phone down. It's a testament to the gluey power of a human company that nobody in Humă and Stokoe's data seems to have done that; if they don’t want what the caller is offering, they put up various kinds of resistance, so that in the end, it's usually the caller backs down and rings off.

Humă and Stokoe break their data down into two sorts of resistance: blocking and stalling, and that's the order in which they give their examples. Perhaps it might be more natural to present them the other way round: one can stall for a while, but blocking wants no come-back. Here's an example of a stall: the caller is asking to speak to a more senior person “Yeah, u::hm < Can we—can we bring him in on the meeting as well?,” but the call-taker responds with the temporizing stall “Do = you wanna: (0.4) do = you wanna: (.) can you give me a call back in a week.” As ever in resistance, the idea is to not progress the interaction in a way that would facilitate the imposer's project. Stalling is a fairly gentle pointing to the exit sign. Blocking, however, though still polite, is much more direct. Caller: “it's in regards tuh- .hhh actually (targeted) A:dverts towards people looking for your se:rvices”; call-taker: “°.hhh° kt (.) We’re alri:ght (.) ↑thank you:=we’re alright = we’ve got our own in ‘ou:se (.) u::h ma:rketing tch- tchompany’.” The call-taker fatally undermines the caller's project; not a pointing to the exit sign, but by a firm closing of the door.

As well as broadening the horizons of social psychology's understanding of persuasion, Humă and Stokoe also, and not coincidentally, show how peoples’ apparently deep-seated sociality hedge even the firmest rejection of the persuader's project. Conversations are sensitive matters and have to be managed appropriately. Even when the persuadee is after, if we were to gloss it in common sense terms, just getting rid of the caller, they nevertheless make sure to sprinkle in the kind of marker that makes a show of some sort of deference: “we’re alright thank you” is perhaps the most obvious, but it's notable how often in the examples that the authors give that a block is prefaced by the word “well,” doing the work of qualification rather than outright obstruction.

In the article by Hepburn et al. (2023/this issue), the spotlight turns to the televised news-interview, where questions are pursued, in principle, for the benefit of the watching audience. The authors have their eye on the very specific practice of using tag-questions (isn’t it, don’t they? etcetera), and it turns out that they do very different work in different locations. When set in the middle of the interviewer's question, a tag seems to be meant collaboratively. So, when a new anchor says to the field reporter “there is a level of uncertainty for these people [Ukrainians] coming over now isn’t there.=about how long [they’ll sta:y,” that gets a nod. No resistance; the viewer is being well-served by this display of confirmable shared news. But note what happens when the interview is more antagonistic, and the interviewer is after overcoming the interviewee's resistance to their point: in the authors’ concise summary, “Here the interviewer issues a declarative about a contentious situation or view of the interviewee, tag formats the declarative, and then adds more material to bury the tag mid turn.” The data and the argument go together very neatly to illustrate such a challenge to resistance at the most microscopic lexical level.

Where the Imposer is Entitled, and Resistance is Hard

Some everyday scenes play out between two people who must manage a recognized asymmetry in their authority. In Flint and Rhys's paper (2023/this issue), the asymmetry shows in the ebb and flow of a teenager balking their parents’ project of getting them to do their homework. A humdrum matter, but one that reveals intriguing subtlety in the teenager's management of their conversational resources from a position of some weakness. Flint and Rhys have the backing of a great deal of prior research on this kind of conversational mapping, and add some more touches to the emerging picture. To take an example: they find the teenager smartly defusing an if–then threat by getting a turn in between the if part and the then part. So when the parent says “okay I'm gonna check on you in ten minutes if you haven't gotten one page done in ten minutes˚” the teenager, predicting that a second clause is coming, overlaps the beginning of it (“you’ll go…”) with a turn of their own, drowning out (or hoping to) the unwelcome threat to come. And what they insert just here is a call for the parent to allow a reduction in the tariff: “one side of a page?” This counts as a proposed repair of what the parent has said, so puts the ball back in their court, and (at least for the moment) pushes the hanging threat out of sight.

The tiny exchange illustrates two recurring features of resistance, visible throughout the special issue: that the recipient of a potentially unwelcome turn can head it off by choosing the moment to delete its worst aspects (here, by issuing a call for repair); but that in doing so, they break the normal contract of letting the other person's turn run its course. In other words, resistance is possible, but it comes at the cost of what any interaction usually wants: smooth onward progression. The resistor pays it, because (for them at least) the alternative cost is worse. The teenager doesn’t mind risking sounding rude, if it gets them out of having to do their homework under their parents’ eye.

Authority turns critical in the paper by Raymond et al. (2023/this issue) who chart what happens when a civilian's projects are in conflict with those of an officer in uniform, who can call on the authority of the law. The degree of imposition and the stakes involved are perhaps most clearly illustrated in this bald exchange between police and civilian, which Raymond et al. use as their example of a counter: Police: “What, (.) is. Your name?”; response: “Why?.” Balking the other's project at such an early stage, even before it's got off the ground, serves, Raymond et al. observe, “as a method for managing the explicitly coercive sequential environment posed by [the officer's] queries,” and that poses a serious problem to the imposer: if the recipient won’t even accept the most basic adjacency-pair structure of question and answer, there's little chance of them agreeing to much else. And, of course, from the point of view of the resister, that might well be exactly what's wanted. What bears inspection, then, is how the police keep the interaction open, and how they get their own projects to win the day. Coercion will do it, but at a cost; what doesn’t leave such a bitter after-effect is, as the authors put it, “where officers propose sequential solutions, civilians accept them, and the emerging conflict comes to be resolved cooperatively.” Ee we know, in principle, of course, that in some circumstances negotiation will overcome resistance; what Raymond et al. show is the particular sequential dance that these police officers use to get them and their interlocutors to the destination they want.

Conclusion

Reading through the collected articles of the special issue will surely have given the reader a strong sense of the conversational realities of imposing and resisting. It is a long way, by design, from the worthy but perhaps over general factors and variables approach of social psychology; the idea here is not to identify broad-scale forces which might shape resistance (social status? gender? unbalanced argument?, and so on), but rather, as the authors argue in the introduction, to see exactly how resistance plays out in the frustrating, argumentative spats and squabbles of everyday interaction. The two projects may not be mutually exclusive; we may want to know how it is that (for example) the resisting participant in the famous Milgram experiment managed to overcome the experimenter's insistence that they continue—a project already underway in the work of Gibson (Gibson, 2013, 2019) and Hollander (2015). Gender, status, and so on will give way to conversational strategy; and even if there were broad (although almost inevitably, rather weak) background factors which seemed to correlate with successful resistance, the fact would remain that the resistance would have to be carried out somehow: and it would be in that somehow that the resistance succeeded or failed. The promise, then is that the kind of close, detailed, and technical work that the articles in this special issue illustrate can draw the attention not only of scholars in communication and linguistics, but in social psychology and in the social sciences at the widest scale.