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Some institutional settings, such as therapeutic or counselling settings, involve normative models, theories or quasi-theories concerning professional-client interaction. These models and theories can be found in professional texts, in training manuals and in written and spoken instructions delivered in the context of professional training or supervision. In this article, we would like to call these models and theories 'stocks of interactional knowledge' (SIKs). Our aim is to explore the possibility of a dialogue between conversation analysis and such SIKs. Based on research on medical and counselling settings, we discuss the different relationships that CA and such interactional theories may have. We propose that CA findings may (i) falsify or correct assumptions that are part of an SIK; it may (ii) provide a more detailed picture of practices that are described in an SIK. (iii) CA may also add a new dimension to the understanding of practices described by an SIK, or (iv) provide the description of practices, not provided by a very abstract or general SIK.

All social life is based on people's ability to recognize what others are doing. Recently, the mechanisms underlying this human ability have become the focus of a growing multidisciplinary interest. This article contributes to this line of research by considering how people's orientations to who they are to each other are built-in in the organization action. We outline a unifying theoretical framework in which the basic facets of human social relations are seen as being anchored in three orders-epistemic order, deontic order, and emotional order-each of which, we argue, also pertains to action recognition. This framework allows us to account for common ambiguities in action recognition and to describe relationship negotiations involving a complex interface between knowledge, power, and emotion.

The starting point of conversation analytical research on psychotherapy was in Kathy Davis's work on problem reformulations in the mid 1980s. Since then there has been a growing body of analysis of psychotherapy, based on the close, sequential relations between adjacent utterances. Through examples drawn from CA studies on psychotherapy in the past decade, this review shows that sequential relations between utterances enable a process of transformation of experience. This process pertains to referents, emotion, and momentary relations between the therapist and the client. The utterance-by-utterance transformation contributes to the process of change in more macroscopic time, spanning the continuum of psychotherapeutic sessions. The recent developments of CA research on psychiatric consultants will also be discussed. Data are in Finnish and English.