From the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), the concept of positioning may offer a compellingly rich metaphor for understanding identity and relations. There appears, however, to be no such analytical concept in EM/CA. Instead, the EM/CA approach offers concepts such as alignment-affiliation, identities and membership categories — all of them based on actional resources on the micro-level of talk. The aim of this article is to inquire if EM/CA tools for the analysis of identities and relations in talk might be considered interesting from the perspective of positioning theory. To do so, we offer EM/CA analyses of narrative and non-narrative data in which the in situ negotiation of identities and relations plays a major role.

Purpose-This article focuses on communication about hygiene in a hospital ward and with the relevant infection control organization. The purpose is to examine the function of the hygiene coordinator as a key change agent and the communicative challenges and role conflicts implied in her practice. The author suggests strategies for improving communication on hygiene on ward level. Design/methodology/approach-The empirical material consists of interviews and recordings of communicative events in relation to a breakout of dangerous bacteria in the ward. Change communication is used as a contextualizing frame of understanding, and positioning theory and analysis are applied to shed light upon the core challenges of communicating as a change agent when the coordinator's professional position and collegial relations do not support it. Findings-It is shown how these challenges are connected to positional dilemmas regarding professional hierarchies and collegial relations. In order to have the hygiene coordinator gain authority and achieve empowerment in her function, additional documentation and training are needed, and communication efforts between the department management and the hygiene coordinator need strengthening. Furthermore, the hygiene area should be connected to the hospital's overarching purpose of saving lives. Originality/value-These findings point to the importance of taking communication on the departmental level into consideration in relation to change strategies, and they highlight the centrality of strategic positioning practices in a work environment which is organized in professional groups and according to distributed responsibilities.

In this article we focus on the negotiation of meaning in narratives. One crucial place for the negotiation of meaning in narratives is its punchline and the sequence it precedes, the post punchline sequence. We will study in detail the interactional construction of the punchline and of the post punchline in institutional talk and private everyday conversation. In our material these activities are systematically examined in a two-step procedure: Firstly, the participants address the modality of the story in their construction of the punchline. Here, the recipient claims a preliminary understanding of the story, and the teller of the story can acknowledge this claim. Secondly, the participants evaluate the story by explicitly negotiating the understanding of the reported experience and by relating the story to a wider context. The first step of this procedure seems to have conditional relevance for step two; therefore we consider the post punchline sequence as part of the narrative. We regard the participants' joint construction of meaning as a central activity, and we approach this topic by investigating how the aspects of modality and negotiation of understanding are constructed and how they contribute to the display of alignment or disalignment in talk.

This article explores narratives as an interactional resource to manage disagreement. On the basis of a detailed analysis of parents' meetings with three educators, three conversational phenomena were found to be particularly relevant to manage disagreement in narratives. The first phenomenon is the participants' manner of negotiating meaning in the narrative. It is demonstrated that the teller (a professional) and not the recipient (the mother) is the one who initiates the display of understanding the told events. In this kind of informal institutional talk, it emphasizes the asymmetry of the encounter. The second phenomenon is the primary speaker's accounting for and providing evidence in an attempt to obtain mutual understanding and to establish professional accountability. However, alignment is not achieved, and therefore the teller's assessments are constructed in a dispreferred format. The third phenomenon is the recipient's responding actions, which are minimal or absent and are used as a strategy for communicating disagreement indirectly. Finally, the relationship between narrative description and sequential and institutional contexts is addressed, and narratives are considered as contextualized as well as contextualizing resources of communication.

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