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This issue of Social Research is organized around the theme of Conversation. Conversation is the glue of social life, the site where people construct relationships, negotiate their business, and test points of view, both through language and by nonverbal means. It encompasses purposive information exchange and informal chat, small-talk and "big talk." In a wider sense, talking to oneself- a major component of our inner lives- is a form of conversation (with the curious sort of interlocutor such a conversation entails). In a yet wider sense, any sort of communication that involves give-and-take can be characterized as a form of conversation, including the give-and-take between people and physical objects (or texts), and between objects themselves. Under a broad conception, conversation is thus a metaphor for political life, for philosophical, scientific, and religious discourse, and for any human or physical interaction.
In this issue we have assembled papers that reflect various ways of thinking about conversation. Some are empirical and some theoretical. Some take a dyadic approach (Schegloff), others a literary (Tracey, Spacks), and still others a political (Tilly, Ryan). Of course, the papers included here address only a small sample of the wide range of questions that would need to be addressed if this were a comprehensive overview. In such an overview we would want to include discussion of "talk therapy," of legal conversation, of the difference between male and female conversation, of the development of the capacity for conversation in the child, and of the role of conversation in film and drama, among other topics. Our hope is that this issue will nonetheless give the reader some introductory sense of current work and reflection on the subject of conversation. Arien Mack, Michael Schober
Roald Hoffman is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Chemistry at Cornell University. He has written several volumes of poetry, and his most recent work is Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition (1997).
Pierre Laszlo is a professor of chemistry at the École polytechnique in France and the Université de Liège ar Sart-Tilman in Belgium. His publications include, must recently, Le Trésor, dictionnaire des sciences (1997). He also writes critical essays in literature and teaches French literature.
Ann Mische is a post-doctoral fellow at the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University. She is currently working on several projects studying sociocultural network dynamics in the Brazilian Impeachment Movement.
Alan Ryan is Professor and Warden of New College, Oxford University. He is the author of Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998) and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995). His essay "Pragmatism and Property" appeared in Property Problems (1998).
Emanuel A. Schegloff is a professor of sociology at UCLA, currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. His many publications include "Whose Text? Whose Context?" (Discourse & Society, 1997) and "Practices and Actions" (Discourse Processes, 1997).
Michael F. Schober is an assistant professor of psychology at the Graduate Faculty, New School University and an associate editor of Discourse Processes. His recent publications include "Different Kinds of Conversational Perspective-taking" in Social and Cognitive Psychological Approaches to Interpersonal Communication (1998).
Patricia Meyer Spacks is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She has published many books about eighteenth-century literature, women's writing, and issues in the academic profession. Her most recent book is Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995).
Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her publications include The Argument Culture (1998), Talking from 9 to 5 (1994), and Gender and Discourse (1993).
Charles Tilly is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He is the author of Durable Inequality (1998) and Roads from Past to Future (1997) and a co-editor of From Contention to Democracy (1998). He is currently at work on Contention and Democracy in Europe.
David Tracy is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is currently a fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton.
Harrison White is the Giddings Professor of Sociology at the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of Identity and Control (1992) and is currently working on a book about the dynamics of production markets.
