The turn-by-turn unfolding of dialogue: Examining participants' orientations to moments of transformative engagement

A central aim of experts, officials, and citizens meeting in the context of policymaking is to organize their encounters in ways that enable them to learn about the other's perspectives - that is, to engage in dialogue. However, what is less understood are the interactional trajectories over which these transformative engagements are pursued. Using conversation analysis and drawing on a corpus of recorded Dutch public meetings on livestock farming, we identify a template describing one way dialogue unfolds. Key to this template is organizers' query that retroactively invokes citizens' apparent trouble and invites discussion of it. Citizens respond by elaborating the issue, resulting in participants' displays of understanding conveying a state of transformation. We discuss the implications for dialogue theory and practice. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study explores the trajectories of transformative engagements in dialogues during policymaking processes. By analyzing recorded Dutch public meetings on livestock farming, the researchers identified a template describing the unfolding of dialogue. The key to this template is the organizer's query that invokes citizens' apparent trouble and invites further discussion. Citizens respond by elaborating the issue, leading to participants' displays of understanding and transformation.