Withholding Academic Advice: Institutional Context and Discourse Practice

This article examines the interactive, reflexive organization of talk and its institutional contexts. Drawing on carefully transcribed audio and video data from academic counseling encounters at an American university, and using conversation analysis and ethnography as major analytical tools, it investigates how the practice of withholding certain information or opinion at an expected moment reconstructs the university institutional order. It details the sequential organization of the practice of withholding, in which a turn of speaking taken by the student counselee projects but is not followed by a relevant next turn by the counselor. It argues that, through avoiding a sequentially relevant next turn, academic counselors embody various institutional contingencies, and the negotiated nature of the give and take of advice constitutes the occasion-specific institutional identities of the participants.