Conflict as interactional accomplishment in Japanese: Arguments in university faculty meetings

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.