Six Basic Principles in the Communication of Identities: The special case of discourses and illness.

Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

This article reviews four pieces of research which focus on conversation and illness. Each is published in a special theme issue of the journal, Communication & Medicine. The review is organized to demonstrate several general points: That communication practice is finely and systematically structured; that structures in communication serve to identify people as members of some social categories rather than others; that movement among these categories is immanent in shifts of communication practices and structures; that relations among people are negotiated through such structuring and shifting of communication resources; and that these patterns of practice are active in socially occasioned, and culturally distinctive ways, from clinical scenes of interaction to the scenes of routine everyday life.