#emergencies

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

By: Geoffrey Raymond and Don Zimmerman

Published by: Research on Language and Social Interaction
Volume 40, Issue 1
Pages 33-61

LL Abstract:

In this article, Raymond and Zimmerman use a corpus of 40 calls to 911 about the same event - a fire on the Pacific coast - to examine how callers and call-takers negotiate rights and responsibilities in their talk and the ways these rights affect actions and trajectories of 911 calls. They identify problems in managing these calls that occur over time, showing how callers and call-takers cannot avoid the institutional constraints posed by the format of an emergency call. Suggesting that institutional resistance to change may stem from such routinized and embodied practices, the authors further consider the impact on emergency services due to shifting presuppositions in multiple calls produced during community-wide events.

LL Summary:

Raymond and Zimmerman begin by describing the emergency captured by their call corpus: a mountainside fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast that affected thousands of residents, allowing the researchers to track an ordered series of calls about the same event. They describe the questions driving their research, outlining their focus on the practices that organize calls and the ways that these practices embody an alignment of identities between a service seeker and service provider. Identifying a directionality to the information flow in emergency calls (where practices are designed to facilitate information into a dispatch center), they introduce three ways that these practices are altered over multiple calls: information flow is reversed, complication of the service seeker/provider relationship, and complication in the rights and responsibilities of that relationship. In the next section of the article, the authors review prior research on the organization and production of emergency calls, beginning with how calls generally have a monofocal character leading to brevity and order as callers are constrained to present service-appropriate matters. They describe the ways that callers are aligned to report problems and answer questions, while call-takers receive the report and ask questions, resulting in the a division of rights and responsibilities that provide the directionality of information they previously discuss. As deviations from the orientations, presuppositions, and activities have consequences for the emergency call, the authors note how the first two turns of a call set up the responsibilities for each party while positioning them to engage in a specific type of activity: reporting an event for the purpose of obtaining help for that problematic event. Using the first call about the fire, Raymond and Zimmerman show how the organization of 911 calls allow callers to use their first turn as a “slot” for presenting the trouble that led them to call (the “caller’s problem). Noting the compact opening and closing sequences of the first call, the authors illustrate the sequencing inherent in emergency calls that facilitates the orientations, presuppositions, and activities that enable callers to report emergencies. Next, Raymond and Zimmerman use examples from several calls to show how callers departed from the norms of an emergency call in reversing the directionality of the calls as the fire emergency progressed, demonstrating that both callers and call-takers maintained a tangential alignment with these norms despite these deviations. Here both call-takers and callers are shown modifying their practices in an effort to see if their call matches previously delivered information, resulting in modified service announcements and orientations to a caller’s right to report an emergency (e.g. when a caller’s first turn opens with a request for a call taker to confirm they already know about the fire, or a call taker provides “candidate locations” for the emergency). In addition to calls where reporting is sustained as the overall activity, the authors next examine calls where other projects are pursued, such as information or advice seeking calls. Here they show that callers orient to their limited rights as reporters yet presuppose that call takers know more about the event in question than the caller, reversing the activities in a typical emergency call. In calls seeking advice, the authors demonstrate that callers use location formulations to establish their proximity to the fire as a basis for pursuing information and advice. They conclude their analysis with two examples of calls where call takers struggled with requests for advice, as in these cases the call takers faced institutional limits on their own rights to provide information or advice (such as encouraging a caller to evacuate). The article ends with a discussion of how the calls systematically changed over time, from reporting the fire to seeking advice or information about the emergency, and the authors note that both the organization and distribution of rights and responsibilities in these calls changed as a result. Despite these changes, they underscore that callers and call takers attempted to preserve the ordinary structure of these calls, suggesting that institutional constraints make resistance to change problematic in such situations.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Feisty Shrimp Linguine:

While the authors of this article discuss different linguistic responses to a fiery situation, you will find yourself loving the fiery flavor of this linguine dish! The shrimp and red pepper of this recipe are a nice twist on the traditional seafood linguine approach, and the thick tomato sauce can be adjusted to your own heat preferences. Even though callers and call takers must deal with problems if an emergency steps outside the norm, you won’t face any problems putting this easy dinner idea together. Good Cooking!

MWV 7/13/18