Talking Social Structure: Discourse, Domination and the Watergate Hearings

Abstract

While all conversation requires use of context to make communication meaningful, one interactant always has the potential of depriving another of this communicative resource. Power can thus be achieved by insisting that all accounts meet a formal test of literal, objective truth-a test that no account can pass. At stake in the success of such a maneuver is the capacity to control conversation and thereby determine substantive outcomes. Through analysis of Watergate Hearings videotapes, we show how such a power struggle is managed as a moment-to-moment, sequential unfolding of manipulations among interactants. The larger goal is to display the mechanisms through which social process and social structure cohere through interaction.