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  • Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings by Douglas W. Maynard
  • Tina Jahn
Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. By Douglas W. Maynard. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 327. ISBN 0226511952. $25.

In Bad news, good news, Douglas W. Maynard explores how people deliver and react to bad or good news. Theoretical aspects are illustrated with narrative data from private conversational encounters. Additionally, each chapter has a coda in which news deliveries in clinical settings are examined. The book consists of eight chapters. Ch. 1 starts with the characterization of the crisis evolving with the news delivery. Interrupting the flow of everyday life, the news delivery puts the recipient in a phase of disorientation and moves him or her into a new social world. The medium of this informing event is language and social interaction. In Ch. 2, M discusses strategies for bad news delivery and possible reactions. Delivery strategies include forecasting, stalling, and being blunt; confirmation, disconfirmation, or knowing the news already are possible reactions to the news delivery. The methodological and theoretical basis for the analysis is provided in Ch. 3, where M adopts an approach of limited affinity of conversation analysis and ethnography.

Ch. 4 focuses on the news delivery sequence (NDS), which consists of five sequences: a preannouncement, the announcement itself, a response from the recipient, and elaboration and assessment sequences. Both the newsworthiness and the valence of the information as news come into existence through the interactional work between the messenger and the participant(s).

The social relationships between the participants are discussed in Ch. 5. When delivering news, participants are aware that the news concerns various parties which are socially related. For example, the news may primarily concern either the deliverer, the recipient, or a third party who is not present. M analyzes how this social relationship is made visible by participants.

The asymmetry between the deliveries of good vs. bad news is the topic of Ch. 6. While bad news is usually covered or shrouded, deliverers expose good news and convey it directly. Furthermore, the focus is on how participants talk after the news delivery. While an immediate topic shift may follow a good news delivery, the reaction to a bad news delivery is markedly different. A good news exit has to be made until a topic shift is allowed to take place subsequent to a bad news delivery. In Ch. 7, M focuses on the messenger of the news, emphasizing once again the asymmetry between the types of news: While a messenger of bad news usually avoids agency and blame, deliverers of good news take responsibility and accept recipients’ compliments.

Ch. 8 deals with the implications of the study for understanding public affairs in which the conveyance of news may influence the affair itself. M shows that the familiar interactional patterns of private interaction are also manifest in more public settings: While bad news gets shrouded, good news is delivered directly. In the epilogue, M makes recommendations for how to deliver news effectively in professional settings such as medicine or law. [End Page 783]

Tina Jahn
Technical University of Braunschweig
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