| dc.description.abstract | This study analyzes two hundred telephone emergency calls between callers and call takers at Brigada Militar (190), in Porto Alegre, from an ethnographic (O’REILLY, 2009) perspective and based on Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (GARFINKEL, 1967; SACKS, 1992) and Membership Categorization Analysis principles (SACKS, 1992; SCHEGLOFF, 1972; SELL; OSTERMANN, 2009). The results of this research study show that the interactions present a macrostructure organized into five key activities that are sequentially negotiated (ZIMMERMAN, 1984; 1992): 1) opening/identification/alignment; 2) request; 3) interrogative sequence; 4) response; and 5) closing, in which the adjacency pair request/response consists of the main sequence of the event. Callers’ strong orientation to the request for a police car and call takers’ orientation to the dispatch of a police car are also identified as the final product of this adjacency pair and of the provision of the service. When the need for the dispatch of a police car is questioned by a caller, the routine of the practices involved in the processing of the call is destabilized and the institutional mandate of 190 is questioned, and this fact brings in interactional consequences to the flow of the interactions. The analysis of the data reveals callers’ orientation to certain Membership Categories (SACKS, 1992; SCHEGLOFF, 1972; SELL; OSTERMANN, 2009) in the production of narrative accounts (DE FINA, 2009), which aim at convincing call takers of the legitimacy of their requests. Based on the socially shared knowledge of morally loaded events, at the same time that these narrative accounts victimize the caller, they also build an antagonistic relationship between caller and aggressor – with the latter being allegedly responsible for the facts being reported. Participants’ orientations to certain Membership Categories can also be seen in their formulation of the place to where the police car must be dispatched. The limitations imposed by the electronic form is materialized, for instance, in the need to insert the name of a street and a number, which can be retrieved from the database, in the address slot. This restriction limits the insertion of other formats of address – which can be found in the current social organization (especially in the less privileged social classes) – and which restricts the access of those people to public safety. It was also possible to notice that, the maintenance of intersubjectivity in emergency calls depends on callers’ and call takers’ orientation to meet the demands of the software, and this fact shows that the study of intersubjectity in new, technologized contexts demands that the researcher considers other semiotic fields (C.GOODWIN, 2000) in the investigation. At the same time, the linguistic resources mobilized by the callers when formulating the place where the police car must be sent to displays their illiteracy concerning the social practices of the modern world. This research resulted in a fifty-hour training program to qualify the call-taking services and in the implementation of an internal recruitment process for the position of call taker, which are also discussed in this work. | en |
