This thesis investigates how street performers entertain passers-by and audience members in exchange for money. Specifically, it investigates how this exchange relationship is accomplished in light of exchange happening outside the routine context of “the market”, where payment for goods and services is ordinarily enforceable. In this regard, this thesis seeks to uncover the ways that exchange in street performance is alternatively organised through donations, and how giving donations are produced and recognised as interactionally relevant and morally accountable actions. To that end, this thesis employs the allied approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. It empirically examines video recordings of street performances, mostly collected at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Three kinds of street performance encounter are considered: these are musical busking, living statue performing, and circle show performing. The order of the discussions of these performances reflects the extent to which the performers explicitly recruit interactional resources —including talk, gesture and material objects—to morally obligate audience members and passers-by to give donations. The main thrust of this thesis is that street performers, passers-by and audience members collaboratively produce and recognise street performances as gifts that should be reciprocated. The street performances are initially freely given, but participation entails indebtedness that in various ways make remuneration interactionally relevant. In this regard, this thesis also explores how money, value and materiality feature in the giving and receiving of donations. This thesis provides new knowledge about how street performance encounters are ordered, how moral obligation is interactionally worked up through the sequential organisation of social actions, and how money donations are exchanged in return for entertainment. It also provides new understanding about how different kinds of street performance encounters share organisationally similar properties for solving the “payment problem”, but at the same time possess properties that are distinct.

付記する学位プログラム名: デザイン学大学院連携プログラム / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(総合学術) / 甲第21920号 / 情総博第2号 / 新制||情総||1(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 吉川 正俊, 教授 大手 信人, 教授 松井 啓之, 教授 椙山 泰生 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy / Kyoto University / DGAM

Young children’s peer interactions involve their use of interactional resources to organise, manage and participate in their social worlds. Investigation of children’s employment of interactional resources highlights how children participate in peer interaction and their social orders, providing insight into their active construction and management of their social worlds. Frequently, these interactions are described by adults as ‘play’. The term play is often used to describe children’s activities in early childhood education, and constructed in three main ways: as educative, as enjoyable, and as an activity of children. Play in educational settings is often constructed, and informed by, adult agendas such as learning and is often part of the educational routine. This study shows how children work with a different set of agendas to those routinely ascribed by adults, as they actively engage with local education orders, and use play for their own purposes as they construct their own social orders. By examining children’s peer interactions, and not describing these activities as play, the focus becomes the construction and organisation of their social worlds. In so doing, this study investigates some interactional resources that children draw upon to manage their social orders and organise their peer interactions. This study was conducted within an Australian, non-government elementary school. The participants were children in a preparatory year classroom (children aged 4 – 6 years). Over a one month period, children’s naturally occurring peer interactions within ‘free play’ were video-recorded. Selected video-recorded episodes were transcribed and analysed, using the approaches of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. These methodologies focus on everyday, naturalistic data, examining how participants orient to and produce social action. The focus is on the members’ perspectives, that of the children themselves, as they interact. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis allow for in-depth examination of talk and action, and are used in this study to provide a detailed account of the children’s interactional strategies. Analysis focused on features of children’s situated peer interaction, identifying three interactional resources upon which the children drew as they constructed, maintained, and transformed their social orders. The interactional resources included: justification; category work, in particular the category of mother; and the pretend formulation of place. The children used these interactional resources as a means of managing peer participation within interactions. First, the children used justification to provide reasons for their actions and to support their positions. Justifications built and reinforced individual children’s status, contributing to the social organisation of their peer group. Second, the children negotiated and oriented to categories within the pretend frame of ‘families’. The children’s talk and actions jointly-constructed the mother category as authoritative, enabling the child, within the category of mother, to effectively organise the interaction. Third, pretense was used by the children to negotiate and describe places, thus enabling them to effectively manage peer activity within these places. For a successful formulation of a place as something other than it actually was, the children had to work to produce shared understandings of the place. Examining instances of pretense demonstrated the highly collaborative nature of the children’s peer interactions. The study contributes to sociological understandings of childhood. By analysing situated episodes of children’s peer interaction, this study contributes empirical work to the sociology of childhood and insight into the interactional work of children organising their social worlds. It does this by closely analysing social interactions, as they unfold, among children. This study also makes a methodological contribution, using ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis in conjunction to analyse children’s peer interactions in an early childhood setting. In so doing, the study provides alternative ways for educators to understand children’s interactions. For example, adult educational agendas, such as the educative value of play, can be applied to examine children’s family play, highlighting the learning opportunities provided through pretend role play, or indicating children’s understanding of adult roles. Alternatively, the children’s interaction could be subjected to fine-grained analysis to explicate how children construct shared understandings of the category of mother and use it to organise their interaction. Rather than examining the interaction to discern what children are learning, the interaction is examined with a focus on how children are accomplishing everyday social practices. Close analysis of children’s everyday peer interaction enables the complex interactional work of managing, and participating in, social order within an early childhood setting to be explicated. This offers educators insight into children’s social worlds, described not as play, but as the construction and negotiation of social order.

This study investigates the everyday practices of young children acting in their social worlds within the context of the school playground. It employs an ethnographic ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. In the context of child participation rights advanced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and childhood studies, the study considers children’s social worlds and their participation agendas. The participants of the study were a group of young children in a preparatory year setting in a Queensland school. These children, aged 4 to 6 years, were videorecorded as they participated in their day-to-day activities in the classroom and in the playground. Data collection took place over a period of three months, with a total of 26 hours of video data. Episodes of the video-recordings were shown to small groups of children and to the teacher to stimulate conversations about what they saw on the video. The conversations were audio-recorded. This method acknowledged the child’s standpoint and positioned children as active participants in accounting for their relationships with others. These accounts are discussed as interactionally built comments on past joint experiences and provided a starting place for analysis of the video-recorded interaction. Four data chapters are presented in this thesis. Each data chapter investigates a different topic of interaction. The topics include how children use “telling” as a tactical tool in the management of interactional trouble, how children use their “ideas” as possessables to gain ownership of a game and the interactional matters that follow, how children account for interactional matters and bid for ownership of “whose idea” for the game and finally, how a small group of girls orientated to a particular code of conduct when accounting for their actions in a pretend game of “school”. Four key themes emerged from the analysis. The first theme addresses two arenas of action operating in the social world of children, pretend and real: the “pretend”, as a player in a pretend game, and the “real”, as a classroom member. These two arenas are intertwined. Through inferences to explicit and implicit “codes of conduct”, moral obligations are invoked as children attempt to socially exclude one another, build alliances and enforce their own social positions. The second theme is the notion of shared history. This theme addresses the history that the children reconstructed, and acts as a thread that weaves through their interactions, with implications for present and future relationships. The third theme is around ownership. In a shared context, such as the playground, ownership is a highly contested issue. Children draw on resources such as rules, their ideas as possessables, and codes of behaviour as devices to construct particular social and moral orders around owners of the game. These themes have consequences for children’s participation in a social group. The fourth theme, methodological in nature, shows how the researcher was viewed as an outsider and novice and was used as a resource by the children. This theme is used to inform adult-child relationships. The study was situated within an interest in participation rights for children and perspectives of children as competent beings. Asking children to account for their participation in playground activities situates children as analysers of their own social worlds and offers adults further information for understanding how children themselves construct their social interactions. While reporting on the experiences of one group of children, this study opens up theoretical questions about children’s social orders and these influences on their everyday practices. This thesis uncovers how children both participate in, and shape, their everyday social worlds through talk and interaction. It investigates the consequences that taken-for-granted activities of “playing the game” have for their social participation in the wider culture of the classroom. Consideration of this significance may assist adults to better understand and appreciate the social worlds of young children in the school playground.