To expand our understanding of the discursive consequences of social change for institutional discourse, this pioneering volume reports on functional and sequential examinations of questioning in and across institutional settings, including ones underrepresented in the existing research literature. As the editors claim in Ch. 1, the introduction, the fourteen other contributions offer new perspectives on three topics: (i) definitional issues about questions, (ii) interactional relations between institutional discourse participants, and (iii) boundaries between institutional talk and ordinary talk.

In his analysis of question-answer sequences in inquiry testimony, Jack Sidnell finds that both turn design and positioning can define questions and relevant responses from witnesses. Doctors’ expectations and beliefs, as John Heritage argues, steer dimensions of question design and thus dimensions of medical communications that construct doctor-patient relationships. Alexa Hepburn & Jonathan Potter discuss child protection officers’ tag questions within crying sequences in child abuse hotline calls. In attempting to project themselves as nondirective, the officers use a question format with a weak response requirement. Geoffrey Raymond investigates the contrasts between yes/no declaratives and yes/no interrogatives used by health visitor nurses and the respective categories of responses they invite from new mothers. He attributes the differences in question formats to the nurses’ varied institutional goals. Elizabeth Stokoe & Derek Edwards are interested in “silly questions” in police-suspect interrogations, exploring the “knowing stance” that police officers adopt towards the elicited information when performing their institutional functions. Susan A. Speer shows that both the syntactic forms of hypothetical questions and the interactional environment they are embedded in are suggestive of the diagnostic “tool” function they are institutionally intended for in psychiatric assessments of transsexual patients. Irene Koshik discusses “designedly incomplete” “quasi-questions” in teacher-student conferences as error-targeted learning-scaffolding devices eliciting students’ responses of self-correction and followed by teachers’ third turn evaluation. Analyzing question data produced by managers at workplace meetings, Janet Holmes & Tina Chiles report on a sequence-sensitive analysis and a contrastive study with those in American friends’ conversations. As nonconstraining as the questions and questioning are, they still tend to enact institutional power. By contrast, questioning by persons without a current special hold on the floor at workplace meetings, as Cecelia Ford shows, manifests the initiation of a claim to power by these speakers, by opening up access to the floor and projecting the questioners as knowledgeable and consequential. Srikant Sarangi ascribes the nondirective ethos for genetic counseling to two factors: (i) clients can be contextually motivated to take over the question-raising roles of counselors, and (ii) counselors’ reflective questions involve their clients in the past or future scenarios relevant for institutional decisions. Steven Clayman demonstrates how question design is influenced by various balances news interviewers strike between professional norms when orienting to an overhearing audience. Joanna Thornborrow demonstrates that talk shows and radio call-in programs, even though more conversational than other media genres, feature institutional distribution of turn-taking, turn-types, question types, and answer types, framed by multiparty participation. Alice F. Freed's data—questioning sequences from telemarketing calls—are shown to have a few much documented institutional constraints on the distribution of turns, turn types, and topic areas. Finally, Anna Kristina Hultgren & Deborah Cameron suggest that call-center agents cannot maintain their interactional power over callers simply by virtue of their institutional position.