Maynard's book seeks to make substantive and methodological contributions: the first to describe the social organization of bad news/good news pronouncements, and the second to address and bridge longstanding methodological schisms between ethnography, conversation analysis (CA), and mainline sociology. Of the eight chapters, three (2, 4, and 7) were previously published and have been modified for the book.

Several basic themes of Maynard's book are stated at the outset (p. 2). For example: “Bad news and good news are pervasive features of everyday life and experience. Waiting for, and then receiving, the news can send a recipient through cycles of dread, despair, depression, hope, elation, ecstasy, and other emotional states.” Maynard thus begins with a straightforward use of everyday descriptive terms and notes how situated experiences of bad and good news can be found across a broad range of reported narratives and tape-recorded incidents. The focus, however, is on the immediate delivery and reception of news, not waiting to give or receive news nor what happens to peoples' lives afterwards. This journey through a variety of situated accounts is like a kind of survey with unknown sampling parameters and unknown circumstances in respect to the way they were obtained originally. The focus is on the dynamics of talk within brief, independent fragments of retrospective narratives and locally situated discourse, with minimal information about the setting and the participants. Maynard, however, is willing to include data sources and literature that more orthodox followers of conversation analysis (CA) do not address. The literature review enables him to challenge other forms of discourse analysis and traditional sociological research that may criticize CA. The narratives of chap. 1 have a believable level of substance about peoples' immediate reaction to “bad and good” news about their lives and depict a range of emotional reactions.

Of special substantive interest to Maynard is what he calls the “informing process,” or the talk and interaction which he feels has been neglected in contrast to the memory-accounting process itself. He argues that situated displays of bad and good news have a common core and states, “It is precisely this interruptive and sometimes utterly disruptive feature of giving or getting news that provides the impetus for this book” (4).

The experiences reported in the narratives and exchanges are viewed as evidence that they have profoundly affected participants, and this is attributed to the notion of “flashbulb memory” as described by Brown & Kulik 1977. The notion of “flashbulb memory” is a less studied part of experimental research on the more general concepts of “declarative” or explicit memory (working, semantic, and episodic memory), and implicit or “non-declarative,” that more extensive but not consciously accessible memory that is always activated by motor/verbal activities during human perception and information processing (Tulving 1972, Schacter & Tulving 1994, Squire 1987). In daily life activities, however, it is difficult to assess the extent of memory loss and the ways events can be transformed or reconstructed over the course of their being depicted in narrative accounts and conversations about past experiences (ff. Loftus 1979).

The key substantive issue for Maynard is the claim that he, like all members of some collectivity, has a reasonably commonsense understanding of bad or good news, because both notions have a “common core”: Such news “momentarily interrupts our involvement in the social world whose contours we otherwise unthinkingly accept as we carry on with daily activities” (4). It is the momentary interruption that is the focus of attention, not the prior and subsequent nature of the social world and daily activities.

Maynard's theoretical assumption about the notion of “social world” is attributed to Alfred Schütz 1962 and Harold Garfinkel 1963: the idea of a “mutual adherence among society's members to a set of primordial presumptions … [that Schütz] calls the attitude of daily life (ADL).” For members of some group, therefore, “the ‘perceived normality’ of events in the everyday world reflects participants' adherence to these presumptions.” A corollary of such “presumptions” is the idea that “we take for granted that objects are as they appear to be.”

A general point of the book is to show how “telling and receiving bad and good tidings, experience an assault on the ordinary, expected, intended, and typical predictable, moral world of everyday life” (6–7). According to Maynard:

Maynard's book, therefore, is not about observing social practices and interviewing participants about their daily live activities before and after they receive bad or good news and about how “the new world” is socially constructed by participants, including observers and those doing CA and other forms of discourse analysis. The new world can only be observed or found “in the co-produced nuances of the disclosure” that occurs during the display of fragments of situated discourse.

To my knowledge, this problem of the role of ethnography and CA first came up at a Social Science Research Council-sponsored conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the summer of 1975, organized by Allen Grimshaw and David Jenness. Some of the attendees were Roger Abrams, Aaron Cicourel, Steven Feld, Charles Fillmore, Erving Goffman, Allen Grimshaw, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff. Other members of the original project included Charles Bird, Lily Wong Fillmore, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, John Gumperz, Michael Halliday, Ruquaia Hasan, and Adam Kendon. A key question was: How much knowledge of the local context is needed to analyze selected fragments of discourse and film or video clips? The differences among linguists, linguistic anthropologists, sociological sociolinguists, and those concerned with CA were clearly evident and have never been resolved. The CA specialists wanted only brief, localized recorded exchanges, while others wanted more extensive recordings of the same individuals or group. The general idea of the conference was to resolve these differences, to see if both groups could examine the same discourse fragments using a simulated “double-blind” design; the CA people would analyze fragments obtained by linguistic anthropologists and provided with minimal information about the participants, and the others were free to offer their own linguistic or ethnographically derived analyses of the same fragments.

Maynard's book is unusual in several ways. First, he is exceptionally rare among students of ethnomethodology and CA for his skilled ability to engage in both of these disparate areas with dedicated ease. For example, Harold Garfinkel, to my knowledge, has never engaged in CA, and Harvey Sacks, in his dissertation and subsequently, did not link CA to ethnomethodological notions. Maynard, however, has been willing to discuss concepts from phenomenology and ethnomethodology using empirical materials, but he always remains dedicated to his use of CA methods.

Maynard has been willing to cite and quote a wide range of sociological and related works despite the fact that they have little to do with ethnomethodology or CA. These excursions into “foreign” areas that ethnomethodologists and CA students normally avoid and from which they always distance themselves make Maynard's book an important attempt to bridge the sometimes large divides between ethnomethodology, CA, linguistic anthropology, and mainstream sociology.

He also reports that “I have recurrently witnessed physicians and other experts from internal medicine, oncology, developmental disability and HIV clinics present the tidings to patients or family members, who say nothing or, if they say something, it is very little and spoken in a resigned way” (153–54). Often, as noted below, patients and family members also do nothing, sitting rather rigidly in their chairs.

On p. 19, Maynard presents his first non-narrative conversational exchange (one that is used also on subsequent occasions in the book). I focus on this exchange because it nicely illustrates both the power of CA and its weaknesses. The power can be seen in the clever way Maynard constructs his analysis. Here is the exchange:

The exchange is about someone reporting to a friend that she is pregnant and shows that the friend remembers that the husband had had a vasectomy (did he have a reversal). Did Maynard know the conversation was to occur because of knowing the participants? How did he learn about the pending conversation? How long ago was the vasectomy performed and what were the circumstances? Did both parties not want a child initially? How did their perspectives change? From a research analyst's perspective, it was a fantastic bit of luck. Or was it planned because the author knew in advance about the pending telephone call and was thus able to take advantage of a wonderful opportunity?

Maynard apparently knew something about the couple because he reports that the vasectomy was “something well known by their friends, including Betty [the recipient of the news].” He then speculates as follows:

What is especially important for the author and other CA research analysts is the way it is possible to build on a few fragments of conversation and create, at first glance, a convincing account that provides the reader with ethnographic-like questions and descriptive material that the author acquired in unknown ways, beginning with the good fortune of having obtained or (perhaps) witnessed the recording.

The strength (and weakness) of CA, therefore, can be found in the ability to make clever inferences about brief fragments of social interaction without having to describe the conditions that made it possible to record the fragments, and without having to specify whether the research analyst was present at the time and if he or she were able to observe or personally know about the participants.

Students of CA are preoccupied with single (often brief) events or particular situated exchanges and not with how long and in what capacity the participants have known each other, their daily or weekly or monthly contacts, nor if and how participants' lives were changed and if and how their social relations and participation in social networks were influenced by bad and good news. Maynard's often dramatic examples of how bad or good news is delivered and received on single occasions, therefore, are difficult to contextualize vis-à-vis the participants' everyday activities and the consequences of such news for their lives (e.g., adjusting to the delivery or reception of bad and good news).

A clear value of CA, however, has been the search for invariant regularities in the way speech exchanges or utterances are part of a concrete sequential context, in turns, hesitations, false starts, breathing, silences, speech tokens, prosodic manipulations, and the adjacent positioning of utterances and turns.

In chap. 3, Maynard discusses the relationship between ethnography and CA and notes:

My understanding, however, is that within linguistic anthropology, the concern has been to provide both “the relevance of larger and wider institutional structures” and recordings (whenever possible) “in the fullness of their detail and as embedded within a local interactional context…”

Maynard's use of CA has long been incorporated into linguistic anthropology and used by many students of discourse analysis who consider “the concrete sequential context of any given utterance. Not only in complete utterances and turns, but in hesitations, false starts, breathing, silences, speech tokens, prosodic manipulations, and other minutia of interaction, participants accomplish socially big things by virtue of the adjacent positioning of these utterances, turns, and minutia” (73).

Maynard continues by claiming:

Were intersubjectivity, joint activity, and orderly sequences of talk discovered by CA? Can they be achieved without the integration of cognition, culture, and language? CA is useful but is only a small part of cognition, culture, and language.

The notion of “limited affinity” is then introduced; it

Unfortunately, despite acknowledging Duranti's (1997:267–77) observation that CA tends to work in its own language and that this can obscure “the extent to which ethnographic knowledge of taken for granted expressions is necessary for the detailed analysis of conversational structure,” Maynard provides the reader with very few analytic or descriptive details about prior and subsequent patterns or courses of action before and after an extract that may be unfamiliar to the reader.

Maynard makes it appear that the selective choice of features and activities is necessary to avoid an infinite regress (a charge often made against ethnomethodology). The regress is avoided by “using, in a limited way, ethnographically derived descriptions of identity and setting.” But the ethnographic “clarification” (74–75) he attributes to an extract by Schegloff avoids the question of how Schegloff obtained his extract and what he knew about the extract before and after it was uttered.

On pp. 80–81, Maynard refers to sociological ethnographic work as obtaining “facts about a particular research site, the biographies and demographic identities of participants – ages, ethnicities, genders, socioeconomic classes, occupational categories – and the cultures to which they belong because of these identities.” Maynard does not provide such “facts” but cites research by L. McClenahan and J. Lofland, B. Glaser and A. Strauss, and R. Clark and E. LaBeff as exemplars of ethnographic research (without detailed discourse materials); he ignores, however, the large linguistic anthropology literature where detailed ethnography includes detailed discourse materials.

Maynard states:

The view of ethnography expressed on pp. 73, 80–81, and 153 is curious because it portrays field research as a kind of correlational enterprise that links abstract categories to “how news is delivered and received.” Are these remarks intended only for “ethnographic research on bad news,” or as a characterization of all ethnography, including ethnography that is combined with the analysis of speech acts in different cultural and organizational settings? Maynard is not clear about this and ignores the relevance of studying a group or community or organization over time in order to understand how social relationships and social networks can vary over clock-time, such that situated discourse in different settings can or may not be viewed as unique or transitive and thus subject to different interpretations.

Whereas Maynard's notion of ethnography appears questionable, he does provide the reader with brief but informative substantive extracts about the way bad and good news is conveyed and received by tellers and recipients. For example, in chap. 4, he underscores the local focus of bad and good news as “progressive increments of interactively produced talk … as participants accord events-in-the-world their in situ newsworthy status and their in vivo valence as good or bad” (117).

In chap. 5, Maynard continues with a detailed description from his previous research that is uncharacteristic of practitioners of CA and illustrates his willingness go beyond this method:

The last quotation was accompanied by four picture clips from a videotape of Maynard's study of a disability clinic. The local details, therefore, are fleeting but informative and graphically displayed.

In chap. 6, Maynard briefly describes and alludes to an unusual asymmetry in an HIV clinic: “… bad news is shrouded and only good news is exposed…” (197). The latter strategy is part of seeking affect from clients and trying to increase the flow of interaction and set the stage for talk about “… the needs of the individual and his relation to the community and its service.” What remains unclear is the kind of additional field research was needed “after the evoked display of affect…” What kind of observation did Maynard pursue in order to document the references to local interaction among deliverers and between them and recipients during the weeks after receiving bad or good news?

In chap. 7, Maynard notes that the ways participants “… approach agency and responsibility differ depending on whether, for example, something has been lost or found, weight has been gained or lost, a test has been passed or failed, a diagnosis has been confirmed or disconfirmed, or negotiations for the sale of a desired house have been blocked or consummated” (212). The situated nature of “moral discourse,” therefore, varies: “It is as if bad new worlds just happen, while good new worlds are something we achieve.”

If good new worlds are achieved, what can we learn about events that preceded such news, and what kinds of prior news (physical symptoms, tests, decisions about consulting professionals, discussions with others about fears and/or denials of what might have happened) preceded bad news? How do participants subsequently discuss, reconstruct, and cope with what is being called “moral discourse?”

Maynard produces generalizations that presuppose considerable observation of many professional communicative acts. Thus, professionals with bad news seek to “eviscerate displays of their agency and responsibility” while “Professionals with good news work to display their agency and to claim responsibility” while trying to avoid “possible attributions of self-praise” (219).

The generalizations described by Maynard appear to involve many observations of situated displays of bad and good news and are suggestive, as when he presents three situated excerpts from different kinds of settings. What remains unclear is the extent to which each setting was observed before and after the situated events were recorded. Readers must rely on their own experiences with different organizational structures and the latter's daily activities in order to comprehend the claims being made. Interviews appear to be presupposed when Maynard suggests (225) that individuals may seek career decisions or occupations that avoid giving “bad tidings” because of the impact such news can have on their own agency.

Maynard, therefore, gives the reader a range of suggestive, situated extracts that appear to have considerable face validity that could be seen as a strong claim that prolonged ethnography is not needed, that we can make generalizations about the delivery of news and its reception by sort of “parachuting” into an organizational or community “clearing” and somehow avoid the labor-intensive work needed first to establish and then to sustain different relationships with personnel or subjects. The study of situated talk also enables the research analyst to avoid the sometimes delicate task of distancing oneself from a research setting despite the extensive interpersonal commitments entailed in obtaining and sustaining ethnographic access to a research site. Such relationships often go beyond the period of study.