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demeaned and knowledgeable selves (see'Studieren als Hobby') in the
achievement of negatively skewed alignment in English and German sociable
episodes respectively.
Such activity has been shown to play itself out as equilibric
conversation, that is, recurring and institutionalised forms of talk endemic to
sociability in each respective culture. Further, this is talk which accommodates
variously both negative and positive aspect of conversational selfhood. In this
sense, what the preceding analyses have demonstrated is that equilibric
interaction has been shown to be contingent on cultural variations in what
Goffman (1967) famously termed working consensus. That is, participants in
both primarily positively aligned and primarily negatively aligned
conversational environments appear to be mutually and reciprocatively
aligning to culturally normative ways to achieve sociable equilibrium. I shall
discuss this last point further in Chapter 9.
Aside from demonstrating how both positive and negative alignments
occur variously in the same conversational environment in each culture, I
have also demonstrated in the preceding analysis that such alignments can
be seen to occur in each of the topic types identified in Chapter 5- viz.
reminiscences (excerpt 'Cookie's Party'), reportables (excerpt'Tommy
Fields'), agonisers (excerpt 'Internationale Arbeitslosigkeit' ['International
Unemployment']), biographicals (excerpt 'Stud iere n als Hobby' ['Studying as a
Hobby']) - ones endemic to sociable conversation in each culture. These
findings are represented in table 8.1. This again evidences the endemic
nature of positive - negative alignment practices in both cultures across major
topic types routinely drawn upon for sociable conversation.
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