Spontaneous or controlled: Overall structural organization of political phone-ins in two countries and their relations to societal norms Gonen Dori-Hacohen * Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States Received 1 July 2013; received in revised form 18 May 2014; accepted 26 May 2014 Abstract This study describes the differing overall structural organization of political radio phone-in interactions in Israel and the USA. The American phone-in is highly organized, tightly controlled by the host, who knows and introduces the caller at the opening, and closes the interaction unilaterally. In the Israeli phone-in, the opening resembles the mundane phone call: the call-taker acts as if he responds to a summons, there are greeting sequences, and the caller has the task of self-identification, since hosts do not know with whom they talk. Closings in Israel are negotiated and include pre-closings and closing sequences. Unlike the US structure, the Israeli structure promotes non-hierarchical institutional relations between participants, akin to mundane relations, often taken as relations between equals. The conclusion connects the overall structural organizations with the communication patterns in each society, suggesting phone-ins are one site that resonates and recreates societal norms. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Overall structural organization; Cross-cultural comparison; Conversation Analysis; Radio phone-ins; Ethnography of communica- tion; Speech code 1. Introduction Garfinkel (1963) suggested that the game tic-tac-toe provides a vehicle for demonstrating norms -- their creation, the way people follow them, and their role in making sense of the world. Repeating Garfinkel’s experiment several times in the contemporary context with students, I found its familiar layout (crossing two horizontal and vertical lines) indeed creates predictable actions from students. Granted, in a decidedly digital-age perception, one student recently did not play, as he saw the layout as a Twitter hash tag (!). But the vast majority has understood the layout immediately as a tic-tac-toe game. I have found this recognition happens in both Israeli culture and that used by Garfinkel, i.e., the USA culture. Beyond basic game recognition, however, things change. In Garfinkel’s experiment, he had the students alter the rules by shifting the first X and then placing an O. Playing with (or against) American students, I have usually received responses similar to Garfinkel’s to this altered game plan. Although students have rarely expressed anger (my status as the professor no doubt playing a role here), I have often observed puzzlement, as students have first frozen, and then labored to understand this entertainment become social predicament. They have found it hard to accept my changing of www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 70 (2014) 1--15 * Correspondence to: Department of Communication, Integrative Learning Center, Rm N374, 650 North Pleasant Street, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-1100, United States. Tel.: +1 413 335 1695. E-mail addresses: gonen@comm.umass.edu, gonendorihacohen@yahoo.com. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.05.010 0378-2166/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.