Assistance in craft workshops: recruitment, identity and multimodality

This thesis investigates how troubles are made public and how assistance is
organised in voluntary, adult craft workshops. Using recruitment as the analytic
lens, it combines multimodal conversation analysis with statistical methods to
link mechanism to distribution while keeping participant orientations central. The
corpus comprises 22 workshops conducted in the UK (11 co-present; 11 video-mediated;
51 hours). All data are in English.

Across three papers, the thesis advances the study of recruitment as
follows. First, it specifies an identity-based mechanism through which displays of
trouble invoke the instructor’s category-bound activity of assistance, making an
instructor’s response the relevant next action. Second, it provides a quantitative
account of the methods on the recruitment continuum. Requests are rare; trouble
reports are the most common audible method and receive assistance-oriented
responses at similar proportions to interrogatives, while embodied displays of
trouble are frequent but less likely to elicit assistance. Third, it offers a systematic
comparison of co-present and video-mediated instruction, showing that students
in video-mediated workshops produce fewer task and trouble queries, yet there is
no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of assistance-oriented
responses. This study also shows that while the mode of instruction has
an effect on the employment of recruitment methods, the overall structural
organisation of the activity is also consequential for the organisation of
recruitment.

This thesis presents the first systematic statistical analysis of the
recruitment continuum and the first systematic comparison of recruitment in co-present
and video-mediated instruction. It offers significant contributions to our
understanding of recruitment, video-mediated interaction and practical skills
instruction.