Children's play activities are widely perceived as developing from primitive to increasingly complex forms of social organization, as children mature and acquire interactional competency. Research following this traditional, developmentally oriented approach postulates that sports and games with rules are the most advanced and complex form of play activity; activities involving fantasy and pretend-play are viewed in comparison as considerably less complex. This article argues that fantasy play encounters exhibit complex features in their own right, and that long-held distinctions between higher-order games and fantasy play are conceptually overdrawn. The argument is grounded in a conversation analytic study of the play activities of a cross-sex, mixed-age neighborhood play group. This analysis focuses on the endogenous social organization of a fantasy play encounter. (Conversation analysis, children's play, socialization, social psychology)

Two hours of conversation among three children were examined for oral disputes concerning use of beds in their bedroom. Examination of transcript segments revealed that the children signaled a social order governing use of property and objects. The children were found to negotiate such use on an ongoing basis, and the form and content of the disputes differed dramatically according to whether the beds were being claimed for the purpose of play or sleep. The conversations reflected the ongoing construction and negotiation of social representations, within shared frames or finite provinces of meaning, for use of space and objects. (Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, property, ownership)

The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turn-taking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power within the school. (Symbolic domination, choice of language, code-switching, French/English language contact, social institutions, Canada)