Maurice Nevile, Beyond the black box: Talk-in-interaction
in the airline cockpit. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xvii, 245. Hb
$94.95.
Maurice Nevile, from the Australian National University, examines the
routine interaction between pilots in the airline cockpit, drawing on
several related theoretical approaches to talk-in-interaction, such as
ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and institutional discourse
analysis. In chapter 1, “The workplace as social interaction,”
Nevile reviews the theoretical background on workplace and institutional
discourse as well as some of the most significant articles in the
literature about aviation communications, in particular about interaction
in the airline cockpit. In this sense, Nevile's work establishes a
different orientation since, as he points out, previous work on this type
of institutional discourse has focused on critical situations, accidents,
and incidents instead of routine interaction, with the result that