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Rapid technological advancements present many opportunities in the way people work, communicate and conduct business. That growth is especially prevalent in the World Wide Web. In the last five years, the Internet has expanded the market place to a global arena. More and more companies are conducting business online. Multinational corporations are becoming extremely dependent on the exchange of information across the Internet. As information flows across national borders, the concern for data security increases. Accordingly, personal data and business transactions collected by international companies are no longer safe once they enter the realm of the Internet. This paper addresses privacy concerns of e‐commerce customers, the security regulations imposed on multinational companies transferring data across international boundaries, and the risks of not complying with data protection regulations.

Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground.

Methodology – This chapter employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7–9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess.

Findings – The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teacher's version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multimodal devices, direct reported speech, and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground.

Value of chapter – This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teacher's social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult–child orders between the teacher and children.

Purpose – This chapter examines disputes produced by two young children during computer game playing and considers how the disputes were related to the children's ongoing activity.

Methodology/approach – The study is framed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Sequential analysis of recorded data details the mutual production of disputes during talk and interaction.

Findings – The analysis establishes how the children made each other accountable to the agreed-upon way of playing the game after one child offered to show the other how to play. Conflict developed during the game and disputes built upon previous disputes, especially in relation to claims made about knowing how to play.

Research implications – The disputes here are best understood in relation to how disagreement was avoided initially but then emerged as the gaming progressed. Examining disputes in the course of computer activity shows how the children turn agreement into disagreement over time.

Social implications – This study establishes some of the ways that disputes arise out of young children's social interactions during computer game playing and how disputes are related, or not, to shared understandings of what is going on moment by moment in the game.

Originality – Overall, this chapter provides a detailed sequential analysis across computer activity and establishes how the children's disputes challenge the order of game playing as the game progresses.

Purposes – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore children's acting and disputing within a family role-play and highlight how different roles are argued upon and negotiated by the participants, both verbally and nonverbally.

Methodology – The chapter is drawn from a single play episode between five 6-year-old girls at a Swedish preschool. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing in particular on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

Findings – The analyses show that the girls use a range of verbal and nonverbal resources to argue and accomplish the social order of the play (i) using past tense to display the factual past event status, and present tense to bid for upcoming events, (ii) building a mutual pretend understanding of places and objects that were used to configure nearness as well as distance in the girls’ interaction and relationship. Finally, the analyses clearly show that the significance of a pretend role is situated and depends on the social context in which it is negotiated.

Practical implications – To get acquainted with detailed analyses of children's pretend play can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how children build relationships within the play, and hopefully awaken their interest to study children's play in depth in everyday practice.

Value of chapter – The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how social relationships are argued and negotiated by preschool girls within pretend family role-play.

Approach – A handful of studies in ethnomethodology have targeted the conflicts of young members of society (Butler, 2008; Church, 2009; Danby & Baker, 1998a; Maynard, 1985a; Theobald & Danby, 2012, in press). Two occasionally overlapping strands of inquiry may be identified in this research: studies with an interest in charting the local organization of dispute exchanges and those seeking to highlight the socializing aspects of dispute procedures.

Purpose – This chapter examines a single feature of everyday exchanges taking place in a correctional facility for male youth. It investigates the ways through which certain membership category collections (such as ‘gender’ or ‘stage-of-life’) are drawn upon to instigate (Goodwin, M. H. (1982). ‘Instigating’: Storytelling as a social process. American Ethnologist, 9, 799–819.) adversarial exchanges.

Methodology – In so doing, this chapter draws on the two chief strands of ethnomethodological inquiry: sequential analysis of talk as well as membership categorization analysis.

Research implications – The analysis not only allows for a deeper understanding of commonplace discourse practices in a confined correctional facility for young people, but more importantly, of the methods through which inmates draw on local, situational as well as commonsense resources to proverbially ‘rock the boat’, that is, to change the order of ongoing events.

Social implications – In this way, this chapter offers insight into the mundane life of a group of young people in forced care.

Purpose – This chapter presents 5- to 12-year-old girls in their performances of persuasion and social control among peers in their inner city Neapolitan neighborhood of the Quartieri Spagnoli. It demonstrates how Quartieri Spagnoli girls employ rhetorical practices of appiccecarse (argumentation), specifically “shutdown” attacks, in attempts to advance one's social positioning and present themselves in control of a situation, while contemporaneously creating moral order among peers. In addition, this chapter elucidates how conflict can also strengthen relational bonds through the creation of alliances.

Methodology/approach – The analysis is based on 16 months of linguistic anthropological fieldwork. Seven focal girls and 16 of their female peers were observed and video-recorded in the home and in neighborhood streets.

Findings – Quartieri Spagnoli girls deploy a grammar of social control, including threats, directives, insults, physical attacks, wit, and intonation, to influence each other's behaviors and establish alliances and social hierarchy in their peer groups. This chapter demonstrates how those who demand control present themselves as agents who have power over other subjects and who themselves cannot be acted upon.

Social implications – Girls’ rhetorical skills serve to buy them status and situational power in their peer groups, offsetting feelings of powerlessness in an environment where they are otherwise excluded from mainstream peer groups and society.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter offers a window onto young girls’ verbal prowess in establishing respect on inner city streets, a topic that has been almost exclusively reserved for males.

Purpose – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how disputes between family members are accomplished and how the actions of copresent members (the mother and elder brother) contribute to the unfolding dispute.

Methodology – Selected from video recordings of the family breakfast, three extended sequences of mealtime talk were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system and analyzed using the analytic resources of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.

Findings – This analysis establishes how both the mother and elder sibling intervene in matters to do with who has access to some bookclub brochures. Appeals to rules such as “you’ve got to share” are used by the mother to manage the local issue of the dispute. In intervening to resolve and settle disputes, the mother makes visible particular moral orders, such as sharing. Intervention is accomplished through directions, increasing physical proximity to the dispute, topic shift, and physical intervention in the dispute, such as gently removing a child's hand from the brochures. Justifications for sharing proffered by the mother that work to establish an alignment with one child are challenged by the other sibling, thus contributing to an escalation of the dispute. Also explicated is how an older sibling buys into the dispute, making visible his view about how sharing is accomplished; that is, you “just cope with it.”

Practical implications – This chapter has some practical implications for adults who interact with children (teachers, parents) highlighting that in some way, adults, through their actions may contribute to the continuation of a dispute and second, how adult attempts to settle or end a dispute may result only in a temporary settlement rather than a cessation of the dispute.

Value of chapter – The chapter contributes understandings about how family members manage disputes interactionally and how social and moral orders are accomplished during family mealtime. Additionally, it shows how some disputes are temporarily settled and connected across a section of action rather than ended.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine an extended gossip dispute event, in which a peer group of 11-year-old girls take action against a girl who has reported about school bullying to the teacher by examining how the accused girls construct their own sociopolitical order away from the adults.

Approach – The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork within a Swedish multiethnic school setting combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of children's language practices.

Findings – It is found that the school's bullying intervention practice sets the stage for a trajectory of a gossip dispute event in which the accused girls work out their own version of the telling as snitching, reallocate blame, and project the future consequences for the girl being accountable for the telling. A moral order emerges via the organization of social actions, alignments, occasion-specific identities, and pejorative person descriptors, rendering the event of telling the teacher a disastrous move for the targeted girl. The micro-politics of the extended gossip dispute is pervasive in terms of how the accused girls strengthen social alignments of power, depict the transgressor by categorizing her as insane, and remedy the norm breaches through justifying their own actions.

Social implications – The success with which the girls here manage to turn the school's bullying intervention practice into a system of retaliation emphasizes the need for highlighting the micro-politics, of children's everyday practices away from adults.

Purpose – This chapter examines children's options for responding to parental attempts to get them to do something (directives).

Methodology/approach – The data for the study are video recordings of everyday family mealtime interactions. The study uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to conduct a microanalysis of sequences of everyday family mealtimes interactions in which a parent issues a directive and a child responds.

Findings – It is very difficult for children to resist parental directives without initiating a dispute. Immediate embodied compliance was the interactionally preferred response option to a directive. Outright resistance was typically met with an upgraded and more forceful directive. Legitimate objections to compliance could be treated seriously but were not always taken as grounds for non-compliance.

Research implications – The results have implications for our understandings of the notions of compliance and authority. Children's status in interaction is also discussed in light of their ability to choose whether to ratify a parent's control attempt or not.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter represents original work on the interactional structures and practices involved in responding to control attempts by a co-present participant. It offers a data-driven framework for conceptualising compliance and authority in interaction that is based on the orientations of participants rather than cultural or analytical assumptions of the researcher.

Purpose – This chapter demonstrates the social organization practices evident in early childhood disputes in order to promote a greater understanding of the role of non-verbal, embodied actions within the dispute process. In doing so, this chapter offers insight into children's co-construction of disputes and has practical implications for early childhood teachers.

Methodology – Ethnomethodology (EM), conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) are applied to the current study of children's disputes in order to offer insight into the sequences of social organization processes evident in children's disagreements.

Findings – This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the everyday disputes which four-year-old children engage in during their morning playtime at a primary school in Wales, UK. It reveals the children's use of physical gestures to support their verbal actions in order to maximize intersubjectivity between the participants. This joint understanding was necessary during the social organization process.

Practical implications – Managing children's physical disputes within an educational context is recognized as a very difficult aspect of a teacher's routine as the timing and level of intervention are so subjective (Bateman, 2011a). This chapter offers insight into the organization of physical disputes between young children, and so enables teachers to make an informed decision in their practice.