Host/host conversations : analysing moral and social order in talk on commercial radio

Talk between dual (or triple) host combinations dominates breakfast and drive programs. These programs are chat-based, and incorporate talk on a range of topics conducted for an overhearing audience, including talkback segments that involve callers. This article considers the features of chat-based programming, and proposes a framework for analysis into talk-in-interaction on this format. Using ethnomethodological approaches, being conversation and membership category analysis, as the basis for analysis, this paper argues that in addition to the influence of the ‘radio program’, there are three membership category devices that influence host/host talk. These are ‘telling stories’, ‘members of a team’, and ‘members of a community’. The way hosts and callers orient to these has consequences that may lead to the overt or subtle exclusion, or otherwise, of members of the overhearing audience, and this approach encourages a systematic analysis of the type of community to which participants orient within particular programs.