Interviewer laughs: Shared laughter and asymmetries in employment interviews

Routinely, in a corpus of videotaped employment interviews, the interviewer invites laughter. The interviewee laughs along. The interviewer may produce a next laughable or briefly topicalize the laughable materials, but the interviewee does not do so. Rather, the interviewee will wait for the interviewer to take the lead in returning them to the business of the interview. The asymmetries evident in the sequential organization of these shared laughs show participant orientation to respective institutional roles. These asymmetries are consistent with those identified in previous research examining doctor–patient and survey interviewer–respondent interactions. While laughing together might appear to reduce power distance and bring participants together, the organization and distribution of these shared laughter instances reflect and reinscribe the hegemony of the roles of interviewer and interviewee.