Co-Operative Action proposes a new framework for the study of how human beings create action and shared knowledge in concert with others by re-using transformation resources inherited from earlier actors: we inhabit each other's actions. Goodwin uses videotape to examine in detail the speech and embodied actions of children arguing and playing hopscotch, interactions in the home of a man with severe aphasia, the fieldwork of archaeologists and geologists, chemists and oceanographers, and legal argument in the Rodney King trial. Through ethnographically rich, rigorous qualitative analysis of human action, sociality and meaning-making that incorporates the interdependent use of language, the body, and historically shaped settings, the analysis cuts across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. It investigates language-in-interaction, human tools and their use, the progressive accumulation of human cultural, linguistic and social diversity, and multimodality as different outcomes of common shared practices for building human action in concert with others.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; Part I. Co-operative Accumulative Action: 2. Co-operative accumulation as a pervasive feature of the organization of action; 3. The co-operative organization of emerging action; 4. Chil and his resources; 5. Building complex meaning and action with a three word vocabulary: inhabiting and reshaping the actions of others through accumulative transformation; 6. The distributed speaker; Part II. Intertwined Semiosis: 7. Intertwined knowing; 8. Building action by combining different kinds of materials; 9. Intertwined actors; 10. Projection and the interactive organization of unfolding experience; 11. Projecting upcoming events to accomplish co-operative action; Part III. Embodied Interaction: 12. Action and co-operative embodiment in girls' hopscotch; 13. Practices of color classification; 14. Creating professional vision co-operatively; 15. Environmentally coupled gestures; Part IV. Co-operative Action with Predecessors: Sedimented Landscapes for Knowledge and Action: 16. Co-operative action with predecessors; 17. The accumulation of diversity through co-operative action; 18. Seeing in depth; 19. Co-operative action as the source of, and solution to, the task faced by every community of creating new, culturally competent members with specific forms of knowledge and skill; Part V. Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants: 20. The emergence of conventionalized signs within the natural world; 21. Calibrating experience and knowledge by touching the world; 22. The blackness of black: color categories as situated practice; 23. Environmentally coupled gestures and the social calibration of professional vision; 24. Professional vision; 25. Conclusion.