The emphasis on the shifting role of the interpreter in interactionistic accounts highlights how agency, despite being culturally or socially inscribed, is achieved in and through local, communicative practices -even in situations of institutionalised power asymmetry between interlocutors. It emphasises discursive freedom while at the same time, recognising that, in particular contexts, certain configurations of co-presence may serve to reproduce rather than challenge social/linguistic orderliness. With respect to interpreting contexts, the focus on the interactional dimension of interpreting activity emphasises the role that interpreters often play in the negotiation, maintenance and/or manipulation of structures of participation as they, with other members of different or the same cultures, enter into some previously uncharted linguistic relationship.

This growing body of interpreting research which focuses on the micro-interactional context represents a significant shift in perspective within interpreting studies. It claims a role for interpreters as actively shaping locally produced communicative practices and characterises interpreted events as a form of sociolinguistic activity, not merely exercises in decontextualised linguistic transfer. I would like to suggest, however, that other relevant questions remain with respect to the role that interpreted interactions and interpreters themselves play in the continuation or transformation of institutionally sanctioned social/linguistic practices. Such questions, rather than taking micro-textual features per se as the primary locus of data, take the macro social as their starting point in order to address the fundamental issue of what constraints there are on interpreting more broadly. If, indeed, interpreters do play a central role in interpreted events, it is worth investigating how, when and in what contexts interpreters are more likely, consciously or unconsciously, to contribute to the continuity of hegemonic social/linguistic processes or to challenge them.

Research of this kind - which can be located at the macro end of the macro/micro dichotomy - shares aims in common with norms and systems theories and sociological theories of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977; Bernstein, 1996). This approach, in which I would locate my own research, views interpreting activity - like all sociolinguistic activity - as both a form of social action and social organisation. It views all interpreting activity as located within distinctive belief and value systems which both operate on and legitimise particular communicative practices. This suggests that the ways in which interpreters work - the particular 'communicative competencies' that they bring to an interpreted event - are influenced by the social and political contexts in which both their work and the training that may inform their professional practice occurs. It maintains that interpreters - though not unreflexively -are caught up in larger social configurations of power and control - both internal and external to their professional field of practice.

A key aim of this approach to interpreting research is to access the higher level features of interpreted interactions having a bearing on discursive production - features located within the social structure and having both an historical and a political specificity. It looks to analyse the ways in which different protocols of interpreting are framed by institutionally organised expectations and practices found in both interpreter-training programmes and in arenas of professional practice. While the primary focus is on the macro-institutional, the approach is empirical. Data are derived from an ethnographic approach, including observation of relevant sites and the interviewing of key participants drawn from each level of organisational structure. This sustains a dynamic relation between structure and action, freedom and constraint - there is no closure of the macro-social framework. Thus, while interpreting is perceived as being framed by macro constraints, local, interactional practices are acknowledged as crucial sites for the potential transformation of the social order.

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