In telephone-mediated service encounters, there are limits on how parties interact with one another. Speakers are restricted to only verbal (what they say) and aural (what they hear) means of communication. Therefore, a practical problem at the heart of such interactions is how speakers manage embodied conduct, given that they can only hear – rather than see the other person. We investigated how verbal and embodied conduct were managed in a corpus of 63 calls to a New Zealand helpline service where callers (complainants) interact with conciliators (institutional representatives) to complain about, and attempt to resolve disputes with their electricity and gas providers. Using conversation analysis, we document two ways that callers could manage verbal and embodied conduct in a particular type of sequence in these calls.
Butler, Carly, Jonathan Potter, Susan Danby, Michael Emmison, and Alexa Hepburn
2010 “Advice Implicative Interrogatives: Building ‘Client-centred Support’ in a Children’s Helpline.” Social Psychology Quarterly 73: 265–287.
DeLand, Michael
2012 “Suspending Narrative Engagements: The Case of Pick-up Basketball.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642: 96–108.
Dewar, Joe
2011 “Calling to Complain: An Ethnographic and Conversation Analytic Account of Complaints to an Industry Ombudsman”. Unpublished master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.
Edmonds, David Matthew
(2016) “Who Knows What and Who Has the Rights to Know It?: Knowledge and Reality Construction in Interaction.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.
Goffman, Erving
1981Forms of Talk. Oxford, U.K: Blackwell.
Goodwin, Charles
2007 “Participation, Stance and Affect in the Organization of Activities.” Discourse and Society 18: 53–73.
Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie Harness Goodwin
1992 “Context, Activity and Participation.” In The Contextualization of Language, ed. by Peter Auer, and Aldo di Luzio, 77–99. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Haddington, Pentti, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile
2014 “Towards Multiactivity as a Social and Interactional Phenomenon.” In Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking, ed. by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 3–32. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Hayano, Kaoru
2014 “Question Design in Conversation”. In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 395–414. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley – Blackwell.
Hepburn, Alexa, Sue Wilkinson, and Carly W. Butler
2014 “Intervening With Conversation Analysis in Telephone Helpline Services: Strategies to Improves Effectiveness”. Research on Language and Social Interaction 47: 239–254.
Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman
2010Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell.
Heritage, John, and Geoffrey Raymond
2012 “Navigating Epistemic Landscapes: Acquiescence, Agency and Resistance in Responses to Polar Questions.” In Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives, ed. by Jan P. de Ruiter, 179–192. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Hopper, Robert
1993 “Hold the phone.” In Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, ed. by Deidre Boden, and Don Zimmerman, 217–231. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity.
(eds)2002Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Kane, Michael, and Randall Engle
2002 “The Role of Prefrontal Cortex in Working – memory Capacity, Executive Attention, and General Fluid Intelligence: An Individual – differences Perspective.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9: 637–671.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi
2015 “Working the Overall Structural Organization of a Call: How Customers use Third-position as Leverage for Gaining Service Representatives’ Assistance in Dealing with Service Problems”. Language and Communication 43: 47–57.
Leung, Fung-Yee
1997 “The Management of Intrusion in Telephone Calls: A Study of Call – waiting in Cantonese Telephone Conversations”. Unpublished master’s thesis, The University of Hong Kong.
Licoppe, Christian, and Sylvaine Tuncer
2014 “Attending to a Summons and Putting Other Activities ‘On Hold’: Multiactivity as a Recognisable Interactional Accomplishment.” In Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking, ed. by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 167–190. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Liddicoat, Anthony
2009 “Sexual Identity as Linguistic Failure: Trajectories of Interaction in the Heteronormative Language Classroom.” Journal of Language, Identity and Education 8: 191–202.
Lindemann, Stephanie, and Anna Mauranen
2001 “It’s Just Real Messy”: The Occurrence and Function of “Just” in a Corpus of Academic Speech.” English for Specific Purposes 20: 459–475.
Levinson, Stephen
1983Pragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Maynard, Douglas W., and Nora Cate Schaeffer
1997 “Keeping the Gate: Declinations of the Request to Participate in a Telephone Survey Interview”. Sociological Methods and Research 26: 34–79.
Mazeland, Harrie
2004 “Responding to the Double Implication of Telemarketers’ Opinion Queries.” Discourse Studies 6: 95–115.
Nevile, Maurice
2015 “The Embodied Turn in Research on Language and Social Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 48: 121–151.
Raymond, Geoffrey
2003 “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/no Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68: 939–967.
Redmayne, Mary
2013 “New Zealand Adolescents’ Cellphone and Cordless Phone User – habits: Are they at Increased Risk of Brain Tumours Already? A Cross-sectional Study.” Environmental Health 12.
Relieu, Marc
2010 “Mobile Phone “Work”: Disengaging and Engaging Mobile Phone Activities with Concurrent Activities.” In The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, ed. by Rich Ling, and Scott Campbell, 215–229. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Schegloff, Emanuel
2002 “Beginnings in the Telephone.” In Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, ed. by James Katz, and Mark Aakhus, 284–299. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel
2007Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel, and Harvey Sacks
1973 “Opening Up Closings.” Semiotica 8: 289–327.
.
Sidnell, Jack
2014 “Basic Conversation Analytic Methods.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 77–99. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Stivers, Tanya, and Jeffrey Robinson
2006 “A Preference for Progressivity in Interaction.” Language in Society 35: 367–392.
Stokoe, Elizabeth
2009 “For the Benefit of the Tape”: Formulating Embodied Conduct in Designedly Uni-modal Recorded Police-suspect Interrogations.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1887–1904.
Sutinen, Marika
2014 “Negotiating Favourable Conditions for Resuming Suspended Activities.” In Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking, ed. by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 137–166. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Szymanski, Margaret
1999 “Re-engaging and Dis-engaging Talk in Activity.” Language in Society 28: 1–23.
Ticca, Anna-Claudia
2014 “Managing Multiactivity in a Travel Agency: Making Phone Calls While Interacting with Customers.” In Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking, ed. by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 191–226. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Watson, Jason, and David Strayer
2010 “Supertaskers: Profiles in Extraordinary Multitasking Ability.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 17: 479–485.
Weatherall, Ann
2015 “But Whose Side Are You On?”: Doing Being Independent in Telephone – mediated Dispute Resolution.” In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and Withholding in Institutional Interaction, ed. by Fabienne Chevalier, and John Moore, 151–179. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Weatherall, Ann
2016 “I Need to Get Some Details First”: Record Keeping as a Potential Barrier to Effective Complaint-call Management”. Mediation Theory and Practice 1: 35–58.
Weatherall, Ann, and Maria Stubbe
2015 “Emotions in Action: Telephone-mediated Dispute Resolution.” British Journal of Social Psychology 54: 273–290.
Whalen, Marilyn, and Don Zimmerman
1990 “Describing Trouble: Practical Epistemology in Citizen Calls to the Police.” Language in Society 19: 465–492.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Arano, Yusuke
2020. Doing reflecting: Embodied solitary confirmation of instructed enactment. Discourse Studies 22:3 ► pp. 261 ff.
Gasiorek, Jessica, Ann Weatherall & Bernadette Watson
2021. Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 40:1 ► pp. 102 ff.
2023. A Conversation Analytic Study of Calls to Medical Reception for Doctor’s Appointments. Health Communication► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.