| Conversation is often used solving problems and fulfilling needs in everyday life. Worthy of study in and of itself, conversation enables members to transact social action. Service encounters are retail events which are communicatively transacted by clients and servers. They provide excellent opportunities to study conversation in use.; This study combines qualitative methods including audio recordings, field notation, informant diaries and interviews, with grounded theorizing, and conversation analysis. The study examines talk's use in service encounters, particularly its rhetorical use.; Thirty-five recorded encounters are analyzed in seven steps. (1) Transcription--an ongoing process of refinement leading to textual representations of sayings. (2) Narrative reconstruction--re-integrating transcripts with context through interpretive story-forms. (3) Saying-by-saying description of the enactment and exchange of talk. (4) Tracking topical movement through five aspects of coherence and cohesion: global and local topicality, topical moves, and two aspects of topic shading--challenge/support and central/peripheral distinctions. (5) Graphic displays--organizing interrelations of the procedures uncovered in the analysis. (6) Analytic memos focusing issues from ongoing analysis toward conceptual development. (7) Empirical theorizing--including further constant comparisons.; Analysis indicates that service encounters are generally cooperative activities, with conversation contributing much to that cooperation. Openings are accomplished along a continuum of "directness," depending on the pre-sequences used prior to global topics. For the most part, servers manage instrumental activities while clients maintain control over potential relationship development.; The ordering of talk in service encounters utilizes dialogic coupling. Sequences of adjacency pairs are abutted, embedded within each other, and used in their basic two-saying form. Backchannel fillers monitor and comment on sayings. Early starts of next sayings enable speakers to self-select while minimizing silences through the use of simultaneous talk.; Three procedures for managing topicality respond to three primary topoi. Interactants temporally structure their discourse by telling stories and making accounts, and construct the product by bringing out selling points. Servers limit client choices while (seemingly) leaving final decisions with clients. These procedures uncover the ostensible purpose(s) of the client's presence and the server's preference for treating the client's exigence, while locating the talk in shared knowledge fields--three topoi which aid interpretation of the conversation in service encounters. |
