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Part of
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 181–206

Chapter 8
Saving face online

Institutional responses to negative customer reviews on TripAdvisor

Working within an interactional-pragmatic framework, this chapter reports on a study of hoteliers’ responses to negative customer reviews on the TripAdvisor website, exploring the significance of facework and rapport management strategies as means of persuasion. Negative reviews represent face-threatening acts which endanger the business’s institutional face, while responses offer an opportunity for face-saving and rapport-building; to maximize persuasive effect, respondents must strike a balance between their own face needs and those of the complainant. The study also explores the extent to which respondents’ persuasive strategies reflect the presence of third parties (readers of the website), as the complaint-response sequence – formerly a private genre – is now increasingly enacted in the public domain.
Keywords: interactional pragmatics, face, facework, rapport management, persuasion, genre, public complaint responses, TripAdvisor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and aims
  • 2.Material and genre
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2The genre and its social context – participants, roles, goals
      • 2.2.1Genres as social processes
      • 2.2.2Communicative goals
  • 3.Facework and rapport management
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Strategies attending to the complainant’s face
    • 4.2Strategies attending to the respondent’s face
      • 4.2.1Face compartmentalization
        • 4.2.1.1Apologies
        • 4.2.1.2Emotionalization of the respondent
      • 4.2.2Supporting strategies attending to the respondent’s face
        • 4.2.2.1Alternative realities
          • i.A usual reality, in which the hotel is competent
          • ii.A future reality, in which the hotel will be competent
          • iii.A hypothetical reality, in which the hotel would have been competent
        • 4.2.2.2Restatement of the events
          • i.Restatement of positive aspects of the review
          • ii.Subjectivity markers
          • iii.Downplaying the impact of the events
          • iv.Blurring responsibility for the events
    • 4.3Strategies attending to third parties
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Corpus
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.09hop
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Corpus
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotels-g186348-Northamptonshire_England-Hotels.html(retrieved 18 October 2014)
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Hopkinson, Christopher
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