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.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Weatherall, Ann & Fiona Grattan
2024. A Conversation Analytic Study of Calls to Medical Reception for Doctor’s Appointments. Health Communication 39:8 ► pp. 1532 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.
2020. Doing reflecting: Embodied solitary confirmation of instructed enactment. Discourse Studies 22:3 ► pp. 261 ff.
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