Chapter published in:
Technology Mediated Service Encounters
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lucía Fernández-Amaya and María de la O Hernández-López
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 300] 2019
► pp. 71–96

Chapter 3
Managing verbal and embodied conduct in telephone-mediated service encounters

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.

Keywords: telephone-mediated interaction, conversation analysis, embodied conduct, multi-activity, temporary interactional exits
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Telephone-mediated service encounters
  • 3.Managing engagement and actions in telephone-mediated interaction
  • 4.Sequence organization, questioning and progressivity
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Data
    • 5.2Procedure
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1Managing verbal and embodied activity simultaneously
    • 6.2Treating verbal and embodied activity as incompatible
  • 7.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.300.03mat
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