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. 223–244

Relational practices on commercial Facebook wall interactions

This chapter explores mediated service encounters in social networking sites, as examples of the new (or reconfigured) forms of social organization and interaction brought about by technology. Social networking sites afford multidirectional communication, i.e. encounters between companies and consumers, as well as interactions among consumers, which are impacting previously stable corporate and consumer roles and are transforming efficiency and sociability management in various ways. This chapter specifically investigates relational practices on commercial Facebook pages. To carry out this research, a reference corpus of commercial wall interactions, comprising over 900 comments, was compiled. A representative sample (n = 290 posts) was quantitatively analyzed to identify consumers’ alignment with the corporation. Drawing on a revised framework of relational work and extant second-order taxonomies of im/politeness, a qualitative analysis unveiled a number of relational practices that emerged in supportive and unsupportive interactions. This chapter unveiled specific interactional patterns and revealed the predominance of both textual and visual relational practices on Facebook.
Keywords: service encounters, relational work, im/politeness, wall interactions, Facebook
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.300.09bou
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