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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

The World of Daily Life

Doing a search for (e‑)shopping purposes

ORCID logo | University of Southern Denmark
ORCID logo | University of Southern Denmark
ORCID logo | University of Southern Denmark

Within social scientific research searching for products is overwhelmingly reduced and represented as an activity that is embedded in decision-making processes. This study shows that searching is extremely multimodally rich and complex and that structured stages of searching are the product of customers’ efforts to order this complexity in and through concrete actions. Importantly, it also shows that customers carry out these actions un-hesitantly in both physical Brick-and Mortar (B&M) shops and in web-shops. The paper concludes that descriptions of searching need to take the nature of the multimodal environment as well as customers’ approach and engagement with it into consideration: searching for products is multimodally rich and complex and yet it is simple.

The study is situated within the broad fields of EMCA and Social Semiotics in multimodality. It is based on video-recordings and eye‑tracking recordings of customers’ buying practices in different kinds of (web)shops.

Keywords: search, multimodality, EMCA, social semiotics, emergence, buying-and selling interaction, online shopping, shopping in physical environments
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research in Multimodality
  • 3.Research in searching
  • 4.Data collection and methods
  • 5.Analysis: The organization of searching
    • 5.1Creating paths and search areas
    • 5.2The emergence of organizing search principles
    • 5.3Examination of products
  • 6.Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Declaration of conflicting interests
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22020.ras
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