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Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity
Edited by Maurice Nevile, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann and Mirka Rauniomaa
[Not in series 186] 2014
► pp. 271–294

Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self-service store

How practices of categorisation matter

ORCID logo | KU Leuven

This chapter investigates how persons shopping together initiate orientation towards commercial objects that populate self-service stores. Drawing on the methods developed in conversation analysis, it discusses the actions that shoppers accomplish when introducing a ‘new’ object into their interaction. In the supermarket setting, objects are available resources: as customers navigate through the aisles of the store, they use (commercial) objects as landmarks, as resources allowing them to organise their overall shopping activity, to initiate buying decisions, to engage in topic talk, etc. This study furthermore discusses the multimodal resources that shoppers employ when establishing a joint focus of attention and analyses the categorisation work that they accomplish when orienting towards objects that are on sale.

Published online: 12 September 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.186.12ste
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