The Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Interactions

A Case Study of an Ethnic Grocery Shop

Dariush Izadi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030195847
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

"This book provides a significant contribution to the discursive analysis of service encounters. It demonstrates, in a very elegant way and based on a solid empirical investigation, how mediated discourse analysis may be enacted to describe and understand the social and cultural practices associated with space, time, ethnicity and identity construction. A must-read for researchers and practitioners interested in language use in professional contexts."

-- Laurent Filliettaz, University of Geneva, Switzerland

"This book contains one of the most thorough and productive applications of the theoretical and analytical apparatus of mediated discourse analysis I have come across, demonstrating how the moment-by-moment ways that people appropriate discourse to perform mundane daily activities such as shopping contribute to the broader maintenance of social identities and communities. The analysis is meticulously undertaken and communicated in clear, elegant prose. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of discourse studies."

-- Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK

This book investigates the social practices of service encounters in the context of a typical Persian shop in Sydney. Although by nature goal-oriented speech events, the book posits that service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions, but that they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. Analysing ethnographic data using the frameworks of Mediated and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the author explores how people use everyday activities to enact social and cultural identities, construct linguistic authenticity, and maintain strong economic ties to the community. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the sociolinguistics of ethnic/ minority sites and urban spaces.

Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics and teaches Language and Linguistics Research Methods, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and TESOL Units at Western Sydney University, Australia. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in social settings.

© The Author(s) 2020

Dariush IzadiThe Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Interactionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19584-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Framing of Service Encounters

Dariush Izadi¹

(1)

Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Dariush Izadi

This chapter contains an extract from the author’s contribution to the volume The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

End Abstract

This is a book about service encounters (interactions) in a typical Persian shop in Sydney. The book is about how people use such everyday mundane activities in the shop to enact certain types of social and cultural (political) identities, to construct authenticity linguistically and culturally, to form and develop relationships with other people and to maintain strong cultural and economic ties to the community. To get a sense of at least some of the complexities and intricacies involved in the study of service interactions, I would like to begin by considering the following interactions in the shop under scrutiny that may serve to show the kind of thing that is going on.

Most readers will instantly be able to identify this interaction as a rudimentary social practice embedded in service encounters, but an interaction with its own particular sets of underlying rules. What I mean by ‘underlying rules’ is that it is governed by a particular set of social and discursive conventions (see Jones 2016) that at least the participants present in the aforementioned interaction have at their disposal. That is not to say that this type of interaction always takes place in the same order. However, participants involving in the social practice of ‘service encounter’ do have a relatively precise set of actions that they need to carry out to be recognized as successful. Minimally, the genre must consist of at least three basic communicative exchanges and activities (speech acts) that occur in service interactions including (a) greetings, or openings; (b) negotiation of the business exchange and (c) closing (Bailey 2000) of the encounter.

Extract 1.1 is an encounter between two customers (a male Persian-speaking customer and a female Anglo-Australian) and the shop-owner typical of the genre of ‘service encounters’. The interaction here centres upon the business-oriented talk organized around the achievement of particular ends and does not incorporate discussion of interpersonal topics or what Bailey (2000) calls a ‘socially minimal service encounter’ (lines 1–8). The encounter starts off as an ordinary inquiry by the female customer asking (openings) whether she can ‘taste’ the dates on the counter (Fig. 1.1) in line 2. The activities involved in service encounters must therefore minimally contain those obligatory to accomplish these ends, in this case the exchange of the customer’s money for the shop-owner’s dates.

Extract 1.1

Fig. 1.1

The dates on the counter

The second basic activity is the negotiation of the business transaction (lines 3–6), which includes such elements as stating the price of the merchandise brought to the counter by the customer or counting out change as it is handed back to the customer. While explicit verbal greetings and closings do not occur in every recorded encounter, each contains a verbal negotiation of the transaction as observed in Extract 1.1. The negotiation of the business exchange can be long and full of adjacency pairs (Schegloff and Sacks 1973)—involving requests for a product kept behind the counter (e.g. CDs, cigarettes), questions about a price, repairs (Schegloff et al. 1977), and requests or offers of a bag. Merritt (1976) calls these adjacency pairs ‘couplets’ (p. 345) and gives a detailed structural flow chart that shows the length and potential complexity of this phase of a service encounter. The third and final activity of the encounter above, the closing, often includes the payment and formulaic exchanges (thank you in lines 7–8) ‘See you later’ and ‘Have a good day’ or in Persian be salamat (take care). Frequently, the words used to close the negotiation of the business exchange also serve to close the entire encounter.

However, one can assume that such interactions are often simple and predetermined by a limited set of actions with participants engaged in their institutional roles (i.e. shopkeeper and customer). Far from it. There are occasions where interpersonal and relational concerns are inextricably implied and often involve multiple social practices and thus are far more complex and unpredictable than they are often imagined. In fact, just to say that this interaction is an instance of ‘service encounter’ overlooks the complexity of all of the other practices pertinent to and in fact necessary for its accomplishment. For one thing, this interaction indexes only one moment in a long chain of actions and interactions that are essential to get a handle on the social practice of ‘buying/tasting dates’ in a Persian shop in Sydney. From the researcher’s perspective, for instance, the interaction seems to represent only a small part of a much longer process, a process that might contain a whole host of other social practices including the shop-owner agreeing the researcher to carry out his research, gaining the approval from the University’s ethics committee and so forth, which are not included in the transcription of the interaction observed above. Let us now go back to Extract 1.2, which is the continuation of Extract 1.1, and see what we can learn from all this.

Extract 1.2

In Extract 1.2, the consumption of dates, as a mediational means (an object; see Chap. 2 for detailed discussion), among Persians brings about a moment of conflict. To elaborate on this point a bit further, a brief background of the use of ‘dates’ in the daily lives of Persians is essential. Irrespective of the rich nutritional content of dates that make them highly beneficial for health and can be found at the Persian breakfast table, dates in Persian culture in general are found to offer other different uses. For instance, when a person passes away, a memorial service is usually held at a mosque and at the deceased’s house. Crying, weeping or other expressions of sorrow are expected and encouraged. Candles are lit, Halva, ‘a sweet food made of crushed sesame seeds and honey, sugar and saffron’, is served, along with tea and ‘dates’ during the gatherings. Furthermore, during Ramadan, a month of fasting in the Islamic calendar, at sunset, families hasten for the fast-breaking meal, known as iftar. During iftar, it is observed that dates are usually the first food to break the fast, which dates back to the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad era where he broke fast with three dates (Stoeltje 2009). During Ramadan, dates were almost an indispensable item that was purchased by almost all Persian-speaking customers in the shop. In addition to that, dates are also used as donations (mainly on Thursday nights) for the purpose of commemoration of the deceased so that the deceased are forgiven for the sins they have committed. Therefore, the use of dates has a religious function among Persians.

Accordingly, as can be observed in Extracts 1.1 and 1.2, all service interactions are mediated through material objects/cultural tools. Key to the application of such an approach is how these cultural tools afford and constrain the types of social actions that the customers, for instance, in the shop can carry out and the kinds of social identities with which they can be affiliated and the kinds of relationships they are able to construct, and ultimately the kinds of societies they are able to create. In Extract 1.2, the usage of date has been internalized at some point in the life cycle of both customers and the shop-owners. The date in fact made it possible who these people are and the various meanings each participant is making.

Dates thus have a history, and this can be discussed in two senses. First, dates have a history within the everyday practice in the shop, where the topic of tasting or purchasing of dates is discussed, and since every time they are purchased, they accumulate the history of that usage which they transfer into future uses. This history predates both customers’ presence in the shop. In the second sense, dates have a history in the world that predates the Persian participants’ knowledge and use of them. In a broader sense, the dates in the shop at some point were purchased by the shop-owners who of course remember why the dates came into their possession. Additionally, and more importantly, it is fair to assume that they purchased them out of some perceived need (i.e. to fulfil their customers’ needs) and hence the shop-owners appropriated it through purchase to mediate actions in the shop (i.e. to respond to their customers’ needs; Scollon 2001a, b).

However, it is evident that the dates carry with them a sociocultural history. While they do not in themselves define this Persian shop as a place where a unique use of dates is practiced, they are, in essence, a cultural tool that is inherent in the practice of the social actors’ shopping experience in the shop as it materially embodies and reproduces a social structure embedded in that practice (Pennycook 2017; Pennycook and Otsuji 2017) of the participants. As a semiotic structure, the dates display much about its use and practice at least in the shop. This history and social structure, Scollon argues, are presented to the female customer as given in this small action of purchasing or tasting of the dates. As such, to that small extent, it can be argued that the female customer has internalized them as mediational means in her practice. The point is that even in this very brief moment of tasting dates, the female customer is becoming a comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Framing of Service Encounters
• 2. Studying Service Encounters
• 3. Framing and Footing: Negotiation of Roles and Status
• 4. Authenticity in Interaction
• 5. The Construction of Identity in Interaction
• 6. Linguistic and Spatial Practices in the Shop
• 7. Narratives
• 8. Conclusion: Mediated Action in the Shop
• Back Matter