Between tradition and modernity: The bargaining genre in women's clothing stores in Jordan

Abstract

This article investigates bargaining exchanges between salesmen and female customers in modern urban women's clothing stores in northern Jordan. Thirty-five audio-recorded interactions of bargaining exchanges were analyzed, informed by a theoretical view of genre as culturally conventionalized discursive ways of achieving communicative ends within a community. In addition to identifying their generic structure, the analysis reveals that these encounters are discursively characterized by three features: ‘stylized’ or ‘mock’ conflict talk, sociability talk, and flirtation talk. The latter discursive aspect suggests how this traditional genre has evolved in a modern setting, which locates this genre somewhere between tradition and modernity and shows how members of a community play an active role in shaping, interpreting, and developing a genre over time. The bargaining encounters involve participants’ particular manipulations of interactional resources: the salesmen used extensive bargaining strategies to gain bargaining power and finalize the sales transaction, such as displaying exaggerated hospitality and generosity and praising the goods’ quality, while women customers used counterstrategies such as justifying why they deserve a lowered price and downplaying or criticizing the design or quality of the goods. The study relates these interactions to increased female agency and participation in public discourse in Jordanian society.