Multimodality, interactional competence, and the ‘intercultural’ in achieving intercultural service encounters in Japan

Abstract

This study uses a multimodal conversation analysis to examine the interactional competence of participants in intercultural service encounters. American customers were video recorded while placing orders at small food shops in rural Japan. Two encounters illustrate how participants used multimodal resources to collaboratively achieve transactional goals in the face of features—linguistic difficulty and relational talk occasioned by language and sociocultural identities—that might be attributed to the ‘intercultural’ setting. The analysis shows how the participants used gesture, movement, and body position in concert with standard transactional routines to navigate relational and transactional sequences of talk and accomplish a shared, transactional goal. The discussion then considers whether these sequential developments are partly responsible for the particular ‘intercultural’ nature of these encounters, thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the interactional components of service encounters between participants of different cultural backgrounds.