Studying Service Encounters

Abstract

Chapter 2 provides important contextual information about the study by presenting a conceptual framework (mediated discourse analysis) for service encounters. The chapter provides an overview of the different disciplines that have greatly contributed to the study of service encounters such as sociology, anthropology and linguistics and the main approaches to service encounters to have developed from these disciplines including interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In fact, it is a main claim of this book that to get a handle on what is going on in a service encounter in particular the shop under scrutiny; the study needs to be approached as an interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary project which is mainly grounded in the aforementioned fields. Such inquiry is increasingly being proven as crucial for studies investigating the complex and situated communicative practices of institutional and professional worlds (Blommaert, Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Blommaert, The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Candlin, & Crichton (Eds.). Discourses of trust. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Coupland, Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory. In N. Coupland, S. Sarangi, & C. N. Candlin (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and social theory (pp. 1–26). Harlow: Longman, 2001; Jaworski, & Thurlow, Introducing semiotic landscapes. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (Ed.), Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space (pp. 1–40). London: Continuum, 2010; Scollon, & Scollon, Discourses in place: Language in the material world. London and New York: Routledge, 2003; Scollon, & Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. London: Routledge, 2004), of which practices of service encounters are categorized as one particular kind.