Facework, power displays, and transaction activities in a public service encounter

The subject of this study is the interactions that take place in public retail service encounters. The study is based on video and audio taped recordings of encounters that occurred in a small newsagent's shop in southern England. It focuses on two features of the encounters: how transaction activities are organized, and how participants' social identities affect their conversational contributions to the social talk done in these encounters.

The analysis of the transaction sequence describes the verbal and nonverbal activities to which participants attend in doing a transaction, and proposes an engagement model of focused actions which customers use to achieve their goals in retail transactional settings. In the proposed model, customers integrate the pragmatic/cultural knowledge they bring to the situation with organizational information provided by the setting, and their transactional goals, in projecting an improvised series of engagement moves appropriate for that setting. The ability to make such a projection is considered a part of a community member's pragmatic competence.

The analysis of social talk in the encounters examines how the power differentials of the salient social identities of participants in these encounters are made manifest in their contributions to social talk. It is argued that the identities of role (customer-seller), gender, and relative age encode status power differentials. A 'power hypothesis' proposes a positive correlation between the possession of greater status power and the greater use of interactional power features such as topic and assessment initiations. The hypothesis' predictions are not fully supported, and a 'facework' model, which accounts for the observed distributions of the interactional power features, is proposed. This revised facework model integrates previous work done in facework studies (Goffman 1967, Brown and Levinson 1987, Tracy 1990) and introduces the distinction between mien (social status) face and lien (self-respect) face as a significant component. It is hypothesised that the satisfaction of mien and lien face wants explains the distribution of interactional power features in this situated social talk.