30.3373, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Fernández-Amaya, de la O Hernández-López (2019)

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Subject: 30.3373, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Fernández-Amaya, de la O Hernández-López (2019)

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Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2019 11:27:59
From: Marine Riou [marine.riou at univ-lyon2.fr]
Subject: Technology Mediated Service Encounters

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36515898


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-975.html

EDITOR: Pilar  Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
EDITOR: Lucía  Fernández-Amaya
EDITOR: María  de la O Hernández-López
TITLE: Technology Mediated Service Encounters
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 300
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Marine Riou, Université Lyon 2

SUMMARY

This collection of papers focuses on service encounters, defined as “a genre
practice in which products, information, or commodities are traded between a
service provider and a service seeker” (p.1). More specifically, the book
focuses on a subtype of service encounters, i.e. when mediated by technology,
such as mobile apps, telephone calls or social networks. Spoken as well as
written interactions are considered, as the book includes chapters analyzing
telephone calls, face-to-face interactions, online reviews, social media
posts, and online marketplace messages. The chapters are organized in three
sections according to the subtype of service encounters in focus: social
services (Section I), call centers (Section II), and e-service encounters
(Section III). The languages studied are Dutch, Spanish (Spain, Ecuador),
English (New Zealand, United-Kingdom, United States), Danish, and Chinese. The
book can be considered a follow-up volume to a previous collection that two of
the editors published previously (Hernández-López and Fernández Amaya, 2015)
and which was reviewed on Linguist List (LL Issue 27.2533). Some of the
contributors to the present volume report on the same dataset as they did in
the previous volume with a new or follow-up research question, which enriches
the previous publication.

The introduction provides a thorough review of the existing literature on
service encounters. The editors artfully combine the presentation of the
chapters with the literature review. This makes for a smooth introduction and
avoids duplicating the content of the chapters’ abstracts.

Chapter 1 authored by July De Wilde, Ellen Van Praet and Yves Van Vaerenbergh
reports on a small-scale experiment testing the impact of a multilingual
mobile app on the satisfaction of both clients and service providers in
Belgium. The aim of the app was to facilitate communication between health
professionals (the service providers) and parents with limited Dutch
proficiency. The study focused on issues that parents encountered during their
child’s potty training. The authors used simulation for their experiment and
recruited 20 Spanish-speaking exchange students as simulated clients. The
study also compared the impact of the app on eye gaze and conversation
sequencing. Satisfaction questionnaires indicated that clients rated the
service highly, irrespective of whether they used the app or not, while the
service providers’ ratings were more mixed, though indicating an overall
preference for service encounters with the app. Service providers looked away
from clients more often when the app was used. As the authors write, this does
not necessarily impact negatively the service encounter. One could argue that
shared attention focused on the app is exactly what the app is meant to
achieve, when speakers need to resort to pictures to understand each other.
The authors explain that potty-training discussions are a very common focus in
these service encounters and “involve strong emotions such as anxiety, stress,
anger, or frustration” (p.21). Consequently, I wonder whether studying the
app’s impact on client satisfaction can be done through role play, when the
simulated clients are young students (aged 18-22) who may not be parents. On
this point I refer to the ongoing debate on the merit of role-play methods for
medical interactions (Pilnick et al., 2018; Stokoe, 2013).

In Chapter 2, Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez and Gabriel Cabrera Méndez used a
discourse analytic approach to study a telephone call made by a group of
Spanish-speaking health professionals to an interpreter, in order to converse
with a patient who did not speak Spanish. Therefore, the interaction studied
was multi-party, with two parties interacting face-to-face (the patient and
the health professionals) and a third party conversing with them remotely via
telephone (the interpreter). In this case study, the authors focused on a
major difficulty encountered by remote interpreters, namely, selecting the
appropriate context and grasping pragmatic meaning. The authors argue that
these difficulties typically arise in the very beginning of the service
encounter, and that this is where they could most easily be addressed. The
authors recommend that checking sound and providing basic interactional
information (such as the setting, participants, and rules for turn-taking)
during the opening sequence could prevent subsequent misunderstandings and
delays. They also suggest mutual education on professional practices. Health
professionals can inform interpreters of the medical rationale for some of
their questions to patients. Conversely, interpreters can guide health
professionals through sociopragmatic pitfalls, as it can be challenging “to
grasp the intention of the primary speakers once their discourse has been
interpreted” (p.64).

In Chapter 3, David Matthew Edmonds and Ann Weatherall used a corpus of 63
telephone calls to a New Zealand helpline, whose role is to mediate disputes
between customers and energy providers (gas and electricity). The study
focused on a subset of 28 sequences where callers were requested some
information by the conciliator but could not provide it right away (e.g. they
needed to look for a document). The authors investigated the ways in which
callers managed the conflicting necessities of providing the requested
information (attending to a physical activity, i.e. looking for
information/documents) and maintaining progressivity (maintaining the verbal
activity, i.e. speaking with the conciliator). They found that some callers
opted to continue talking with conciliators. Callers then used practices such
as informings, announcements, commentary, and self-talk to verbalize their
physical activity and thus make it hearable to the conciliator (“let me deal
with this here” p.81; “it’s frozen” p.81; “I’ll just get this out” p.79). In
these cases, progressivity was prioritized. Alternatively, some callers chose
to suspend the interaction and attend to the physical activity instead. In
those cases where callers treated embodied action as incompatible with verbal
activity, they could account for it with a “hold” request or announcement
(“I’ll put the phone down please just one moment” p.86). The authors argue
that this practice confirms a preference for progressivity in interaction
(Stivers and Robinson, 2006).

Chapter 4 by Anna Kristina Hultgren investigates the speech style prescribed
to agents in four call centers in Denmark, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the
United Kingdom, and compares it to the actual practices of agents in two of
these settings: the United Kingdom and Denmark. The study used a variety of
source materials: interviews, institutional documentation, field notes, and
transcribed recordings of service encounters (108 calls from Denmark and 79
calls from the UK). The author argues that technology-mediated service
encounters have become “increasingly globalized, i.e. linguistically and
pragmatically similar despite taking place in different cultural and national
settings” (p.98), and that one aspect of it is the globalization of
politeness. She found that the four call centers prescribed a very similar
type of language, and that their prescriptions all involved the following
categories: active listening (e.g. “listen, listen, listen” p.104), making the
customer feel understood (e.g. “checks own understanding with the customer”
p.105), avoiding jargon (e.g. “avoid being too technical” p.106), signposting
(e.g. “recaps next steps” p.107), and empathizing (e.g. “emotional and
frustrated callers want us to empathize with their situation” p.108). The
author reports that British agents adhered to institutional linguistic
prescriptions more than the Danish agents did, which she interprets as “a
possible Danish preference for a more direct, ‘to the point’ and
transactionally oriented speech style” (p.116). However, I wonder whether
level of adherence could be connected to an institutional difference, as
Danish agents are not routinely recorded while the British agents are (p.101)
– maybe the British agents are audited on exact compliance more than their
Danish counterparts.

Chapter 5 by Rosina Márquez Reiter is a conversation analytic case study of a
telephone call in Spanish between a client and a sales agent working for a
holiday exchange company. The author discusses the respective interactional
agendas of the agent (securing a sale) and the client (obtaining another
product). She argues that both participants used ambiguity to maximize the
chances of accomplishing their respective interactional goal and until they
could “determine what the other party will give in exchange” (p.140). The
agent camouflaged the reason for his call (selling) by first informing the
client on an update of contact details, and he used oblique responses to avoid
delivering a response that could end the interaction before a sale. The client
initially withheld her expertise on the company’s operating rules, and
revealed her knowledge later when she encountered resistance from the agent.

In Chapter 6, Gerrard Mugford used Critical Discourse Analysis to study the
perceptions of Mexican call center agents when interacting with customers from
the United-States. The agents speak English as a foreign language and they
interact with native speakers of English. The author used semi-structured
interviews with 12 agents to investigate the challenges that they encountered
as well as the discursive strategies that they deployed. Findings are
organized in three categories mirroring Halliday's (1997) language functions:
ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The author describes some strategies
that agents report using when experiencing issues, for example when customers
ask to speak to an American agent instead, comment on their accent or English
proficiency, or request information that the agents are not allowed to reveal
(e.g. their full name and location in Mexico).

In Chapter 7, Maria Elena Placencia focused on written exchanges in Spanish
between buyers and sellers on an online marketplace (Mercado Libre Ecuador).
>From the perspectives of discourse analysis and politeness theory, the author
used descriptive statistics to analyze speech acts in 74 refusals to bargain.
The premise of the study is the hypothesis that sellers do not need to engage
in much relational work with buyers, as the exchanges are anonymous. The
findings show that sellers do engage in relational work, which the author
analyzes in light of the public reviews that buyers and sellers receive on the
website, and the continued relationship that buyers expect to entertain with
potential buyers. It is difficult to assess the quantitative results of the
study due to the way results are reported. However, the main points of the
chapter are that sellers tended to refuse offers explicitly (35/60) more often
than implicitly (25/60), and that sellers typically used supporting moves to
accompany their refusals with a mitigation effect, for example using greetings
(“saludos ‘greetings’”), affiliative terms of address (“amigo ‘friend’”),
explanations (“los cachorros salen con pedigree y tienen muy buena línea ‘our
puppies are sold with pedigree and are of a very good lineage’”), or
appreciation (“muchas gracias ‘thank you very much’”).

Chapter 8 by Wei Ren used grounded theory for a study of intensification in
355 Chinese online consumer reviews for an e-reader. In a convincing rationale
for the research question, the author described the existing knowledge gap
regarding online consumer reviews in general, and non-English ones in
particular. Two clear and thorough background sections are provided: one on
online consumer reviews, and one on intensification in Chinese.
Intensification is “operationalized as the linguistic and orthographical means
by which consumers scale up the degree of the head verb, adjective, or
illocutionary force of a speech act” (p.206). The study aims were to describe
and quantify the linguistic strategies used by customers for intensification,
and to determine if there is an association between the type of linguistic
strategy used and the valency of the review (positive vs negative review).
Findings indicate that the most common intensification strategy was to use
preceding intensifiers (e.g. hen 很 ‘very’), which represented 82% (781/947) of
all devices used, and punctuation emphasis (e.g. exclamation marks). A
statistically significant association was found between negative reviews and
the use of three linguistic strategies: punctuation emphasis, metaphorical
expressions, and expletive/taboo words – though there were few observations
for the latter two strategies.

In Chapter 9, Patricia Bou-Franch used mixed-methods to study relational
practices on a commercial Facebook page. From a larger dataset, the author
selected an interaction initiated by a status update from the company,
advertising a new product for sale. The initial post received 289 comments (by
consumers) and replies (from the company). On semantic grounds, she coded
every comment for its alignment to the status update and found that 53% (153)
were supportive, 39% (112) were unsupportive, and 8% (24) were undetermined.
The author then selected two sequences and described how consumers wrote
mostly supportive comments in the first one, and mostly unsupportive comments
in the second one.

EVALUATION

The main strength of this collection of papers lies in the careful and
detailed reviews of the literature provided in the introduction as well as in
each individual chapter. The editors put together a well-rounded collection of
papers from frameworks as different as conversation analysis and interactional
linguistics, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, ethnography,
and grounded theory. The variety of methodologies and frameworks employed
makes for a real and valuable dialogue beyond theoretical traditions. Another
strong point of the volume is that all chapters bring to light data that is
very interesting to see for itself and in its variety.

I regretted sometimes that analysis did not delve deeper into the topic, as
some contributions are rather descriptive. A few chapters include quantitative
analysis, and a more rigorous attention could have been given to the
presentation and interpretation of quantitative results, as well as the use of
tables and plots. It is regrettable that percentages are presented without raw
numbers or the total number of observations (p.111; p.189), that statistical
significance was claimed without showing the results (p.110), and that some
plots do not contain numbers at all (p.187; p.189). It is not possible to
assess the statistical results of some chapters.

Despite these limitations, the book is a good starting point for a researcher
or student willing to familiarize themselves with service encounters as a
research topic.

REFERENCES

Halliday, M., 1997. Language in a Social Perspective, in: Coupland, N.,
Jaworski, A. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. Macmillan,
London, pp. 31–38.

Hernández-López, M. de la O., Fernández Amaya, L. (Eds.), 2015. A
Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters. Brill, Leiden.

Pilnick, A., Trusson, D., Beeke, S., O’Brien, R., Goldberg, S., Harwood, R.H.,
2018. Using conversation analysis to inform role play and simulated
interaction in communications skills training for healthcare professionals:
identifying avenues for further development through a scoping review. BMC
Medical Education 18, 267.

Stivers, T., Robinson, J.D., 2006. A preference for progressivity in
interaction. Language in Society 35, 367–392.

Stokoe, E., 2013. The (In)Authenticity of Simulated Talk: Comparing
Role-Played and Actual Interaction and the Implications for Communication
Training. Research on Language and Social Interaction 46, 165–185.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marine Riou is currently Assistant Professor in English Linguistics at Lumière
Lyon 2 University (France) and Adjunct Research Fellow at Curtin University
(Australia). Her main research interests include grammar and prosody in
interaction, corpus linguistics, and linguistics applied to health.





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