Maximizing participation while preserving the normative order of the service: The autonomy and porosity of service encounters.

Abstract

While Conversation Analysis has mostly focused on single autonomous episodes of social interaction, characterized by their overall structural organization delimited by openings and closings, alternative forms of organization have also, although more rarely, been pinpointed, involving several interactions intersecting together. This paper explores the systematic practical and normative way in which participants orient to the autonomy of encounters while at the same time dealing with their porosity, that is, with emerging intersecting actions impinging on the current course of interaction. The empirical analysis focuses on service encounters at the market, in France, in which several customers assemble at the counter, waiting to be served. The paper analyzes how the salesperson manages the encounter with a current customer, while addressing new customers, by initiating intersecting sequences of actions. it also show what whereas some intersecting actions are treated as unproblematic, others are normatively oriented to as violating the order of the service. These observations enable us to analyze the autonomy versus porosity of the encounter as a members' concern and study how they deal with these alternative organizations while maintaining a normative sense of the order of service.