Face, Communication and Social Interaction - Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
3. How to get rid of a telemarketing agent? Facework strategies in an intercultural service call
Face, Communication and Social Interaction - Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
Rosina Márquez-Reiter [+]
University of Surrey
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Description
In this chapter, I examine how face is manifested in an intercultural service call between a Uruguayan telemarketing agent and a prospective Argentinean client. By doing so, I aim to contribute to the extensive body of research that has examined face in interaction and to research that has investigated aspects of the interactional behaviour of Spanish speakers in mediated service encounters (Codó Olsina, 2002; Márquez Reiter, 2005, 2006) and thus add to our knowledge of institutional talk in Spanish, a language which until now has received very little attention when compared, for example, to English (Drew and Heritage, 1992; Holmes and Stubbe, 2003), French (Boutet, 2005; Pène, Borzeix and Fraenkel, 2001), Italian (Aston, 1998; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997) or German (Müller, 2003), to mention but a few. The interaction I analyse here is a service call in which an institutional representative, from a multi-national company, telephones a client for the purpose of having the client’s membership renewed as it had lapsed for a relatively long period of time. The conversational participants’ contributions are oriented toward the achievement of a task; namely, the institutional representative wants to obtain a sale and, the client wants to obviate any possible avenues for the former to attain her goal.