A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters [1 ed.] 9789004260160, 9789004260153

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A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters

Studies in Pragmatics Series Editors Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (University of Manchester) Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark) Anne Barron (Leuphana University Lüneburg)

VOLUME 14

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sip

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters Edited by

María de la O Hernández-López Lucía Fernández-Amaya

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters / edited by Maria de la O Hernandez-Lopez, Lucia Fernandez-Amaya.   pages cm. — (Studies in pragmatics ; volume 14)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-26015-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26016-0 (e-book) 1. Intercultural communication. 2. Business communication. 3. Customer relations.  4. Communication in marketing. I. De la O Hernandez-Lopez, Maria, editor. II. FernandezAmaya, Lucia.  P94.6.M86 2015  302.2—dc23 2015007700

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1750-368x isbn 978-90-04-26015-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-26016-0 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures, Tables and Charts ix List of Contributors Xi About the Editors xv

Part 1 Merging Communication Studies and Business Introduction to Part 1 2

1 Service Encounters and Communication: Why a Multidisciplinary Approach? 3 Lucía Fernández-Amaya and María de la O Hernández-López

Part 2 Online Service Encounters Introduction to Part 2 14

2 Setting the Linguistics Research Agenda for the E-service Encounters Genre: Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives 15 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 3 Address Forms and Relational Work in E-commerce: The Case of Service Encounter Interactions in MercadoLibre Ecuador 37 María Elena Placencia 4 The Genre of Web-Mediated Service Encounters in Not-for-Profit Organizations: Cross-Cultural Study 65 Patricia Bou-Franch

Part 3 Interpersonal Communication in Small Businesses Introduction to Part 3 86

5 Customer Perceptions of Politeness as a Differentiating Element in Spanish Restaurants Encounters 87 Antonio Carmona-Lavado and María de la O Hernández-López

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6 Pragmatic Variation in the Performance of Requests: A Comparative Study of Service Encounters in Valencia and Granada (Spain) 113 Rebeca Bataller

Part 4 The Influence of Cultural Dimensions on Service Encounters Introduction to Part 4 140

7 The Impact of Cultural Dimensions on the Engagement Markers of Spanish, British and US Toy Selling Websites 141 Francisco Miguel Ivorra-Pérez 8 The Evolution of Communication with Foreign Population in Medical Settings in Spain 164 Raquel Lázaro-Gutiérrez

Part 5 Beyond Service Encounter Interactions Introduction to Part 5 190

9 Service Encounters in the Natural World: Bringing Children Along 191 Marilyn Merritt 10  The Role of Nonverbal Communication in Service Encounters 211 Sundaram Dorai and Cynthia Webster 11 Seeking Attention: Testing a Model of Initiating Service Interactions 229 Sebastian Loth, Kerstin Huth and Jan P. de Ruiter Index 249

Acknowledgements We would like to thank each of the authors who decided to participate in this volume and share their projects and ideas with us. It was a real pleasure working with them. We are grateful also to the reviewers: without their help this book would not have been possible. If this volume has been published, it is definitely a colleague and friend to blame: special thanks to Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich for encouraging and supporting us at all times, both academically and personally. Finally, we are indebted to Pedro, on the one hand, and our parents, on the other, for suffering us during all the time we have been immersed in the writing up and editing of this volume. We know that without their constant support and understanding, this book would have never seen the light. Thank you. The Editors

List of Figures, Tables and Charts Figures 4.1 Make your donation logo 77 8.1 The Calgary-Cambridge Guide 166 10.1 Conceptual model of nonverbal communication in service encounters 215 11.1 A grid of example snapshots recorded in the ‘Movie’, Bielefeld 236 Tables 2.1 Time spent online on key Internet categories 17 2.2 Reasons to trust a website 22 2.3 Information needed to make a final purchase 22 2.4 Reasons to abandon a purchase 22 3.1 Nominal address by shoppers and sellers 52 3.2 Greetings produced by shoppers and sellers 57 4.1 List of British and Spanish NPOs whose websites provided the data under analysis 70 4.2 Taxonomy of content categories for the creation of relationships in NPO websites 71 4.3 List of positive and negative politeness strategies used in the analysis 72 4.4 Number of Spanish and British NPO websites that contained the different categories for relationship building 73 5.1 Definitions of constructs suitable to evaluate service encounters 94 5.2 Examples of service encounters with the presence of politeness 98 5.3 U-Mann-Whitney test on summary indicators of customer evaluation of service encounters 101 5.4 U-Mann-Whitney test on experiential indicators of customer evaluation of service encounters 101 6.1 Opening phase strategies 125 6.2 Request sequences 127 6.3 Request head act strategies 129 6.4 Internal lexical mitigating devices 131 7.1 Model of interactional metadiscourse strategies 147

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list of figures, tables and charts

7.2 Frequencies and chi-square test results of engagement markers in the toy selling websites selected for the research 152 8.1 Interviewees and answerers to the questionnaires 171 11.1 Summary of customer behaviour per interaction in 105 bids for attention 233 11.2 Categorial results of the experiment 237 11.3 Proportions of yes- and no-responses as a function of the presence of the two signals ‘being at the bar’ and ‘looking at the bar’ 239 11.4 Results of the experiment 239 Charts 3.1 Pronominal address usage by shoppers 48 3.2 Pronominal address usage by sellers 48 3.3 Nominal address by shoppers and sellers 53 3.4 Greetings by shoppers and sellers 58 7.1 Spain, UK and USA scores on the ‘individualism index’ 143 8.1 Assistance to foreign patients (mother tongue different from Spanish) 171 8.2 Patients’ linguistic difficulties, according to healthcare staff 172 8.3 Patients’ linguistic difficulties according to patients 172 8.4 Repetitions uttered by clinicians as a sign of lexical asymmetry 177 8.5 Rewordings uttered by clinicians as a sign of lexical asymmetry 177 8.6 Comparison of the number of turns uttered by clinicians and patients 178 8.7 Repeated utterances by clinicians as a sign of participatory asymmetry 179

List of Contributors Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Ph.D. University of Valencia) is Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in linguistics. She is interested in im/politeness models, genre and identity theories, and traditional and new media. Recent publications include, among others, papers in international journals such as Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics and Journal of Politeness Research, and Journal of Language and Politics, among others. She has also co-edited collections published by Palgrave Macmillan (2013) and guest edited special issues for Journal of Politeness Research (2013) and the Journal of Pragmatics (forthcoming), among others. She is co-editor of the series “Advances in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis” (CSP) and the Journal of Language of Aggression and Conflict (John Benjamins). María Elena Placencia (PhD. University of Lancaster) is Reader in Spanish Linguistics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are in (Spanish) intercultural communication and discourse analysis. She has published extensively in these areas with works on a range of topics, including forms of address, small talk, discursive racism and (im)politeness in service encounters, the media, and other contexts. She is co-author of Spanish Pragmatics (Palgrave) and co-editor of Research on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World (Taylor & Francis) and Pragmática y comunicacion intercultural en el mundo hispanohablante (Rodopi). Patricia Bou-Franch (PhD. University of Valencia) is Associate Professor at the University of Valencia. She teaches English Language, Discourse Analysis and History and Culture of English Speaking Countries. She is a member of the Research Institute on Applied Linguistics (IULMA). Her research interests include gender and discourse, interpersonal and cross-cultural communication and television / computer-mediated communication. She has published in international journals like Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Journal of Language and Politics, among others. She is editor of Ways into Discourse (Comares, 2006) and Gender and Sexual Identities in Transition: International Perspectives (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2008). She is currently guestediting a special issue for the Journal of Pragmatics on Pragmatics and New Media.

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Antonio Carmona-Lavado (PhD. University of Seville) is a Senior Lecturer in the Business Organization and Marketing Department at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville). He holds a PhD in Business and his main research areas are service quality, customer satisfaction, customer delight, experience economy and product and service innovation. He has done research collaborations with Manchester Business School, Hanken School of Economics and New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research has been published in academic journals such as Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Industry and Innovation, R&D Management and British Journal of Management. María de la O Hernández-López (PhD. Pablo de Olavide University) is a Lecturer at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville), where she teaches English and Culture and Societies of the Anglosaxon World. She holds a PhD in English English Linguistics (CrossCultural Pragmatics) from Pablo de Olavide University and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Birkbeck College (London). She has worked at Greenwich University (London, UK), European Business School (London), Huelva University (Huelva, Spain) and Pablo de Olavide University. Her research interests revolve around cross-cultural and intercultural communication in service encounters, (im)politeness, negotiation and interpersonal communication. She is now involved in a research project on hotel interaction and interpersonal management and is developing an individual project on Politeness1 and patients’ perceptions of doctors’ interpersonal skills in Britain and Spain. Rebeca Bataller (Ph.D. University of Iowa, Iowa City) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Foreign Language Education at Gettysburg College. Her research interests include interlanguage and variational pragmatics, SLA in the study abroad setting, and foreign language education in general. Her recent publications are related with requesting behaviour in study abroad settings, interlanguage pragmatics and service encounters in general. She has published in journals such as Journal for Linguistics and Language Teaching. Francisco Miguel Ivorra-Pérez (PhD. University of Alicante) is a Lecturer in English Language in the English Studies Department at the University of Alicante (Spain). He has a Ph.D. in English Studies and his thesis dealt with the influence of cultural values on English and Spanish business websites. His main areas of research are

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discourse analysis, intercultural communication and English for specific purposes. Raquel Lázaro-Gutiérrez (PhD. Universidad de Alcalá) holds a PhD in Modern Languages and works as a PhD assistant professor in the Undergraduate Degree in Modern Languages and Translation of Alcalá University. She also gives lectures and is part of the coordination team of the European Master’s Degree in Intercultural Communication and Public Service Interpreting and Translation and belongs to the FITISPos-UAH Group. Marilyn Merritt holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is a Washington based scholar, university teacher, and consultant, who has lived 12 post-doctoral years in India, Kenya, Niger, and Senegal. A former diplomacy fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and author of “Resources for Saying in Service Encounters”, “On Questions following questions in service encounters”, “On the use of O.K.” “Socialising multilingualism”, “Of Ritual matters to master”, her research interests focus on structures of interaction and situated discourse, how these structures are learned, their sociocultural salience, and how they are creatively enacted under conditions of social change. Sundaram Dorai holds a PhD from the Illinois University and is Head of Department at the Department of Management and Marketing, College of Business and Management, Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Dorai has published widely in such journals as Journal of Services Marketing and Journal of Business Research and focuses on types of service encounters and customer satisfaction. His interests revolve around examining service failure recovery, study of word of mouth influence and social media marketing. Cynthia Webster holds a PhD from the Mississippi State University and is Professor of Marketing, College of Business, Mississippi State University. She has published in such journals as the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing, and has won several best paper, best article, and teaching awards. Her interests revolve around the study of service culture and its impact on business performance, marital decision making and marketing organization culture measurement.

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Sebastian Loth holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld and studied linguistics, informatics and German language in Leipzig. He completed his Ph.D. in Psychology working with Colin J Davis at Royal Holloway, University of London. After moving to Bielefeld, Sebastian is a postdoctoral researcher in JAMES project, focused on human-robot interaction. Kesting Hugh holds a MA. From University of Bielefeld and studied in Linguistics as a first degree at the University of Bielefeld. She continued her studies in Bielefeld and completed a Master’s degree in Linguistics and received the Faculty’s annual price for the best MA thesis. She is a researcher in the JAMES project and pursues a Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics. Jan P. De Ruiter holds a PhD from Nijmegen University and did his Ph.D. with Willem Levelt at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. After working as a postdoctoral researcher in Cologne and Nijmegen, he was appointed Chair of Psycholinguistics at the University of Bielefeld. He is coordinator of the Sonderforschungsbereich “Alignment in Communication” and PI in the JAMES project.

About the Editors María de la O Hernández-López is a Lecturer at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville), where she teaches English and Culture and Societies of the Anglosaxon World. She holds a PhD in English Linguistics (Cross-Cultural Pragmatics) from Pablo de Olavide University and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Birkbeck College (London). She has worked at different universities in the United Kingdom and Spain. Her research interests revolve around cross-cultural and intercultural communication in service encounters, (im)politeness, negotiation and interpersonal communication. She is now involved in a research project on hotel interaction and interpersonal management and is developing an individual project on Politeness1 and patients’ perceptions of doctors’ interpersonal skills in Britain and Spain. She has co-edited Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and New Perspectives on (Im)politeness and Interpersonal Communication (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Lucía Fernández-Amaya is a Lecturer at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University. She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Seville. She currently co-ordinates the research group SETIC (Service Encounters, Tourism and Intercultural Communication). Her research interests and publications focus on pragmatics and translation, sociopragmatics, politeness, interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, and intercultural communication in service encounters. She has co-edited Current Trends in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (Fénix, 2004), Studies in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and New Perspectives on (Im)politeness and Interpersonal Communication (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

part 1 Merging Communication Studies and Business

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Introduction to Part 1 Part 1 aims to provide a state-of-the-art account of service encounter (SE) studies from an interdisciplinary standpoint. The field of SEs, or the period of time during which customers make use of a service, focuses attention on all forms of communication that are developed in this context. This section serves as an introduction in which the relationship between communication studies, anthropology and business is unveiled. It also prepares the reader for the information included in the following chapters.

CHAPTER 1

Service Encounters and Communication: Why a Multidisciplinary Approach? Lucía Fernández-Amaya and María de la O Hernández-López We are living in an age of globalization in which economic pressures are more and more related to international business and mutual understanding, and therefore the ability to reach consumers appropriately is one of the main aims marketers bear in mind when planning their strategies. In a society that is communicating faster than ever, with flows of inbound and outbound consumers who are not restricted to using only local, on-site services, it is a challenge for service encounters (SEs) to succeed in this international scenario. In this sense, it is not only a marketing perspective of service that matters, but also how and why this service is performed, and how it is presented and perceived by users. In this vein, all forms of communication, whether faceto-face or online, must be conveyed appropriately in order to reach target consumers. Moreover, behaviour in SEs comprises an undeniably rich source of sociolinguistic and anthropological material. It is in this context that we have joined marketing researchers, anthropologists and linguists (among others) in this volume to provide the tools to understand both consumers’ use of SEs and their perception of any kind of interaction. In this way, we aim to examine the role of language, linguistics and communicative behaviour in an area of research, SEs, which has traditionally been related only to business and marketing. The field of SEs, or the period of time during which customers make use of a service, focuses attention on all forms of communication that are developed in this context. We are not only referring to customer-employee encounters here; customer-customer, customer-physical surroundings, customer-technology and encounters between the customer and bystanders, children, interpreters, over-hearers or any kind of assistants, are all part of the service and contribute, to a greater or lesser extent, to make the user’s experience unique in a broad sense (Baron et al. 2009). However, the factors influencing service perception and production are not restricted to the interactants themselves, but quality, expectations, the appropriate use of language and a good marketing company are but some of the facets that service providers bear in mind when it comes

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to improving the service. In fact, just by considering communication (and not the product or the service itself), the amount of issues that may modify customer perception are endless: Why should online SEs be treated as a subgenre? How can nonverbal communication contribute to making the customer feel good? To what extent can service providers control for what is linguistically expected from them? In what ways is relational work crucial in e-commerce? Is there situational and cultural variation that may be worth exploring for the sake of improving the service? Why should interpersonal communication and politeness considerations be taken into account here? What is the relationship between politeness and successful encounters? These are but a few of the issues that arise in this volume, with the aim of bringing different perspectives and providing tools for new paths that have remained underexplored in this interdisciplinary area of research. We cannot, however, say that research in SEs is new in the literature. Indeed, nothing is further from the truth. Besides that vast amount of relevant journals that are common among business experts and scholars, proliferation of edited and authored volumes on the issue has not stopped since the 70s. Only recently, Ayad (2012), Boog (2012), Johnson (2010) and Noe, Uysal and Magnini (2009) are just a few examples of how much there is to investigate on issues such as tourism, health care encounters, non-profit organizations (NPOs) and remote or online encounters, among many others. What these and other studies published to date have in common is the fact that there is a tendency to focus on customer satisfaction and how to achieve high quality services. However, marketing alone has proven to fall short in linguistic insight and in understanding the process by which customers can switch their perspective if something unexpected is communicated; it seems as if one of the main components in SEs—interaction between entrepreneur and customer—had passed unnoticed or been neglected from linguistic, sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives. It is high time that communication and behaviour were taken into account. Given the nature of A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters, this volume is designed to appeal not only scholars working in the fields of linguistics and anthropology, but also professionals in the tourism industry, health care managers, restaurant industry experts, shop owners, telephone and online service providers, marketers and researchers of different disciplines, who may be interested in bringing deeper insight to their expertise. The authors have strong conceptual backgrounds on marketing, customer satisfaction, service interactions, human behaviour, pragmatics and communication. Although each researcher has worked independently to develop a series of

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chapters revolving around the same interest, all of them have considered issues that have been under-researched, controversial or marginal in the literature. It is worth noting that while each chapter presents a different perspective, this volume also needs to be read as a unitary contribution with common features and topics linking chapters. Specifically, while this first part aims to provide a brief introduction to the contents and prepares the reader for the rest of the chapters, Part II focuses on online or remote SEs, that is to say, those interactions in which communication is not face-to-face, the importance of relational work in e-commerce and also NPOs’ online communication. Part III highlights the importance of interpersonal communication and politeness in face-toface interaction in small businesses. This goes in line with Part IV, which also deals with face-to-face interaction, but with a special interest in the impact of culture on the service provided. The contexts under study address cultural variation in toy-selling websites, on the one hand, and the intercultural facets and competence of interpreters in health care contexts, on the other. Finally, Part V includes issues that are undeniably underexplored to date: the presence of children in SEs, the role of nonverbal communication, and the inclusion of robots in communication with customers; all three topics are in need of further exploration and understanding. Apart from the variety of contexts covered here, we also deemed it necessary to integrate a series of different methodologies that, in the end, would contribute to a unitary volume able to inform about SEs in their many facets. Paradoxically though it may seem, a lack of well-grounded theoretical bases of the different contexts within SEs is one of the gaps to bridge in the current literature. Some chapters, therefore, are theoretically based and programmatic in nature to fulfil this aim; on the one hand, an updated state of the art of electronic SEs is provided (Chapter 2) along with a discussion on how different this is from face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, we also include a detailed historical overview of health care encounters requiring an interpreter, in order to understand which directions research should take from now on (Chapter 8). On another front, Chapter 10 argues that not only verbal communication but also non-verbal communication has an impact on SEs and thus it is paramount not to neglect this area of research. These theoretical chapters are complemented by others that are more empirical in nature, whether to understand cultural variation in websites providing a service (for example, see Chapter 4 for an analysis of non-profit organizations, and Chapter 7 on toy-selling companies), to cover a variety of second-order analyses of linguistic forms occurring in SEs (for example, address forms in Chapter 3, requests in Chapter 6, and engagement markers in Chapter 7, among others), or to gather a first-order

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perception of customers by means of questionnaires or reports of personal experience, as in Chapters 2 and 5. Whenever data was not online or written down in different forms, recordings were also used, as in Chapters 6 and 11. Finally, and given the undeniable anthropological aspect of these studies, field notes or anthropological observation have been necessary to provide another perspective to this volume (see Chapter 6, on observation in cafeterias, and Chapter 9, on observation of SEs with children). Thus, all eleven chapters are tied up by providing different angles that complete the prism of SEs as an area that, contrary to what it may seem, is still in its infancy in many respects, as demonstrated in novel topics such as the incorporation of robots into SEs (Chapter 11), and SEs with children (Chapter 9). Thematically, the three chapters comprising Part II revolve around online SEs. The section opens with Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich’s chapter, “Setting the Linguistics Research Agenda for the E-Service Encounters Genre: Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives”, whose main goal is to propose a research agenda for the mostly unexplored e-service encounters genre, from a linguistics perspective. The traditional, face-to-face SE genre has received considerable attention from linguists, anthropologists, marketing and business specialists, and social psychologists, among others. These have mostly focused on diverse aspects related to customer-provider interaction. The author argues that this focus on interaction is the consequence of the erroneous assumptions that on/off-line versions of the same genre practices are necessarily guided by exactly the same (communicative) purposes and needs. Based on the results of a two-pronged, first-order analysis, the author proposes that it is informed choice, rather than interaction, that is at the core of e-customers’ preference for the on-line medium. Thus, this should constitute the basis of an empirical approach to e-service encounters as a social practice, along the same lines that sharing (Androutsopoulos, 2014) is the key concept around which understandings and research on social media are organized. Furthermore, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich believes that the crucial role of the medium in fundamentally altering p-service encounters calls for the development of hybrid methodologies that systemically combine natively digital theories of Internet communication and uses with digitized linguistic models and frameworks. In the following chapter (Chapter 3), “Address Forms and Relational Work in E-Commerce: The Case of Service Encounter Interactions in Mercado Libre—Ecuador”, María Elena Placencia examines how address forms are used in 230 interactions between shoppers and sellers in an Ecuadorian online marketplace. The role played by address forms in the management of interper-

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sonal relations has been widely recognized (cf. among others, Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne, Norrby, and Warren 2009; Formentelli 2007). They figure, for example, in Spencer-Oatey’s (2008[2000]) rapport management framework as stylistic devices that can set the tone of an interaction. In relation to SEs, studies available on face-to-face interactions have shown how address forms contribute to constructing the interaction as friendly and egalitarian (cf. Hernández López and Placencia 2004), for example, or perhaps hierarchical and even discriminatory. E-commerce, however, is a context in which address usage has received little attention. The growth of Internet retailing over recent years makes examining address usage in e-service encounters a timely and revealing exercise. The site in question provides a question-answer format that shoppers can employ to ask for further information and which they also use to make offers and arrange contact with sellers. The focus of this chapter is on both pronominal and nominal address, although some attention is also given to greetings as co-occurring forms. Contributed by Patricia Bou-Franch, Chapter 4 (the final chapter of the present section) is entitled “The Genre of Web-Mediated Service Encounters in Not-For-Profit Organizations: Cross-Cultural Study”. This chapter aims to examine web-mediated SEs within the non-commercial sector. As has been stated above, most research in the SE literature has focused on face-to-face or telephone interactions within the commercial sector. However, technological developments over the past decades have completely altered the form and functions of service seeking/providing interactions. Furthermore, the noncommercial sector has emerged as central in the economies of the developed countries, significantly contributing to national economies. Despite the enormous increase in electronic interactions and the relatively new prominence of the non-commercial sector within national economies, there is scant research into web-mediated SEs in NPOs, and even less within the field of discourse analysis. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature through a crosscultural study of SEs in NPO websites based in Spain and the UK, which provide different forms of social aid to women. The data were analyzed drawing on insights from NPO marketing literature, computer-mediated communication research and the field of politeness studies. The following section of the volume focuses on interpersonal communication in small businesses. In Chapter 5, entitled “Customers’ Perceptions of Politeness as a Differentiating Element in Spanish Restaurant Encounters”, Antonio Carmona-Lavado and María de la O Hernández-López analyse the influence of employees’ politeness on customers’ evaluations of SEs. The authors state that, on the one hand, (im)politeness as part of staff attitude or

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behaviour has emerged in the service management and marketing literature as an important driver in satisfactory and dissatisfactory critical incidents, which is of concern in the design of customer experiences or as a factor able to predict customer delight. On the other hand, although the effect of impoliteness and politeness on unfavourable and favourable encounters respectively seems to be clear, the distinctive impact of politeness on positive experiences has received less attention so far. This chapter presents an account of an empirical study that was carried out by collecting a sample of customers’ delightful and satisfactory experiences in a service restaurant setting in Spain. In general, the results confirmed the differentiating role of front-line employees’ politeness in positive encounters in restaurants. In the second chapter of this section (Chapter 6), Rebeca Bataller talks about “Variational Pragmatics in the Performance of Requests: The Case of Service Encounters in Valencia and Granada (Spain)”, which is a comparison of naturally-occurring interactions at four Spanish cafeterias in order to address regional variation: the Andalusian Spanish dialect spoken in Huétor Santillán (Granada), on the one hand, and the Spanish spoken in Valencia, where two languages coexist, Valencian and Castilian Spanish. The findings show that there are differences at discursive, stylistic and illocutionary levels. At an illocutionary level, Bataller compared the request strategies and mitigating devices used by both groups of speakers. At a discourse level, the general structure of the opening and request phases of the interactions was examined, and the inclusion of non-transactional language was also observed. At a stylistic level, the use of the formal and informal personal pronouns (tú/usted) as well as the inclusion of address terms was compared. The results indicated that even though there were some differences in the communication style between Granadan and Valencian speakers, these were not sufficiently evident to suggest that the two groups of participants operated according to different communication norms. The two chapters that make up the following section of the present volume focus on the influence of cultural dimensions on SEs. The first of these two studies, Chapter 7, is Francisco Miguel Ivorra Pérez’s “The Impact of Cultural Dimensions on the Engagement Markers of Spanish, British and US Toy Selling Websites”. The author hypothesizes that the different cultural orientations that Spain, the UK and the USA hold with respect to Hostede’s (1991) ‘individualism index’ and Hall’s (1976) ‘context dependence’, as well as their preferences for ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987), may lead to different professional discourse cultures. In particular, manufacturers from these countries could have varying perspectives

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as well as different socio-cultural expectations in relation to the engagement markers (Hyland and Tse 2004), which are used to interact with prospective customers by means of their toy-selling websites. Based on a sample of 150 websites (50  from each country), a mainly quantitative analysis was carried out to determine whether there are statistical differences in the use of these interactional metadiscourse strategies. The following chapter (Chapter 8), contributed by Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez, is entitled “The Evolution of Communication with Foreign Population in Medical Settings”. According to the author, the high number of foreigners and immigrants making use of public services in Spain and other European countries these days results in continuous examples of cross-cultural communication. In a health care SE, if the patient does not share the doctor’s mother tongue, s/he may face two main linguistic difficulties: on the one hand, understanding the doctor’s message; on the other hand, explaining her/his conditions in a foreign language. In order to overcome these communicative difficulties, an interpreter or linguistic mediator may take part in communicative exchanges. Given this situation, the aim of this chapter is to present a theoretical account of the evolution of communication with the foreign population in Spanish medical consultations in recent decades in contrast with other countries, and to examine the role of interpreters in this context. The results are presented chronologically in order to explore the communicative changes undergone in this kind of interactions and to understand the complexities of communication in health care encounters with the foreign population, as well as the importance of hiring interpreters and mediators to bridge communicative gaps. The volume closes with a section dedicated to issues that have not been taken into account or have been considered as marginal to date within SEs. Marilyn Merritt, in the chapter entitled “Service Encounters in the Natural World: Bringing Children Along” (Chapter 9), widens the scope of analysis and observation by introducing the complexities and nuances of ‘service encounters with children’ (SEWC). SEs in which one or more adult(s) in the ‘customer cluster’ brings along a child (or children) or youth(s) occur regularly in the natural world of face-to-face interaction in public spaces throughout the world, but have thus far been neglected as a locus of observation in research. Since children have at least the status of ‘legitimate peripheral participants’, observation of SEWC may provide a useful approach to uncovering elements of socialization that underlie the development of cultural practices in these settings.

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While presenting a number of naturally occurring SEWC, the author shows that the analysis previously put forward for the canonical form of SEs between one adult server and one adult customer provides useful concepts for analyzing SEWC. In particular, the maintenance of ‘ritual equilibrium’ (especially with supportive and remedial moves) and the maintenance of ‘territorial boundaries’ can be straightforwardly applied and extended to SEWC. The examples given provide evidence that children’s and youths’ participation in SEs are major sites for socialization practices. Chapter 10 revolves around another under-explored issue within SEs: nonverbal communication. While the verbal components of SEs have been widely investigated, the nonverbal aspects of employee-customer interactions have remained virtually unexplored in the marketing and communication literature. Thus, this chapter aims to discuss the importance of service employees’ nonverbal communication during service interactions in the Western world. Specifically, a conceptual model is presented that links nonverbal communication (kinesics, paralanguage, proxemics, and physical appearance), customer affect, and consumers’ evaluations of service providers (with respect to credibility, friendliness, competence, empathy, courtesy, and trustworthiness) in order to pave the way for future empirical studies. Moreover, the importance of nonverbal elements is discussed and managerial implications are given. The last chapter in this volume (Chapter 11), “Seeking Attention: Testing a Model of Initiating Service Interactions”, shows how initiating a service interaction is a highly significant part of the conversation, and failing to recognise the customer’s interest is fatal for the whole SE. Sebastian Loth, Kersting Huth and Jan P. De Ruiter explain that, in order to enable customers to interact naturally with a robotic bartender, an explicit and robust account of how customers signal their intention to place an order is required. The bartender-customer scenario is challenging because there are several people in close proximity to the bar. Thus, the bartending robot has to distinguish between people who are intending to place an order, chatting with friends or just passing by. To develop an explicit account of human behaviour, a corpus of 108 real-life customerstaff interactions was recorded in a variety of German clubs. All interactions were annotated and signals that customers produced when bidding for staff attention were identified. From these data, the authors extracted candidates for sufficient and necessary signals. A classification experiment for validating these candidates was designed using snapshots from the recordings. In summary, this volume introduces and examines the relationship between different forms of communication and marketing in SEs, which makes these eleven chapters a contribution to the multidisciplinary study of interaction

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among service provider(s) and consumers. Indeed, we hope that this volume is useful not only for the analyst interested in anthropological, pragmatic or linguistic studies, but also for the business and marketing professional who wants to improve business performance and aims to enrich communication with service users. References Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2014. “Moments of Sharing: Entextualization and Linguistic Repertoires in Social Networking”. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 4–18. Ayad, Nihal. 2012. The Effect of Nonverbal Communication on Service Encounter Evaluation: an Application on Private Egyptian Hospitals. Saarland: Lambert Academic Publishing. Bargiela, Francesca, Corinne Boz, Lily Gokzadze, Abdurrahman Hamza, Sara Mills and Nino Rukhadze. 2002. “Ethnocentrism, Politeness and Naming Strategies.” Working Papers on the Web 3. Baron, Steve, Kim Harris, Kim Cassidy and Toni Hilton. 2009. Services Marketing: Text and Cases. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Boog, Roman. 2012. Remote Service Quality: How to Measure the Quality of Remote Service Encounters in the Capital Goods Industry. Deutschland: Akademiker­ verlag. Brown, Penelope and Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby and Jane Warren. 2009. Language and Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Formentelli, Maicol. 2007. “The Vocative Mate in Contemporary English: A Corpusbased Study.” In Language Resources and Linguistic Theory, edited by Andrea Sansò, 180–199. Milan: Franco Angeli. Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books. Hernández López, Mariola and María Elena Placencia. 2004. “Modos de Conducir las Relaciones Interpersonales en Interacciones de Atención al Público: El Caso de Farmacias en Sevilla y Londres.” Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 189: 129–150. Hofstede, Geert. 1991. Culture and Organizations: Software of the Mind. London: Profile Books. Johnson, William E. 2010. Service Delivery vs. Service Excellence. Opposing forces during the Patient Encounter and How to Overcome Them. Lulu Publishing (eBook).

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Noe, Francis, P. Noe, Muzaffer Uysal and Vincent Magnini. 2009. Tourist Customer Service Satisfaction. An Encounter Approach. London: Routledge. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2008[2000]. “Face, (Im)Politeness and Rapport.” In Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, edited by Helen SpencerOatey, 11–47. London: Continuum.

part 2 Online Service Encounters

⸪

Introduction to Part 2 Part 2 focuses on online or remote SEs, which have increased enormously in the last decade. The main characteristics of these interactions in which communication is not face-to-face will be outlined, paying special attention to the importance of customers’ perception of electronic commerce, relational work in e-commerce and not-for-profit organizations’ online communication.

CHAPTER 2

Setting the Linguistics Research Agenda for the E-service Encounters Genre: Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 1 Introduction This chapter is programmatic in nature. Its main goal is to propose a research agenda for the mostly unexplored, from a linguistics perspective, electronic service encounter genre (e-service encounter henceforth). For its part, the traditional, face to face service encounter genre (personal service encounters, p-service henceforth) has received considerable attention from linguists, anthropologists, marketing and business specialists, and social psychologists who have mostly focused their research on diverse aspects of the genre related to customer/provider interaction. It is within the three latter fields that e-service encounters have been more widely explored as well. A cursory look at the research on e-service encounters within these three fields, however, reveals that research on e-customer/service provider interaction is still given priority among the different antecedents to customer satisfaction found (Bitner, Brown, and Meuter 2000). In what follows, I will argue that this focus on interaction is the consequence of, on the one hand, (i) the erroneous assumptions that on/off-line versions of the same genre practices are necessarily guided by exactly the same (communicative) purposes and needs, and, on the other, (ii) the widespread tendency to digitize extant methodologies, i.e. export to the Internet methods, theories, and models that were developed to account for face-to-face interaction. The vast proliferation of e-service encounters, which are multimodal but still have a solid textual base, should merit the interest of linguistics (see Locher 2010 on a related issue). Before we too readily proceed to transfer the traditional foci of research of p-service encounters (i.e. aspects related to customer/provider interaction) to their online realization, however, we should carefully consider whether this is warranted by the data available or even feasible given the linguistic models at our disposal, which were initially developed to account for face to face, mostly dyadic communication.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_003

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By taking a first order approach (see Watts 2003, among others) to understand e-customers’ reasons for shopping online—i.e. where it is consumers’ opinions, rather than our views as analysts, that point us to the focal points we should include in our research agenda—this chapter will argue that (i)  informed choice rather than customer/provider interaction is the main antecedent to e-customer satisfaction and indeed the main reason why people shop online; and (ii) new interdisciplinary methods need to be developed. These methods need to combine linguistic models and natively digital theories, specifically developed to account for Internet phenomena. 2

Why Should Linguists be Interested in E-service Encounters?

In 2010, Nielsen Reports carried out a survey of 27,000 Internet users in 55 markets in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Their main goal was to find out how people shop online. Interestingly for this paper, one of the main conclusions of the report was that the aspect of our lives more deeply transformed by the Internet is how we shop for goods and services. With 79% of online European consumers and 90% of Chinese and Koreans, to cite just but a few markets, planning to make purchases online at the time of the survey, it is undeniable that e-service encounters are now an established genre practice among consumers worldwide. For their part Media Metrix, the industry-leading online audience measurement and media planning company, researched how much time people spent on different Internet categories during a four-year span. As shown in Table 1, online retail sites occupy the third position on the list. Another interesting piece of information regarding the future projection of Internet sales was provided by Cisco in their 2011 Connected World Technology Report. According to this report, 39% of college students surveyed in 14 different countries indicated that they buy more online than they do in person. It is only to be expected that this habit will persist, and perhaps increase, once students are gainfully employed. However, it is not just retail, but a myriad of other services that customers can also access via the Internet. Ba, Stallaert, and Zhang (2010, 423) summarize this point well: Tracking courier packages, booking tickets, scheduling car maintenance, applying for mortgage loans are just a few examples of services that one can now expect to do using digital systems, as opposed to the human

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HOURS PER MONTH (BILLIONS)

table 2.1

Time spent online on key Internet categories worldwide

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

2007

2008

SOCIAL NETWORKING SEARCH/NAVIGATION

2009

2010

RETAIL COMMUNICATION*

2011 OTHER CONTENT

*Time Spent on Communications includes time spent on web-based Email and Instant Messengers. Source: comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide, March 2007–October 2011.

intervention needed a decade ago . . . The spectrum of digital services offered seems to expand more and more to include, for example, legal services, accounting and tax services, and other services where it was previously thought that human intervention was necessary. From the information above, it can be gleaned that e-service encounters are here to stay, and that the scope of services that customers can access via the Internet has experienced an exponential growth. Although e-service encounters are multi-modal by nature, they still rely heavily on textual communication and should therefore be of as much interest to linguists as their p-service counterparts. The fact that they have hardly been tackled from a linguistic perspective (but see Bou-Franch this volume, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008, Placencia this volume) makes the study of e-service encounters specially relevant and timely. What is important to bear in mind at this juncture is that there are fundamental differences between p-service and e-service encounters and those differences need to be well understood and taken into consideration when devising a research agenda. These differences will be tackled in the next two sections, which will also explore what counts as appropriate theoretical models for e-service encounters and Internet data in general.

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E-services Versus P-services

3.1 Technology and the Human Element Ventola (2005, 19) defined p-service encounters as: “Everyday interactions between the customer and the server whereby some commodity (information or goods) will be exchanged. The exchange may involve monetary exchange as well”. P-service encounters have been widely researched in linguistics (see, among others, Antonopoulou 2001; Bayyurt and Bayraktaroğlu 2001; EconomidouKogetsidis 2005; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2008; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2006; Márquez Reiter 2004; Petrits 2001; Placencia 2004; Placencia and MancedaRueda 2011; Traverso 2006), marketing and other related disciplines (see Campbell and Davis 2006 and specially Gremler and Gwinner 2000 for a review of the marketing literature on p-service encounters). What these disparate fields have in common is that, although the main purpose of p-service encounters is transactional in nature, the focus of the research has been on the interactional rather than transactional aspect of the encounter (see Cameron 2000). For their part, e-service encounters are seen as a technology mediated information/self-service. According to Rowley (2006, 342–3), e-service encounters—and the Internet in general terms, for that matter—have been described as being used mostly to gratify users’ need for information. In the case of e-service encounters, that means that information retrieval and content are fundamental in what regards customer satisfaction. Furthermore, e-service has been portrayed “as a self-service experience, i.e. a service in which there is no direct assistance from or interaction with a human service agent” (Rowley 2006, 343). Therefore, e-customers need to learn, as it were, a new role within this genre practice. From the definitions above, it is obvious that it would not make much sense to continue placing our research emphasis on aspects of e-service encounters derived from the customer/provider interaction. Similar thoughts have been expressed by marketing scholars. For example, Van Riel, Liljander, and Jurriens (2001, 360) argued that since most research into consumer evaluations and quality of services has been conducted with respect to services that are characterized by personal interaction between customers and service providers, its outcomes cannot be necessarily applied to services that are characterized by interaction with technology. Along the same lines, Bitner, Brown, and Meuter (2000, 140–41) claimed that p-service-encounters research is considered to be a “low-tech, high-touch paradigm” that has focused primarily on the interpersonal dynamics between customer and provider with little attention to the role

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of technology in the service encounter. Yet, technology is radically changing interpersonal encounter relationships and, in some cases, eliminating them altogether. Therefore, research on self-service technologies challenges the notion that customer/provider interaction is a fundamental characteristic of service marketing. Both definitions and descriptions of the e-service encounter genre clearly point to the fact that the personal interaction on which research on p-service encounters has focused is for the most part absent. Therefore, it cannot continue to be the focal point of the incipient research on e-service encounters from a linguistic perspective. E-services Versus P-services: Digitized Versus Natively Digital Methods There is a further complication that linguists need to take into consideration before they tackle e-service encounters, or any other Internet data for that matter. This problem can be articulated along the following lines: are extant linguistic models, taxonomies or theories that were mostly developed to account for face to face dyadic interaction well equipped to account for linguistic data and new forms of interaction closely tied to the affordances of the Internet? This has already been pointed out by other scholars. For example, Cutting (2008, 31) when describing the application of Conversational Analytic (CA) methodology to Internet data cautioned that “Since CA was born before the advent of electronic discourse, it needs to adapt to new varieties of structure and language conventions of conversation in Computer Mediated Communication”. Also discussing CA methods, Herring (2010, 246) argues: 3.2

innovation is a vital process in the evolution of any research; without it, the paradigm would stagnate. Innovation is especially needed when new phenomena present themselves. This does not mean that web researchers should be allowed to have lax standards; they do, however, need to hold themselves to high standards of conceptual clarity, systematicity of sampling and data analysis, and awareness of limitations in interpreting their results, since they cannot depend entirely on traditional CA prescriptions to guide them. (emphasis added) Along these lines, Heyd (2013), who applied speech act theory and the Cooperative Principle to analyze deception in CMC, argues that studies of online discourse can greatly benefit the development of pragmatic theory. Georgakopoulou (2013) provides a programmatic discussion of narrative in

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CMC and makes the case that basic features of narratives need reformulation as analyses of online narratives reveal new practices. For their part, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014) showed how models that were developed to account for face to face, dyadic, local, synchronic instances of conflict cannot properly account for conflict in massive, online polylogues that are mediated, societal and diachronic in nature. Relevant for our discussion is the difference that Internet theoreticians (Rogers 2009) establish between methods of analysis that are natively digital versus those that have been digitized, i.e. they were developed for off-line research and then migrated online. From the discussion so far, it would seem that marketing scholars have digitized most of the methods of analysis traditionally used to account for p-service encounters, i.e. they have transferred those exact models and underlying assumptions to the analysis of e-service encounters with varying degrees of success, as can be gleaned from the claims made by Van Riel, Liljander, and Jurriens (2000) as well as Bitner, Brown, and Meuter (2000) discussed above. To be able to set a reasonable research agenda, linguists need to find solutions to the two problems set out above, namely: 1) If customer/provider interaction cannot constitute the basis of the research on e-service encounters, what should be its focus? 2) If most linguistic models have not been developed to account for the affordances of Internet based genres, are we justified in digitizing them or should we strive to come up with interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that combine digitized linguistic methods with insights from digitally native ones? Regarding the first problem, rather than taking a top-down, second order approach in which the analyst decides what the focus of future research should be, I believe we should take a bottom-up, first order approach where it is consumers’ opinions, rather than the analyst’s views, that make us aware of what the focal points we should include in our agenda are. Regarding the second problem, and once the focus of future research has been established, I would suggest that linguists familiarize themselves with digitally native models and theories and combine them with extant linguistic models to come up with hybrid, better equipped linguistic approaches to online phenomena. In section 4, I will explain in detail the two pronged approach I used to conduct a first order analysis of e-customers’ antecedents to satisfaction which are inextricably connected to the reasons they shop online.

Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives

4

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Why Do People Shop Online? What is a Good E-shopping Experience?

4.1 Methods To answer those questions, I developed a two-pronged approach: a)

b)

I researched the results of previous institutional/private surveys on e-customer satisfaction/reasons for purchasing online; reasons to abandon online purchases, etc. as well as web-design companies that specialize in e-shopping. These surveys provided the quantitative data on which my conclusions are based. The data provided by these companies, associations and research groups were selected for the analysis due to their relevance to the topic at hand as well as the established reputability of the companies and research groups themselves. More information on the data and sources can be accessed through the links provided in the reference section. I undertook a qualitative research project looking into e-customers’ reasons for shopping online. The results reported here are preliminary. Thus far, I have collected detailed information from 30 informants. My informants were 30 graduate students at an urban, research university in the South East of the US, ranging in age between 23 and 52, who were assigned a project in which they had to compare their personal experiences with e and p-service encounters. 68% of the informants were female, 32% male. The project posed open questions and consequently students responded in varied ways and referred to different experiences involving various e-service providers. The project was highly qualitative, and thus not easily quantifiable. In interpreting the responses, I have identified thematic reoccurrences to illustrate the discussion and have provided quantitative information where possible.

The answers to the institutional surveys and the detailed comments obtained in my project are given by real customers and provide the perspective of lay, first-order approaches. 4.2 Data and Discussion 4.2.1 Econsultancy Econsultancy carried out a survey of 2.000 e-shoppers to look at the reasons why customers choose to abandon online purchases. To the question: “If you are shopping from a retailer you don’t know well, how would you decide whether to trust the website?” Customers responded along the following lines:

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table 2.2 Reasons to trust a website

The site displays trustmarks (recognizable logo) to reassure shoppers The site displays a clear contact number and address details A friend colleague or family member has used the site The site looks professional and well designed It loads quickly and works well The site contains well-known brand names and products

48% 46.35% 40.7% 32.2% 23.65% 24.1%

To the question: “What information do you need to see on product pages to help you decide whether to make a purchase?” Customers responded that they deemed the following types of information as essential: table 2.3 Information needed to make a final purchase

Delivery timescales and changes Detailed product information Information on return policies Reviews from other shoppers Multiple images of products

68.4% 60.95% 53.4% 45.9% 38.8%

To the question: “After adding items to your basket, what would make you abandon your purchase?” Customers saw the following as important reasons to abandon their purchase: table 2.4 Reasons to abandon a purchase

High delivery charges Technical problems Price too high Having to register before buying

74.5% 54.5% 49.3% 25.65%

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23

4.2.2 Tenengo For their part, Tenengo, a web design company specializing in commercial websites, enumerated the main reasons why people shop online. Location comes up as important motive to shop online as e-customers can buy from the comfort of their home and do not have to interact with high pressure sales people. Furthermore, e-customers find the convenience of shopping online very appealing. E-customers just need internet access. They do not need to drive anywhere or be subjected to a regular business schedule, as online shopping can be done at any time that is opportune. Total time of purchase is also seen as advantageous by online customers: with faster Internet access and download times, e-shopping (selection and checkout process) is much quicker than it used to be. Online customers are cost oriented. Actually, 35% of e-customers will not make a purchase unless they find a good deal. Indeed, for most e-customers, shopping online means finding good deals or coupons. Often, retailers drop their product pricing to compensate for shipping costs or offer free shipping. Besides, online customers also incur fewer expenses as they do not have to spend money on gas, babysitters, or food. Increased security was also mentioned as one of the reasons why customers shop online. Reputable online stores try to ensure that credit card information is safe, as they need to comply with be the Payment Card Industry and meet Security Standards Council’s standards. Finally, an important reason why customers shop online is to establish comparisons. E-customers can easily research products, compare prices, features etc. Crucially, e-customers can share information and reviews with other shoppers who have experience with a product or retailer. Tenengo also specified the reasons why people do not shop online. Among those, the inability to touch or try on the product was a significant one. In addition, customers are wary of shipping costs, as these may turn out to be quite high. Despite improvements in overall security, customers also expressed some privacy concerns. They were afraid of identity theft although through a secure website the chances of this happening are relatively small. Another deterrent from shopping online was the costs involved in returning products as often e-customers are financially liable for the cost of shipping the product back to the online vendor. 4.2.3 Social Shopping Study Interestingly for this study, results of the ‘Social Shopping Study’, conducted by PowerReviews in association with the e-tailing group, indicate that online consumers’ main goal is to obtain thorough information about products and find

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the best prices before they make a final purchase. One in two survey respondents spent 75% of their overall online shopping time researching products, compared to 21% in 2010. 4.2.4 Nielsen Global Customer Report According to Nielsen Global Consumer Report (2010), one of the great benefits of online shopping is being able to read other e-customers’ product review. Sometimes, these reviews are provided by experts, sometimes by lay people. Nielsen’s data indicate that customer reviews are most important when purchasing electronics as 57% of e-customers consider reviews prior to buying. Indeed 40% of e-customers indicated they would not even buy electronics without consulting online reviews first. Reviews on cars (45%) and software (37%) are the other two most important online influences when making a purchase. Also, 41% of e-customers said that they would share a negative experience online. This brief review has made it clear that personal interaction is not high on online shoppers’ list of reasons for shopping online. Indeed customers point out that, within the context of technology-based service encounters, most causes of customer dissatisfaction are related to customer-contact employees’ behaviours, as employees are not well equipped to deal with customers in an online context (Massad, Heckman, and Crowston 2001) and that one of the main advantages of e-commerce is that it allows them to skip personal interaction with providers (Meuter et al. 2000; Van Riel, Liljander, and Jurriens 2001). 4.2.5 My Informants’ Feedback My own informants agree, as the examples below clearly illustrate. Interaction with the sales-person was described by them as annoying: (1) Another major difference is in an e-service encounter there is no threat of being coerced into buying something . . . In many respects, I think this is one of the attractions of online shopping. While face-to-face interactions in a shop can be helpful and useful, they can just as easily be annoying and lead to the uncomfortable situation of trying to get rid of the salesperson. Informant-1 (I-1, etc. henceforth) The sales-person’s efforts to establish contact with the customer are also described as bothersome: (2) I would much rather shop online if only because I don’t like the seller bothering me while I’m trying to shop. I would much rather navigate myself around a site to get to the sale than be bothered while shopping. I-9

Natively Digital versus Digitized Perspectives

25

(3) You can see an example of this in the Gap’s website, as by clicking on a product, the site naturally suggests coordinating accessories to complete the look. It feels as if you have your own personal attendant with you (that is without the bother of personal interactions and conversation). I-3 (4) By shopping online, those that prefer not to be bothered can do so browsing at a pace that is comfortable for them, and in the privacy of their own home. This is especially helpful when purchasing something embarrassing or something that would threaten someone’s face if bought in public. I-15 Both I-1 and I-13 refer to the avoidance rituals the customer is forced to engage in to avoid the sales-person, and argue that not having to engage in those is one of the benefits of shopping online: (5) Avoidance rituals on the part of the customer become unnecessary. If the customer does not want to purchase an item, he or she does not need to offer a quality statement on the price or the goods; instead, he or she must simply navigate away from the site to avoid purchase. I-13 In fact, avoiding interaction with service providers was mentioned as a main reason to buy online by 26 out of my 30 informants. The survey data reviewed above indicated that the antecedents to e-customers’ satisfaction seem to be related to the product (overall quality and total price) and to the medium [ease of access to the product (i.e. few clicks), ease of webpage download, ease of access to information on the product (thorough product description; other customers’ evaluations), and overall webpage technical performance]. Among these, price information and product information (both provided by the manufacturer and through customers’ reviews) are essential to the final purchase decision. Once again, there was a clear correlation between the institutional/private survey data discussed above and my informants’ detailed responses. Regarding convenience, my informants agreed that the e-service encounter offers a much higher level of convenience than its personal counterpart: (6) One of the main differences between traditional and e-service encounters is the convenience factor for the customer. With a computer, the customer does not have to travel anywhere and does not have to shop during pre-determined hours. Customers have the option to shop 24 hours a day in the comfort of their home or office and may be dressed (or not) in any manner appropriate for those settings even if it’s not appropriate for a public place of business. I-21

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(7) Target.com is available 24 hours so the consumer is free to shop when it is most convenient to them. I-25 The ease associated with the affordances of the medium is also pointed out as one of the main reasons to shop online: (8) The online shopping experience is much easier in that I can use keywords to bring up pictures of just the products I am looking for. Old Navy. com allows me to sort my research by the size I want by specific categories like shirts, pants and shoes. I-2 (9) One of the most convenient features of both Amazon and eBay is the ease of processing orders. Both websites offer secure methods of storing shipping and payment information, making it easier for customers to complete the transaction. I-20 (10) Even though the e-service encounter can be seen as highly personalized through the targeted recommendations and deals, the encounter also allows customers a large measure of choice which enables them to be more in control of the transaction. I-7 Shopping online is often encouraged by retailers by the promise of special prices and offers to e-customers. My informants noticed that the retail websites they analyzed did try to entice customers with online only offers: (11) US Airways really strives to meet the needs of the frequent flyer. They are always offering special deals for those with over 25,000 miles and this is usually the business person. I-16 (12) An interesting use of this exists in the Wal-Mart website in the form of the savings counter. Over the last two days that I have worked on this project, this counter has gone from a little over $3 million to over $200 million. The practical application to the average user is to be surprised by the saving and use Wal-Mart.com. I-14 A recurrent theme in my informants’ responses—mentioned in 22 out of 30 responses—was that online shopping afforded them endless choices which were also informed choices. Information can be gathered online through detailed product descriptions and images, customers’ facility to compare similar products across many retail websites, and crucially the information provided by other customers through their reviews on a given product or service:

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(13) Consumers who intend to purchase a certain product are able to see coordinating pieces and how they were rated by others. Viewing coordinating pieces would be very easy in the store. However, customer ratings are not available offline. I-18 (14) Amazon offers an endless variety of products to consumers . . . more details are available at this website. Not only do you find product details that are created by the sellers, you can find online customer reviews to learn about how the product actually functions for others who have purchased it. I-19 Of special interest is this insightful comment by informant#27 in which it is argued that detailed product information has replaced personal interaction in e-service encounters: (15) Extensive product descriptions are usually included with online products; however, online customers are often at a ‘disadvantage’ being unable to physically see/touch the product. In essence these descriptions are in replacement to physical interaction with sales associates, individuals who often provide these. I-27 Indeed, agrees informant#29, e-customers’ goal is to use the affordances of the Internet to find information without interruption: (16) It is a trademark of e-service in general that customers want convenience and time to browse unhindered. I-29 From the institutional surveys and my informants’ responses, a few tentative conclusions can be drawn. First, provider/customer interaction is not a priority in e-service encounters which are seen by many as a way to avoid the pressures of shop-assistants. Second, access to detailed product information (provided by the retailer or other e-customers’ reviews) on which to narrow down the endless choice available online emerges as the main motivation behind e-service encounters. It would seem, then, that we have a case in which re-mediation—i.e. how familiar genres are imported into a new medium (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010)—has fundamentally altered the relational nature of the service encounter genre, i.e. bringing its transactional character—often backgrounded in p-service encounters—to the front. Furthermore, there has been a significant change in the discourse modes (Bax 2011) from which the e-service genre draws in its p and e realizations. Discourse modes can be

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described as the building blocks of genres and are situated at a level of abstraction which is independent of context. Whereas p-service encounters fundamentally draw from the interacting discourse mode, e-service encounters draw from the describing and narrating modes. In fact, many disciplines—i.e. linguistics, Rhetorical Genre Studies, among others—have started to examine how participation in genres and genre systems is not only shaped by activity systems, social groups and organizations but crucially by medium (Askehave and Nielsen 2005; Miller and Shepherd 2009; Bawarshi and Reiff 2010; Herring 2007, among others). This allows us to provide, at least, a tentative response to the first question posed above: “If customer-provider interaction cannot constitute the basis of the research on e-service encounters, what should be its focus?” The answer would be that informed choice, rather than interaction, is the notion that guides e-customers. Thus, it should constitute the basis of an empirical approach to e-service encounters as a social practice along the same lines that sharing is the key concept around which understandings and research on social media are organized (see Androutsopoulos 2014; John 2013). My proposal is that informed choice should be understood as the driving force behind e-shopping practices, indeed what e-service encounters are all about, to paraphrase Androutsopoulos. In the next section, I will attempt to provide an answer to the second question posed in section 4 regarding whether extant linguistic models traditionally applied to the study of p-service encounters should be digitized or new interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that combined digitized linguistic methods with insights from digitally native ones should be developed. 5

Understanding the Medium

E-customers’ responses that placed informed choice at the core of e-service encounters also unveiled that the re-mediation of the service encounter genre has brought its true transactional essence to the fore. It follows that a good understanding of the e-service encounters genre needs to be related to a thorough understanding of the medium’s impact on communication. My suggestion is that linguists interested in e-service encounters familiarize themselves with extant models and theories that have been put forth to account for computer mediated communication and use. In the next subsection, I will briefly introduce and describe some of the most well known theories that have tackled computer communication.

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5.1 Theories and Models of Computer Mediated Communication One of the first theories trying to come to grips with Internet communication is Social Presence Theory (Short, Williams, and Christie 1976). Social presence theory is a seminal theory of the social effects of communication technology. It argues that the social impact of a medium depends on the social presence it permits communicators to have. Social presence is described as a property of the medium itself: the degree of acoustic, visual, and physical contact that it allows. The theory assumes that more contact will increase the essential components of ‘presence’: greater intimacy, immediacy, warmth, and inter-personal rapport. As a consequence of social presence, social influence is expected to increase. In the case of computer mediated communication, the assumption is that more text-based forms of interaction (e-mail, instant messaging) are less social than face to face, and therefore less conducive to social influence. Indeed, it is assumed that a decline in presence, as the conversational partner is de-individuated, may lead to anti-social behavior. In the case of e-service encounters, lack of presence on the providers’ part is seen as an advantage by customers. This is certainly an aspect of e-shopping that deserves further investigation. The Social Model of Deindividuation Phenomena (SIDE) (Reicher, Spears, and Postmes 1995), in turn, takes a different perspective and argues that traditional models of deindividuation are based on individualistic views of the self, and do not take into consideration the fact that deindividuation affects the cognitive salience of social identity. Thus, deindividuated contexts are conducive to individuals constructing themselves mostly as members of a relevant social category, i.e. a certain social or collective identity. I believe that the SIDE model is of particular interest to e-service encounters researchers. Despite e-retailers’ efforts to personalize their sales (Amazon’s push messages based on a customer’s purchasing history), e-customer services are for the most part based on social, rather than individual, identity. For its part, Media Richness Theory (Daft and Lengel 1986) posits that the quantity of information communicated fluctuates with respect to a medium’s richness. According to this theory, the main objectives of communication are resolving ambiguity and diminishing uncertainty. Depending on how restricted a medium’s capacity is, it may be able to manage less uncertainty and equivocality. Therefore, the richness of the medium should match a specific task so as to avoid oversimplification or complication. Morreale, Spitzberg and Barge (2007) have listed several attributes that can be used to analyze the richness of a specific medium: Speed (how rapid the production, sending and receiving of a message can be)/Interactivity (two way information exchange and feedback/

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time lag between the sending and reception of a message)/Completeness (the degree to which the medium can transmit the nonverbal forms of a message and representations of emotional content). One of the drawbacks of shopping online is not to be able to touch and feel the products. The lack of these non-verbal aspects in the shopping experience is compensated by multimodal resources (videos, pictures), detailed product descriptions, and customers’ reviews. Linguists interested in e-service encounters could investigate the suggestion that profuse textual descriptions are in replacement for interaction with sales associates and how these descriptions interact with other multimodal resources to make up for the lack of physical contact with the product. Conversely, the Hyperpersonal Model (Walther 1996, 2007) proposes that CMC interaction can reach more socially desirable levels than face to face communication due to its lower bandwidth. The partial cues allowed by visual anonymity can be used strategically. Also, asynchronicity promotes the selective construction of messages, and provides individuals with the time to plan, compose and revise message structure and content, as well as to decide when and how much to self-disclose and to carefully arrange message exchange. The Hyperpersonal Model seems to be supported by the results of the surveys and my informants’ detailed accounts. E-retailers avoid the possible dangers associated with sales-person/customer interactions that may go wrong and have the advantage of divulging just the information about the product that best positions it. Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) takes what could be described as a more humanistic approach to the understanding of media use. UGT is an audience-centered approach to understanding mass communication. Their focus is not the influence of media on people, but on what it is that people do with media. Blumler and Katz (1974) believe that there is not merely one way that people use media. Instead, they claim the reasons for using different media are as varied as users themselves. Accordingly, UGT tries to account for the reasons why consumers/users choose a specific medium when other communication media are also available. Its main claim is that people use a given medium to satisfy certain needs and desires. Different media offer different gratification opportunities, i.e. they differ in the ways they can satisfy certain needs and reward their use. For example, email is superior to phone when we need to adjust the use of the medium to other people’s work schedules or for communicating with others who are in different time zones, etc. (Dimmick, Kline, and Stafford 2000). Along these lines, Papacharissi and Rubin (2000) investigated motives for Internet use and found that the Internet is used as a functional alternative by users for whom other communication channels are not available or rewarding. The authors found that the primary motives for Internet use

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were (i) Information seeking for an instrumental purpose; (ii) Interpersonal interaction; (iii) Convenience; (iv) Entertainment; and (v) Passing time. UGT captures the essence of e-service encounters: Choice. Consumers are heterogeneous and the Internet offers them endless choices. Making informed purchasing choices, and having boundless alternatives regarding those choices is at the heart of consumers’ selecting e-service encounters rather than p-service encounters. How texts describing choices and products accomplish this goal is certainly a study worthy of linguists’ interest. Clearly these theories are not linguistic in nature, having been posited by scholars from diverse disciplines. However, they can provide a very useful macro level framework for linguistic micro level analysis, along the same lines as theories and models from sociology, anthropology, or psychology have done in the past. Crucially, they help us get a better understanding of the medium, and by understanding the medium we can better understand the effects it has on different genres through the process of remediation. After having reviewed some of the most commonly applied Internet theories and having suggested that they provide the crucial understanding of the medium that is needed by linguists, the answer to the second question posed above can be tentatively provided: 2) If most linguistic models have not been developed to account for the affordances of Internet based genres, are we justified in digitizing them or should we strive to come up with interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that combined digitized linguistic methods with insights from digitally native ones? The crucial role of the medium in fundamentally altering p-service encounters calls for the development of hybrid methodologies that systemically combine natively digital theories of Internet communication and uses with digitized linguistic models and frameworks. 6 Conclusion The main goal of this chapter was to set an agenda for the linguistic research of e-service encounters. To that end, the views that (a) e-customer/service provider interaction is key to e-service encounters and (b) that extant theories/models of communication developed for face to face interaction can adequately account for computer mediated communication were problematized.

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In moving forward with this agenda, rather than analysts deciding what the research foci on e-service encounters must be, it was argued that a firstorder approach should be followed in order to ascertain the antecedents to e-customers’ satisfaction and those, in turn, related to reasons why e-customers purchased online. This was seen as a way to avoid the analyst making, which may be, potentially erroneous assumptions regarding computer mediated communication based on premises developed for face to face communication. The first order approach developed for this study was two-pronged: it was based on responses to institutional/private surveys and the detailed responses of 30 informants. From these responses, it was established that customer/ provider interaction—the focus of p-service encounters research—was not tied to antecedents of e-customers’ satisfaction and thus not high on e-customers’ reasons for shopping online. On the contrary, freeing themselves from the pressure and interruptions of sales-people emerged as a primary reason for why the Internet was preferred as a medium by e-customers. Therefore, it was concluded that customer/provider interaction should not be the focus of future linguistic research on e-service encounters. Furthermore, caution was raised regarding the suitability of digitizing linguistic models and theories, developed for face-to-face dyadic interaction. This led to the formulation of two related questions: 1) If customer-provider interaction cannot constitute the basis of the research on e-service encounters, what should be its focus? 2) If most linguistic models have not been developed to account for the affordances of Internet based genres, are we justified in digitizing them or should we strive to come up with interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that combine digitized linguistic methods with insights from digitally native ones? Regarding the first question, responses to surveys and informants’ comments evidenced that, as a consequence of remediation, the service encounters genre underwent a major transformation when it migrated online which brought its true transactional nature to the fore and fundamentally altered the discourse modes it draws from. Indeed, it is informed choice, rather than interaction, that is at the core of e-customers’ preference for the online medium. Thus, it should constitute the basis of an empirical approach to e-service encounters as a social practice along the same lines that sharing is the key concept around which understandings and research on social media are organized. In regards to the second question, it was argued that the crucial role of the medium in fundamentally altering p-service encounters calls for the

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development of hybrid methodologies that systemically combine natively digital theories of Internet communication and uses with digitized linguistic models and frameworks. To that end, some prominent theories developed for Internet communication and use were briefly described and possible applications to the analysis of e-service encounters suggested. Although these theories are not linguistic in nature, having been posited by scholars from diverse disciplines, it was argued that they can provide a very useful macro level framework for linguistic micro level analysis, along the same lines as theories and models from sociology, anthropology, or psychology have done in the past. Fundamentally, these theories help us get a better understanding of the medium, and by understanding the medium we can better understand the effects it has on different genres through the process of remediation. E-service encounters continue to experience an exponential growth. The genre, though multimodal in nature, still presents a substantial reliance on discourse. Therefore, it should merit the interests of linguistics. Hopefully, the research agenda set out in this paper will help provide a solid foundation for future studies tackling the linguistic and generic aspects of e-service encounters. References Askehave, Inger, and Ellen Ellerup Nielsen. 2005. “Digital Genres—A Challenge to Traditional Genre Theory”. Information Technology and People 18, 2: 120–141. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2014. “Moments of Sharing: Entextualization and Linguistic Repertoires in Social Networking”. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 4–18. Antonopoulou, Eleni. 2001. “Brief Service Encounters. Gender and Politeness”. In Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries. The Case of Greek and Turkish, edited by Arın Bayraktaroğlu and Maria Sifianou, 241–269. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ba, Sulin, Jan Stallaert, and Zhongiu Zhang. 2010. “Balancing IT with the Human Touch: Optimal Investment in IT-based Customer Service”. Information Services Research 21, 3: 423–442. Bayyurt, Yasemin, and Arın Bayraktaroğlu. 2001. “The Use of Pronouns and Terms of Address in Turkish Service Encounters”. In Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries. The Case of Greek and Turkish, edited by Arın Bayraktaroğlu and Maria Sifianou, 209–240. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bawarshi, Anis S., and Mary Jo Reiff. 2010. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press.

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Bax, Stephen. 2011. Discourse and Genre. Analysing Language in Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bitner, Mary Jo, Stephen Brown W., and Matthew Meuter. 2000. “Technology Infusion in Service Encounters”. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 28, 1: 138–149. Blumler Jay. G., and E. Katz, Elihu. 1974. The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2014. “Conflict Management in Massive Polylogues: A Case Study from YouTube”. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 19–36. Cameron, Deborah, 2000. “Styling the Worker: Gender and the Commodification of Language in the Globalized Service Economy”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, 323–347. Campbell, Kim Sydow, Lenita Davis and Lauren Skinner. 2006. “Rapport Management during the Exploration Phase of the Salesperson-Customer Relationship”. Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management 26,4: 359–370. Cisco The Cisco Connected World Technology Report. Available at http://www.cisco .com/en/US/solutions/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns1120/CCWTR-Chapter1-Report .pdf Accessed January 3, 2013. Cutting, Joan. 2008. Pragmatics and Discourse. 2nd. London: Routledge. Daft, Richard. L., and Robert H. Lengel. 1986. “Organizational Information Require­ ments, Media Richness and Structural Design”. Management science 32, 5: 554–571. Dimmick, John. Susan Kline, and Laura Stafford. 2000. “The Gratification Niches of Personal e-mail and the Telephone: Competition, Displacement and Complemen­ tarity”. Communication Research 27, 2: 227–248. Econsultancy. Digital marketing excellence. Available at http://econsultancy.com/us. Accessed January 3, 2013. Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2005. “ ‘Yes, Tell me Please, What Time is the Midday Flight from Athens Arriving?’ Telephone Service Encounters and Politeness”. Intercultural Pragmatics 2: 253–273. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2008. “Selling and Gender: Rapport Building Strategies Used by American TV Shopping Networks’ Hosts”. In Gender and sexual identities in transition: Cross-cultural perspectives, edited by Jose Santaemilia and Patricia BouFranch, 144–179. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Garcés Conejos Blitvich, Pilar, and Patricia Bou-Franch. 2008. “Cortesía en las Páginas Web Interactivas: El Comercio Electrónico”. In Cortesía y Conversación: de lo Escrito a lo Oral, edited by Antonio Briz, Antonio Hidalgo, Marta Albelda, Josefa Contreras, Nieves Hernández-Flores, 468–487. Valencia, Estocolmo: Universidad de Valencia, Programa EDICE. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2013. “Narrative Analysis in Computer Mediate Communication”. In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, edited by

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Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen, 695–716. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gremler, Dwayne, and Kevin P. Gwinner. 2000. “Customer-employee Rapport in Service Relationships”. Journal of Service Research 3: 82–104. Herring, Susan. 2007. “A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer Mediated Discourse”. Language@Internet 4, article 1. Herring, Susan. C. 2010. “Web Content Analysis: Expanding the Paradigm”. In The International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup and Matthew Allen, 233–249. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Heyd, Theresa. 2013. “Email hoaxes”. In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, edited by Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen, 387– 412. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. John, Nicholas A. 2013. “Sharing and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword”. New Media & Society 15, 2: 167–182. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2006. “Politeness in Small Shops in France.” Journal of Politeness Research 2: 79–103. Locher, Miriam. 2010. “Introduction: Politeness and impoliteness in computermediated communication”. Journal of Politeness Research 6: 1–5. Márquez Reiter, Rosina. 2004. “Displaying Closeness and Respectful Distance in Montevidean and Quiteño Service Encounters”. In Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish, edited by Rosina Marquez-Reiter and Maria E. Placencia, 121–155. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Massad, Nelson, Robert Heckman, and Kevin Crowston. 2001. “Customer Satisfaction with Electronic Service Encounters”. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 73–104. Media Metrix available at http://www.comscore.com/Products/Audience_Analytics/ Media_Metrix Accessed January 3, 2013. Meuter, Matthew L., Amy L. Ostrom, Robert I. Roundtree, and Mary Jo Bitner. 2000. “Self-Service Technologies: Understanding Customer Satisfaction With Technologybased Service encounters”. Journal of Marketing 64: 50–64. Miller, Carolyn, and Dawn Shepherd. 2009. “Questions for Genre Theory from the Blogosphere”. In Genres in the Internet, edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, 263–290. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Morreale, Sherwyn P., Brian H. Spitzberg, and J. Kevin Barge. (2007). Human communication: Motivation, knowledge, and skills. Cengage Learning. Nielsen Global Consumer Report. 2010. Global Trends in Online shopping. Available at h t t p : / / w w w. n i e l s e n . c o m / c o n t e n t / d a m / c o r p o r a t e / u s / e n / r e p o r t s downloads/2010-Reports/Q1-2010-GOS-Online-Shopping-Trends-June-2010.pdf. Accessed September 8, 2013.

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Papacharissi, Zizi, and Alan M. Rubin 2000. “Predictors of Internet Use”. Journal of Language and Electronic Media 44: 175–196. Placencia, Maria E. 2004. “Rapport-building Activities in Corner Shop Interactions”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8: 215–245. Placencia, Maria E., Ana Manceda-Rueda. 2011. “ ‘Vaya, ¡qué chungo!’ Rapport-building Talk in Service Encounters: The Case of Bars in Seville at Breakfast Time”. In Spanish at Work: Analysing Institutional Discourse across the Spanish-speaking World, edited by Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, 192–207. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petrits, Angelique. 2001. “Addressing in Modern Greek: Evidence from a Case Study in the Athens Central Market”. In A Reader in Greek Sociolinguistics: Studies in Modern Greek Language, Culture and Communication, edited by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Marianna Spanaki, 199–222. Berlin: Peter Lang. Power Reviews—Social shopping study Available at http://www.powerreviews.com/ Accessed January 3, 2013. Reicher, Stephen D., Russell Spears, and Tom Postmes. 1995. “A Social Identity Model of Deindividuation phenomena”. European Review of Social Psychology 6: 161–198. Rogers, Richard. 2009. The End of the Virtual: Digital Research Methods. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA. Rowley, Jennifer. 2006. “An Analysis of the E-service Literature: Towards a Research Agenda”. Internet Research 6, 3: 339–359. Short, W.E. Williams, and B. Christie. 1976. The Social Psychology of Communication. London: Wiley. Tenengo Design available at http://www.tenengo.com/ Accessed January 3, 2013. Traverso, Veronique. 2006. “Aspects of Polite Behaviour in French and Syrian Service Encounters: A Data-based Comparative Study”. Journal of Politeness Research 2: 105–122. Van Riel, Allard C.R., Veronica Liljander, and Petra Jurriens. 2001. “Exploring Consumer Evaluations of E-services: A Portal Site”. International Journal of Service Industry Management 12, 4: 359–377. Ventola, Eija. 2005. “Revising Service Encounter Genre—Some Reflections”. Folia Linguistica 39: 19–43. Walther, Joseph B. 1996. “Computer-mediated Communication: Impersonal, Inter­ personal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction”. Communication Research 23: 3–43. ——— 2007. “Selective Self-presentation in Computer-mediated Commu­ nication: Hyperpersonal Dimensions of Technology, Language and Cognition”. Computers in Human Behavior 23: 2538–2557. Watts, Richard. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

CHAPTER 3

Address Forms and Relational Work in E-commerce: The Case of Service Encounter Interactions in MercadoLibre Ecuador María Elena Placencia 1 Introduction It has long been recognized that address forms play a central role in expressing interpersonal relations through language in everyday life. This idea, epitomized in Brown and Gilman’s (1960) influential work on pronominal address, with the T-V distinction, as well as Brown and Ford’s (1972 [1961]) classic study on nominal forms, has been taken up by other scholars over time. As Knapp, for example, put it in the 1970s: [t]he way we address another person may be quantitatively brief, but it may say volumes about the relationship we have with that person. We are able to communicate . . . how well we are acquainted with them, whether we are angry or affectionate toward them, and whether the situation is a formal or informal one [ . . . ] (Knapp 1978, 158)

At present, however, it is acknowledged that through the use of address forms we do not simply reflect particular relationships but we actually negotiate them (cf. McCarthy and O’Keefe 2003) and may (re)create particular ideologies of interpersonal relations (Fitch 1998). From a politeness perspective, which I adopt in this study, address forms serve as one means of realizing what Locher (2006, 4) refers to as relational work—“the ‘work’ individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others”—(see also Locher and Watts 2005), or what Spencer-Oatey (2008 [2000], 12) calls ‘rapport management’: the use of language in the “management of social relations”. Address forms fall under the stylistic domain in Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management framework, contributing to setting the tone of an interaction as “serious or joking”, for example (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000], 21). Indeed, in a recent work on address in French, German, English and Swedish, Clyne, Norrby and Warren (2009) highlight this central function of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_004

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address forms as tools for the management of social relationships. They assert that modes of address allow users, among other things, to “express a degree of social distance, common ground and group boundaries” (2009, 79). To use a single example to illustrate the range of meanings that address forms can convey, and therefore the different functions that they can perform in relational work, from a survey which I carried out of studies on address forms in Ecuadorian and Colombian Spanish (Placencia 2010a, 367), various meanings surfaced, associated with the pronouns of address tú, vos, usted and sumercé. They include the following: respect, closeness/trust (confianza),1 distance, familiarity, solidarity or a lack of it, intimacy, warmth (calor humano), affection (in)equality, hierarchy, impatience, anger, annoyance, condescension, contempt, servility and humiliation. These different meanings highlight the fact that address forms can be employed to various effects: to construct, enhance or threaten interpersonal relations, to keep one’s boundaries intact or to dispense with them, etc. When it comes to service encounters, address forms, together with other forms such as greetings and politeness formulas, have been found to play a role in constructing a (face-to-face) service encounter interaction as respectful and deferential, perhaps, friendly and egalitarian, or maybe overfriendly or abusive in some respects (see Section 2). Address usage in e-service encounters, on the other hand, has, to the best of my knowledge, received very little or no attention.2 However, the growth of e-commerce over recent years makes examining such usage a timely and revealing exercise. One of the features of interest in e-service encounters is precisely the relational aspect of the interaction: the extent to which, and the ways in which, participants invest in the service relationship while interacting in a virtual context and within the constraints of the online medium. This is what I aim to examine in a corpus of interactions drawn from MercadoLibre (ML henceforth) Ecuador, an online market place (see Section 4), through the analysis of address usage. The present study forms part of a broader study on relational work in service encounters in e-commerce where I examine the structure of such encounters in terms of ‘discursive moves’ (cf. Locher 2006; Miller and 1  Relationships of confianza are characterized by “closeness and a sense of deep familiarity” (Thurén 1988, 222) and certain behavioural expectations (e.g. that one can count on help when in need) according to the degree of confianza obtaining between the participants. See also Fitch (1998), among others, for a definition of this notion. 2   Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch (2008) examine politeness phenomena in e-commerce, but their focus is on the content of interactive webpages rather than actual service encounter interactions.

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Gergen 1998) or micro-actions that make up the service-encounter. I also look at the linguistic strategies that interactants employ to realize the different moves in the negotiation of a transaction (Placencia, forthcoming). Clyne, Norrby and Warren (2009, 79) suggest that in face-to-face interaction, “[o]ften participants take note of visible attributes to guide them in how to address someone whom they are meeting for the first time”. Age is one of these attributes that allows participants to establish degrees of ‘sameness’ or of difference which in turn can influence address choices. In virtual contexts such as ML, these attributes are not readily available to participants, so it is of interest to see what address choices participants make without access to such attributes. Curiously, one of our interviewees (a male shopper, aged 34) (see Section 4) commented on the fact that he normally read how others interacted on the site in order to copy the style of interaction that he observed; that is, for some individuals, neither age nor other possible predictors for face-to-face interaction and / or chat forums (see Clyne, Norrby and Warren 2009) may play any role at all in address selection on ML. On the other hand, another interviewee (male, age 36) highlighted the influence of social media on the language employed on ML. As a matter of fact, he regards ML as “a kind of extension of Facebook”. Thus he claims to follow the conventions of informal language on Facebook in his ML interactions, including address choice. Why examine the Ecuadorian site of ML? Studies available on face-to-face, commercial and non-commercial service encounter interactions in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito) (cf. Placencia 2004; 2008a, 2010b) provide a certain baseline against which interactions on ML can be considered. One of the features that these studies have highlighted is the formality of the encounter, particularly among strangers, with participants attempting to convey respect and polite distance through the selection of formal pronominal (namely, usted ‘you formal’) and nominal (e.g. titles such as señora ‘madam’) address as well as formal greetings (e.g. buenos días ‘good morning’), for example. Thus, it is of interest to see how the face-to-face service relationship translates in the virtual context of ML. Address forms provide a window onto this. Studies on interactions in virtual environments such as chat rooms (cf. Yus 2010) and discussion forums (cf. Morrow 2006) have identified informality as a common trait of such environments, with anonymity placing participants on an equal footing. One might expect the same from ML too; however, as we will see, while there seems to be a move towards informality, the picture is still somewhat mixed. In the following sections, before reporting on the results of the present study (Section 5), address usage in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito), with reference to service encounters in particular, will first be described (Section 2). Next,

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the interest of examining online service encounters in the context of internet retailing in Latin America will be briefly highlighted (Section 3). Finally, some features of ML will be considered in Section 4, together with details of the corpus employed. 2

Address Terms in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito)

Starting with pronominal usage, the forms available in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito) are tú, vos and usted (Placencia 1997; Toscano Mateus 1953; Uquillas 1989). Tú and vos are usually associated with familiarity and intimacy, with vos of more restricted use, marking a higher degree of intimacy when used among friends, for example, and usted with respect and distance. Nonetheless, depending on the context, these pronouns can be employed to convey other meanings, as indicated earlier. For example, usted appears to achieve greater intimacy than tú when employed among couples, and tú and vos can convey condescension when mestizos employ these forms to address indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Andes (Cervone 1999; Placencia 2008b). In relation to nominal address forms in Ecuadorian Spanish, different categories have also been identified (Jijón y Chiluisa 1998; Placencia 1997, 2010c; Toscano Mateus 1953). For example, titles or honorifics like señor/a (‘Mr /Mrs’), señorita (‘Miss’), which may occur on their own or with a name or surname if known to the speaker,3 are usually linked to formal contexts where conveying respect is expected. These forms would correspond to what Clyne, Norrby and Warren (2009, 159) refer to as V-like modes of address. Additionally, there are other multiple forms in use such as kinship terms, sometimes employed metaphorically (e.g. mijita, a contraction from mi hijita ‘my little daughter’) and nicknames which normally convey closeness among friends and family, and as such constitute T-like modes of address in Clyne, Norrby and Warren’s (2009: 18) terminology, but which may have other meanings in other contexts (cf. de la Torre Espinosa 1999). Yet another option available is ∅ address (Wolfson and Manes 1980), that is, avoiding using a direct nominal or pronominal address form altogether. This is an alternative that has been highlighted in other studies (see, among others, Clyne, Norrby and Warren, 2009; Placencia 1997) and that surfaces in the present study also. 3  Señor and señora occurring on their own would be equivalent to the English ‘sir’ and ‘madam’, respectively. Following Leech (1999), I refer to these forms as honorifics, restricting the use of ‘title’ to combinations with a name or surname.

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With respect to service encounters in Ecuadorian Spanish, address patterns have been examined in different data sets of naturally occurring face-to-face service interactions, taken from a range of settings, including, among others, hospital reception desks (Placencia 1998), service desks at a public institution (Placencia 2001), corner shops (Placencia 2005, 2008a) and hair-dressers (Placencia 2007). In these studies, some among strangers and some among interactants who are familiar with each other, an overall preference for usted, the formal form, in service interactions among adults has been identified, although this may be in the process of changing.4 Usted has been found to occur with formal greetings like buenos días ‘good morning’ and buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’, which reinforce the relational value of usted as a marker of respect in the contexts examined. Here is one example: Example 1: In a shop selling clothes (Shopkeeper and customer, both females in their 30’s) Shopkeeper: buenos días ‘good morning’ Customer: buenos días ‘good morning’ Shopkeeper: en qué le puedo ayudar ‘how can I help youV’ Customer: verá ando buscando una chaqueta de cuero ‘lookV I am looking for a leather jacket’

(Taken from Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2011 [2004], 372–373)

Regarding nominal address in service interactions among strangers, the data examined at public institutions, for example, have highlighted a formal and sometimes rather deferential style of Quiteños through their use of honorifics like señor ‘sir’, señora ‘madam’ or señorita ‘madam’ (literally, ‘mademoiselle’), as in this example:

4  Observation of service encounters in shops in the surroundings of a university in Quito (Placencia, in preparation), shows the use of tú (‘you’ familiar) in cases where the shop assistant and the shopper are both young. Also, some taxi drivers working in the same surroundings, for example, report being addressed with tú by some university students; this is something noticeable for them, as they normally expect the usted address.

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Example 2: Service desk at a public institution in Quito Client: señorita muy buenos días ‘madam very good morning’ Clark: buenos días . . . ‘good morning . . .’

(Taken from Placencia 2001, 196)

In brief, in service interactions among (adult) strangers, conveying respect and certain distance through the choice of formal pronominal and nominal address (often together with other formal forms such as greetings) is what has transpired as the general norm or appropriate behaviour for such encounters in previous studies. Transgressions of the norm, such as the use of tú on the part of the service provider when usted is expected, or their use of familiar terms such as papá ‘dad’ or hijita (literally, ‘my little daughter’), have been found to be impolite and even discriminatory, for example when they are used (asymmetrically) in interethnic interaction (Placencia 2008b). 3

E-service Encounters in the Context of Internet Retailing in Latin America

A Euromonitor International report on the growth of retail by channel, that is, internet- vs. store-based retailing, between 2005 and 2010 shows that, globally, from 2009 internet-based retailing features as an area of stronger and more uniform and consistent growth (Internet retailing, June 2011). The report also notes that, as expected, different regions performed differently in the period considered. Interestingly, Latin America and Asia Pacific were the regions achieving the highest growth rates in internet retailing in this period. This is confirmed by other reports such as the 2010 AméricaEconomía Intelligence report for Visa (Estudio de comercio electrónico en América Latina, Junio de 2010), which notes a 39% growth in e-commerce for Latin America in 2009, with an expected growth of 27% for the first quarter of 2010. While there is variation in growth in this sector in Latin America, linked to, among other factors, matters of infrastructure and internet penetration, with countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile in the lead,5 growth in internet 5  See, for example, indexes of e-readiness in Latin America vis-à-vis Spain provided by Instituto Latinoamericano de Comercio Electrónico ILCE at http://www.einstituto.org/nuestras-iniciativas/ observatorio-y-centro-de-estudios-de-la-economia-digital/america-latina/.

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retailing in Latin America is expected to continue. Teijeiro (2011), for example, suggests that e-commerce spending will have increased by more than 90% in Latin America by 2014.6 One of the biggest players in this sector, offering “the largest online commerce platform in Latin America” (Teijeiro 2011) is MercadoLibre. This is a company ranked 15th in 2011 by Fortune among the fastest growing tech companies around the world (Jaramillo Marín 20 Sep 2011). In terms of audience, globally ML occupies 8th place, after companies such as Amazon, Apple and eBay (ComScore 17 August 2011). In the context of this growth of internet retailing in Latin America and of companies such as ML, which represent an increasing shift from face-to-face to e-service interaction, it is of interest to examine how the e-service exchange is carried out, particularly when service interactions between shoppers and sellers are available for inspection. This is the case with ML. A selected corpus from its subsidiary in Ecuador7 is, as previously indicated, the object of analysis in the present study. 4

Some Features of ML and the Corpus Employed

ML is a market place described by the site as: la mayor plataforma de compras y ventas por Internet de América Latina. Compradores y vendedores se encuentran para intercambiar información y realizar transacciones de comercio electrónico con una amplia gama de productos y servicios, a precio fijo o en subasta. the largest retail platform for Internet purchases and sales in Latin America where shoppers and sellers meet to exchange information and carry out e-commerce transactions of a large range of products and services, at a fixed price or at auction. (My translation) ML is similar to the eBay concept, for example, in that individuals themselves can sell a wide range of products online. However, while ML offers the possibil6  For example, a 30% growth in e-commerce was reported for Colombia in 2011 (Díaz 2011). 7  According to a 2012 ILCE report, in the rankings on internet retailing in Latin America, Ecuador appears in 8th place, after Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. http://www.hoy.com.ec/noticias-ecuador/ecuador-es-octavo-en-e-commerce-enamerica-latina-554434.html. Accessed 10 April 2013.

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ity of auctions like eBay, on ML auctions seem to be the marked rather than the default option, and they are not considered in the present study. In relation to products sold at a fixed price as stipulated by the site, interestingly, bargaining is not infrequent and nor is bartering. ML thus shares some key features with eBay and other market places like Amazon, but displays some differences too. Its uniqueness lies in its format: it offers a question-answer structure that allows prospective shoppers to ask for additional information, make an offer, and/or arrange face-to-face contact before proceeding with the purchase. In turn, sellers can also publicly provide the information requested, respond to offers and may invite shoppers to proceed with the transaction and/or arrange face-to-face or other contacts. These exchanges are visible to anyone visiting the site. They take place, as previously indicated, with participants interacting with virtual identities on display. In a few cases, a first name can be seen at the end of a seller’s replies; however, it is unlikely to be his/her real name: ML explicitly instructs users to register on the site with a pseudonym and not to provide personal details. This question-answer format is available to customers requiring further information or wishing to engage in bargaining or bartering; others can simply select the product and proceed to purchase without engaging with the seller at all. The following thread, taken from the animals and pets domain, illustrates this question-answer format: Thread 1

•

Tiene este pero[sic]http://bimg2mistatic.com/bulldog-france-listos-paraesta-semana_MEC-F-3563139175_122012jpg? ‘Have youV got this dog http://bimg2mistatic.com/bulldog-france-listospara-esta-semana_MEC-F-3563139175_122012jpg?’8 Esta vendida la vaquita, tengo dos hembras pardas disponibles, una con patitas blancas hermosa [Hace 1 día] ‘The cow-looking one has been sold, I have two brown bitches available, one with white paws she’s beautiful’ [One day ago]  amigo 450 compra inmediata, gracias  ‘friend 450 immediate purchase, thanks’

 •

  

8  In the examples provided here and throughout the text, tú ‘you familiar’ is translated as youT, and, usted ‘you formal/respectful’, as youV. Also, the examples are reproduced as they appeared on ML, with spelling and other mistakes.

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No gracias [Hace 7 días]    ‘No thanks’ [7 days ago] • Te interesa cambio con bull dog ingles    ‘If youT are interested, I can exchange it with an English bulldog’ N  o muchas gracias [Hace 7 días]    ‘No, many thanks’ [7 days ago] Hola • disculpa tienes el cachorro? Te puedo ofrecer un cambio? Tengo una



cachorra pug carlino mas una laptop hp core 2duo para negociar que dices saludos espero tu respuesta  ‘Hello sorry to bother youT do youT have the puppy? Can I offer youT an exchange deal? I have a pug carlino female puppy plus an hp core 2 duo laptop for negotiation what do youT think greetings I’ll be waiting for your answer’ No me interesa otro perro, muchas gracias [Hace 3 días]  ‘I’m not interested in another dog, many thanks’ [3 days ago]

  

From the top, the first exchange in this thread displays a request for information by the shopper (Tiene este pero[sic] . . . / ‘Have youV got this dog . . .’), followed by its corresponding reply from the seller (Esta vendida . . . / ‘It’s been sold . . .’). The second exchange shows an offer (amigo 450 compra inmediata, gracias/ ‘friend 450 immediate purchase, thanks’), followed by a rejection (No gracias/ ‘No thanks’). The third exchange also displays an offer involving bartering this time: Te interesa cambio con bull dog ingles ‘If youT are interested, I can exchange it with an English bulldog’. This offer is also rejected by the seller, as can be seen from his/her answer: No muchas gracias/ ‘No, many thanks’. The last exchange shows two main acts: a request for information (. . . tienes el cachorro ‘. . . /do you have the puppy’) and an offer (tengo una cachorra pug carlino mas una laptop hp core 2duo para negociar . . . /‘I have a pug carlino female puppy plus an hp core 2 duo laptop for negotiation . . .’), which is also turned down (No me interesa otro perro . . . /‘I’m not interested in another dog . . .’). As can be seen, service interactions on ML share key features with face-toface commercial service encounters in that they can involve the exchange of information and/or price negotiation, but also with different types of computer-mediated communication such as anonymous forums with asynchronous interactions via the written medium. There are several different product domains within ML. The one I have chosen to focus on for the present study is that of ‘pets and other animals’, as in the above examples. This domain was selected because purchases of animals are more likely to involve locals; other products like clothes and accessories can

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be more easily shipped by post to any address in Ecuador or indeed elsewhere. The system allows prospective shoppers to choose a city or province, and I chose Quito and the Pichincha province in which Quito is located. However, from the exchanges examined it can be seen that some shoppers naturally come from surrounding areas and sometimes from even further afield. This can be derived from shoppers’ explicit comments on where they are based. A corpus of 230 exchanges between 22 sellers and multiple shoppers was compiled by randomly selecting products within the chosen domain.9 Additionally, the study draws on information provided by the site and informal interviews with 3 Quiteño ML users on their choice of address on the site—two shoppers and one seller, all males, between 34 and 45 years of age. Attempts were made to contact 6 sellers who publicly displayed either the name of their business or their telephone number in the exchanges examined; however, in practice, I was only able to get in touch with one of them. Out of 30 shoppers who were approached at a certain time in a busy shopping centre in Quito, 4 reported to be ML users, and 2 agreed to be interviewed for the present study. A future study, however, would benefit from insights from a larger number of ML users, both shoppers and sellers (see Section 6). In relation to ethical matters, this study conforms to the recommendations of the Association of Internet Researchers in that the exchanges examined appear in a site of public access. Also, shoppers and sellers conceal their identity by using pseudonyms or nicknames, as previously indicated. Therefore, informed consent from participants is not required. In any case, pseudonyms were modified where names had to be mentioned; this is because even if they are not the true names, they still constitute identity markers (Danet 1998). I am aware, nonetheless, that the distinction between what is public and what is private is not entirely clear-cut, as Sveningsson Elm (2009) suggests. This has to do with the fact that users of a particular site may conceive of a public site as being private. Given the complexity of the topic, what is important, as Sveningson Elm (2009) points out with reference to the recommendations provided by the Swedish Research Council, is to ensure that the study does not cause harm, offence or humiliation to participants. This is something that other authors have also emphasized in the past in other areas (cf. Triandis 1983) and that is a consideration guiding the present study. 9  58 pets and other animals available for sale at the time the data were collected were numbered from 1 to 58. 22 were then randomly selected using StatTrek random number generator, excluding duplicates (http://stattrek.com/statistics/random-number-generator.aspx). The reader should note that some of the exchanges in the corpus generated were incomplete since ML erases questions or answers that breach the site’s rules.

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5 Results Pronominal address usage by both shoppers and sellers is considered in section 5.1 below, followed by nominal address in 5.2. It was pointed out in Section 2 that formal greetings have been found to co-occur with formal address in faceto-face service interactions in Ecuadorian Spanish (Quito), reinforcing or adding to the formality of the encounter. It is thus interesting to see the kinds of greetings that are employed on ML. This topic is examined in Section 5.3. 5.1 Pronominal Address Starting with shoppers, their use of both familiar tú and respectful usted was identified. This can be seen, for example, in the first (Tiene . . . ‘Have youV got . . .’) and third (Hola disculpa . . . ‘Hello sorry to bother youT’) exchanges in thread 1 above. Instances of a mixture of the two pronouns, as in 3 below, were also found among shoppers’ enquiries: Example 3 disculpa cual es la diferencia del bullmastif con el mastin ingles me podria ayudar con esa informacion ‘excuseT me what’s the difference between the bullmastif and the English mastiff can youV help with this piece of information’ Finally, ∅ pronominal address was also identified, as in this example which consists of a brief direct question by which the pronominal address is bypassed: Example 4 cuanto es lo ultimo? Gracias ‘what’s the bottom price? Thanks’ The following chart shows the overall results for shoppers. As can be seen, usted emerges as the form employed most frequently, in line with results from face-to-face service interactions, followed by ∅ address, the tú form, and only a few cases of T+V. The relatively high occurrence of ∅ address among shoppers may be an indication of uncertainty about what is appropriate address in this virtual context. Shoppers may therefore avoid addressing the seller directly; however, their formulation might simply be dictated by the need for speed and briefness in the online environment where the entire SE interaction, with greetings,

48 60%

Placencia

55.30%

50% 40% 27.43%

30%

16.81%

20% 10%

0.44%

0% Usted/[V]

∅ Address

Tú [T]

Tú + Usted [T+V]

chart 3.1 Pronominal address usage by shoppers (N=226)

question(s) or offers, expressions of gratitude and farewells, is often condensed into one turn. Analyzing users’ perceptions of this usage would help better understand their preferences. Turning to sellers, the same trend is observed in that usted is employed more frequently than tú; however, a lower incidence of both usted and tú can be seen, along with a much higher incidence of ∅ address: 50% 45% 40%

47.03% 41.55%

35% 30% 25% 20% 15%

10.50%

10% 5% 0%

0.91% Usted [V]

∅ Address

Tú [T]

chart 3.2 Pronominal address usage by sellers (N=219)

Tú + Usted (T+V)

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This higher incidence of ∅ address can be explained by the fact that the questions posed by shoppers project a response in the form of a direct or an indirect yes/no answer or an item of information, as in the first exchange in thread 1 above (Tiene este pero . . . ‘Have you got this dog . . .’; Esta]vendida ‘It’s been sold . . .’), or an acceptance or rejection when it comes to offers. Sellers often restrict themselves to providing the information requested or agreeing to or rejecting an offer, as in this example: Example 5 cambio por un bulldog de 7 meses ‘I’d like to exchange it for a 7-month old bulldog . . .’ gracias pero no deseo cambios ‘thanks but I do not want a swap’ All in all, and comparing tú and usted usage, the results show that usted is more frequently employed, mirroring, to a large extent, the trend in the face-to-face context of distance keeping referred to in Section 2; however, one can see that familiar tú is on the increase. Also, despite the overall preference for formal usted, the data shows quite a few features of informal language in the exchanges in terms of the use of certain nominal forms (see 5.2), abbreviated language, and generally little attention paid to norms of punctuation. Additionally, as suggested earlier, there seems to be hesitation among some users about which pronominal form to select, resulting perhaps in ∅ address in some cases, or in the use of a mixture of forms. Individual variation in preferences can also be observed. Concerning sellers, when there are threads with multiple enquiries and/or offers for the same product, and, therefore, multiple replies by the same seller, it is possible to observe certain patterns. For example, usted is invariably used by some sellers even when tú is employed by shoppers. In an interview with one such seller (male, age 45),10 when asked which pronominal form he preferred to use in address to customers and why, he replied: Si usted ve en nuestras respuestas, es muy difícil que [. . .] en nuestras respuestas encuentre que nosotros les tratamos de tú. Nosotros le damos respeto al cliente, lo primero le tratamos con mucha consideración al cliente

10  It was possible to contact this seller as he provided the name of his (family) business and, therefore, details of his business could be accessed on the internet.

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entonces nosotros nunca le tuteamos. Venimos de una familia muy respe­ tuosa entonces nosotros nunca al cliente le tuteamos. If you check our answers, it’s highly unlikely that you will find us using tú. We convey respect to our customers; we treat them with a lot of consideration, thus we never use tú. We come from a very respectful family so we never address our customers with tú. (My translation) Conveying respect and consideration is thus what is associated by this seller with the use of usted, as opposed to tú, and it is what he regards as appropriate in the ML service encounter context. He wants to project the image of a seller who is considerate and respectful.11 Others, on the other hand, appear to favour creating confianza with their interlocutor, that is, a certain closeness and familiarity (see Section 1), rather than emphasizing respect. Tú allows them to do this. 5.2 Nominal Address A variety of forms were identified in the corpus examined. They include the following categories: a.

Honorifics (Leech 1999) such as señor ‘Mr/Sir’ or its variant, mi señor (literally, ‘my Mr/Sir’), caballero (‘gentleman’) and estimado (literally, ‘esteemed’), or its variant, mi estimado ‘my esteemed’. We have also included in this category the noun vendedor ‘seller’ which can be classified as a marker of profession (cf. Quirk and Greenbaum 1973; Carrasco Santana 2002), but which occurs preceded by the title señor ‘Mr’ (señor vendedor ‘Mr seller’) thus expressing respect or deference. Here are some examples:

Example 6 Le pago mi señor buenas tarde por el cachorro 250 . . . ‘I’ll pay you mi señor 250 good afternoon for the puppy . . .’ Example 7 Estimado le ofrsco 350 Animese 11  Similar observations have come from commercial face-to-face service contexts in Quito (cf. Placencia in preparation).

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‘Estimado I offer you 350. Go for it’ Example 8 . . . senor vendedor en mi afan de conseguir . . . le hago la propuesta de 110 por el cachorro . . . Esperando su positiva respuesta caballero, me despido . . . Buenas noches ‘. . . Mr seller in my effort to get . . . I offer you 110 for the puppy. . . . Gentle­ man, hoping for a positive response, I say good bye. . . . Good night’ b.

Shoppers’ usernames on ML as in the following examples:

Example 9 Buenos dias FRODITAMUS, vivo por el Valle de los Chillos ‘Good morning FRODITAMUS, I live in the Valle de los Chillos area’ Example 10 Buenos dias CERTEP2008, si tengo 3 cachorros . . . ‘Good morning CERTEP2008, yes, I do have 3 puppies . . .’ c.

Terms of friendship (Formentelli 2007; Biber et al. 1999)12 or familiarisers (Leech 1999) which include amigo (friend) from the standard register, and the colloquial pana ‘mate’ and, borrowed from English, bro or brother:

Example 11 AMIGO ANIMESE EN LOS 300 ‘FRIEND GO FOR IT TAKE [US$] 300’ Example 12 pana te doy 200 que dice confirma saludos 12  See also Carrasco Santana (2002, 151) who refers to similar terms in Peninsular Spanish as “tratamientos de carácter amistoso y afectuoso” ‘address of friendly and affectionate character’ (my translation).

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‘mate I’ll give you 200 what do you say confirm greetings’ Example 13 brother cuanto lo ultimo pana . . . quiero ese nene- . . . ‘brother what’s your bottom price mate . . . I want that baby- . . .’ As with pronominal address, ∅ nominal address is also considered here as an alternative option. In relation to the frequency of occurrence of nominal forms among both shoppers and sellers, as can be seen in Figure 3 below, a preference for ∅ nominal address is to be observed. However, in both cases, among those who use a nominal form, terms of friendship are more frequent than honorifics in both groups, and, within this category, amigo is the form with the highest occurrence. Table 3.1 also shows that honorifics are employed slightly more frequently by shoppers compared to sellers, and that usernames are employed only by sellers. These findings can be seen more clearly in Table 3.4, also below, that shows the results for both sets of ML users, grouped into the four categories listed above—honorifics, usernames, terms of friendship and ∅ nominal address. table 3.1

Nominal address by shoppers and sellers Shoppers

Address categories

Honorifics

Usernames

(mi) señor señor vendedor (mi) estimado caballero a variety of forms

Terms of friendship amigo pana bro / brother ∅ nominal address ∅ Total

Sellers

No.

% (N=226)

No.

% (N=219)

3 1 4 1 0

1.33% 0.44% 1.77% 0.44% 0.00%

1 0 1 0 9

0.45% 0.00% 0.45% 0.00% 4.10%

53 2 2 160 226

23.45% 0.88% 0.88% 70.80% 99.99%

51 1 0 156 219

23.29% 0.45% 0.00% 71.23% 99.97%

53

ADDRESS FORMS AND RELATIONAL WORK IN E-COMMERCE 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Honorifics

Usernames Shoppers

Terms of friendship

∅ Nominal Address

Sellers

chart 3.3 Nominal address by shoppers and sellers

Honorifics in the corpus examined can be said to construct the commercial relationship as formal and respectful, whereas terms of friendship aim to construct it as familiar and/or solidary. However, there are nuances of meaning. On the affiliative, closeness-seeking end of the continuum, amigo ‘friend’ among strangers seems to occupy a sort of middle ground: it is a term that renders the interaction somewhat friendly as well as egalitarian, whereas the forms pana ‘mate’ and bro or brother seem to project a stronger claim for closeness or familiarity at least by virtue of their being highly colloquial forms. Nonetheless, there is one instance of an intensified formulation of amigo (amigo + augmentative suffix –azo), also highly colloquial, through which the shopper in question seems to claim greater familiarity as well: Example 14 TENGO UNA CONSULTA AMIGASO ESPERO ME PUEDA AYUDAR ‘I HAVE A QUERY AMIGASO [SIC] I HOPE YOU CAN HELP ME’ It is interesting to see which moves amigo occurs with. For instance, it was found together with greetings by sellers, as in example 15 below, or requests by shoppers as in 14 above. Likewise, it was found in offers by shoppers (example 16) and various dispreferred responses (e.g. rejections to offers) by sellers, as in example 17:

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Example 15 qué tal amigo . . . ‘how are you friend . . .’ Example 16 amigo 450 compra inmediata, gracias ‘friend 450 immediate purchase, thank you’ Example 17 NO AMIGO GRACIAS EL PRECIO QUE ESTÀ ‘NO FRIEND THANK YOU IT IS THE STATED PRICE’ Amigo therefore seems to be used together with some face-enhancing acts such as greetings thus emphasizing cordiality, or, with face-threatening acts with a mitigating effect. The latter is the case with offers that sellers may not appreciate as well as with rejections by sellers to offers made by shoppers.13 Interestingly, the same seller (male, age 45) who expressed a preference for usted in address to customers, showed a preference for amigo, explicitly avoiding the use of señor. In his particular case, there seems to be a religious motivation behind this avoidance. In the interview, he indicated that El Señor ‘The Lord’ is “the one above us” meaning God, so it was more appropriate to refer to customers as amigo rather than señor. Others nonetheless seem to prefer the formal form señor in order to convey respect, or they avoid using a nominal form altogether. In relation to usernames such as Froditamus (example 9 above), they can be regarded as a way of personalizing the exchange and thus as affiliation forms. However, in the data examined, their use is restricted to one seller’s exchanges, marking his/her individual style. How friendly or appropriate ML shoppers perceive these forms is something that would need to be explored by means of a questionnaire, for example, as suggested above. At the formal end of the continuum, there are also some subtle differences. For example, while the different forms available convey respect, caballero ‘gentleman’, mi señor, literally ‘my Mr/Sir’ and señor vendedor ‘Mr seller’, seem to involve a deferential aspect. Mi señor in particular seems to have echoes 13  See Carrasco Santana (2002, 149) who highlights the mitigating function of amigo/a (‘male/female friend’) in Peninsular Spanish, when employed with directives and assertives.

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of the servant-master relationships of the past, as suggested by one of our interviewees (male shopper, 34): Esa expresión ‘mi señor’ es casi como decir ‘patrón’. Es una forma de decirle a la persona que él está en control, que él es el que domina la situación y el que manda implícitamente, aunque solamente sea una manipulación comercial. Addressing someone as mi señor is almost like calling them ‘master’. It is a way of telling them that they are in control; that they are in charge, and implicitly, that they are ‘the boss’. You say these things even if it is just a commercial manipulation. (My translation) At the same time, the possessive mi ‘my’ in mi señor seems to be an attempt at drawing the interlocutor in, bringing him or her closer and establishing confianza—a closer relationship—(see Section 1) as also suggested by the same interviewee: Cuando le agregas el “mi” lo que estás haciendo es automáticamente tener más confianza con la persona y ponerte más servicial [. . . .] Por una parte esto es para adular a la persona y hacerle sentir bien y por otro lado para darle confianza. When you add mi ‘my’ [to señor] what you are doing is automatically establishing confianza with your interlocutor and presenting yourself as a more helpful person [. . . .] The aim is to flatter the other person on the one hand and make him/her feel good, and to give them confianza. Estimado (literally, ‘esteemed’) is also an interesting case in that it is an adjective employed here as a nominal form. In formal written correspondence, it would normally precede a title like señor/a (e.g. Estimado señor ‘Dear sir’). As such, estimado can be described as an elliptical form of address that conveys respect, but that has an informal ring to it by virtue of being an abbreviated, and therefore, non-standard form. It may occur, as previously indicated, precedeed by mi ‘my’. As with mi señor, in using mi estimado, the speaker expresses deference and attempts to create closeness at the same time.14 Regarding the use of honorifics, these were found mainly with offers, as in examples 6–8 above, and requests, as in 18 below. Their use can be regarded 14  The use of estimado ‘esteemed’ on its own is also surfacing in correspondence over e-mail in Quito.

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ultimately as a strategy employed by shoppers to gain acceptance of an offer or compliance with a request, or when employed by sellers, to encourage or retain custom. Example 18 . . . yo deseo tener un macho mi señor avíseme ‘. . . I wish to acquire a male puppy mi señor letV me know’ In brief, there are a number of nominal forms in use, although ∅ address is preferred overall by users in both groups. Terms of friendship were found to be more frequent than other forms in both groups. Amigo, as indicated previously, is the term most commonly employed. This is in contrast with face-toface interactions where honorifics still appear to be of widespread use (see Section  2). With respect to their function, their rapport-building role was highlighted: they are used to construct the service interaction in familiar ways. However, the overall preference by both shoppers and sellers for ∅ address can be interpreted as suggesting greater focus on expedience—on getting the task done—rather than on the person.15 One alternative explanation could be uncertainty about what forms are appropriate in this virtual environment, when you have little or no knowledge of your interlocutor and his/her attributes (i.e., age, sex, etc.). 5.3 Greetings as Co-occurring Forms The following categories of greetings as co-occurring forms were identified: a. b.

Formal greetings such as buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’ and a slight variation of this—the intensified greeting muy buen día ‘very good day’. Semiformal greetings which include the greeting abbreviation buenas (from buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’ / noches ‘good evening’) and the form saludos ‘greetings’. The latter seems to have been borrowed from e-mail communication, perhaps where it is normally used in the closing section of semi-formal emails; however, in the corpus examined, saludos also occurs as a greeting, as in 19 below. One case where formal and informal greetings are combined (i.e. hola buenos días ‘hello good morning’) is also included in this category, as well as a few cases of how-are-you inquiries that occur on their own, at the beginning of a turn, rather than accompanying a greeting, as in 20:

15  See Fant (1995), among others, for a distinction between person- and task-orientedness in interaction.

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Example 19: Saludos te doy 200 por que yo tengo 2 bull mas ‘Greetings I’ll give you 200 because I already have 2 more bulldogs’ Example 20 QUE TAL AMIGO LOS DOS PERRITOS . . .  ‘HOW ARE YOU FRIEND THE TWO PUPPIES . . .’ c.

The informal greeting hola ‘hello/hi’ as in this example:

Example 21 Hola tienes hembras y de que color ‘Hello have youT got any bitches and what colour’ In terms of overall results, 60 instances of greetings were found in the turns produced by shoppers, and 50, in those by sellers, as detailed in Table 3.2 below. table 3.2 Greetings produced by shoppers and sellers Type of greeting

Realizations

Shoppers No.

Sellers No.

Formal

buenos días ‘good morning’ buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’ buenas noches ‘good evening’ (muy) buen día ‘(very) good day’ buenas (abbreviated form)16 saludos(cordiales) ‘(cordial) greetings’ cómo está / qué tal ‘how are you’ hola buenos días ‘hello good morning’ hola ‘hello/hi’

8 0 6 5 2 11 2 1 25 60

7 5 9 0 0 8 3 0 18 50

Semiformal

Informal Total

16  In Ecuadorian Spanish, buenas stands for either buenas tardes ‘good afternoon’ or buenas noches ‘good evening’.

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As can be seen, informal hola is clearly the most commonly employed greeting by both shoppers and sellers. Interestingly, this greeting accompanies not only tú address as expected, but also usted and ∅ address. Indeed, including both shoppers and sellers, there are 16 instances of hola co-occurring with tú address, but also 12 instances with usted, and 16 with ∅ address. As such hola and semiformal forms can be said to counteract in some cases the distance marking effect of formal pronominal forms. Overall, informal forms are the most frequent among both shoppers and sellers, as can be seen in Chart 3.4 below. However, comparing the two groups, informal forms are slightly more frequent among shoppers while formal forms are slightly more frequent among sellers. With the inclusion of intensifiers, nonetheless, greetings such as muy buen día ‘very good morning’ seem to adopt the character of actual expressions of good wishes with affiliation rather than distance-keeping coming to the fore. As with address, individual variation can also be observed in ML users’ choice of greeting, with some sellers, for example, employing formal greetings systematically. They do so whether shoppers use formal or informal forms, and whether shoppers include a greeting in their first turn or not. In other words, greetings do not necessarily occur as second pair-parts of greeting sequences. Other sellers seem to opt for the informal hola, again whether that is the form they get from the shopper or not. 50% 45% 40% 35% 30%

Sellers

25%

Shoppers

20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

Formal

Semiformal

chart 3.4 Greetings by shoppers and sellers

Informal

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Summary and Conclusions

To sum up, in this paper I looked at address usage in online service encounters on the basis of a corpus extracted from ML-Ecuador, and with reference to findings from face-to-face service encounters in Quito. Unlike the face-to-face context where the choice of address terms, together with other forms such as greetings, has shown a preference for marking respect and distance, the online context examined shows a mixed picture. The respectful usted is still more frequent than the familiar tú among both shoppers and sellers; however, it can be observed that tú is on the increase and that there appears to be uncertainty among some ML users about what pronominal address is appropriate. Also in some cases, the distance and deference marking quality of usted is counteracted by its co-occurrence with terms of friendship such as amigo. Furthermore, one has to take into account that ∅ pronominal address was found to be more frequent than tú among shoppers and that it is the most frequent form among sellers. This usage may represent an avoidance strategy for some or it could simply be a reflection of the need for brevity in the online medium. Certainly sellers need to answer multiple questions and many restrict themselves to providing the information requested, thus not paying much attention to the interpersonal relation through address. Regarding nominal forms, the face-to-face context has shown a preference for formal forms such as señor and señora through which, again, distance is maintained and respect is emphasized. By contrast, the results from the present study show a move away from this formality. Most users opt for avoiding nominal forms altogether and among those who employ them, there is a preference for the affiliative amigo. Amigo seems to offer a suitable middle ground in constructing the service relationship as not being distant, but not too close either. New, elliptical forms such as estimado are also emerging. Again, this form seems to offer a kind of middle ground by conveying respect but in a more casual way than the full form. Looking at the co-occurrence of pronominal and nominal forms, one can see that there is some code mixing. While in face-to-face encounters the use of formal usted has been found to be largely consistent with formal nominal address (as well as with formal greetings), terms of friendship such as amigo in the present study were also found to co-occur with usted. The same can be said about greetings: hola, for example, was found to co-occur with both familiar and respectful address. Individual variation is another feature of address behaviour that surfaces in the present study: certain address preferences among sellers, for example,

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were identified. Some appear to want to construct themselves in the image of traditional shopkeepers in Quito—those who keep some distance from their customers through pronominal (and nominal) address, thus showing them respect. In brief, what one can see from these results is that the online environment, with its anonymity, is allowing for the development of more informal and more egalitarian service relationships. In some cases they verge on the impolite with the overfriendliness conveyed through colloquial forms such as brother, pana or amigazo when there is no familiarity between the participants. How ML users perceive these forms, however, would need to be explored by means of a questionnaire, for example, or through interviews or focus group discussions. The distance-keeping and deferential address in face-to-face encounters has been related to the traditionally hierarchical character of Ecuadorian society, where being a shopkeeper in corner shops, for example, is regarded as a low status activity. However, the online environment seems to be having a levelling effect—an effect of the new technologies available on the internet, as suggested by authors such as Sproull and Kiesler (1991), that results in what Castells (2002: xxxi) refers to as horizontal communication. In virtual environments, the ethnic or socioeconomic background of the participants, or their age or gender, seem to become irrelevant. The result is also a less personalized service encounter as can be seen through shoppers and sellers’ overall preference for ∅ nominal address. Nonetheless, there is still a great deal to be explored (see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch or Ivorra, this volume, for more studies related to e-service encounters). For example, although in this paper I have focussed on address forms and briefly considered greetings as co-occurring forms, it would be important to look at other features of the interactions such as the realization of actual requests for information and offers. This is something that I explore elsewhere (cf. Placencia forthcoming). Likewise, I examine other domains within ML as part of my broader study (see Section 1) since there can be variation in address and other aspects of the service encounter interaction in relation to the type of product sold and purchased. Additionally, a future study could look at ML service encounters interactions in different geographic regions. Finally, as we have already noted, it would be interesting to explore how shoppers and sellers perceive the address that they receive on ML and what their expectations are (cf. Clyne, Norrby and Warren 2009). This is something that I have only briefly touched upon in this study.

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References Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Longman. Brown, R., and M. Ford. 1972[1961]. “Address in American English.” In Communication in Face to Face Interaction, edited by John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson, 128–145. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1960. “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, edited by T.A. Sebeok, 253–276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carrasco Santana, Antonio. 2002. Los Tratamientos en Español. Salamanca: Ediciones Colegio de España. Castells, Manuel. 2002. “The Internet and the Network Society (Series Editor’s Preface).” In The Internet in Everyday Life, edited by Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite, xxix–xxxi. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cervone, Emma. 1999. “Racismo y Vida Cotidiana: Las Tácticas de la Defensa Étnica.” In Ecuador racista. Imágenes e Identidades, edited by Emma Cervone and Freddy Rivera, 137–156. Quito: FLACSO-Sede Ecuador. Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren. 2009. Language and Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. ComScore. 17 August, 2011. “Sitios de Amazon visitados por 1 de cada 5 de los usuarios de internet mundiales en junio”. http://www.comscore.com/esl/Insights/Press_ Releases/2011/8/Amazon_Sites_Visited_by_1_in_5_Global_Internet_Users_in_June. Danet, Brenda. 1998. “Text as Mask: Gender, Play, and Performance on the Internet.” In Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-mediated Communication and Community, edited by Steven G. Jones, 129–158. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De la Torre Espinosa, Carlos. 1999. “Everyday Forms of Racism in Contemporary Ecuador: The Experiences of Middle-class Indians.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, 1: 92–112. Díaz, Carlos Alberto. 1 July 2011. “Colombia representa el 1% del comercio electrónico del mundo.” Enter.co. http://www.enter.co/?p=21872. Accessed 10th January 2012. “Estudio de comercio electrónico en América Latina.” June 2010. AméricaEconomía Intelligence report for Visa.” http://especiales.americaeconomia.com/2010/comercio_ electronico/index.php. Accessed 21st November 2012. Fant, Lars. 1995. “Negotiation Discourse and Interaction in a Cross-cultural Perspective: The case of Sweden and Spain.” In The Discourse of Business Negotiation, edited by Konrad Ehlich and Johannes Wagner, 177–201. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fitch, Kristine L. 1998. Speaking Relationally: Culture, Communication, and Interpersonal Connection. New York Guilford Press.

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———. 1998. “Pragmatic Variation: Ecuadorian Spanish vs Peninsular Spanish.” Spanish Applied Linguistics 2: 71–106. ———. 2001. “Percepciones y Manifestaciones de la (Des)cortesía en la Atención al Público: El Caso de una Institución Pública Ecuatoriana.” Oralia 4: 177–212. ———. 2004. “Rapport-building Activities in Corner Shop Interactions.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 8: 215–245. ———. 2005. “Pragmatic Variation in Corner Store Interactions in Quito and Madrid.” Hispania 88: 583–598. ———. 2007. “Entre lo Institucional y lo Sociable: Conversación de Contacto, Identidades y Metas Múltiples en Interacciones en la Peluquería.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (RILI) V, 1, 9: 139–161. ———. 2008a. “Pragmatic Variation in Corner Shop Transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish.” In Variational Pragmatics. A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages, edited by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron, 307–332. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 2008b. “ ‘Hola María’: Racismo & Discriminación en la Interacción Interétnica Cotidiana en Quito.” Discurso & Sociedad 2, 3: 573–608. ———. 2010a. “El Estudio de Formas de Tratamiento en Colombia y Ecuador ” In Formas y Fórmulas de Tratamiento en el Mundo Hispanohablante, edited by Martin Hummel, Bettina Klugge and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop, 341–373. México D.F./ Graz El Colegio de México / Karl Franzens Universität. ———. 2010b. “(Des)cortesía, Migración y Comunicación Intercultural.” In (Des)cortesía en Español. Espacios Teóricos y Metodológicos para Su Estudio, edited by Franca Orletti and Laura Mariottini, 399–430. Roma Universidad Roma Tre—Programa EDICE. ———. 2010c. “¿Qué Dice Flaco? Algunos Aspectos de la Práctica Social de Apodar en Quito.” In Formas y Fórmulas de Tratamiento en el Mundo Hispánico, edited by Martin Hummel, Bettina Klugge and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop, 965–992. México, D.F./Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl Franzens Universität. ———. Forthcoming. “AMIGO ANIMESE EN LOS 300. Relational Work in Offers in Commercial Service Encounter Interactions in an Ecuadorian Online Market Place.” ———. In preparation. The impact of age in address behaviour in service encounter interactions in Quito. Quirk, Randolph, and Sidney Greenbaum. 1973. A University Grammar of English. Harlow: Longman. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2008 [2000]. “Face, (Im)Politeness and Rapport.” In Culturally Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, edited by Helen SpencerOatey, 11–47. London: Continuum. Sproull, Lee, and Sara B. Kiesler. 1991. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

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CHAPTER 4

The Genre of Web-Mediated Service Encounters in Not-for-Profit Organizations: Cross-Cultural Study Patricia Bou-Franch 1 Introduction The aim of this chapter is to examine web-mediated service encounters in which the service providers are not-for-profit organizations. Most research in the service encounters literature has focused on face-to-face or telephone interactions within the commercial sector. However, the increasing use of technologies over the past decades has completely changed the interactional landscape (see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Placencia or Ivorra, this volume). Further, the non-commercial sector has gained importance in the economies of the developed countries. Despite the popularity of electronic interactions and the importance of the non-commercial sector, there is so far little discourseanalytic research into web-mediated service encounters in not-for-profit organizations (NPOs, henceforth). This chapter addresses this gap in the literature through a cross-cultural study of service encounters in NPO websites. In order to explore the genre of web-mediated, NPO service encounters, a corpus of NPO websites, based in Spain and the UK, was compiled and analysed drawing from insights from the NPO marketing literature, computer-mediated communication research and the field of politeness studies. Specifically, a genre approach to im/politeness was adopted in the analysis of the data. The chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, the literature on service encounters is critically discussed and reviewed. Next, NPOs and the genre of non-commercial e-service encounters are introduced in relation to the data (section 3). The review of the literature in the previous sections leads to the formulation of three research questions that guide the analysis. Section 4 provides details of the methodology employed in answering the research questions while section 5 reports and discusses the results of the analyses in terms of choice of content and style, and of cross-cultural comparison. The last section is devoted to the conclusions of this study.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_005

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Service Encounters

This chapter reports on a preliminary cross-cultural investigation of webmediated service encounters provided by not-for-profit organizations, based in Spain and the UK. Service encounters have been traditionally understood in terms of ordinary social interactions between a service provider and a customer (Merritt 1976), which involve the exchange of different types of commodities, like information or goods (Ventola 2005). Service encounters constitute a type of social practice or genre enacted through specific semiotic elements, including language (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008; Ventola 2005). Through the linguistic analysis of these practices “cultural patterns can emerge and preferred communicative styles can be established” (Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004: 121). They are, therefore, ideal sites for cross-cultural study. Most research into service encounters has analysed dyadic, face-to-face interactions in a range of contexts (Antonopoulou 2001; Bayyurt and Bayraktaroglu 2001; Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004; Placencia 2008; Traverso 2006, to mention a few), with some attention also paid to telephone-mediated conversations. The studies on call centre interactions in an airline company and in a caregiver service company illustrate this interest (see Economidou-Kogetsidis 2005 and Márquez Reiter 2005, respectively). Finally, the study of web-mediated service encounters from discourse analytic perspectives is surprisingly scarce and in need of further research, a point I return to later (but see GarcésConejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008 or Placencia, this volume). Service encounters have been characterized as an institutional genre, involving an institutional representative and an ordinary participant (EconomidouKogetsidis 2005; Drew and Heritage 1992; Márquez Reiter 2005). Participant roles, and the rights and obligations that come with them, are well-defined and are particularly stable over time (Bayyurt and Bayraktaroglu 2001), with the institutional representative enacting the role of service provider, e.g. seller or company representative, and the ordinary participant acting as service seeker, e.g. customer or buyer. The interaction between these participants is taskoriented or transactional in Brown and Yule’s (1983) terms. It is precisely this transactional objective which constitutes the genre’s communicative purpose and its most clearly defining feature. However, the transactional and interpersonal functions are not mutually exclusive, and an interpersonal orientation is also to be expected in any transactional encounter (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008). Indeed, the study of how interpersonal relations are constructed, (re)negotiated and maintained within these transactionally-oriented interactions has

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taken centre stage in the service encounters literature. This has mainly dealt with requests, which are considered to be the most frequent type of linguistic action in service encounters (Antonopoulou 2001, but see Márquez Reiter 2005). Studies in this field have moved from a focus on the speech-act level to addressing the unfolding of the whole encounter (Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004; Ventola 2005). Interpersonal concerns, or rapport-building work, can be found in other exchanges or sequences throughout the encounter (Placencia 2008, Traverso 2006). Another interesting tendency within the service encounter literature is to increasingly examine naturally-occurring discourse data (Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004, Merritt, this volume). The present study also addresses the interpersonal level of communication in a non-experimental context. Specifically, this chapter adopts a genre approach to politeness (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010, 2013) in order to examine the discourse of web-mediated service encounters in NPOs. This is innovative in at least two respects (i) it deals with the non-commercial sector, and (ii) the focus shifts from face-to-face or telephone conversations to computermediated service encounters. Both areas are under-researched in the field of service encounters (but see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008 or Placencia, this volume). To the best of my knowledge, there is no discourse-analytic study of service encounters in the non-commercial sector, even though this is a “significant and growing section of developed countries’ economies” (Johnston 2005, 1303). In the next section, I define NPOs and begin to describe the genre of non-commercial e-service encounters drawing from extant literature and a preliminary analysis of the corpus of NPO websites collected for this study. 3 NPOs and the Genre of Non-commercial E-service Encounters Not-for-profit or non-profit making organisations include a variety of voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises which broadly exist ‘for public benefit’ and the improvement of society, rather than to make profit1. The NP Sector is also known as civil society, the Voluntary and Community Sector or the third sector (Tercer Sector, Sector de las ONG o Sector no lucrativo, in Spain2), as it sits between the Government or public sector and the private or commercial sector. NPOs in this sector seek social change and share social 1  They are therefore eligible for a range of income and property tax exemptions. http:// knowhownonprofit.org/basics/what-is-non-profit. 2  http://plataformaong.org/upload/87/08/Coordinadora_ONGD.pdf.

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values related to solidarity and citizen responsibility and they aim to transform society into a fair, equal and sustainable reality. According to the UK’s National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO),3 in 2008 there were nearly 700,000 people in paid work in the sector. Ruiz Olabuenaga (2006) estimated that, in Spain, a similar number of people were in paid work in this sector. These figures reflect the importance of the NP sector in both Britain and Spain. Service providing companies, in the commercial as well as the non-commercial sectors, have modified the way they interact with their customers by resorting to electronic interfaces or self-service technologies “that enable customers to produce a service independent of direct service employee involvement” (Meuter et al. 2000, 50). From the point of view of genre analysis, in order to describe non-commercial e-service encounters as a social practice or genre, their communicative purposes must first be identified, as these will constrain choices of content and style (Swales 1990). In addition to the general transactional goal identified for face-to-face and electronic commercial service encounters (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008), NPOs have four further specific objectives, related to different social groups. NPOs seek to provide clients with different social services and community members with the opportunity to become involved and serve their community (Persaud et al. 2009). These aims are part of NPOs’ mission and objectives and constitute important communicative purposes from a genre perspective. Additionally, raising funds is also seen as a crucial challenge, especially within the current climate of economic slowdown in which NPOs compete for individual donors, government funds, and funding from the public sector (Goatman and Lewis 2007; Long and Chiagouris 2006). Finally, volunteers play a crucial role within NPOs, since they rely on both personnel and volunteers to achieve their goals (Wu and Shyu 2011). These organizations, therefore, must also target volunteers and engage in volunteer recruiting. In sum, NPOs target multiple population groups and aim to “attract and sustain public support, while simultaneously maintaining a focus on their mission and objectives” (Persaud et al. 2009). Before going online, NPO marketing relied on consumer shows, word of mouth, printed media, phone calls, and letters offering information and asking for donors. Only large NPOs could afford to produce public service announcements for radio or television. However, digital technologies offer commercial and non-commercial organisations the opportunity to gain greater visibility and reach a wider audience. NPOs have been increasingly going online since 3  http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/.

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1999 (Persaud et al. 2009). Wenham et al. (2003) argue that thanks to internet, NPOs can cut costs, reach new audiences, raise funds and involve users. Thus, I take the four main goals of NPOs websites (Persaud et al. 2009) to constitute the communicative purposes of the genre of non-commercial e-service encounters, namely: 1) 2) 3) 4)

to provide information on the organisation and the services it offers; to enable online donations; to facilitate online volunteer recruitment; and to foster relationship building with/among their supporters.

To my knowledge, within language-based disciplines, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch (2008) and Placencia (this volume) are the only studies of computer-mediated service encounters. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and BouFranch (2008) argue that even though there is no interpersonal interaction within the e-commerce genre, politeness still plays an important role. This is because, given the transactional goal of the genre, organizations will resort to persuasive acts like requests, advice or suggestions in addressing their potential customers; further, these acts may pose a threat to identity and face, which are at the heart of politeness. However, the degree of politeness is not open to negotiation in this genre, and the service provider will have to anticipate consumers’ needs and establish the adequate parameters to achieve the optimum balance between closeness and deference with clients (GarcésConejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008; Garcés-Conejos and Bou-Franch 2002; Sperber 1995). Electronic service encounters in the NP sector share these features with the genre of electronic commerce. However, little is known of the exact content and style of the non-commercial e-service encounter in Britain and Spain. Against this backdrop, the specific aim of this chapter is to carry out a crosscultural examination of the genre of the non-commercial e-service encounter. Having identified the genre’s goals, my inquiry focuses on choices of content and style (Swales 1990). To guide this research, three research questions were formulated: RQ1—What is the content of non-commercial web-mediated service encounters? RQ2—What are the politeness strategies of non-commercial webmediated service encounters? RQ3—What are the similarities and differences between Spanish and British non-commercial web-mediated service encounters?

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4 Methodology In order to answer the three research questions, a corpus of 20 NPO websites was compiled and analysed. The websites belonged to NPOs registered in the UK (n = 10) and Spain (n = 10). All twenty NPOs in this study provided women with a range of social services. Women-oriented NPOs were chosen to make gender inequality more visible and to find comparable contexts. Firstly, despite advances in women’s rights over the last century, women and girls still face a myriad of problems in contemporary societies as a result of gender inequality and discrimination. Women oriented NPOs address such problems and offer support through their websites. Secondly, comparability in cross-cultural research is an important and often delicate methodological issue, especially when dealing with non-experimental data (Bou-Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2008; Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004, Traverso 2006). By selecting women-oriented websites the comparability of the two data sets was expected to increase. The 20 NPOs were selected according to google ranking. The search terms ‘ayuda mujer españa’ and ‘help women UK’ were googled and the first ten links yielded by each search were compiled, provided that they corresponded to registered NPOs. The websites of the organizations listed in table 4.1 constitute the data under analysis. Importantly, service encounters included in the data are instances of computer-mediated communication, which is subject to social and technological table 4.1

List of British and Spanish NPOs whose websites provided the data under analysis

British NPOs

Spanish NPOs

Women’s aid Rights of women Women for women Enterprising women Refuge Women’s support project Eaves Sharan Bristol crisis service for women Maypole women

Proyecto esperanza Mujeres progresistas Faraxa Fundación mujer Línea de atención mujer Círculo de mujeres de negocios Fundación Anabella Mujeres para la salud Asociación de mujeres investigadoras y tecnólogas Centro de asistencia a víctimas de agresiones sexuales—CAVAS

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constraints (Herring 2007). Of particular importance are the technological affordances which mark e-service encounters as different from face-to-face service encounters (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2008). These include the polylogal nature of website communication, which involves not only multiple authors but also multiple recipients; its asynchronicity or lack of physical co-presence of the ‘pair’ sender/receiver, the convergence of different media in one digital platform, and its multimodality (Androutsopoulos 2011; Bou-Franch 2013; Bou-Franch et al. 2012; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Herring 2007; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011; Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). In order to address the three research questions posed above, a combination of methodologies from different disciplines was used. To investigate the content of websites (RQ1), I resorted to computer-mediated communication and the NPO marketing literature (Herring 2008, Persaud et al. 2009). Specifically, the analysis draws from a taxonomy of content categories designed for the study of relationship building between NPOs and web visitors. For the purposes of this study, only the contents used by the NPO to address visitors were selected (Table 4.2): table 4.2 Taxonomy of content categories for the creation of relationships in NPO websites, based on Persaud et al. (2009) Organization to visitor

1. Shares information about organization activities 2. Offers any type of membership 3. Asks to become a volunteer 4. Asks for donations 5. Organization has online newsletter /news section 6. Provides external links 7. Allows account creation 8. Offers advice related to its cause

The style of NPO electronic service encounters was analysed in terms of the politeness strategies employed in the websites (RQ2). For their analysis, a second-order study was developed within a genre approach to politeness (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010, 2013a). Politeness2 studies view politeness as a term within a sociolinguistic theory and draw from taxonomies designed by analysts to identify patterns of social and linguistic behaviour (Watts et al. 1992). The genre approach to politeness views second-order studies as valuable

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in providing a common set of terms to label sociolinguistic behaviour (Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013) and as a means of identifying patterns of use in interaction (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011). Further, the genre approach views politeness as related to identity processes; in particular, it argues that “politeness evaluations can ensue as a result of (i) identity verification and/ or an (ii) im/explicit recognition of the authenticity/self-worth/self-efficacy attributes associated with one identity” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013, 18). Although the specific examination of identity processes falls outside the scope of this chapter, the study of the communicative purposes of the genre in the previous section revealed that NPO websites target multiple population groups. Therefore, the social identities relevant to the data under scrutiny include the corporate identity of the organizations which own the websites, the recipients of the social services provided, donors, volunteers and supporters, be they individuals or other corporations. This approach crucially argues that politeness assessments are made within the expectations of a given genre practice; although there is no visible negotiation of politeness in NPO websites, the genres enacted in such websites are not new. NPOs have a previous history of relationships with customers, volunteers, and donors, whether individuals, government or commercial organisations, and can draw from their past experience, from their genre knowledge, to attempt to establish communication with the different social groups and institutions through their webs. Further, genre knowledge also assisted the analyst in identifying politeness strategies. This study focused on positive and negative politeness strategies and employed a taxonomy adapted from Brown and Levinson (1987), as shown in table 4.3, below: table 4.3 List of positive and negative politeness strategies used in the analysis Positive Politeness (PP)

Negative Politeness (NP)

1. Notice, attend to visitors’ interests, wants, needs 2. Exaggerate interest, approval, sympathy with visitor 3. Intensify interest to visitor 4. Use in-group identity markers 5. Claim common ground 6. Assert or presuppose NPO’s knowledge and concern for visitors’ wants 7. Offer, promise 8. Give, or ask for, reasons

1. Be conventionally indirect 2. Question, hedge 3. Give options 4. Minimize the imposition 5. Give deference 6. Apologize 7. Impersonalize 8. Nominalize

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Once the data were selected, the analytical procedure involved different steps. First, a quantitative analysis of the contents of each website was carried out; this involved identifying and computing the contents for relationship building found in the Spanish and the British websites. Second, a qualitative analysis was carried out that explored the politeness strategies used in relation to the above contents in both data sets. Unlike the case of the quantitative analysis, however, the qualitative analysis was restricted to the homepage or landing page of the websites. The taxonomies developed above (Tables 4.2 and 4.3, respectively) were used in these steps of the analysis. Finally, results for the two data sets were compared in order to carry out the cross-cultural study (RQ3). 5

Results and Discussion

5.1 Contents of Relationship Building The analysis of the data sets in terms of the content categories for the creation of relationships was used to answer RQ1, reproduced next: What is the content of non-commercial web-mediated service encounters? The analysis yielded the following results: table 4.4 Number of Spanish (S, n = 10) and British (B, n = 10) NPO websites that contained the different categories for relationship building Organization to visitor

S

B

Shares information about organization activities Offers any type of membership Asks to become a volunteer Asks for donations Organization has online newsletter /news section Provides external links Allows account creation Offers advice related to its cause

10 8 5 6 6 9 3 3

10 7 8 9 10 10 4 7

As can be observed in table 4.4, providing information about NPO activities was the most frequent category, occurring in every single website of the Spanish and British data sets. In the case of the British data, providing an online newsletter or news section together with providing external links were found in all

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websites, whereas only the latter, providing external links, was also very prominent in the Spanish data. The categories of news section and the external links, however, are closely related to the sharing of information. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that these categories were also very common in the websites under scrutiny. Also frequent was the category through which the NPO offers any type of membership, which occurred in 8 Spanish and 7 British websites. In contrast, the category of allowing the creation of an account was infrequent, having occurred only in 3 Spanish and 4 British NPO websites. This shows a common preference for enhancing relationships through the offering of different kinds of membership rather than through the specific creation of NPO related accounts. As regards the categories of asking to become a volunteer and asking for online donations, these were less frequent in the Spanish data (occurring in 5 and 6 websites, respectively) than in the British data (occurring in 8 and 9 websites, respectively). Finally, the category of giving advice on NPO’s causes, related to the organizations’ objectives and missions, was very frequent in the British data (7/10 websites) but very infrequent in the Spanish data (3/10), a contrasting result to which I will return later. In sum, all categories of relationship building, within the section of communication from the organization to web visitors, featured in all twenty websites, with only two categories in the Spanish data and one in the British data occurring in less than 40% of the websites. 5.2 Politeness Strategies The analysis of politeness strategies in the data sets responded to RQ2: What are the politeness strategies of non-commercial web-mediated service encounters? The qualitative analysis of the politeness strategies employed in the homepage of the NPOs was carried out in relation to the contents for relationship building identified above (section 5.1). In relation to content category 1: ‘Shares information about organization activities’, NPOs in both the Spanish and the British data sets frequently resorted to a combination of PP1: Notice, attend to visitors’ interests, wants, needs and PP6: Assert or presuppose NPO’s knowledge and concern for visitors’ wants. The following examples come from the Spanish data and illustrate this point: (1) Materiales informativos para educación afectivo-sexual (S3) Information on affective and sexual education

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(2) Para ampliar información consultar la declaración de estrategias revisada en el 2009 (versión tríptico) (S9) For further information, go to the declaration of strategies, revised in 2009 ( flier) By offering visitors information, the NPOs show a concern for them and simultaneously presuppose that they know what the visitor wants or needs to know. In both examples, the negative politeness strategy NP7. Impersonalize was also identified: in the first case impersonalization was achieved through a nominal clause whereas, in the second, it was achieved through the infinitive, used with imperative meaning, ‘consultar’ (go to). Resorting to multiple strategies within the same discourse move was very frequent in the data. The strategies of presupposing NPO visitors’ needs (PP6) and impersonalization (NP7) were also common in the British data. (3) Domestic Violence A–Z (B1) / Directory of support services (B6) A point worth mentioning is that many of the examples in the data were used not as text but as hypertext; thus, the NPO further shares information by providing the option of further navigation; this corresponds to the first content category. In the following example, the NPO shares information about its services and mission by resorting to the strategies of intensifying the interest that something/somebody has for the visitor (PP3) and by asserting that they are aware of women’s needs (PP6) and have the tools to improve their lives. (4) The SHARAN Project is designed to empower, educate and inspire women who want to actively learn more about the support and choices that are available to them, to provide them with the tools to lead life on their own terms (B8). In relation to the second category for relationship building, through which NPOs ‘Offer any type of membership’, the analysis underlined the frequency of use of saliently positive politeness strategies. For instance, in example 5, below, the Spanish NPO resorts to PP2. Exaggerate interest, through use of the imperatives ‘participa’ (get involved) and ‘haz’ (become); which try to involve web visitors in the activity. Further, the NPO resorts to use of the ‘T’ pronoun of solidarity, in ‘-te’, which reflects PP4. Use in-group identity markers and communicates a meaning of closeness between the NPO and its visitors. Exaggerating interest through use of imperatives (PP2) and presupposing knowledge of visitors’ needs (PP6) were also common in the British data, as illustrated next. (5) Participa: Hazte Socio (S1) Get involved: Become a member

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(6) Join us: How to become a member (B2) The following example, 7, draws from these strategies and further minimizes the imposition (NP4) that asking someone to pay a membership fee involves, by underlining it is inexpensive. (7) Become a member—for roughly £1 a week—and you’ll get REDUCED entry to networking events (saving £££s each time), hundreds of FREE online guides to boost your business and FREE wisdom and advice from your very own mentor (B4) In this example the NPO also gives gifts (PP9) in the form of saving money and offering free guides, wisdom and advice. Further, the use of exaggeration in “hundreds”, or the capital letters used in key words like ‘REDUCED’ or ‘FREE’, point to use of PP3, through which the NPO intensifies interest to visitor. Regarding the content category 3: ‘Asks to become a volunteer’, this was related to mainly positively oriented strategies like PP1. Notice, attend to visitors’ interests, wants, needs and PP6. Assert, presuppose NPO’s knowledge and concern for visitors’ wants (examples 8, 9, 10). Example 9 further drew from nominalizations (NP8), within the saliently negative politeness strategy NP3. Give options, as the link to ‘Voluntariado’ (Volunteering) was part of a menu. This latter strategy is also present in example 10. (8) Talleres de Voluntariado: Consulta toda la programación (hyperlink) hasta finales de año. (S2) Volunteer workshops: check schedule (hyperlink) until end of year. (9) Servicios: violencia de género / empleo y formación / inmigración / Salud / TICs / Voluntariado / Comunicación . . . (S2) Services: gender violence / job and training / immigration / Health / ITCs / Volunteering / Communication . . . In the example from the British data that follows, asking visitors—in this case, another organization—to become volunteers is also part of several options (NP3) provided in the site, and is further expressed through strategies PP1 and PP6, as mentioned above: (10) There are lots of ways that you can get involved in Eaves’ work from undertaking a challenge or organizing an event, to getting your company involved in corporate volunteering (B7) The next content category for relationship building, 4: ‘Asks for donations’, was very frequently invoked through use of nominalizations (NP8) in Spanish and of direct imperatives related to PP2. Exaggerate interest with visitor, in English, as shown in examples 11 and 12, respectively: (11) Donaciones (S4) / Donations (12) Donate (B2, B3, B5, B6) These short expressions were usually one in a series of various hyperlinks within a navigation menu. In some cases, though, longer moves were used to

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refer to this category. In 13, below, two saliently positive politeness strategies are used, namely, intensify interest to visitor (PP3) and give gifts (PP9)4. The gift, in this case, takes the form of a heart symbolically meaning ‘love and gratitude’. The positive politeness orientation is further underlined through the use of the in-group marker (PP4) pronoun ‘tu’. Example 14, from the British data, asks for donations indirectly (NP1) and focuses on the benefits of donating, thus resorting to PP3. Intensify interest to visitor and PP8. Give reasons.

(13)

Figure 4.1 Make your donation

(S1)

(14) Your contribution can make a real difference to abused women and children (B5) The next relationship building category, 5: ‘Organization has online newsletter /news section,’ was often expressed through exaggerating NPOs’ interest in visitors, as in the following two examples: (15) Regístrate para recibir nuestro newsletter (S2) Subscribe to receive our newsletter (16) Subscribe to our e-newsletter (B4) The next category, 6: ‘Provides external links,’ was considered to be always related to giving options (NP3); as could be expected, the texts in this case were always hypertexts, which allow visitors to decide whether to follow the link. In the following cases, both examples use nominalizations (NP8): (17) Enlaces (S9) / Links (18) Useful links (B1, B8) Category 7: ‘Allows account creation’, was closely related to category 5; they were sometimes realized together. The final category, 8: ‘Offers advice related to its cause,’ was sometimes expressed through nominalized and impersonalized (NP8, NP7) hypertexts in the Spanish data, which assumed knowledge of visitors’ wants (PP6), as in example 19, while on other occasions more indirect means (NP1) were used, although these also drew on PP6, as in 20. (19) Consejos prácticos (S10) /Practical advice (20) La mejor manera de protegernos contra la Violencia Sexual es Denunciar (S10) / The best way to protect ourselves from sexual violence is to Report abuse

4  For a discussion of imperatives as forms of positive politeness in requests, please see Sifianou (1992).

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In the British data, this content was frequently expressed through strategies that exaggerated interest in the visitor (PP2), as in example 21. In example 22, interest to visitor is intensified (PP3), and the visitor is offered access to the advice in different languages, which was considered an example of PP9, give gifts. (21) Get advice (B7) (22) Survivor’s Handbook: In depth advice about finances, housing etc. with translations in different languages (B1) 5.3 Cross-cultural Considerations In this section results are considered from a comparative perspective, thus addressing the last research question, namely, RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between Spanish and British non-commercial web-mediated service encounters? The previous analyses showed that all Spanish and British NPO websites resorted to the category of sharing information, thus heavily orienting to the first communicative purpose identified for the genre of web-mediated service encounters, namely, to provide information on the organization and the services it offers. Generic similarity was very high in this respect and also regarding the providing of external links, a content category also related to the first generic purpose. However, differences were found regarding the number of NPOs that provided newsletters or news sections, another form of the first generic purpose, this being more common in the British than the Spanish websites. The most significant difference in this respect, however, was offering advice related to the NPO cause: while most British NPOs offered advice, less than half the Spanish websites did so. While this may be related to cultural differences, the different nature and problems addressed by the NPOs in the data may have had an impact on these results. If we take the contents mentioned to fulfil the demands of the genre’s first communicative purpose into account, the findings suggests that British NPOs were more consistent in conforming to the expectations of the genre than Spanish NPOs. Differences, however, were not great and were mainly related to offering advice. The pervasiveness of contents related to the generic purpose of providing information can also be partly explained by attending to the technological affordances of the medium. In contrast to face-to-face encounters, in which service recipients formulate specific requests for information or action, in web-mediated encounters the service provider needs to anticipate the potential requests and needs of service recipients or web visitors, and therefore provide all the information believed to be of potential use to visitors. The second communicative purpose of the genre, to enable online donations, was related to contents 2 and 4, asking for membership and donations. In this case, both data sets were equally, and prominently, oriented to this

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generic purpose, revealing, therefore, cross-cultural similarities. This result could be explained in terms of the current social context of economic slowdown and the pressing need for funding that these NPOs are experiencing. The third communicative purpose, related to recruiting volunteers, was more frequently found, through content 3, in British than Spanish NPOs, thus showing that British NPOs were more clearly oriented to recruiting volunteers. The last communicative purpose identified for this genre, to foster relationship building with/among supporters, was considered to be related to all the content categories rather than to one in particular. As the eight content categories for relationship building in the taxonomy used in this study were more frequent in the British than the Spanish NPOs, we can conclude that the former-British NPOs-more clearly oriented to the communicative purposes of the genre. However, genres are culturally shaped and, as these results suggest, not all the generic purposes identified in the literature may be equally significant in the two cultural contexts associated with the NPOs. Also, although repetition within a specific genre is essential and aids recognition, variation and innovation are features that underline the dynamics and evolution of genre practices (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2013). Therefore, it could be argued that there were cross-cultural differences and similarities regarding the value that the different cultural groups under scrutiny given to the different communicative purposes identified in the literature. Turning now to the stylistic features of the two data sets, the picture that emerged shows that both NPO groups resorted more frequently to saliently positive politeness strategies. Particularly common were those strategies which seek to establish common ground between NPOs and their visitors, and the strategies that convey that NPOs and visitors are co-operators (Brown and Levinson 1987). Saliently negative politeness strategies were far less frequent in the data. However, it is important to signal that the most common strategy in both data sets was giving choice. This can be explained in terms of the technological affordances of websites, a fact that may contribute to crosscultural similarities within a given genre. Stylistic choices within the genre of web-mediated service encounters, therefore, exhibited a great degree of crosscultural similarity, suggesting that genre constraints override, in this case, cross-cultural variation. 6 Conclusion This chapter has explored non-commercial, web-mediated service encounters in Spanish and British NPOs. After describing electronic NPO service encounters as a discursive genre, its communicative purposes were identified.

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In this way, an important difference between web-mediated non-commercial service encounters and other types of encounters traditionally studied in the literature was highlighted. As websites are platforms where several interactions may converge, the study revealed that NPO websites contained multiple service encounters through which NPOs target different social groups; NPOs addressed not only the recipients of the services they provide, but also other social groups like donors, volunteers and other supporting individuals or corporations. NPO websites, in sum, constitute sites of multiple e-service encounters. Further studies are needed to account for the interplay and distinctiveness of the different encounters within these websites. The content of the NPO websites in the data was analysed by drawing on computer-mediated communication and NPO marketing studies (Herring 2008; Persaud et al. 2009). The content analysis revealed that both Spanish and British NPOs are oriented to the four communicative purposes of the genre. However, cross-cultural similarities and differences were identified regarding the value or weight of the different contents and purposes in each data set. The style of the NPO websites was analysed within the genre approach to (im)politeness (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010, 2013), through a second-order politeness study. The stylistic analysis showed that both data sets heavily relied on saliently positive politeness strategies, especially those which seek to establish common ground between NPOs and their visitors, and those which allow the NPO to convey that both, NPO and visitors are co-operators. The saliently negative politeness strategy of giving options was found to be recurrent in all websites, a result which was explained in terms of the technological affordances of the medium. Finally, these analyses also underlined the interrelatedness between generic purposes, on the one hand, and decisions at the levels of content and style, on the other. Two final caveats are in order. First, the size and type of the websites in the data varied greatly. Website design and interfaces have evolved since the early days of internet, from static websites to more participatory web 2.0 sites (Herring 2008; Walther and Jang 2012). The NPO websites differed in these respects. This was, therefore, a source of difference in the data that needs to be acknowledged. Second, this was an exploratory study of cross-cultural differences in web-mediated encounters. Website design has been shown to vary cross-culturally in terms of presentation of information, colour preferences and image modality, to the point that “cultural differences have become an important issue in international interface design” (Callahan 2006, 241). Further research is therefore needed to determine the role of discourse in expressing such cultural differences. This chapter was presented as a preliminary study of the genre of webmediated, non-commercial service encounters. It has contributed to advancing

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WEB-MEDIATED SERVICE ENCOUNTERS IN NOT-FOR-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS 83 Márquez Reiter, Rosina. 2005. “Complaint Calls to a Caregiver Service Company: The Case of Desahogo”. Intercultural Pragmatics 2, 4: 481–514. Merritt, Marilyn. 1976. “On Questions Following Questions in Service Encounters”. Language in Society 5: 315–357. Meuter, Matthew L., Ostrom, Amy L, Roundtree, Robert I., and Bitner, Mary J. 2000. “Self-Service Technologies: Understanding Customer Satisfaction with TechnologyBased Service Encounters”. Journal of Marketing 64: 50–64. Persaud, Ajax, Madill, Judith, and Rubaj, Anna. 2009. “Website Marketing in Canadian Non-Profit Organizations: An Exploration of Strategies, Approaches and Usability”. Annual Conference of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada 30: 3. Placencia, María E. 2008. “Requests in Corner Shop Transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish”. In Variational Pragmatics, edited by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron. 307–332. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ruiz Olabuenaga, José I. 2006. El Sector no Lucrativo en España: Una Visión Reciente. Bilbao: Fundación BBVA. Sifianou, Maria. 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon. Sperber, Dan. 1995. “How Do We Communicate?” In How Things Are: A Science Toolkit for the Mind, edited by John Brockman and Katinka Matson, 191–199. New York: Morrow. Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thurlow, Crispin, and Mroczek, Kristine. 2011. “Introduction. Fresh Perspectives on New Media Sociolinguistics”. In Digital Discourse: Language in the Media, edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, xix–xliv. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traverso, Veronique. 2006. “Aspects of Polite Behaviour in French and Syrian Service Encounters: A Data-Based Comparative Study”. Journal of Politeness Research 2: 105–122. Ventola, Eija. 2005. “Revising Service Encounter Genre: Some Reflections”. Folia Linguistica 39: 19–43. Walther, Joseph B., Jang, Jeong-Woo. 2012. “Communication Processes in Participatory Websites”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18: 2–15. Watts, Richards J., Ide, Sachiko, and Elich, Konrad. 1992. Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. The Hague: Mouton. Wenham, Kate, Stephens, Dereck, and Hardy, Rachel. 2003. “The Marketing Effectiveness of UK Environmental Charity Websites Compared to Best Practice”. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 8, 3: 213–223. Wu, C.Y. and Shyu, C.S. 2011. “Empirical Development of a Voluntary Self-Management Work Scale”. International Journal of Management 28: 612–620.

Part 3 Interpersonal Communication in Small Businesses

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Introduction to Part 3 Part 3 emphasizes the significant role of interpersonal communication and politeness in face-to-face interaction in small businesses (restaurants and cafeterias). In Chapter 5 the influence of employees’ politeness on customers’ evaluations of service encounters is analysed, whereas in Chapter 6 regional variation in cafeterias in two different regions of Spain is addressed.

CHAPTER 5

Customer Perceptions of Politeness as a Differentiating Element in Spanish Restaurants Encounters Antonio Carmona-Lavado and María de la O Hernández-López 1 Introduction Even though the general, lay-people conception of politeness is associated with good manners (Moreno Fernández 1998) or, historically, the refined manners of the upper classes in the past centuries, the pragmatics and linguistics traditions view politeness as (part of) the explanation for social and linguistic behaviour. Indeed, politeness has traditionally been related to language and words themselves (Brown and Levinson 1978 [1987]; Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983), in a way that a message could be intrinsically polite or impolite. It is clear, though, that it is not only literal messages or specific formulaic language, such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ that involve politeness in communication, but also attitudes, intonation, non-verbal communication, implicit meanings and, above all, the context in which the conversation is embedded. In this sense, politeness refers to specific communicative behaviour that mirrors particular thoughts, actions or reactions in a certain community of practice1 and that are desirable, expected or predictable in a given context (Eelen 2001; Fraser 1990; Meier 1995). When these are coherent with social norms or conventions, the members of the specific community of practice value them positively and assess them as polite. In other words, being polite means being appropriate, and this requires deep knowledge of the behavioural conventions of each community of practice and of individual expectations, history and intentions. 1  The notion of ‘communities of practice’ was first developed by Wenger (1998). A community of practice refers to a group of people who come together in the same situational or geographical context and have some shared views of what is expected or unexpected. This includes expected ways of talking and behaving, as well as values, power relations and other conventions. Thus, each community will develop a series of linguistic and behavioural conventions that only have the expected effect in that specific community of practice. In this sense, it is not individual linguistic acts but the community-based perspective on politeness that counts.

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Politeness may also be a matter of emotions, which must be contextually understood in order to comply with what is appropriate in each situation. Brown (2001, 11620) states that politeness is [. . .] a matter of taking into account the feelings of others as to how they should be interactionally treated, including behaving in a manner that demonstrates appropriate concern for interactants’ social status and their social relationship. Politeness is also negotiated: Upon entering into a given conversation, each party brings an understanding of some initial set of rights and obligations that will determine, at least for the preliminary stages, what the participants can expect from the other(s). During the course of time, or because of a change in the context, there is always the possibility for a renegotiation of the conversational contract: the two parties may readjust just what rights and what obligations they hold towards each other (Fraser 1990, 232). Appropriateness, social harmony, positive feelings and negotiation of meanings seem to be central to understanding politeness. But how can this appropriateness be achieved? If social harmony is negotiated and flexible, how can interlocutors understand intentions and perceptions? We contend that only by analysing a specific community of practice can politeness be appropriately identified, used and managed. If we shift our gaze to the marketing arena, understanding politeness is crucial, as this may involve satisfied or dissatisfied customers, mainly in the context of service encounters. However, politeness and its unique effect on customer experience has hardly been specifically addressed in the management and marketing literature, since this attribute is often blurred with broader service dimensions in empirical studies. Although it has been reported that polite staff is related to customers’ positive evaluations of service encounters while impolite staff to negative ones (Johns and Howard 1998; Johnston 1995, 1997; Mersha and Adlakha, 1992; Silvestro and Johnston 1990; Yang and Fang 2004), it is not yet clear whether such feature of communication is able to differentiate the service provided by the firm or not. What is true is that politeness could be an important source of competitive advantage, and its cost is relatively low in comparison with other service dimensions, such as servicescapes or physical environment (Bitner, 1992).

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Therefore, by considering a two-sided perspective (politeness within pragmatics, on the one hand, and customer experience within service management and marketing, on the other), our research question is the following: Does politeness really make a difference in favourable incidents? By adopting this interdisciplinary perspective, this study will analyse the impact of employees’ politeness on the customer evaluation of service experiences in restaurants. To this end, we aim to content analyse participants’ responses and apply quantitative methods, and use both summary indicators such as service quality, expectancy disconfirmation, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and experiential indicators such as surprise or surprising consumption, positive emotions and customer delight. 2

Theoretical Politeness and the Pragmatic Tradition

Politeness is an umbrella term traditionally related to a wide variety of angles or areas of research. Within the area of pragmatics, politeness has little to do with the ‘good manners’ primitive version of human behaviour and involves or is related to every factor that conforms appropriateness or social expectations in a given context. Thus, in service encounter interactions, for instance, knowledge of social rights and obligations, together with the how and why of the development of the interaction itself, are of paramount importance in order to know how to communicate in a way that the interlocutors meet each other’s expectations (Spencer-Oatey 2008; Placencia, this volume). Within this approach, politeness studies have also differentiated first-order politeness or Politeness1 from second-order politeness or Politeness2 (Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992). Defining politeness or observing and evaluating politeness, for instance, falls within the scope of Politeness2: the researchers’ interpretations of communicative situations, considering their interactants reactions and (un)successful linguistic exchanges. Politeness1, instead, is directly based on the perceptions of the participants involved and their expectations, with little or no influence of the researcher’s interpretation whatsoever. Eelen (2001), Grainger (2011), Locher (2006), Terkourafi (2011) and Watts (2003), among others, support this idea and argue that Politeness1 predominates over Politeness2, given that no communicative exchange is inherently polite or impolite but will greatly depend on the perception of those involved in interaction. This perception clearly places politeness within a framework of interpersonal communication or relational work (Locher 2006; Locher and Watts 2005; Watts 2005), with a focus on interpersonal relations, which are flexible, changeable and

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subjective. In this sense, context plays a central role to understanding perceptions and interpretations. Politeness1, albeit generally acknowledged as determinant, has not been examined in depth in previous politeness studies, which have rather focused on the analytic side of language (Politeness2) instead. On another front, politeness has been viewed as two different poles in which the needs for closeness and the needs for deference may influence on the politeness strategies used in each context. Indeed, the first linguists to adopt this approach were Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), who referred to positive face as the desire to be liked and admired, and negative face as the desire not to be imposed upon. Depending on the interlocutors’ needs and cultural conventions, positive politeness strategies (e.g., the use of terms of endearment) or negative politeness strategies (e.g., the use of indirectness or formality) will be appropriate or inappropriate. Scollon and Scollon (1995), in turn, considered that individuals base their relational experience on either involvement or independence strategies, which, contrary to Brown and Levinson (1987), are not based on specific linguistic realizations but on situational communicative factors. Within the Spanish trend of politeness studies, Bravo (1996) and Hernández-Flores (1999) support the idea that Peninsular Spanish is rather oriented towards solidarity and involvement, concepts that are under the umbrella term ‘confianza’. ‘Confianza’ refers to the freedom to say what one thinks in a context of closeness and familiarity in which interlocutors are understanding and open to the other’s opinions. One of the shortcomings of these studies is that all these terms have been unravelled from empirical and theoretical studies based on Politeness2 or the analysis of linguistic data, where the perception of the speakers is disregarded. Given that politeness is intrinsically negotiated and is changeable in nature, these phenomena are usually examined through communities of practice, as well as situational frames (Hall 1959), small units of communication such as greetings, gift-giving, table manners, etc. which allow for an analysis and understanding of successful or unsuccessful communicative events. When it comes to institutional or professional settings, the term ‘genre’ (Swales 1990) seems to fit better, to encompass a situation or event in which individuals have specific communicative expectations and there is a schematic structure of discourse in terms of style and content that is known by the participants of that speech event. A genre-approach to politeness (Garcés-Blitvich 2010; Bou-Franch, this volume) is necessary to understand it in context. Thus, individuals of the same community and embedded in the same genre intrinsically know what is expected or what is not in a service encounter situation, but it is not necessarily so if the community or genre is new to the individuals. In this study, a particular genre (restaurant interaction) will be analysed from a

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Politeness1 perspective (the perceptions of a sample of individuals), in a particular community of practice (university students) in order to give an account of the importance of politeness for marketing and service management, as well as customer experience. 3

Politeness, Service Management and Marketing

Within the service management and marketing literature, politeness has been examined on the grounds that its function or usefulness is key to improve the service experience in order to enhance loyalty or attract new customers. Indeed, courtesy or politeness has been considered a determinant of service quality identified in focus groups interviews by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) and later found in studies on critical incidents (Johnston 1995, 1997; Silvestro and Johnston 1990). In fact, Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) state that courtesy is an umbrella term that includes politeness, respect, consideration and friendliness of personal contact. In the same vein, Johnston (1995, 70) defined courtesy as the politeness, respect and propriety shown by the service, usually contact staff, in dealing with the customer and his/her property. This includes the ability of staff to be unobtrusive and uninterfering when appropriate. Interestingly, both definitions view courtesy as wider than politeness itself. In the development of the SERVQUAL instrument for measuring service quality (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry 1988), courtesy (as politeness is often called in the service management and marketing literature), becomes part of a broader dimension called ‘assurance’ (knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence). However, ‘courtesy’ has emerged as a separate dimension using exploratory factor analysis in the context of tire stores (Carman 1990) or travel agencies (LeBlanc 1992). Others have considered a service dimension called ‘courtesy and politeness’ (Imrie 2005). This obviously implies that courtesy in service management and marketing is relevant and should be further examined. In this sense, exploring pragmatic theories may contribute to a better understanding of expectations and perceptions of politeness in service settings. It should be noticed that politeness or courtesy is implicit in other service quality dimensions such as ‘communication’, ‘friendliness’, ‘empathy’, and so on. Indeed, Wels-Lips, van der Ven and Pieters (1998) merged ‘courtesy’ and ‘understanding the customer’ in their analysis of critical incidents, given the

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difficulty to distinguish these dimensions in real data. Bernhardt, Donthu and Kennett (2000) also considered ‘attentiveness’ and ‘courteousness of employees’ as a joined quality attribute in a restaurant setting. As pointed out by Winsted (2000, 403), “courtesy is discussed in virtually every study of the service encounter either by itself or as contributing to another construct”. As can be seen here, and in line with similar shortcomings found in the pragmatic and linguistic traditions, politeness (and in this case, courtesy) is associated to a wide variety of terms such as ‘understanding the customer’, ‘friendliness’ or ‘empathy’, with little consensus among scholars. It can be stated that politeness is related to the process or how the service is delivered, or what Grönroos (1982, 1984) calls ‘functional quality’, which is opposed to ‘technical quality’ (the outcome or what the customer receives). Thus, it would fall within the scope of the so-called ‘interaction quality’ (Brady and Cronin 2001) or ‘interpersonal quality’ (Dagger et al. 2007), but in any case these terms essentially refer to the same concept. This section has shown how politeness is almost a synonym of courtesy in the service marketing and management literature, and that politeness/courtesy often overlaps with other service dimensions or is part of them. The next section will examine the relationship between politeness as a service attribute or dimension and some other variables evaluating the customer experience. 4

The Impact of Politeness on Customer Evaluation of Service Encounters

In service research, politeness is found to be able to generate either customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, as examined in a wide range of service industries (Silvestro and Johnston 1990), but it is usually more frequently mentioned in incidents in which the customer is satisfied, rather than dissatisfied, as shown in studies on the bank sector (Johnston 1995, 1997) and on a setting of online security brokerage services (Yang and Fang 2004). In other words, politeness could be viewed as a satisfier or enhancing factor. Expressions of politeness, as a part of employee behaviour, are associated to satisfactory service encounters, whereas profanity, yelling or rudeness are associated to dissatisfactory ones, as reported by customers of airlines, hotels and restaurants (Bitner, Booms and Tetreault 1990). In line with this, Mersha and Adlakha (1992) classify courtesy and rudeness as attributes of good and poor service quality, respectively, although they

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showed that these are not the most important variables.2 By contrast, WelsLips, van der Ven and Pieters (1998) found that courtesy/understanding the customer is the most frequent service quality dimension in both positive (52%) and negative (46.1%) critical incidents. Polite staff appears also as a positive aspect or attribute of the meal experience, while impolite staff is a negative one (Johns and Howard 1998).3 Politeness and courtesy of personnel is one of the attributes included in a study by Matzler, Sauerwein and Heischmidt (2003) on bank services using importance-performance analysis, but it is classified as a performance factor of low importance. A similar analysis applied to Taiwanese hot springs tourism revealed, however, that the attribute of courtesy and friendliness of staff have both high performance and importance (Deng 2006). Employees’ rudeness or inappropriate verbal exchanges are behind service failures in restaurants (Hoffman, Kelley and Rotalsky 1995), and impolite employees, described by the customers as rude, condescending, impatient or ill-tempered, are one of the reasons for switching services, as found by Keaveney (1995) in her critical incident study. In the context of experience economy, firms are encouraged to deliberately design memorable customer experiences by creating surprise and provoking positive emotional reactions (Haeckel, Carbone and Berry 2003; Pine and Gilmore 1998, 1999). In this sense, it is precisely the so-called ‘humanic clues’4 (emerging from the behaviour of service providers), and hence related to politeness that offer the chance to develop customers’ emotional connections to the firm (Berry, Wall and Carbone 2006). The interaction between customers and front line employees, which tends to be associated with politeness, is also one of the areas of innovation in experiential services, related to engaging with customers or building emotional connections with them through, for instance, empathic skills or emotional 2  Courtesy is the eighth in an overall ranking of attributes for good quality (e.g. knowledge of the service, thoroughness/accuracy or consistency/reliability had a high importance score). Rudeness is the ninth in an overall ranking of attributes for poor quality (e.g. lack of knowledge about the service, employees’ indifference or ‘I don’t care’ attitude, reluctance to correct errors, etc. had more importance than rudeness). 3  In a similar way, ‘employee’s attitude’ is more frequent in favourable than in unfavourable restaurants’ encounters (Kivelä and Chu 2001). 4  According to Berry, Carbone and Haeckel (2002, 86) “anything that can be perceived or sensed—or recognized by its absence—is an experience clue”. In other words: “if the customer can see, hear, taste, or smell it, it is a clue” (Berry, Wall and Carbone, 2006, 44).

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intelligence (Voss and Zomerdijk 2007). In addition, politeness is also connected to sociability, an experiential realm proposed by Fuglsang, Sundbo and Sørensen (2011). Verma (2003, 127) concluded from another critical incident study that the most important aspect of service contributing to customer delight, is how customer is treated in a service episode. Courtesy (employee politeness, respect, friendliness and consideration) was the top most factors. Service staff that are polite/courteous, friendly/nice or have a pleasant demeanour, create guest delight in the hotel sector (Magnini, Crotts and Zehrer 2011). Interpersonal factors or customer-employee interactions, linked to politeness to some extent, have been demonstrated to influence customer delight in critical incidents studies (Arnold et al. 2005; Barnes, Ponder and Dugar 2011). Even Kumar and Iyer (2001) revealed that attributes related to interpersonal behaviour are able to predict customer delight rather than satisfaction. Based on the above literature review, some constructs seem to be appropriate for evaluating service encounters from the customer perspective. Two types of constructs are considered: those that represent a summary or overall post-consumption evaluation of the service encounter, and those that are more related to the experiential view or the hedonic perspective (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), referred to states or reactions taking place during the service encounter. Table 5.1 includes a definition of each construct: table 5.1

Definitions of constructs suitable to evaluate service encounters

Constructs providing a summary or overall evaluation of the service encounter

Service quality: the consumer’s judgment about a service’s overall excellence or superiority (Zeithaml, 1988). Expectancy disconfirmation: the result of a comparison between what was expected and what was observed (Oliver, 1997). Customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction: the degree to which the consumer’s level of fulfilment is pleasant/unpleasant (Oliver, 1997). Loyalty: a deeply held psychological commitment to repurchase a product or repatronise a service in the future (Oliver, 1997).

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Surprise (surprising consumption): the state of consciousness that something is unexpected (Ortony, Clore and Collins, 1988). In the case of surprising consumption the surprise would be provoked by the company’s value proposition. Positive emotions: Emotions are valenced (affective) reactions to events, agents, or objects (Ortony, Clore and Collins, 1988; Richins, 1997). In the case of positive emotions, the valence would be positive. Customer delight: “an emotion, characterized by high levels of joy and surprise, felt by a customer towards a company or its offering (product/service)” (Kumar, 1996, 9). This construct can be also a summary or overall evaluation of the service encounter, however, the notion of customer delight used in this study is closer to what Arora (2012) has called ‘sensual delight’.

While the effect of impoliteness and politeness on unfavourable and favourable encounters, respectively, is widely supported by empirical studies within the service marketing and management literature, the distinctive impact of politeness on positive experiences has hardly been analysed. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the effect of employees’ politeness as perceived by customers on their evaluations of service encounters. Therefore, one general hypothesis will be tested: .

H1: Customer evaluation would be better in positive service encounters with presence of front line perceived politeness. H1a: Summary indicators of customer evaluation would be higher in positive service encounters with presence of front line perceived politeness. H1b: Experiential indicators of customer evaluation would be higher in positive service encounters with presence of front line perceived politeness. 5 Methodology 5.1 Data Collection and Sample The technique used for collecting a pool of positive service encounters combines the Critical Incident Technique (Bitner, Nyquist and Booms 1985; Flanagan 1954) and the Sequential Incident Technique (Stauss and Weinlich

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1997).5 Respondents were asked to recall and describe in writing their latest personal experience in which they felt delighted with a restaurant and that in which they felt satisfied (but not very satisfied6 or delighted). In this way, we differentiate between delight and mere satisfaction, in order to achieve a high variety of positive service encounters. The open-ended questions for each type of experience were followed by the measures of customer evaluation of the service encounter. The data were gathered by using a convenience sample of students from a Spanish University (see explanation below), but they answered the questionnaire as ‘consumers of restaurants’, that is to say, their experiences at the canteens on campus were not included in the data. Convenience samples are frequent in critical incidents studies (Bitner, Booms and Tetreault 1990; Hoffman, Kelley and Rotalsky 1995; Keaveney 1995) and students usually represent a relatively homogeneous sample in terms of demographic characteristics and experience, which is crucial to provide a strong test of theory (Calder, Phillips and Tybout 1981; van Beuningen, de Ruyter and Wetzels 2011). The survey method was a self-completed questionnaire written in Spanish,7 which was distributed in class to last year students of five different degrees and also masters’ students. This was done on different days of the week, in the morning and in the afternoon/evening. Students’ most frequent age is 21–23 years old. The total sample consisted of 270 valid positive encounters: 117 were delightful and 153 satisfactory. 64.8% were provided by women and 31.1% by men (4.1% did not answer the gender question). Although slightly biased to the female gender, the sample roughly reflects the distribution of the student population at the University where the data were collected. 5.2 Measures 5.2.1 Politeness For the purpose of this study, politeness has been measured as a dichotomous variable, where 1 represents the presence of politeness and 0 its absence in the written reports of the participants. The value given to this variable derived

5  Stauss and Weinlich (1997) differentiate between the first story-telling method (CIT), which collects critical incidents or extreme service contact situations (in our case delightful encounters), and the second and the second one (SIT) which collects usual, uncritical incidents or normal or routine situations (in our case merely satisfactory encounters). 6  A ‘very satisfied’ customer is similar to a delighted customer. 7  See appendix.

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from the content analysis of the encounters experienced by the respondents, as explained later. 5.2.2 Indicators of Customer Evaluation of Service Encounters As stated in the literature review, there is a number of constructs normally used to evaluate service encounters and widely accepted measures for them. Two groups of indicators are distinguished: on the one hand, summary indicators, including service quality, expectancy disconfirmation, customer satisfaction and loyalty. On the other, experiential indicators are composed of surprising consumption or surprise, positive emotions and customer delight elicited during the experience by the service provider. All the indicators can be seen in the appendix. Single-item measures for overall service quality, overall expectancy disconfirmation and overall customer satisfaction are based on Cronin and Taylor (1992), Iacobucci, Grayson and Ostrom (1994), Oliver (1980), and Westbrook and Oliver (1991). Loyalty was measured by means of repurchase intention and recommendation, adapted from Cronin, Brady and Hult (2000), and Lee, Lee and Yoo (2000). All of them are seven-point scales. Items for measuring surprising consumption or surprise, discrete positive emotions and customer delight are based on Chitturi, Raghunathan and Mahajan (2008), Kumar, Olshavsky and King (2001), and Richins (1997). All of them are five-point scales. The survey was pre-tested prior to full-scale administration to make sure that all the questions were well understood by the respondents. 6

Results and Discussion

6.1 Content Analysis The descriptions in writing of the 270 service encounters reported by the customers were content analysed in order to see whether there is presence of politeness in the customers’ reports. The presence of politeness in its broad sense or Politeness1 was codified when adjectives related with employees or staff such as polite, respectful, discreet, kind, nice and so on, were mentioned. Table 5.2 shows some examples of service encounters in which customers refer to employees’ politeness (the registration unit is underlined).8 8  The texts written by the participants and provided in Table 5.2 have been left as they were originally written. Spelling or punctuation mistakes, therefore, may occur.

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table 5.2 Examples of service encounters with the presence of politeness

Example 1: Restaurante Al-Muthamid, en la Gran Plaza. Fue con motivo de hacer un año en una relación y en el mes de febrero. Me sentí encantada con el restaurante debido al trato que nos ofrecieron, además de la amabilidad mostrada a la hora de la elección del menú; esta amabilidad se extendió tras haber acabado la cena y tras haber pagado la factura. [Translation: Al-Mutamid Restaurant, at Gran Plaza. We went there on our anniversary in February. I was delighted with the restaurant due to the treatment we received, as well as the friendliness shown when choosing the menu. This friendliness continued after we finished the dinner and after we paid the bill] Example 2: Fue hace una semana, estaba cenando en el restaurante la isla, celebrando un cumpleaños, nos atendieron con mucha cordialidad y respeto. Además de con mucha rapidez. Por todas estas razones me fui satisfecha. Además decir que nos regalaron una botella de champán al enterarse del motivo por el cual estábamos reunidos. [Translation: It was a week ago, I was having dinner in The Island restaurant, celebrating a birthday. We were attended with great cordiality and respect, as well as rapidly. For all these reasons I felt satisfied. Also they gave us a bottle of champagne when they came to know the reason why we were meeting] Example 3: Ocurrió de pronto sin haberlo planeado ¿cenamos aquí? Desde que entramos el personal estuvo en todo momento pendiente y solícito hacia nosotros sin por ello dejar de atender a los que allí ya estaban. Correctísimos y sin sentirnos en ningún momento agobiados de tanta amabilidad. Todo estaba perfecto tanto la consumisión que hicimos así como la sincronización entre comedor, barra y cocina, tanta armonía junta no la había sentido en ningún otro Restaurante en los que con anterioridad había estado. [Translation: It happened suddenly, without planning. [We just said:] “Shall we have dinner here?” From the moment in which we went into the restaurant, the staff were at all times attentive and taking care of us but without neglecting those who were already there. They were utterly correct and in no time did we feel overwhelmed with such kindness. Everything was perfect, [mainly] the menu we ordered and the organization among [the staff in the] dining room, the bar and the kitchen, I had not felt such harmony in any other restaurant I had previously been]. Example 4: Fui con mi padre y mis hermanos a cenar a un restaurante italiano de la calle Betis (no me acuerdo del nombre, pero no es ni San Marco ni Mamma Mía). Hace + o–1 año. Con el motivo de cenar juntos ya que no vivimos juntos. La decoración era acogedora, había música de fondo y los camareros eran encantadores; el trato fue bueno, nos atendieron bien (sin atosigarnos). Aunque no es grande, es acogedor y no agobiante. No llevábamos recomendación, entramos porque fue el primero que vimos abierto.

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[Translation: I went with my father and my siblings to have dinner at an Italian restaurant to Betis Street (I don’t remember the name, but it is not San Marco or Mamma Mia). It was a year ago, more or less. With the purpose of having dinner together because we no longer live together. The decor was cosy, there was background music and the waiters were lovely, the way we were treated was good, they attended us very well (but without overwhelming us). Although [the place] is not big, it is comfortable and not too cramped. Nobody had recommended the place, [we just entered] because it was the first one we saw open]. Example 5: Esta experiencia sucedió con motivo de la celebración del santo de mi padre en el Restaurante “Manolo León” Sevilla. Me sentí satisfecha con la actuación del Restaurante porque su trato y atenciones fueron correctos y la compañía agradable. [Translation: This happened when we went to celebrate my father’s day at the restaurant “Manolo León”, Seville. I was satisfied with the behaviour of the restaurant staff because their treatment and attentions were correct and the company was pleasant]. Example 6: Fue en un restaurante chino hace unos 15 días, el trato que nos ofrecieron fue correcto y la comida buena. El servicio fue adecuado a las circunstancias. [Translation: It was in a Chinese restaurant [we went to] about 15 days ago; the treatment they offered was correct and the food was good. The service was appropriate to the circumstances]. Example 7: Fuimos a un árabe en la calle Betis, la experiencia fue sólo satisfactoria. Se llama Ali-Baba. Es pequeñito, sólo tiene 3 mesas y 9 sillas para sentarse, los camareros son agradables y tiene aspecto limpio, se ve como te preparan la comida. [Translation: We went to an Arab restaurant in Betis Street. The experience was just satisfactory. It’s called Ali-Baba. It is tiny, only has 3 tables and 9 chairs to sit on, the waiters are nice and have clean appearance, and you can watch while they prepare your food].

Although the purpose of this study is not to analyse which aspects of interaction are associated to politeness or what is politeness for customers (but see Fernández-Amaya, Hernández-López and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014), it is indeed meaningful in Table 5.2 that delightful and satisfactory encounters seem to be influenced by politeness which, at the same time, seems to be related to ‘friendliness’ (amabilidad), ‘courtesy’ (cordialidad) and ‘respect’ (respeto). Considering Scollon and Scollon’s (1995) view of politeness as a continuum, in which involvement is one end representing closeness, while independence is the other side referring to deference, customers seemed to value

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a balance of both ends of the continuum when they experienced delightful encounters. It demonstrates that, contrary to the literature on Peninsular Spanish politeness, perceived politeness in this particular genre (restaurants) is not only based on categories denoting closeness, friendliness and mutual trust (first termed as ‘confianza’ in Bravo (1996) and Hernández-Flores (1999)), as illustrated, for instance, in example 1, but this should be balanced with certain amount of ‘respectful distance’ (Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2011) (see example 2). This is clearly seen in example 3, in which the speaker reports that “the staff were at all times attentive and taking care of us but without neglecting those who were already there. They were utterly correct and in no time did we feel overwhelmed with such kindness”. Clearly, the balance between attentiveness (Bernhardt, Donthu and Kennett 2000) and non-intrusion or negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987) seems crucial to understand these satisfactory events. In line with this, example 4 also illustrates the importance of respectful distance in this context, when a participant says, “they attended us very well (but without overwhelming us)”. This leads to a further reflection by which, rather than viewing politeness as characteristic of national cultures, specific communities of practice (university students) and genres (restaurant interaction) may reveal the extent to which there is variation across situations. In this sense, the term ‘confianza’ is likely to better characterise informal contexts while it seems that service encounters (or at least restaurant interaction between service providers and customers) may be constrained by conventions in which it is important to be not only friendly but also respectful. 6.2 Quantitative Analysis and Hypothesis Testing The results showed that politeness appeared in 54 incidents. Another person (judge) codified again the 270 experiences in order to verify interjudge reliability (Ronan and Latham 1974). The percentage of agreement is above 80%. Thus, the classification in two groups of encounters, presence of politeness (54) and absence of politeness (216), seems to be reliable. This shows that politeness is one of the variables that customers take into consideration when assessing an encounter as favourable, and therefore positive communication may have a direct relationship with customer satisfaction and delight. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test showed that the data were non-normally distributed, thus the U-Mann-Whitney test, the non-parametric alternative of two-sample t test, is used for testing the difference between polite and nonpolite encounters in terms of the indicators of customer evaluation of service encounters. Table 5.3 shows that customer evaluation with summary indicators exhibited a higher mean for the group with presence of politeness than for the group with its absence, since the U-Mann-Whitney test is statistically significant at

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the .001 level in all of them (which means that there is the chance of one in 1,000 of making an error or that the difference is not real and happen by fluke). In other words, ‘service quality’, ‘expectancy disconfirmation’, ‘customer satisfaction’, ‘repurchase intention’ and ‘recommendation’ are all positively influenced by perceived politeness. Hence, H1a is strongly supported: table 5.3 U-Mann-Whitney test on summary indicators of customer evaluation of service encounters Summary indicators

Politeness

Mean

SD

Sig.

Service quality

Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent

6.33 5.33 5.81 4.98 6.69 6.16 6.33 5.61 6.15 5.36

.932 1.283 1.230 1.241 .543 .780 .932 1.397 1.309 1.590

.000

Expectancy disconfirmation Customer satisfaction Repurchase intention (loyalty) Recommendation (loyalty)

.000 .000 .000 .000

Note: A 7-point response scale is used.

In the case of the experiential indicators, a better evaluation is also found in the encounters in which the participants mention politeness than in those that did not: table 5.4 U-Mann-Whitney test on experiential indicators of customer evaluation of service encounters Experiential indicators

Politeness

Mean

SD

Sig.

Surprise

Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent

2.89 2.49 3.13 2.61 4.07 3.77

1.298 1.326 1.289 1.427 .929 1.026

.011

Amazement Joy

.038 .054

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table 5.4 U-Mann-Whitney Test on experiential indicators (cont.) Experiential indicators

Politeness

Mean

SD

Sig.

Content (discrete positive emotion)

Present Absent Present Absent Present Absent

4.28 3.76 3.98 3.57 4.11 3.31

.811 1.005 1.124 1.131 1.076 1.333

.000

Happy (discrete positive emotion) Customer delight

.011 .000

Note: A 5-point response scale is used.

Table 5.4 shows that ‘customer delight’ and ‘content’ were statistically significant at the .001 level, ‘surprised’, ‘amazed’ and ‘happy’ at the .05, and ‘joyful’ is at the .1 (but very close to the .05, p = .054 < .1). Hence, H1b can be accepted. Thus, our results showed that the evaluation of the customer experience is enhanced by the presence of politeness. Therefore, hypothesis H1 is confirmed in our data. 7 Conclusions By combining both pragmatic perspectives on politeness and service management and marketing studies, this interdisciplinary research aimed at contributing to the current literature by enriching points of view in two fields of study, with the objective of advancing in the context of service encounters. From a pragmatic point of view, by examining Politeness1 in its broad sense, or the perception customers may have of the employees in restaurants, it is possible to unravel some of the issues that are important in the area of service encounters according to customers. On the other hand, the service management and marketing literature has provided the tools to address a variety of indicators of customer evaluation in service encounters. Our results strongly support the idea that when employees meet or exceed customers’ expectations in terms of politeness considerations, customer evaluation of (positive) service encounters in restaurants improves, considering both summary and experiential indicators. Thus, politeness as a component of the behaviour of front line employees seems to be a powerful differentiating attribute as showed by its positive impact on the perception and assessment

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of the whole encounter or experience. From a pragmatic perspective, our results are also revealing because, contrary to some of the literature on Spanish pragmatics, which establishes that friendliness and closeness are the bases of politeness (Bravo 1996, Hernández-Flores 1999), the examples illustrating this study seem to suggest that participants may consider politeness in restaurants as a mixture of respectful distance and friendliness. This proves that politeness cannot be examined as something uniquely cultural, but rather situation and genre-based (see also Bou-Franch, this volume). However, what customers consider to be politeness has only been touched upon; our concern here, instead, is to test whether there is a clear relationship between positive encounters and the presence of Politeness1. Politeness is a pervasive term that, as the literature review has shown, is difficult to define and determine. However, what is true is that politeness or impoliteness is not only constantly present in communication, but may also be a key determinant of the interlocutors’ perceptions, who do not need to define the term to perceive it. Politeness has often been examined in isolation (and hence its pervasiveness) while this study has been designed under the assumption that it is not an isolated factor in communication and perception but simultaneously operates with other dimensions that are part of the communicative experience itself. In fact, the participants’ reports on their experiences seem to reveal that politeness is related to a variety of terms, such as ‘friendliness’ or ‘respect’ and other non-verbal exchanges or attitudes that communicate politeness somehow (e.g., complimentary wine). These are but examples; what specific aspects of the interaction are to be related to the customer’s perception of politeness is, indeed, a future research line that is yet to be explored. Barnes, Ponder and Dugar (2011) found in a qualitative study with a representative sample of a large cross-section of service firms that 12.5% of the time customers have low expectations prior to the encounter because they expect rude/indifferent employees (negative employee behaviour). Hence, an important implication of our research is that not only is there an opportunity for improving service quality by addressing politeness as a factor to offer training or to reorganise the company staff, but also for achieving a firm’s competitive advantage. Moreover, encouraging polite communicative experiences, understood as correct, as well as friendly (which are the terms used by the participants) between contact employees and customers is a low-cost and feasible way to enhance the customer experience. Within the service encounters literature, there is the need to in-depth examine those politeness considerations that customers view as relevant, as this has proven to be of paramount importance in terms of customers’ evaluations.

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In other words, future studies should address what politeness is for customers in each genre and situation, how politeness expectations can be adequately fulfilled or even better exceeded, and how politeness influences on other variables of the customer experience. Some limitations of our study should be mentioned in order to interpret our results. The study contains service encounters with only one industry (restaurants), and a convenience sample (students) is used. This could lead to some concern regarding the generalization of the conclusions to other contexts. Further research using both qualitative and quantitative methods should investigate how politeness is managed and perceived in other communities of practice within the Spanish culture. The critical incident technique could be applied to examine service encounters where employees are especially polite or impolite, and a different age range and social or professional status would confirm or contradict this research. There are also some opportunities to connect politeness with other research topics: – Gender differences (Bou-Franch, this volume; Iacobucci and Ostrom 1993; Mattila, Grandey and Fisk 2003) or media (face-to-face versus online) (Carlo and Yoo 2007) as moderating factors. – Service script9 usage, including the effect of script level (extent to which the script is less or more rigidly followed) and script detection by the customer (Victorino et al. 2012). – Nonverbal communication such as authentic/false positive displays (e.g. smile) (Dorai and Webster, this volume; Grandey et al. 2005; Jung and Yoon 2011). – Language used especially in multilingual and multicultural markets (Holmqvist and Grönroos 2012; Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2011; Placencia 2008; Scollon, Scollon and Jones 2011). – Positive and negative emotions elicited during the service experience (Lin and Liang 2011; Price, Arnould and Deibler 1995; Spencer-Oatey 2011). – Emotional contagion or transference of positive emotions from employees to customers (Barnes, Ponder and Dugar 2011; Pugh 2001). – The effect of customer’ politeness or rudeness (e.g. customer’s verbal abuses on the employee) using a dyadic perspective (Bitner, Booms and Mohr 1994; Chandon, Leo and Philippe 1997). 9  According to Victorino et al. (2012, 390): “Service scripts are predetermined guides for employees to follow when delivering service to customers”.

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———. 1999. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Placencia, María Elena. 2008. “ ‘Hola María’ Racismo y Discriminación en la Interacción Interétnica Cotidiana en Quito”. Discurso & Sociedad 2, 3: 573–608. Poon, Patrick S., Michael K. Hui, and Kevin Au. 2004. “Attributions on Dissatisfying Service Encounters: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between Canadian and PRC Consumers”. European Journal of Marketing 38, 11/12: 1527–1524. Price, Linda L., Eric J. Arnould, and Sheila L. Deibler. 1995. “Consumers’ Emotional Responses to Service Encounters: The Influence of the Service Provider”. International Journal of Service Industry Management 6, 3: 34–63. Pugh, S. Douglas. 2001. “Service with a Smile: Emotional Contagion in the Service Encounter”. Academy of Management Journal 44, 5: 1018–1027. Richins, Marsha L. 1997. “Measuring Emotions in the Consumption Experience”. Journal of Consumer Research 24: 127–146. Ronan, William W. and Gary P. Latham. 1974. “The Reliability and Validity of the Critical Incident Technique: A Closer Look”. Studies in Personnel Psychology 6, 1: 53–64. Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Scollon. 1995. Intercultural Communication. A Discourse Approach. Oxford: Wiley. Scollon, Ron, Suzanne Scollon and Rodney Jones. 2011. Intercultural Communication. A Discourse Approach. (4th edition). San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell. Silvestro, Rhian and Robert Johnston. 1990. “The Determinants of Service Quality: Hygiene and Enhancing Factors”. Quality in Services II Conference, St. John’s University, New York, July. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2008. Culturally Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness. London: Continuum. ———. 2011. “Conceptualising ‘the Relational’ in Pragmatics: Insights from Metapragmatic Emotion and (Im)Politeness Comments”. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3565–3578. Stauss, Bernd and Bernhard Weinlich. 1997. “Process-Oriented Measurement of Service Quality. Applying the Sequential Incident Technique”. European Journal of Marketing 31, 1: 33–55. Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Terkourafi, Marina. 2011. “Politeness1 to Politeness2: Tracking Norms of Im/Politeness across Time and Space”. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour and Culture, 7, 2: 159–185. van Beuningen, Jacqueline, Ko de Ruyter, K. and Martin Wetzels. 2011. “The Power of Self-Efficacy Change during Service Provision: Making Your Customers Feel Better about Themselves Pays off”. Journal of Service Research 14, 1: 108–125. Verma, Harsh V. 2003. “Customer Outrage and Delight”. Journal of Service Research 3, 1: 119–133.

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Appendix SUMMARY INDICATORS OF CUSTOMER EVALUATIONS OF SERVICE ENCOUNTERS



Service Quality

The service quality you have perceived in the restaurant in this particular occasion was: (1 = “Very poor,” 7 = “Very high”)

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Expectancy Disconfirmation



Customer Satisfaction



Purchase Intention

The overall performance of the restaurant in that occasion was: (1 = “Much worse than expected,” 4 = “Exactly as expected,” 7 = “Much better than expected”)

How did you feel on this particular occasion? (1 = “Very dissatisfied,” 2 = “Dissatisfied,” 3 = “Something dissatisfied,” 4 = “Indifferent,” 5 = “Something satisfied,” 6 = “Satisfied,” 7 = “Very satisfied”)

The likelihood that you would go another time to this restaurant, if possible, as a result of this experience, is: (1 = “Zero,” 7 = “Very high”)

Recommendation

You recommend to other people that restaurant as a result of this experience. (1 = “Strongly disagree,” 4 = “Neutral,” 7 = “Strongly agree”) EXPERIENTIAL INDICATORS OF CUSTOMER EVALUATIONS OF SERVICE ENCOUNTERS Indicate with what intensity you felt the following states in that particular experience as a consequence of the performance of the restaurant or the restaurant itself on that occasion:



Surprise or Surprising Consumption



Discrete Positive Emotions



Customer Delight

Surprised (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”) Amazed (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”)

Joyful (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”) Content (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”) Happy (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”)

Delighted (1 = “Not at all,” 5 = “Very much”)

CHAPTER 6

Pragmatic Variation in the Performance of Requests: A Comparative Study of Service Encounters in Valencia and Granada (Spain) Rebeca Bataller 1 Introduction As Barron and Schneider (2009) have stated, variational pragmatics, a subdiscipline of intercultural pragmatics, studies the impact of social factors, such as region, social class, age or gender, on language use. Although regional language variation has been studied from different perspectives (i.e. phonological, lexical and morphological), pragmatic variation is a relatively new field of study that looks, in particular, at variations that occur across pluricentric languages such as Spanish or English (Barron and Schneider 2009): ‘to date there exists more research on the pragmatics of national varieties of Spanish than on varieties of any other language’ (Barron and Schneider 2009: 433). As regards variational pragmatics studies focusing on Spanish, some have compared different regions (e.g. Mexico, Costa Rica and Dominican Republic; Ecuador and Spain) of the Hispanic world (Félix-Brasdefer 2009; García 2004, 2008; Placencia 2005, 2008), while others have considered the effect that factors such as gender (Bou Franch, this volume; Félix-Brasdefer 2012) or familiarity with the interlocutor (Placencia and Mancera Rueda 2011a) have on the language used by the native speakers (NSs) of specific regions. Even though this research area is growing, there are still very few pragmatic studies that have compared two or more regions within the same country. One of them is Placencia (2008), who analysed service encounter interactions in two different cities of Ecuador: Manta and Quito. The present study compares and contrasts service encounter interactions at cafeterias in two different regions in Spain: Andalusia (Huétor Santillán, Granada) and the Autonomous Community of Valencia (Valencia). To the best of my knowledge, this is the only study to date that has analysed this particular pairing of Spanish language varieties from the perspective of variational pragmatics. The data collected for this study was analysed according to Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) illocutionary, discourse and stylistic categories for the analysis of ‘rapport management’. Furthermore, Scollon, Scollon and Jones © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_007

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(2012) notion of ‘communicative style’1 was used to describe the exchanges between bartenders and customers in the two regions being compared. This study begins with an overview of the Spanish spoken in Andalusia and in the Autonomous Community of Valencia. I then discuss other studies in the area of variational pragmatics in Spanish, paying close attention to those studies that, like the current one, have focused on service encounters. A methodological description of the study follows, focusing on the instruments and procedures of data collection, the informants and analysis of the data. Next, the results of the study are presented, followed by a discussion of their implications and a conclusion. 2

Literature Review

2.1 The Andalusian and Valencian Varieties of Spanish This study compares two varieties of Peninsular Spanish: that spoken in Huétor Santillán, a small town located in Granada, where Andalusian Spanish is spoken, and the Spanish spoken in Valencia, the capital of the Autonomous Community of Valencia, a region where two languages coexist: Spanish and Catalan, or Valencian.2 Andalusian Spanish is a dialect that has certain phonetic, phonological and morphosyntactic characteristics that clearly differentiates it from Castilian Spanish (Alvar 1996, 236). García Mouton (1994) has pointed out that Andalusian Spanish is not a uniform dialect. There are two distinct areas, each with its own characteristics, namely, the eastern and the western. The Spanish spoken in Huétor Santillán would fall into the eastern part of the region. Although the phonetic, phonological and morphological features of Andalusian Spanish have previously been studied (HernándezCampoy and Trudgill 2002), very little is known about the pragmatic characteristics of the Spanish spoken on the eastern side of Andalusia. The Autonomous Community of Valencia is an area of social bilingualism where two languages coexist, Spanish and Catalan (or Valencian) (GimenoMenéndez and Gómez-Molina 2007). Catalan (or Valencian) is a Gallo-Romance Peninsular language that developed in the south of France. Valencian was the original language spoken in the Autonomous Community of Valencia, but it 1  Communicative style is a term used to refer to the linguistic style or ‘register’ used to describe “personal identities or interpersonal relationships among participants” (Scollon, Scollon and Jones 2012, 46). 2  Valencian is the name that the Catalan dialect spoken in Valencia has traditionally been called (Gimeno-Menéndez and Gómez-Molina 2007, 95).

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underwent a slow shift to Castilian Spanish from the 16th century onwards. Nowadays, Valencian and Spanish are considered to be co-official languages in the Autonomous Community of Valencia. Gimeno-Menéndez and GómezMolina (2007) have pointed out that although Valencian is a co-official language in Valencia, only 49.4% of the population is actively bilingual; 37.1% are passive bilinguals3 and 13.5% are Spanish monolinguals (Census 2001). Valencian monolinguals are practically nonexistent in this region. The fact that two languages have coexisted for centuries in this region makes the Spanish spoken there different from that spoken in other monolingual areas of Spain. As Gimeno-Menéndez and Gómez-Molina (2007) noted, there have been many bi-directional influences between Castilian and Valencian; for example, phonological transfers from Valencian to Spanish, such as the devoicing of the /-d/ sound. In terms of syntax, the authors point to the prevalent use of the expletive que in interrogative sentences (e.g. ¿que no vienes? ‘so aren’t you coming?’), or the addition of the definite article before names: (e.g. la María, el Diego; the María, the Diego). We also see the overuse of the verb ‘to do’ (e.g. vamos a hacer tarde; ‘we are going to do [it] late’); and the irregular use of some prepositions (e.g. estamos a Barcelona: ‘we are at Barcelona’) among others. Another important characteristic of the Spanish spoken in Valencia is code switching with Spanish (e.g. vamos al mejador; ‘let’s go to the dining room’), which is used as a “communicative strategy with a specific pragmatic function (quotations, to avoid reiterations, address specification, message qualification, etc.)” (Gimeno-Menéndez and Gómez-Molina 2007, 98–99). Finally, Alvar (1996) noted that the present-day status of Valencian Spanish varies on the basis of social factors such as age, gender, social status and region. In general, Castilian Spanish is still considered the instrumental language in public affairs and socioeconomic and cultural development; Valencian is mainly used within the family and more private contexts. Although some studies have discussed the Spanish spoken in Granada and in Valencia (e.g. Alvar 1996; Gimeno-Menéndez and Gómez-Molina 2007), few have studied these varieties from a pragmatic perspective, and even fewer have addressed naturally occurring service encounter interactions. In the next section I review the literature on service encounter interactions in Spanish, and also discuss variational pragmatic studies that have compared service encounter interactions in various regions of the Hispanic world.

3  Active bilinguals are those who actively use two languages, while passive bilinguals understand them but do not use them both (Gimeno Menendez 1986, 250).

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2.2 Studies on Service Encounter Interaction Requests made in service encounters can be considered as a particular type of request that do not threaten the requester’s face (Danblon, de Clerck and van Noppen 2005), as “the receiver has more to gain than the person making the request (in this economic system of open competition)” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005, 36). Therefore, when a customer makes a request for a service and uses mitigating strategies, these could be viewed as devices to display friendliness, good manners and conventional courtesy with the interlocutor rather than as ways to mitigate the imposition of making a request (Danblon, de Clerck and van Noppen 2005, 55). Service encounter requests have been described as ‘ritualistic exchanges’. In a study describing interactions at bakeries in France, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2005) observed that most of the ‘verbal material’ in her data had “a ritual, rather than a transactional function” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005, 38). Traverso (2001) compared service encounter interactions between clients and clerks in three different shopping districts in Damascus, Syria. She also noted that “many of the verbal activities regularly achieved in a shop encounter come in the form of ritual formulae or at least accompanied by such formulae” (Traverso 2001, 426). Among the studies analysing service encounter interactions in specific regions of the Hispanic world, some have focused on the non-transactional aspect of the encounter (e.g. Aston 1994; Placencia 2004; Placencia and Mancera Rueda 2011b; Traverso 2001). These studies have looked into the phatic nature of non-transactional exchanges, analysing participants’ use of greeting formulas, discussions about set topics (e.g. weather), and inclusion of small talk in their interactions (Laver 1975). Other studies have dealt with the transactional aspect of the interaction, observing either the customers’ (Félix-Brasdefer 2012; Placencia and Mancera Rueda 2011a; Ruzickova 2007), or the service personnel’s request sequences (Placencia 2002). Placencia (2004) studied non-transactional exchanges in corner shop interactions in Quito, Ecuador. She particularly focused on analysing tokens of phatic communication, such as greetings and leave-takings, the presence of particular conversational topics, or the occurrence of activities such as wordplay or linguistic games with names. Placencia argued that these types of exchanges played an important part in the transactions and that in Quito informants tended to orient more to the personal side of these interactions. She suggested that the frequency of non-transactional exchanges in this context may reflect that Quiteños see corner shops as places where one develops personal relationships and not merely as places for conducting a commercial transaction.

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Aston (1995) analysed the expression of thanks as a closing strategy in service encounters in Italian and English, noting that closing strategies differed between both cultures. He observed that in Italy the interactions finalised at times without the need of a thanking exchange, while in the United States they were always followed by a thanking sequence. Aston emphasised the importance of examining the procedures of conversational management in cross-cultural pragmatic studies, as these really affect the way members from different cultures interact with each other and can even lead to pragmatic failure. Similar conclusions were reached by Hernández-López and Placencia (2004) in relation to Peninsular Spanish and British English. In contrast, Félix-Brasdefer’s (2012) focused on the transactional aspect of service encounter interactions by analysing naturally occurring interactions in an open-air market in the south of Mexico. The focus of this study was the effect that the customer’s and seller’s gender had on these interactions. He found that the seller’s gender was quite influential on the choice of strategies, noting that the command dame (‘give me’) was more frequently used when the seller was male, regardless of the customer’s gender; also, the informal pronoun of address tú was used more frequently when the seller was a male. He concluded that, although there are cross-gender differences, participants in these exchanges tended to use more solidarity markers than negative politeness strategies. Ruzickova (2007) analysed service encounter requests, or more specifically, hints, in naturally occurring interactions taking place in different contexts (e.g. post office, library) in Havana, Cuba. Ruzickova noticed that, when using hints, the speakers used many more positive politeness strategies4 (e.g. informal pronoun, joking or diminutives) rather than negative or deferential politeness ones [Brown and Levinson 1987]. The author explains that “in Cuban-Spanish hints, the expression of concern for the interlocutor’s positive face-wants is clearly the prevailing, preferred and expected politeness strategy” (Ruzickova 2007, 1198). Very few studies have described Andalusian or Valencian Spanish from a pragmatic perspective. Two studies, Hernández López and Placencia (2004), and Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a), have examined the Spanish spoken in Andalusia; however, they focused on Seville, a city that is located on the western side of the region, unlike Granada. Hernández López and Placencia 4  Positive politeness strategies show that the speaker and hearer are collaborating with each other and that the speaker is attending to the hearer’s interests, while negative politeness strategies express respect and deference, maintaining distance between hearer and interlocutor (Brown and Levinson 1987).

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(2004) described requests in pharmacies, and Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a) focused on interactions in two types of cafeterias in Seville. The latter study is particularly relevant because it was carried out in a similar context to the present study. The authors compared interactions at two different types of cafeterias—those with mostly sporadic customers, and those with mostly regular ones. They analysed the interactions at three different levels: discourse, stylistic and illocutionary. They found more differences than similarities in the requests made in both of the study contexts. At a discourse level, there was more variety of structures in the interactions that took place with regular customers. These included requests for confirmation by the bartenders, (e.g. ¿lo de siempre? ‘same as always?’), jokes, word games, requests for advice or help, compliments and conversation about extraneous topics, such as sports or religion. These sequences occurred rarely with the sporadic customers. At the stylistic level, the use of the informal pronoun tú was more common with the regular customers, while the formal usted was preferred by the sporadic ones. Finally, at an illocutionary level, the sporadic customers used more internal mitigating devices (e.g. por favor; ‘please’) and impersonal strategies such as elliptics (e.g. zumo de naranja natural; ‘a fresh orange juice’). In contrast, regular customers used commands (e.g. dame un cortado; ‘give me a macchiato’), which are more personal as they show some degree of trust or ‘confianza’ between interlocutors (Placencia and Mancera Rueda 2011, 501). In discussing their study results, the authors argue that generalisations about people’s interactive style should not be made on the basis of nationality, as there are other factors, such as the degree of familiarity between interlocutors, which may play an even more important role in the types of interaction strategies participants use to interact with each other. Hence, although several studies have suggested that native speakers of Spanish (NSs) use plenty of solidarity strategies frequently (e.g. García 2008), this may only apply in certain contexts (Placencia and Mancera-Rueda 2011a). Regional Variational Pragmatics Studies of Service Encounters in Spanish Even though in the last two decades several studies have compared service encounters in different regions of the Hispanic world (Márquez Reiter and Placencia 2004; Placencia 1998; Placencia 2005, 2008), there are very few to date that have compared naturalistic service encounter interactions from two regions within the same country. To our knowledge, only one has compared the service encounter interactions in two regions of Ecuador ‘at a sub-national level’ (Placencia 2008, 308). Most variational studies have shown that even 2.3

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though there are similarities, significant differences do exist with service encounter interactions taking place in different Spanish regions. As for those studies that have compared Spanish spoken in a region of the Iberian Peninsula with a region from Latin America, it is worth noting Placencia (1998). She examined the politeness strategies used in service encounter requests at hospital information desks in Quito, Ecuador and in Madrid, Spain. She noted that Ecuadorian NSs used a more formal register in this context, including a more frequent use of the formal pronoun usted, and more indirect and mitigated requests, while the Spaniards were more informal, using casual greetings, the informal pronoun tú and sometimes very direct requests. As the author states, this may indicate that in Peninsular Spanish the relationship between service providers and customers is more egalitarian than in Ecuadorian Spanish in this type of context. In a later study, comparing the same two regions but in a different setting, Placencia (2005, 586) examined interactions in four corner shops from a range of residential neighbourhoods in the cities of Quito and Madrid. She observed that while both groups of NSs preferred direct strategies, Ecuadorians used a greater number and variety of mitigating devices (por favor deme pancitos; ‘please give me small breads’); they also used the formal pronoun usted much more frequently than the Madrileños, who rarely used it. Overall, as in her earlier study (1998), Placencia found the Madrileños were more informal and task-oriented, while the Quiteños showed greater interest in the interpersonal nature of the interaction, using more ritualistic exchanges. She hypothesised that in Quito corner shops may be seen as places where one establishes personal relationships, while this may not be the case in Madrid, and that differences in linguistic styles may be attributed to the faster pace of life in Madrid, which is a much larger city than Quito. In a study comparing Ecuadorian and Montevidean Spanish, MárquezReiter and Placencia (2004) looked into the organisation of service encounter interactions in clothing and accessories shops from Montevideo and Quito, focusing closely on the service providers’ language. Overall, they found that the Montevidean shop assistants used strategies that sought closeness, while the Quiteños tended to keep a more respectful distance. There was also a difference in the length of the interactions. While the Quiteños used longer and more formulaic greetings, showing more interest in preserving their negative face, the Montevideans used more product-related strategies, such as explanations and offers, which made their interactions seem longer and more intrusive. As the authors noted, the Montevidean salesperson might be regarded as pushy by the more reserved Quiteños. In terms of style, the interactions also

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differed markedly, with the Montevideans favouring a more informal style than the Quiteños. This difference was reflected in their choice of terms of address, titles and discourse markers. The study concluded that Montevideans are more ‘verbose’ than the more ‘formal’ Quiteños sales personnel (MárquezReiter and Placencia 2004, 150). Regarding research on two varieties of Spanish spoken in the same country, Placencia (2008) conducted a sub-national variational pragmatic study that compared corner shop interactions from two cities in Ecuador, the coastal city of Manta and the Andean city of Quito. This study noted several differences between the two regions. In terms of the request strategies used, while both groups preferred direct requests, the Quiteños used more imperatives (deme pancito ‘give me bread’), and the Manteños showed a preference for imperatives and elliptical forms (un litro de leche ‘a litre of milk’), strategies later classified by Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a) as more impersonal strategies. In terms of internal mitigating devices, the Quiteños used many more mitigators, such as diminutives (pancitos ‘little breads’), politeness markers (por favor ‘please’), lexical downgraders (regalar ‘to give away’ instead of dar ‘to give’)5 and hedges (unos pancitos ‘a few little breads’) (Ibid., p. 12). Only the Manteño participants used aggravators, such as raising the tone of voice, strategies “that can make the request more forceful”. The Quiteños used opening and closing phrases more frequently and they were often longer; they also made more use of small talk, verbal play and jokes in their exchanges. In general, customer relationships with shopkeepers in Manta did not seem as personal or interactive as those in Quito (Placencia 2008, 325). Stylistically, both groups used the formal pronoun ‘usted’ more frequently than the informal ‘tú’. However, they differed in their use of address forms, which were more informal and less frequent in the Manteño corpus. The range of politeness strategies shown by each group differed notably, with the Quiteños using a wider variety than the Manteños. Overall, Quiteños and Manteños seem to operate under different interaction norms: while the former approach the interactions from a more personal perspective, the latter are more task-oriented (Placencia 2008, 329). In general, there were more similarities between the Manteños and the Madrileños, from Placencia’s (2005) study, than between the Quiteños and the Manteños. Hence, as Placencia (2008) stated, this comparative analysis highlighted the need to undertake more sub-national studies in order to avoid faulty generalizations about the pragmatics of a country. Hence, the present

5  As Placencia (2005, 590) explains, regalar ‘to give away’ makes the request sound more like a plea than a request.

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study aims to address this need by comparing service encounter interactions from two different regions in Spain. 3 Methodology 3.1 Data Collection Procedure The data was collected via field notes and recordings made with a digital tape recorder placed at the counters of two cafeterias in Valencia (VL) and two cafeterias in Huétor Santillán (HS), a small town located approximately 24 km from Granada. The cafeterias in VL and HS were both neighbourhood businesses where most of the customers were regulars, although some did not know the bartenders personally. The data was collected during the mornings, from 9:00 am to 13:00 pm, a time frame when customers were mainly ordering breakfast, coffee, and mid-morning snacks or drinks. We asked the bar owner’s permission to make recordings and this was granted. The researcher was always present in the cafeterias while the recordings were being made and wrote down supplementary field notes about the interactions as they were being recorded. These notes were important to later understanding and analysing of the recorded data and included details such as the informants’ gender, their apparent relationship with the bartenders, and some points about their tone of voice or body language. 3.2 Informants The HS corpus consisted of 57 interactions and the VL corpus of 53. In order to keep the data as natural as possible, informants were not approached to provide personal information. I chose not to collect these details so as not to risk losing the spontaneity of the interaction. Hence, I knew nothing about the informants represented in each data set except their gender and approximate age (they were all adults). In the HS corpus there were 12 women, and 45 men; in the VL corpus, there were 20 women, and 33 men. The bartenders were two young men in HS, and two middle-aged men, and a woman employed to help part-time in VL. 3.3 Analysis of the Data As Barron and Schneider (2009) explain, variational pragmatics studies the effect that ‘social factors’ such as region, social class, ethnicity, age and gender have on language use in interaction. Also, they state that it is essential that “varieties of a language are contrasted” (Barron and Schneider 2009, 429). Among the different approaches found, Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) framework,

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called ‘rapport management’—or how we construct, maintain, or threaten relationships through language (Spencer-Oatey 2000, 11) has been proven to be useful and revealing in variational pragmatics studies (Placencia 2008). This framework distinguishes the five following interrelated domains that play an important role in the management of rapport: illocutionary, discourse, participation, stylistic and non-verbal domain. The illocutionary domain involves the performance and interpretation of speech acts, the discourse domain focuses on the structure of the interactions, the participation domain involves the procedural aspects of exchanges, the stylistic domain analyses aspects such as honorifics and choice of tone, and the non-verbal domain deals with nonverbal aspects such as gestures and body movements (Spencer-Oatey 2002, 543). Three of these domains (illocutionary, discourse and stylistic) are used to analyse the data of this study. Below I describe in more detail the elements I considered in the data analysis at each level. 3.3.1 Analysis at the Discourse Level The structure and content of the opening and request phases of the service encounter were observed. Any inclusion of small talk or humour within the exchanges was also noted. In order to examine the structure of the inter­actions, each exchange was subdivided into three phases (opening, request and closing). The opening phase is that part of the interaction where participants establish their first contact. Its function is to lubricate the transition from noninteraction to interaction and to ease any potential tension during the early moments of the encounter (Laver 1975, 218). The request phase starts with the request for service, and ends after this has been granted. Finally, the closing phase wraps up the interaction and eases the transition from full interaction to departure (Laver 1975, 218.) The scripted example below illustrates the three phases from a typical service encounter interaction (1) C=customer; BT=bartender (Opening phase) CL: hola ‘hello’ BT: hola ‘hello’ (Request phase) CL: ¿me pones tostadas con tomate y un cortado? ‘Will you serve me toasts with tomato and a macchiato?’

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BT: vale ‘sure’ (pays and bartender returns change) (Closing phase) BT: hasta luego ‘see you later’ CL: adiós ‘bye’ The impingement of external factors, for example, background noise or movement of customer from the counter to a table after they had ordered, meant that we failed to record clearly the closing strategies from many of the inter­ actions. Therefore, since many interactions were incomplete in both data sets, we decided not to analyse the closing phase. The frequency counts and percentages of the main strategies used in the opening phase, as well as the type of request sequences in the request phase were calculated. Additionally, a difference of proportions test was used to analyse whether the difference in the use of these strategies was statistically significant between groups. 3.3.2 Analysis at the Illocutionary Level In order to classify the main request head act strategies and internal mitigating devices, a modified version of Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme was used. The researcher used this scheme as a basis, and she added a new request strategy, the simple interrogative, and one internal mitigating device, the diminutive, items that emerged in the study data, but which were not included in Blum-Kulka’s model. The names of some strategies were also changed in the interest of clarity. Below is a summary of this study’s main request strategies based on Blum-Kulka’s coding scheme: – Want statement: an expression of the speaker’s desire for something. (2) quiero un café ‘I want a coffee’ – Command: strategy described as ‘mood derivable’ or ‘the grammatical mood of the locution conventionally determines its illocutionary force as a request’ (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, 278). (3) ponme una Coca-cola ‘serve me a Coke’ – Elliptical: a functional equivalent of the ‘mood derivable’ as it expresses the same level of directness.

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(4) un cortado ‘a machiato’. – Simple interrogative: this strategy does not exist in English, and in Spanish it is formed with the indirect object pronoun ‘me’ and a verb in the present tense. (5) ¿me pones una tostada? ‘Will you serve me a piece of toast?’ – Query ability: an indirect strategy described as a type of ‘Query Preparatory’ by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). This is an indirect strategy by which the hearer must infer that the question about his or her ability to do something counts as an attempt from the speaker to make them hearer to do so. (6) ¿me puedes sacar un zumo de naranja? ‘can you bring me an orange juice?’ Internal mitigating devices: – Politeness marker: these are additional elements ‘added to the request to bid for cooperative behavior’ (Blum Kulka et al. 1989, 283). (7) un café, por favor ‘a coffee, please’ – Cajoler: conventionalised speech items whose semantic content is of little transparent relevance to the overall meaning of the discourse (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, 284). (8) ¿sabes? me gustaría pedirte un favor ‘you know, I would like to ask you a favour’. – Appealer: these items appeal to the hearer’s understanding; “they are used by the speaker whenever he or she wishes to appeal to his or her hearer’s benevolent understanding” (Blum-Kulka, et al. 1989, 285). (9) no digas eso, ¿vale? ‘don’t say that, all right?’ – Diminutive: forms with the lexical morpheme (-ito/ita), to express affection and to mitigate the direct force of the request (Félix-Bradefer 2009, 483). (10) cafetito y media ‘a small coffee and half piece of toast’. The frequency counts and percentages of the main request strategies and internal mitigating devices were calculated. Furthermore, a difference of proportions test was used in order to analyse whether the difference in request strategies and internal mitigators was statistically significant between groups. 3.3.3 Analysis at the Stylistic Level Finally, at a stylistic level, the use of the informal and formal personal pronouns tú/usted, and terms used by customers to address bartenders, as well as the general tone of the exchanges were considered. A difference of proportions

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test was used in order to analyse whether the difference in personal pronouns and was statistically significant between groups. 4 Results 4.1 Discourse Domain: Opening Phase Openings are strategies used to establish a first contact between interlocutors. In the present study these are performed by means of either greeting strategies (hola ‘hello’), attracting the interlocutor’s attention with an alerter (oye, ‘listen’) or a combination of more than one strategy (‘hola, ¿qué tal? ’ ‘hello, what’s up?’): table 6.1

Opening phase strategies

Hola ‘hello’ Buenos días ‘good morning’ ¿qué tal? ‘how are you?’ Alerters Combinations TOTAL

VL (N: 53)

HS (N: 57)

22  4  0  2  1 29

 2 12  3  8  6 31

41.5%  7.5%  0%  4%  2% 55%

3.5% 21%  5% 14% 10.5% 54%

As Table 6.1 shows, not all interactions started with an opening phase; in fact, only 55% of the VL interactions, and 54% of the HS interactions did so. Although both groups used a similar number of opening strategies, the specific ones used were different. While the VL informants mainly used the informal greeting hola ‘hello’ (41.5%), this was less frequent among the Granadans (3.5%). The difference in the use of hola ‘hello’ between both groups was statistically significant at the .01 level (z = 4.821, p = .000001). The HS group tended to use buenos días ‘good morning’ (21%) more frequently than the VL group (7.5%), showing a statistically significant difference at the .05 level (z = −2.0075, p = .045) in their use of this strategy. Alerters (14%) or combinations of strategies (10.5%) were also more frequent in the HS data, however the difference in the use of these strategies was not statistically significant between the groups: alerters (z = −1.871, p = .061) and combination strategies (z = −1.854, p = .064). It also appeared that, as examples (2) and (3) illustrate, the opening phases in the HS interactions tended to be longer, as they generally included two turns,

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while this was less frequent in the VL corpus, where often only the customer or bartender greeted, with no response from the requester who moved straight into making the request. (2) HS (3) VL BT: ¿qué hay? BT: ¡hola! ‘how is it going?’ ‘hello’ CL: bueno(s) día(s)¡hola! CL: un café; ‘good morning’ ‘hello’ ‘a coffee’ BT: señor ‘sir’ BT: ‘buena(s)’ ‘good morning’ 4.2 Discourse Domain: Request Phase The opening phase of the interaction was usually followed directly by a request. In this phase we observed a variety of sequences, with four main types observed: some were initiated by customers (4); some by the bartenders (5); in some the bartender requested a customer confirmation (6); lastly, there were some where no explicit request was needed, as the bartender had made an assumption about what the customer would order and had gone ahead with preparing it (7). (4) CL: hola, ¿me pones un café con leche y unas tostadas? ‘hello, will you serve me a coffee with milk and some toasts?’ (5) BT: ¿qué te falta Cento? ‘What are you missing, Cento?’ CL: un tubo fresquito ‘a cold beer’ (6) BT: lo de siempre ¿no? ‘the same as always, right?’ CL: sí, lo de siempre, pero con hielo . . .’ ‘yes, the same as always but with ice’ (7) [CL sits down, BT serves him a coffee] BT: ¿te saco el cafelillo fuera? ‘Shall I bring you the coffee outside?’

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table 6.2 Request sequences

Client initiated Bartender initiated Client confirmed No explicit request TOTAL

VL N: 53

HS N: 57

34 12  6  1 53

30 17  8  2 57

 64%  23%  11%   2% 100%

 53%  30%  14%   3% 100%

As shown in Table 6.2, the type of request sequences was very similar in both regions. There were more customer-initiated sequences in both sets (64% for VL, and 53% for HS), and these were followed by bartender-initiated sequences (23% for VL; and 30% for HS). There was also a considerable variety of strategies used by the bartenders when addressing the customers. Even though some queries appeared in both sets (¿qué te pongo/ponemos? What can I/we serve you?), there were others that were only present in the HS corpus (¿qué te falta? ‘What are you missing?’; ¿qué va a ser? ‘What will it be?’; dígame usted caballero ‘tell me sir’), or in the VL data (¿qué quiere tomar? ‘What would you like to drink?’). Customer-confirmed requests were much less frequent in both sets (11% for VL, and 14% for HS), and these were followed by non-explicit requests, which were almost non-existent (2% for VL, and 3.5% for HS). There was no statistically significant difference in the use of request sequences between groups (client initiated z = 1.223, p = .221; bartender initiated z = −.854, p = .392; client confirmed z = −.426, p = .669; no explicit request z = −.521, p = .297). 4.3 Discourse Domain: Non-transactional Talk Even though sequences of non-transactional talk only appeared in a few of the interactions (VL: 6 or 11%; HS: 6 or 10.5%), these interactive sequences showed familiarity and in-group membership between bartenders and customers, playing an important role in the exchanges where they appeared. In the VL corpus these exchanges were briefer, and they consisted mainly of briefly remarks about the weather or football, whereas in HS there was a more varied range of topics (e.g. family, job, weather) and the exchanges were lengthier and more personal. The tone of the HS small talk sequences often turned to humour or bantering, and the exchanges sometimes involved other customers. The examples below illustrate the contrast between the two sets:

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(12) VL BT: ¡qué calor está haciendo! It is so hot right now! CL: dicen que hoy llegamos a 39 o 40 They say it will get to 39 or 40 degrees today. BT: ¿estás esperando? Are you waiting? CL: no, tráeme un té No, bring me some tea. (13) HS (BT serves a drink to C1) C1: ¿y la tapa?6 ‘and the tapas?’ BT: ¿te da(s) cuenta de que te estoy poniendo una tapa que no e(s) la pri­ mera, sino la segunda, Felipe? ‘Do you realise, Philip, I am serving you your second ‘tapas’ not your first? C1: ¿la segunda?, la(s) aceituna(s) no cuenta(n) ‘The second one? Olives don’t count’ C2: ¿y a mí no me pone(s) tapa? ‘Don’t I get any tapas?7 BT: ¡a ti que te voy a pone(r)!/ lleva(s) ahí to(d)a la mañana No, you don’t! You have been sitting there/all morning / C1: /lleva ahí to(d)a la mañana y no ha gasta(d)o na(da)/, no ha gasta(d)o na(da) You have been sitting there all morning and you haven’t spent a cent, you haven’t spent a thing. (laughter) BT: ¿y qué? ¿hace mucho calo(r) ahí en el campo? So tell me, is it very hot out there in the fields? C2: pue(s), tú verá(s) Are you kidding me? BT: ¿qué va a ser? What are you going to have? C2: échame un vasito de vino blanco con Casera Pour me a little glass of white wine with Casera. 6  A tapa is a small portion of food that is given for free when you order a drink. This is customary in the south of Spain. 7  In this region, it is customary to serve a little appetizer with each drink that is served for free; these free appetizers are called ‘tapas’.

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As the examples above show, the inclusion of small talk suggests familiarity and closeness between interlocutors. Small talk and joking sequences were often evident in those interactions where the bartender and the customers knew each other, and they tended to happen at times when the cafeteria was not too crowded. While the VL examples, such as (12), were usually more formal, involving simple remarks about the weather or football matches, the interactions in HS were more casual and light-hearted, and they included a wider range of topics and jokes (as shown in example (13)). In that example, bartender and customer 1 start talking about the ‘free tapa’ in a humorous way when the customer demands a second portion. Then customer 2 also requests his own tapa and customer 1 intervenes, stating that customer 2 does not deserve one as he has already spent a lot of time but too little money at the cafeteria that morning. This provokes laughter between the three participants. Finally, bartender and customer 2 converse in a humorous way about the weather. This interaction demonstrates the element of familiarity or ‘confianza’ that was prevalent in the HS interactions. 4.4 Illocutionary Domain In this section I discuss the main request strategies and internal mitigating devices used by the participants to make their service encounter requests. I only included in the analysis those requests in which a specific request strategy was actually used, as there were some examples in which the request was made via extralinguistic devices such as gestures or facial expressions. As specified in section 3.3.2 above, an adapted version of Blum-Kulka et al’s. (1989) coding scheme was used to classify the main request strategies and internal mitigating devices. 4.5 Request Head Act Strategies With regards to request head act strategies, Table 6.3 shows, that in both data sets almost all strategies used were direct. Indirect strategies (¿me puedes dar un vasito de agua? ‘Can you give me a little glass of water?’) were almost nonexistent (VL 2%; HS 4%): table 6.3 Request head act strategies Request strategies

VL (N=48)

HS (N=48)

Direct Elliptical Command Want Simple interrogative

24  4  7 12

25 16  3  2

49%  8% 14% 24%

53% 34% 6% 4%

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table 6.3 Request head act strategies (cont.) Request strategies

VL (N=48)

HS (N=48)

Indirect Query ability TOTAL

 1 48

 2 48

 2% 100%

4% 100%

In terms of the specific direct request strategies favoured by each group, I noticed a slight difference between the groups. While both used the elliptical (dos cafés con leche y media de tomate; ‘two coffee lattes and half of tomato’) most frequently (VL 49%; HS 53%), the VL group also used simple interrogatives (¿me pones un café con leche y tostada?; ‘Would you bring me a coffee latte and a toast?’) often (24%), followed by want statements (Lorenzo, yo quiero un café, ¿vale?; Lorenzo, I want a coffee, okay?) in 14% of the cases. In the HS dataset, however, the command (dame una copilla de pacharán; ‘Give me a glass of pacharán’) was used more frequently (34%), while the simple interrogatives (4%) and want statements (6%) were rarely used. There was a statistically significant difference in the use of the simple interrogative at the .05 level (z = 2.891; p = .004) and of the command at the .01 level (z = −3.015, p = .002). However, no statistically significant difference was found in the use of want statement (z = 1.336, p = .181), elliptical (z = −.024, p = .838) or query ability (z = −.586, p = .557) between both groups. 4.6 Illocutionary Domain: Internal Mitigating Devices Even though internal mitigating devices are normally used to soften the imposition of requests, in service encounter scenarios they may serve other functions, and are sometimes used as solidarity markers. It has been suggested that strategies such as use of diminutives (ponme un vinillo; ‘Serve me a small wine’); appealers (yo quiero un cortado, vale?; ‘I want a macchiato, okay?’) and politeness markers (dos cafés, por favor; ‘two coffees, please’) seem to be used to denote friendliness or courtesy rather than to mitigate a threat to face (Danblon et al. 2005). As Table 6.4 shows, the HS group used more internal mitigators than the VL group (40% vs. 24%). In terms of the specific mitigating devices used, the HS participants used diminutives almost exclusively, while the VL group used them much less frequently. There was a statistically significant difference in the use of diminutives at the .01 level, (z = −3.432, p = .0005) between both

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Table 6.4 Internal lexical mitigating devices

Politeness marker Diminutive Cajoler Appealer TOTAL

VL (N=49)

HS (N=47)

 3  3  3  3 12

 1 16  0  2 19

 6%  6%  6%  6% 24%

 2% 34%  0  4% 40%

groups. They used other devices at a much lower rate; for example, politeness markers (VL 6%; HS 2%), appealers (VL 6%; HS 4%), and cajolers (VL 6%; HS 0%). While the difference in their use of cajolers was statistically significant at the .05 level (z = .4116, p = .0218), the difference in their use of politeness markers (z = .979; p = .327) and appealers (z = .411, p = .681) was not statistically significant between groups. 4.7 Stylistic Domain In the stylistic domain I analysed the type of address pronoun used (informal tú or formal usted), as well as the type of terms that customers and bartenders used to address each other. I noted a similar choice of pronouns in both data sets; the informal pronoun tú was used much more frequently than usted (VL 92%; HS 89%). There was not a statistically significant difference in the choice of personal pronouns between groups (z = .543, p = 1.412). However, the HS group used short forms of names slightly more frequently than the HS group (VL 0; HS 10.5%). The difference in the use of short forms of names between groups was statistically significant at the .05 level (z = −2.429, p = .015). The use of short forms of names added a more personal or familiar touch to the interactions, as the example below shows: (11) CL: Ponme un par de cañas Nando.8 ‘Serve me a couple of beer drafts, Nando’

8  Nando is a short form of the name Fernando.

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The use of shortened names, as well as the more humorous tone noted in the non-transactional sequences, make the HS interactions seem more personal and informal than the VL ones. 5 Discussion This study compared naturally-occurring service encounter interactions at cafeterias in two regions of Spain: Andalusia (Huétor Santillán, Granada) and the Autonomous Community of Valencia (Valencia, Valencia). After conducting an analysis at the illocutionary, discourse, and stylistic levels, I was able to compare and contrast them. At the discourse level I analysed the use of phatic tokens at the opening and request phases of the exchanges. In the opening phase, we observed that the HS informants used longer and more frequent opening strategies, including more ritualistic exchanges and alerters, while in VL openings were generally briefer, consisting mainly of the informal greeting hola; ‘hello’. The longer openings in the HS sequences made their interactions appear more personal. The type of request sequence used was very similar in both sets. Customers usually initiated the exchanges with a request strategy (e.g. ponme un café; ‘Bring me a coffee’), and in some cases the bartender made the request for their order first (e.g. ¿qué le ponemos?; ‘What shall we get you?’). Requests for confirmation (e.g. ¿un café solo?; ‘a black coffee?) and non-explicit requests were much less common in both sets. This similarity in type of request sequence may be due to the fact that both contexts attracted a similar type of clientele. As Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a) state, the choice of a specific request sequence may be related to the degree of familiarity that bartenders and customers share. In that study, requests for confirmation and non-explicit requests occurred only among the regular customers, and this seems to apply in the present study as well. These sequences, as Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a) also found, are individualised strategies that show affiliation between bartender and customer, and they are used in order to carry out the service more efficiently. Regarding non-transactional speech sequences, these were equally present in both data sets; however, they differed in length and in the topics of conversation. While the VL data included mainly exchanges about the weather, the HS interactions included more humour, jokes, banter, a greater variety of topics, and the inclusion of more than one customer in the interactions. Placencia (2005) also observed in her study, the fact that the Madrileño customers joined in conversations with other customers more frequently than the Quiteños.

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Our study results show that, at a discourse level, the HS informants used a more personal approach, including more phatic exchanges and noninteractional passages in their exchanges. Several reasons might explain the more personal approach found in the HS interactions in comparison to the VL ones. Firstly, Huétor Santillán is a small town, while Valencia is a mid-size city. In small towns people tend to know each other better, and hence are more inclined to interact in a more personal manner with more use of phatic exchanges. Second, the HS informants may have been using different ‘communicative styles’ (Scollon, Scollon and Jones 2012); while the VL informants were more distant and formal, the HS group may have adopted a warmer style of communication. It is worth noting that in both locations solidarity strategies were prevalent, illustrating what Placencia (1998) calls the ‘Spaniard’s disposition for friendly communication’. Other studies of service encounters have also pointed out Spaniards’ informal and easy-going communication style when compared with other regions of the Hispanic world (Placencia 1998; Placencia 2005). At an illocutionary level, both groups tended to choose direct strategies, with elliptics being the most frequently used. This result was not surprising, as other service encounter studies (e.g. Placencia and Mancera Rueda 2011a; Placencia 2005) have also found that elliptical forms were the most frequently used strategies by their Peninsular Spanish participants. In the next most common strategy, the VL participants used simple interrogatives (¿me pones un cortado?; ‘Will you serve me a macchiato?’), and the HS group chose more imperatives (ponme un café; ‘Serve me a coffee’). Simple interrogatives may be considered more indirect than imperatives as a result of their interrogative structure. Some researchers have even classified them as indirect strategies rather than direct ones (LePair 1996). According to Placencia and Mancera Rueda (2011a), imperatives are explicitly direct strategies, and this may be an indication of a certain degree of familiarity or solidarity between interlocutors. Hence, the Granadans made more use of strategies that suited a more personal relationship between bartenders and customers than the Valencians. However, it is important to note that both groups used mainly direct strategies. Previous studies of service encounters have also found this level of directness on the customers’ part. As Placencia (2005) explains, it is possible that the use of directness in certain kinds of service encounters is characteristic of the activity type, irrespective of the degree of power or social distance between the participants, just because it is the most efficient way of carrying out the transaction. In terms of stylistic analysis, I looked at use of pronouns and terms of address. Regarding the address pronouns, both groups of participants strongly favoured the informal tú rather than usted. This was expected since researchers such as

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Blas Arroyo (2005) have noted that in less formal scenarios, such as cafeterias or the street, the use of tú is now clearly preferred in Spain (p. 305). Other studies analysing service encounter requests in Peninsular Spanish (e.g. Placencia 2005; Placencia and Mancera-Rueda 2011a) also noted the almost exclusive use of tú in these contexts. The only stylistic difference between both groups was the fact that the HS data contained more informal address terms, all shortened forms of names (e.g. Nando, Migue, Guti) than the VL set, where only one customer called the bartender by his first name. The use of these shortened names by the Andalusian group also conveys a more personal approach. Overall, the HS group used more interpersonal strategies and showed more solidarity with their interlocutors than the VL participants. This is shown by the higher frequency of informal address terms, longer opening phases, more frequent use of commands, diminutives, and longer non-transactional sequences in their interactions. Although the VL group also used solidarity strategies, such as direct request, and few internal mitigating devices, they used fewer personal strategies on the whole than the HS group. Hence, we may safely conclude that there were some differences between the communicative styles of these two Peninsular Spanish groups. However, even though in other linguistic areas (e.g. phonology), there are clear distinctions between the two groups, the pragmatic differences were less marked, mainly consisting of a more informal tone in the Andalusian corpus. It is noteworthy that certain factors may have affected our study results. Although the interactions were recorded in similar types of cafeterias, we should bear in mind that the VL data was collected in two neighbourhood cafeterias within the city of Valencia and the HS interactions were recorded in Huétor Santillán, a small town close to the city of Granada. Hence, the use of a more personal approach in the Andalusian data may have more to do with the different pace of living between a city and a small town. Similarly, Placencia (2005) suggested that the differences she found between Quiteños and Madrileños may have been partly due to the fact that Quito is a smaller city than Madrid. In contrast with Placencia’s (2008) subnational variation study, the differences I observed between Valencians and Granadans were not as evident. Placencia (2008) stated that ‘Quiteños and Manteños do not operate according to similar norms of interaction’ (p. 331). In the present study I found some differences in the communicative styles of Granadan and Valencian speakers, but these were not sufficiently evident to suggest that our two groups of participants operated according to different communication norms. Further pragmatics studies comparing these two regions would be needed to confirm these results. Pragmatics studies comparing the Andalusian dialect with the

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Spanish spoken in other regions of Spain would also be a useful way to investigate any other clear differences between the Andalusian dialect and Castilian Spanish. More studies of the Spanish spoken in different locations within the Autonomous Community of Valencia, where Valencian is spoken more widely than in Valencia itself, would also reveal more about the pragmatics in a bilingual context. References Alvar, Manuel. 1996. Manual de Dialectología Hispánica. El Español de España. Barcelona: Ariel. Aston, Guy. 1995. “Say ‘Thank you’: Some Pragmatic Constraints in Conversational Closings”. Applied Linguistics 16, 1: 57–86. Barron, Anne, and Klaus Schneider. 2009. “Variational Pragmatics: Studying the Impact of Social Factors on Language Use in Interaction”. Intercultural Pragmatics 6, 4: 425–442. Blasco Arroyo, José Luis. 2005. Sociolingüística del Español. Desarrollos y Perspectivas en el Estudio de la Lengua Española en Contexto Social. Madrid: Cátedra. ———. 1995. “Tú y Usted: Dos Pronombres de Cortesía en el Español Actual. Datos de una Comunidad Peninsular”. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 10: 21–44. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane, House, and Gabriele Kasper. 1989. “Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies”. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bou Franch, Patricia. Current Issue. “The Genre of Web-mediated Service Encounters in Not-for-profit Organizations: a Cross-cultural Study”. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danblon, Emmanuelle, Bernard de Clerck, and Jean Pierre van Noppen. 2005. “Politeness in Belgium: Face, Distance and Sincerity in Service-exchange Rituals”. In Politeness in Europe, edited by Leo Hickey, and Miranda Stewart, 45–57. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. 2009. “Pragmatic Variation across Spanish(es): Requesting in Mexican, Costa Rican, and Dominican Spanish”, Intercultural Pragmatics 6, 4: 473–515. ———. 2012. “Pragmatic Variation by Gender in Market Service Encounters in Mexico”, in Variation in First and Second Languages, edited by César J. Félix-Brasdefer, and Dale Koike, 17–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. García, Carmen. 2004. “Reprendiendo y Respondiendo a una Reprimenda: Similitudes y Diferencias entre Peruanos y Venezolanos [Reprimanding and Responding to a

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Pluricentric Languages, edited by Klaus Schneider and Anne Barron, 307–332. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ———. 2005. “Pragmatic Variation in Corner Store Interactions in Quito and Madrid”, Hispania 88, 3: 583–598. Placencia, María Elena, and Mancera Rueda, Ana. 2011a. “Dame un Cortado de Máquina, cuando Puedas: Estrategias de Cortesía en la Realización de la Transacción Central en Bares de Sevilla”. In Aproximaciones a la (Des)cortesía Verbal en Español. Fondo Hispánico de Linguística y Filología, 3, edited by Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez, Esperanza. Alcaide Lara, and Ester Brenes Peña, 491–508. Berne: Peter Lang. ———. 2011b. “Vaya Qué Chungo. Rapport Building Talk in Service Encounters: The Case of Bars in Seville at Breakfast Time”. In Spanish at Work: Analyzing Institutional Discourse across the Spanish Speaking World. 192–207. Ruzickova, Elena. 2007. “Customer Requests in Cuban Spanish: Realization Patterns and Politeness Strategies in Service Encounters”. In Research on Politeness in the Spanish-speaking World, edited by Placencia, María Elena and García, C. 213–41. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Scollon, Ron, Suzanne Wong Scollon and Rodney H. Jones. 2012. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, 3rd edition. Oxford (UK) and Mandel (MA): Wiley Blackwell. Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2000. “Face, (Im)politeness and Rapport”. In Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk about Cultures, edited by Helen Spencer-Oatey, 11–46. Continuum: New York. ———. 2002. “Managing Rapport in Talk: Using Rapport Sensitive Incidents to Explore the Motivational Concerns Underlying the Management of Relations”. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529–545. Traverso, Veronique. 2001. “Syrian Service Encounters: A Case of Shifting Strategies within Verbal Exchange”. Pragmatics 11: 421–44.

Part 4 The Influence of Cultural Dimensions on Service Encounters

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Introduction to Part 4 Part 4 tries to provide a better understanding of the impact of culture on the development of service providers and customer interaction and perception. In Chapter 7, this impact is studied through the use of engagement markers of Spanish, British and US toy-selling websites. Chapter 8 shows the evolution of communication with the foreign population in Spanish medical consultations in recent decades, putting special emphasis on the role of interpreters in health-care contexts requiring an interpreter.

CHAPTER 7

The Impact of Cultural Dimensions on the Engagement Markers of Spanish, British and US Toy Selling Websites Francisco Miguel Ivorra-Pérez 1 Introduction In the 21st century, major social changes such as the globalization process, the solidification of the European Union and the convergence between member states are encouraging export companies to become more aware of the hidden dimensions of culture and how these may have an impact on their international negotiations. In other words, it would appear imperative for export manufacturers to become familiar with the different ‘cultural dimensions’, also called ‘value dimensions’, which affect societies equally but for which there are different answers. These are often referred to as ‘cultural orientations’. From an anthropological perspective, there have been many definitions of the concept of ‘culture’. The term was first defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of a society” (Tylor 1871, 21). Gibson (2000, 7) conceives this concept as “the sense of a shared system of attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour”. ‘Culture’ is also understood as “a pattern of learned, group-related perceptions-including both verbal and nonverbal language, attitudes, values, belief systems, and behaviours that is accepted and expected by an identity group” (Singer 1998, 107). And last but not least, Hofstede (1991, 4) defines ‘culture’ as “the collective mental programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others”. All these definitions draw our attention to the way a group of people is trained from a very early age to internalize the behaviour and attitudes of the community. These patterns of thinking, acquired from our childhood onwards, make up our ‘cultural framework’, which can be interpreted as “the perceptual lens through which an individual filters the information provided by our physical senses and comes to grips with the world” (Guillén-Nieto 2005, 99). This means that our senses provide us with information that becomes meaningful “only by passing it through the selective filters derived from our cultural © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_008

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beliefs, attitudes and values embedded in our cultural frame” (Walker, Walker, and Schmitz 2003, 266). In the following sections, we review the two cultural dimensions that most concern us in this study (individualism index and context dependence), the importance of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ politeness, as well as the different studies carried out regarding the influence of cultural values on the linguistic patterns found in different countries and cultures. 2

Individualism and Collectivism as Cultural Dimensions

In his ground-breaking work “Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind” (1991), the Dutch anthropologist and social psychologist Geert Hofstede analysed a large data base of employees’ values scores collected by IBM between 1967 and 1973, covering more than 70 countries. This work is widely known for the development of one of the most outstanding paradigms within the framework of the cultural dimensions theory: ‘individualism vs. collectivism’, ‘small power distance vs. large power distance’, ‘masculinity vs. femininity’, ‘strong uncertainty avoidance vs. weak uncertainty avoidance’ and ‘long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation’. It is important to underline that other dimensions have recently been added to the paradigm, although academic publications are yet to be published. These are ‘indulgent-restraint’ and ‘pragmatic-normative’ dimensions.1 In the present study, special attention is paid to the cultural dimension of ‘individualism’. This is closely related to the concept of the ‘self’, namely the way individuals from a particular culture define their own identity and their relationship with other people (Hofstede 1981; Troompenaars 1993; Walker, Walker, and Schmitz 2003). This cultural dimension may be explained as part of a continuum along which cultural groups may show preferences in terms of strategic orientations of value dimensions. These are often referred to as ‘individualistic’ and ‘collectivist’ cultural orientations: Individualism is characteristic of societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family. Collectivism as its opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty (Hofstede 1991, 51).

1  Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html.

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Hofstede’s words imply that in individualistic societies people value selfreliance, achievement, independence and success as an individual responsibility, which is very important in business negotiations. In contrast, in collectivist societies, individuals are more connected with strong societal bounds. In this sense, there is more emphasis on group decision-making and success, and responsibility is shared. On a scale that ranges from a low to a high level of ‘individualism’, in which 0 corresponds to the most collectivist society and 100 to the most individualistic one, the overall results obtained in Hofstede’s research indicate that Spain scores 51 points on the index of individualistic values, whereas the United Kingdom and the USA score 89 and 91 points respectively. These empirically verified scores confirm that there are strong cultural differences if we compare Spain with the UK and the USA. Therefore, Spanish society may be considered a moderately individualistic culture, whereas Britons and North Americans seem to hold highly individualistic cultural values. Chart 7.1 below shows the scores obtained by Spain, the UK and the USA on the ‘individualism’ cultural dimension in the percentage scale designed by Hofstede:

chart 7.1 Spain, UK and USA scores in percentages on the ‘individualism index’ (Hofstede 1991, 53)

Although Hofstede’s five-dimensional model has attracted much criticism lately, either because it is considered old-fashioned, or because it might promote cultural overgeneralization or even lead to stereotyping (Loukianenko Wolfe 2008), in the opinion of some scholars (Clark 1990; Simon 1999) it has been the most comprehensive and influential study based on empirical quantitative data of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture at a collective level. It should be pointed out that the empirical results derived from Hofstede’s study are called into question by other researchers specialized in the interdisciplinary field of intercultural communication. One remarkable example is the President of Global Business Consultants, Leaptrott (1996, 88), who claims that although the foundations of English culture are extremely

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individual-oriented, there is a strong overlap of tribal values from both the Roman and Holy Roman empires that has made England a predominantly tribal society. Apart from that, Leaptrott (1996, 107–109) explains that Spain’s history has been dominated by Roman, Islamic and Catholic values at various times, and these three cultural powers were all tribal in nature with strong authoritarian power structures. Thus, Spanish society is considered highly tribal since its primary motivation is the power and welfare of the family group. 3

Context as a Cultural Dimension

The North-American anthropologist Edward T. Hall is considered one of the pioneering researchers in the interdisciplinary field of intercultural communication. In his work “Beyond Culture” (1976) he examines the effect of ‘context’ on meaning. His research is based on observations of interpersonal transactions across a wide variety of cultural interfaces, taking into account how information and communication are managed. The results cover a scale in which ‘high-context’ communication and ‘low-context’ communication comprise two ends of a continuum: High context transactions feature pre-programmed information that is in the receiver and in the setting, with only minimal information in the transmitted message. Low context transactions are the reverse. Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context (Hall 1976, 101). Although Hall’s study is observational in nature, it has proved to be a recognizable pattern in a wide range of cultures. In general terms, Hall observed that Northern Europeans operate lower on the context scale than Southern Europeans. Spain, for instance, has been considered a moderately high-context culture. As fairly high-context communicators, Spaniards observe their business interlocutors and do business with them not so much because of what they say but because of the good impression they give. They rely mainly on nonverbal, symbolic and situational cues rather than on spoken or written ones (Walker, Walker, and Schmitz 2003). Hence, high-context cultures promote an implicit communicative style which relies on the audience’s ability to grasp the main message, even if that message is not openly announced in the text. In contrast, Britons and North Americans value low-context communication and they believe that detailed and explicit messages have more importance than information that is conveyed by means of context. As such, they often require that “meaningful and significant information be recorded meticu-

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lously, ask for and provide explicit confirmation of their understanding of interactions and situations” (Lewis 1996, 184). Therefore, low-context cultures favour an explicit communicative style which is characterised by presenting information in a straightforward manner. Both Hofstede’s (1991) ‘individualism index’ and Hall’s (1976) ‘context dependence’ open new lines of interdisciplinary research regarding the influence of culture on a wide range of specialized fields, such as the business arena. Thus, numerous studies cover the influence of these cultural dimensions on protocol and social etiquette in the international business context (Jandt 2001; Leaptrott 1996; Lewis 1996; Salacuse 1991; Walker, Walker, and Schmitz 2003); written business genres (Guillén-Nieto 2009; Ivorra-Pérez 2011; Loukianenko Wolfe 2008); marketing and advertising messages in international negotiations (De Mooij 2004; García-Yeste 2013; Grande 2004; Lin 1993; Mueller 1992; Zandpour et al. 1994; Zhang and Gelb 1996); content and design of digital genres like industrial websites (Ivorra-Pérez 2009, 2011, 2012; Singh, Zhao, and Hu 2003; Singh and Matsuo 2004); and consumer behaviour (De Mooij 2000), among others. 4

Positive and Negative Politeness Orientations

Hall’s ‘context dependence’ and Hofstede’s ‘individualism index’ are very much related to communicative styles and politeness. Brown and Levinson (1987, 13) state that, in any communicative act, human beings are always endowed with what they call ‘face’, which refers to “the public self-image that every member of a society wants to claim for himself or herself” (Goffman 1967, 61). As such, these linguists distinguish two types of ‘face’: ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. The former refers to the individual’s need to be liked, approved of and appreciated, whereas the latter regards the individual’s right not to be completely dominated by group or social constraints, and to be free from the imposition of others. In spite of the fact that Brown and Levinson’s aforementioned model (1987) has been regarded as one of the most complete in linguistic politeness literature, it has also received criticism from many researchers interested in studying the performance of speech acts in different countries and cultures. In fact, much of this criticism derives from the alleged universalism that Brown and Levinson claim in their model. In this vein, studies that examine Eastern cultures clearly object to accepting the positive-negative dichotomy as explanatory of their cultural orientations and communicative styles. Brown and Levinson seem to give more importance to the ‘negative’ aspect of face, that is, the preference for respecting each participant’s personal space and freedom of action. This approach seems to suggest that their model is

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based on an essentially Anglo-Saxon context, where there is a general preference for individualistic cultural values, deference and indirectness when dealing with issues related to linguistic politeness. However, some other cultures tend to value the ‘positive’ side of face when expressing politeness strategies, like establishing and maintaining social relations as well as involving other interlocutors in the message or activity. Indeed, different studies carried out from an intercultural perspective reveal that the linguistic politeness strategies used in some cultures for the performance of speech acts are not exactly the same as those used in the English-speaking world (Blum-Kulka 1989; BouFranch, this volume; Díaz-Pérez 2003, 2009; Fernández-Amaya 2008; GuillénNieto 2009; Kasper et al. 1993; Márquez-Reiter 2000; Scollon and Scollon 1995; Vázquez-Orta 1995; Wierzbicka 1991; among many others). As far as Peninsular Spanish and British English are concerned, studies show that Spaniards, who are regarded as more collectivist, have a preference for the use of ‘positive’ linguistic politeness strategies (Díaz-Pérez 2003, 2009; Fernández-Amaya 1999, 2004, 2008, 2011; Guillén-Nieto 2009; Hernández-López and Placencia 2004; Hernández-López et al. 2012; Vázquez-Orta 1995; among others). This preference tends to be linguistically reflected in the use of more direct and involvement strategies that address the needs of other speakers in the communicative act. On the contrary, British culture tends to favour ‘negative’ linguistic politeness strategies as a result of its individualistic values. This is why they use more indirect and independence strategies than their Spanish counterparts, so as not to invade their interlocutor’s autonomy and freedom of action. This said, and notwithstanding individual differences, we may conclude that the identification of shared cultural orientations in a community may help to explain the general preference for “certain patterns of non-linguistic and linguistic behaviour, namely genre conventions, communication strategies and rhetorical patterns” (Guillén-Nieto 2009, 37). 5

The Influence of Cultural Dimensions on Communication

The relationship between cultural dimensions and linguistic behaviour has been of central concern for linguists and anthropologists in recent years. For example, Prykarpatska (2008) undertakes a contrastive analysis of the culturespecific pragmalinguistic conventions ruling complaints in American English and Ukrainian. Her study reveals that the different scores of North Americans and Ukrainians on Hofstede’s ‘individualism index’ may provide an explanation of the differing linguistic strategies, namely indirectness versus directness and implicitness versus explicitness, that the speakers tend to favour when complaining in their respective languages.

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Loukianenko Wolfe (2008) also draws together a few areas of Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions, namely ‘power distance’, ‘uncertainty avoidance’ and ‘individualism’, which might show how cultural systems influence the rhetorical patterns in Russian and American business correspondence. In her analysis, a correlation is established between the ‘power distance index’ and the reference to previous communication and salutation; the ‘uncertainty avoidance index’ and its impact on the style of commands and requests (explicit versus vague), on the placement of the purpose statement as well as on the form of providing contact information; and finally, the ‘individualism index’ and its influence on the form of reference to self (as an individual versus as a group). With regard to the ‘context’ cultural dimension, several studies have explored its influence on the linguistic patterns of different professional genres. For instance, Guillén-Nieto (2009) examines its impact on Spanish and British sales letters. In particular, she analyses how the different level of ‘context dependence’ held by each of the two cultures is reflected in the more or less explicit or implicit information shown in this written genre. Ivorra-Pérez (2009) also examines the influence of this cultural dimension on the way information is conveyed in the transactional discourse of Spanish and British business websites, as well as in Spanish and British sales letters from the toy sector (IvorraPérez 2012). García-Yeste (2013), for his part, also studies how this dimension plays an important role in the design of press advertisements for food in Spain. Accordingly, the present study aims at analysing the impact of individualism and context, on the one hand, and politeness, on the other, on the engagement markers that appear on the presentation page or ‘home page’ of Spanish, British and US toy-selling websites. With this goal in mind, the analysis is based on the interactional metadiscourse strategies model developed by Hyland and Tse (2004), as shown in table 7.1 below: table 7.1

Hedges

Model of interactional metadiscourse strategies (Hyland and Tse 2004, 169)

withhold writer’s full commitment to proposition Boosters emphasize force or writer’s certainty in proposition Attitude markers express writer’s attitude to proposition Engagement markers explicitly refer to or build relationship with reader Self-mention markers explicit reference to author (s)

e.g. might/perhaps/possible/ about e.g. in fact/definitely/it is clear that e.g. unfortunately/I agree/ surprisingly e.g. consider/note that/you can see that e.g. I/we/my/our

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Interactional metadiscourse strategies are related to “the way writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the content and the audience of the text” (Hyland and Tse 2004, 156). In particular, we refer to those linguistic markers that involve readers in the argument by alerting them to the author’s perspective towards both propositional information and readers themselves. This issue clearly relates to the tenor of discourse (Hyland 1998), concerned with controlling the level of personality in the text. In recent decades, numerous intercultural studies have researched the use of metadiscourse strategies in different countries following the above-mentioned model (Dafouz-Milne 2006, 2008; Mur-Dueñas 2010; Shokouki and Talati 2009; Suau 2010; Valero-Garcés 1996). Although these concentrate on the intercultural use of metadiscourse strategies in different genres belonging to professional fields such as business, tourism or journalism, in my opinion, a deeper explanation is needed to shed some light on how cultural values may influence the divergent interactional metadiscourse strategies found in different countries and cultures. Regarding the present study, it should be stressed that engagement markers play an important interpersonal function, since they build an explicit relationship between the sender and the receiver of any particular message. In other words, these interactional markers are mainly used to establish social interaction in the online encounter that is held between the company and prospective customers, who may wish to obtain information about the firm and make a possible purchase of the products. 6

Aims and Hypotheses

The aim of this study is threefold: (a) to examine the type of engagement markers used on the home page of Spanish, British and US toy selling websites; (b) to analyse how Spanish, British and North American cultural individualism index, context dependence and politeness orientations are reflected in the engagement markers used on the presentation page of their companies’ websites to interact with potential buyers; and (c) to study whether the websites belonging to ‘individualistic’ and ‘low-context’ cultural orientations, namely British and US websites, use these interactional metadiscourse strategies to the same extent to communicate with customers. Based on this, the following hypotheses have been raised: 1

If Spain is considered a moderately individualistic society, whilst Great Britain and USA are highly individualistic, it is expected that:

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(a) The moderate score of Spaniards (51) on the ‘individualism index’, together with their preference for a ‘positive’ politeness system could possibly make the engagement markers used on the presentation page of their toy selling websites more direct or involvement oriented than those shown by their British and the US counterparts. (b) The high individualism scored by the UK (89) and the USA (91), together with their ‘negative’ politeness preferences, could make them resort to the use of more indirect engagement markers in their toy websites, so as not to threaten the consumer’s negative face. In other words, they will respect their consumers’ personal space and freedom of action to different degrees. (c) There could be some differences regarding the engagement markers used on the presentation page of North American and British websites as a result of their slightly different cultural dimensions. This hypothesis is based on the explanation provided by Leaptrott (1996), which has been dealt with in previous paragraphs. 2

With regard to the ‘context dependence’ value dimension, two main hypotheses have been raised: (a) If Spaniards have been found to operate moderately highly in the context continuum, the engagement markers used on the home page of their toy selling websites could be more implicitly conveyed than the ones shown in the British and the US websites. (b) Given the low-context orientation of British and North Americans, the engagement markers used to address prospective customers on their toy websites may be more explicit than those shown by their Spanish counterparts. (c) Although the UK and the USA share the same official language to communicate, there could be differences in terms of engagement markers as a result of their context orientations. This last hypothesis is backed up by some intercultural studies (Guillén 2005, 114; Lewis 1996, 184) which claim that the British are not as low context communicators as North Americans in the context continuum and thus their communication style seems to be a bit more implicit.

Having described the aims and the main hypotheses of this research, the following section seeks to clarify the method used and the corpus chosen for the analysis.

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Methodology and Corpus Selection

Different methodological steps are followed in this study. First, a sample of 150 business websites from 50 Spanish, 50 British and 50 US toy companies was chosen. These were collated during the year 2011 making use of different Internet directories, such as www.aefj.es, www.britishchamber.co.uk, www .uschamber.co.uk, and www.kompass.es. The decision for selecting toy companies is mainly due to the fact that they are considered one of the leading industrial sectors in export activities nowadays. The reason for choosing these three cultures is based on previous studies, such as the ELISE project (European Language and International Strategy Development in SMEs, 1996–1998) as well as the ELUCIDATE project (Business Communication Across Borders: A Study of Language Use and Practice in European Companies), which revealed that British and Spanish small and medium-sized companies from different industrial sectors show the largest percentage of loss in business turnover in the EU due to communicative and cultural barriers in their international negotiations. In 2005, the findings of the ELAN project (Effects on the European Economy of Shortages of Foreign Language Skills in Enterprise, 2005–2007) revealed that firms need to be encouraged to enhance their employees’ linguistic and intercultural skills. Actually, a report carried out in the framework of that project confirms that those companies that invest in the linguistic and intercultural skills of their staff “achieve an export sales proportion 44.5% higher than one without those investments” (CILT 2006, 7). Consequently, cultural sensitization and communicative competence in English and/or Spanish in international business settings, as in the case of business websites, are two fundamental social needs that capture our interest. Our corpus selection methodology is based on Moreno (2008, 26), who states that “it is necessary for the linguist to compare what is comparable across cultures”. Therefore, this study aims at analysing whether the professional discourse of Spanish, British and US toy selling websites is comparable regarding the engagement markers used on the presentation page of each company. The main reason for using this section of the website and not others such as forums, chats or blogs (though these are also worth considering in terms of communication with customers) is because this is the page in which firms provide the most essential information about their main objectives and the type of products manufactured. As far as the analysis is concerned, the first stage consisted in observing and classifying the most relevant types of engagement markers used on the presentation pages of the websites selected for the corpus. To accomplish this, we

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have focused on those interactional metadiscourse strategies that help establish interaction with customers. Secondly, a quantitative analysis has been carried out with the help of the computer program Textworks 1.0 (Gil et al. 2004), in order to count the absolute and relative frequency of each type of engagement marker on each company’s presentation page. Then, the results have been submitted to statistical analysis through the chi-square test of homogeneity in a contingency table by means of SPSS Statistics Software 18. The chi-square test is a non-parametric test used to compare frequencies in studies dealing with data measurable with nominal scales. If one compares the frequency of the different types of engagement markers used at a p