Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping [1 ed.] 1032255919, 9781032255910

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Contributors
1 Introduction • Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen
2 Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice: an inquiry into the multimodal and linguistic repertoires in markets in Sydney • Dariush Izadi
3 Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason: accepting or rejecting sellers’ offers to taste at the market • Lorenza Mondada
4 Reassembling meaning while shopping • Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook
5 Multimodal engagement and interaction, and the appearance of contemporary non-traditional retail shopping • Gitte Rasmussen
6 Trust, transparency, and transactions: revealing participation in collocated and hybrid auction sales • Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff
7 Checking before checkout: how customers deal with trust and accountability in grocery shopping in online and brick-and-mortar shops • Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen
8 Curating a lifestyle experience: how Pottery Barn makes it so • Louise Ravelli
9 Going shopping: a social semiotic study of resources for walking offline and online • Søren Vigild Poulsen
10 Community or commerce—the story of eBay • Theo van Leeuwen
Index

Citation preview

Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping

This collection brings together social semiotic, ethnographic, and conversation analytic approaches to multimodality in global studies of shopping, drawing on the rich diversity of the latest multimodal methods to critically reflect on shopping as a cornerstone of contemporary social life. The volume explores shopping as an area of study in its own right, with the buying and selling of goods and services a fundamental part of the social and cultural life of human communities for centuries. The book looks at both online and offline shopping, examining it as both everyday multisensorial practice and its translation into the interactive text and imagery that comprise the online shopping experience, from London street markets to Japanese grocery shops to Danish supermarkets to worldwide online shopping sites. Highlighting the diversity of modern multimodal approaches through contributions from established scholars, the book critically surveys both the challenges and opportunities in the embodied interactions between buyers and sellers and how these points of connection have been translated and will continue to transform in the age of algorithms and emergent technologies. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in multimodality, multimodal conversation analysis, social semiotics, social interaction, and retail studies. Gitte Rasmussen is Professor of Social Interaction at the University of Southern Denmark. Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Routledge Studies in Multimodality Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran Curtin University

Multilingualism from Manuscript to 3D Intersections of Modalities from Medieval to Modern Times Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk, Elżbieta Adamczyk, and Jukka Tyrkkö Multimodal Experiences Across Cultures, Spaces, and Identities Ayelet Kohn and Rachel Weissbrod A Multimodal Stylistic Approach to Screen Adaptations of the Work of Alice Munro Sabrina Francesconi Multimodal Chinese Discourse Understanding Communication and Society in Contemporary China Dezheng (William) Feng Organizational Semiotics Multimodal Perspectives on Organization Studies Edited by Louise Ravelli, Theo Van Leeuwen, Markus A. Höllerer, and Dennis Jancsary Reading Images for Knowledge Building Analyzing Infographics in School Science J. R. Martin and Len Unsworth Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping Edited by Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studiesin-Multimodality/book-series/RSMM

Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping Edited by Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-25591-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25592-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28412-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Contributors  1 Introduction

vii 1

GITTE RASMUSSEN AND THEO VAN LEEUWEN

  2 Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice: an inquiry into the multimodal and linguistic repertoires in markets in Sydney

13

DARIUSH IZADI

  3 Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason: accepting or rejecting sellers’ offers to taste at the market

40

LORENZA MONDADA

  4 Reassembling meaning while shopping

85

EMI OTSUJI AND ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK

  5 Multimodal engagement and interaction, and the appearance of contemporary non-traditional retail shopping

104

GITTE RASMUSSEN

  6 Trust, transparency, and transactions: revealing participation in collocated and hybrid auction sales

128

SYLVAINE TUNCER, CHRISTIAN HEATH, AND PAUL LUFF

  7 Checking before checkout: how customers deal with trust and accountability in grocery shopping in online and brick-and-mortar shops ELISABETH DALBY KRISTIANSEN

152

vi  Contents   8 Curating a lifestyle experience: how Pottery Barn makes it so

172

LOUISE RAVELLI

  9 Going shopping: a social semiotic study of resources for walking offline and online

187

SØREN VIGILD POULSEN

10 Community or commerce—the story of eBay

208

THEO VAN LEEUWEN

Index225

Contributors

Christian Heath is Professor Emeritus at King’s College London. His publications include The Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and Antiques (Cambridge), Video and Qualitative Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life (Sage, with Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff), and Technology in Action (Cambridge, with Paul Luff). Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and teaches language and linguistic research methods, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and TESOL units at Western Sydney University, Australia. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in social settings. Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests concern ethnomethodological and conversation analytical studies of multimodal social interaction conducted face-to-face as well as mediated through online platforms. She investigates how people accomplish social organization in shopping, project work, and care work. Paul Luff is Professor of Organizations and Technology at King’s College London. With colleagues in WIT, he has undertaken video studies in a diverse variety of settings, including various areas of healthcare, control rooms, auctions, news and broadcasting, museums, and science centres, and within design, architecture, and construction. Publications include Video in Qualitative Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life (Sage, with Hindmarsh and Heath) and Technology in Action (Cambridge University Press, with Heath). Lorenza Mondada is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research deals with social interaction in a variety of ordinary, professional, and institutional settings within an ethnomethodological and

viii  Contributors conversation analytic perspective. Her specific focus is on video analysis and multimodality, integrating language and embodiment in the study of human action as well as social relations, materiality, and sensoriality. Emi Otsuji is Senior Lecturer in International Studies and Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. She writes both in English and Japanese and is co-author (with Alastair Pennycook) of Metrolingualism: Language in the City (2015, Routledge) and co-editor (with Ikuko Nakane and William Armour) of Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan. Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney and Research Professor at the MultiLing Centre at the University of Oslo. He is best known for his books The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic); Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places; and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize). His most recent book (with Sinfree Makoni) is Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South; a second edition of Critical Applied Linguistics, a Critical Reintroduction was published in 2021. Søren Vigild Poulsen is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and Member of the Centre of Multimodal Communication. He has published research articles and book chapters on semiotic technology and practices, history of social media, website design, transduction, as well as social and cognitive approaches to multimodal analysis. Gitte Rasmussen is Professor of Social Interaction at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests concern ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of social interaction with a focus on the embodied and multimodal fit between practices and their environments. Publications include A body of resources—CA studies in social conduct (special issue of Journal of Pragmatics) (with Spencer Hazel and Kristian Mortensen) and chapters and journal articles: ‘Singing as a resource in conversations involving persons with dementia’, ‘Interactional consequences of object possession in institutional practices’ (with Dennis Day), and ‘On the social constraints of having a world’. Louise Ravelli is Professor of Communication in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Joint Chief Editor of the journal Visual Communication. She researches how language, images, and other modalities—including spatial design—can be understood as meaning-making resources.

Contributors ix Sylvaine Tuncer is Sociologist and Lecturer in Work, Interaction, and Technology at King’s College London. She uses ethnography and video data drawing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to shed light on work and organizational phenomena through the use of technologies in collaboration. Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. He has published widely in the areas of social semiotics, multimodality, and discourse analysis and was a founding editor of the journals Social Semiotics and Visual Communication. His most recent book is Multimodality and Identity (Routledge).

1 Introduction Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen

1.

The many forms of shopping

Buying and selling, or, more broadly, exchanging goods and services, are, and always have been, fundamental parts of the social and cultural life of human communities. But during the past two centuries, it has undergone significant changes. From the 19th century onwards, sellers no longer only sold what they themselves produced, by bringing produce to market or selling from their craft workshops, but began to diversify, in the process learning to fix prices, create display windows, engage in advertising, and so on. In the late 19th century, department stores diversified even further, often reinstating credit to increase sales and directing their advertising specifically to women, so fostering the rise of consumerism. The 1950s saw the introduction of supermarkets, soon followed by megastores specializing in areas such as gardening and hardware materials, office supplies, furniture, and electronics. In these stores, paid labour was replaced with unpaid labour. Where previously, sellers had collected the goods and weighed, measured, and packaged them for their customers, now customers had to collect the goods themselves and take them to a cashier. Soon, stores of this kind grew into global chains, cutting costs by exploiting suppliers in developing countries, with grocery chains, for instance, creating food waste and plastic pollution as a result of the pre-packaging of goods. Today, shopping is moving online, like many other social practices. It is a development which has been underway for several decades, but the pandemic has accelerated it. As a result, exchanges between customers and sellers become even more impersonal; the actual shops, with their robotized warehouses, are even more powerful and remote; and traditional high streets and malls even more deserted, as shops close one by one. Auctions, too, have gone online, in cases such as eBay turning garage sales and peerto-peer trading into global businesses. But change is gradual. The old continues to exist alongside the new. Street markets are still vibrant in many countries. Migrant communities

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-1

2  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen take the supply of goods from their home countries into their own hands through shops and markets that also function as community hubs. In the well-to-do suburbs of rich countries, boutique bakeries and small, exclusive fashion shops continue to flourish. Even online, global giants exist alongside informal peer-to-peer social media trading. This volume deals with shopping in all its diversity, from second-hand shops to supermarkets and from small multicultural groceries to the screens of our laptops and smartphones. Pennycook and Otsuji (Chapter 4) visit a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop in Tokyo where customers speak Urdu, English, Japanese, Hindi, and other languages; shop for mobile phones and specialized groceries; talk with the shop workers; and meet with friends. Dariush Izadi (Chapter 2) describes the Parklea Markets, a busy market in an area of Sydney where immigrants from the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific come to buy meat, fruit, and vegetables, as well as cheaply produced shoes, clothes, and other goods. Lorenza Mondada (Chapter 3) describes a Christmas market in a town in Alsace, France, where locals shop for regional food items, in particular, Munster cheese and locally produced wines, whiskies, and gins; and are offered samples to taste or drink by the stallholders. Gitte Rasmussen (Chapter 5) explores a small café-shop in Denmark where people who seek alternatives to anonymous mass consumption can enjoy quality coffees and cake and play retro board games as well as buy second-hand and new goods. Elisabeth Kristiansen (Chapter  7) focuses on a contemporary supermarket which also trades online, investigating in detail how actions such as paying for the goods at checkouts translate into paying on websites. Poulsen (Chapter 9), similarly, compares shopping in a large electronics store with shopping in the online version of the same store, focusing on how moving between different parts of the store to inspect products, ask for advice, and so on translates into moving a cursor to access the corresponding parts of the shop’s website. Louise Ravelli (Chapter 8) deals with the way a large furniture chain store has pioneered new ways of displaying goods, again both in-store and online. Two further chapters deal with auctions. Tuncer, Heath, and Luff, in Chapter  6, compare traditional offline auctions with the hybrid modes of auctioning introduced during the pandemic, in a chapter that includes a partial transcript of the auctioning of a Picasso. van Leeuwen (Chapter 10) compares traditional forms of auctioning to the very different way in which goods are auctioned online on eBay and includes a history of this company, which started as a platform for peer-to-peer selling but soon became a large and powerful global company. 2.

The multimodality of shopping

Multimodality is a key theme of our book—shopping as involving all the senses, including touch and smell, and using a wide range of forms of communication, including, in brick-and-mortar shops, gestures and other aspects

Introduction 3 of non-verbal communication, and, online, the multimodality of texts and images which attempt to compensate for a loss of multisensoriality and explore new approaches to centuries-old ways of attracting customers. The Christmas market described by Mondada (Chapter 3), for instance, with its offers of tasting the produce, involves smell, touch, and taste, as well as the gaze, the body postures, movements, positions, and trajectories of sellers and passers-by. In the café-shop described by Rasmussen (Chapter 5), similarly, shopping is enhanced by the pleasures of good coffees, specialty drinks, and cakes, and the physical handling of goods; while moving through the shops is facilitated by the way the shop’s design has created pathways for shoppers to follow. Pennycook and Otsuji (Chapter 4) use Latour’s concept of assemblage to focus on the way gestures; texts, such as shopping lists; artefacts, such as shopping bags; and the produce on offer come together in multimodal complexes; for instance, in an assemblage of the gesture of pointing with the objects pointed at and the shopping basket. Online shops, in contrast, must replace what, in brick-and-mortar shops, is physical and sensory with words and images. In online supermarkets, fruits and vegetables can no longer be touched to test their ripeness, which, as Mondada has described elsewhere (2022: 178–179), market customers saw as an infringement of their rights when touching was prohibited on street markets during the pandemic. In online fashion shops, the fabric can no longer be touched, and the clothes can no longer be tried on. In online furniture stores, it is no longer possible to sit on chairs or lie on the beds to try the mattresses. And as described by Poulsen (Chapter 9), the physical action of walking through large stores must be translated into the limited actions of moving a cursor across the screen. Online shopping, therefore, on the one hand, reduces the multimodality of shopping but, on the other hand, introduces new forms of multimodality in shopping through the way it combines text, image, and layout. Where video images are used, as in the auctions described by Tuncer, Heath, and Luff (Chapter 6), gaze and gesture become important again but in a new way, as they must now locate the different bidders, even when the viewers cannot see them, as only the auctioneer is on camera. 3.

Shopping as social interaction

A second and equally important focus of our book is on shopping as social interaction, whether online or in brick-and-mortar shops, and whether designed and managed top-down or created and coordinated in situ by buyers and sellers. Izadi (Chapter  2) describes how, in Sydney’s Parklea Markets, the interaction between shoppers and sellers goes beyond the formalities needed to conduct the actual sale, as when buyers and sellers discuss the pros and cons of a new system of paying; or the cultural differences between shopping in Iran and Australia. Rasmussen (Chapter 5)

4  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen describes similar interactions, such as when a salesperson tells a customer how she sold some of the café chairs to customers so inadvertently reducing customers’ opportunities for drinking coffee and playing board games. Pennycook and Otsuji (Chapter  4) relate a philosophical discussion in which a shop owner assures (non-Islamic) customers that “nothing can be confirmed in this world”, although “Allah knows everything”. In online shops, such interactions are no longer possible or may be sourced out to chatrooms that are quite separate from the shops themselves. As van Leeuwen (Chapter 10) describes in detail in his chapter on eBay, online buyers (and sellers) are restricted to following instructions or choosing from pre-programmed menus of options and have only a few options for entering messages themselves—typing in search terms, 50-word descriptions of goods offered for sale, and of course, the personal data that will result in an avalanche of emails offering discounts and top deals. At the same time, the company seeks to compensate for this by addressing buyers in informal, sometimes even chummy ways, which nevertheless are deliberately and strategically designed and lack improvisational spontaneity. Interrogating online social interaction also raises issues of power and trust. As van Leeuwen (Chapter 10) shows, online customers do not have access to the same linguistic and multimodal resources for interaction as sellers, which creates power inequality. The issue of trust comes up in several chapters. Tuncer, Heath, and Luff (Chapter 6), for instance, discuss the importance of trusting the genuineness of offers in auctions, even when the bidders cannot be seen, and the ways in which auctioneers deal with this problem, in part through gestures that indicate the bidder. Kristiansen (Chapter 7) discusses how, in brick-and-mortar supermarkets, there is an intersubjective trust that rules will be followed. Even the final checking of the basket, before proceeding to the counter, takes account of the other shoppers in the queue, ensuring that they will not be delayed. In the online checkout, however, no other customers are co-present to witness and observe, and the action can be stalled or interrupted without inconveniencing anyone. As a whole, our book seeks to bring out what is gained and what is lost as shopping moves online—as we move from those lively corner shops and marketplaces, those hubs of sociability that are close to cafés and restaurants and may even incorporate cafés, to the more isolated but also more efficient, effective, and convenient act of ordering things online. 4. Multidisciplinarity A final key aspect of our book is its multidisciplinarity, the way in which it brings together different approaches to the study of multimodal interaction and textuality. Studies of corner shops, markets, café-shops, and so

Introduction 5 on, such as the chapters by Izadi, Mondada, Pennycook and Otsuji, and Rasmussen in this volume, tend to employ a predominantly ethnographic approach, as do the chapters by Kristiansen and Tuncer, Heath, and Luff. A key approach here is (multimodal) ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (MEMCA), which, as we will show later in more detail, has produced a considerable amount of work on shopping. Textual approaches to multimodality and interaction in shopping have been less numerous, but as the result of a growing interest in semiotic technology and spatial discourse, they are now increasing in number, particularly in the field of social semiotics. Following, we therefore briefly introduce these two key approaches—EMCA and social semiotics. They complement each other in a number of ways, ensuring that our book places shopping both in its immediate contexts of situation, where negotiation can take place, and in its broader cultural context, by analyzing shopping in the light of major contemporary social and cultural developments, yet through the lens of the more micro ways in which they have been designed and organized. 4.1. Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research in multimodality

Though EMCA research has investigated online interaction, most studies concern shopping in brick-and-mortar shops (but see Kristiansen (this volume); Rasmussen et  al. (under review)). Studies in brick-and-mortar shops are based on video recordings and seek, in general, to capture how customers and salespersons order local and concrete actions and (re)establish practices (Garfinkel et al., 1981; Garfinkel, 2002), with the overall purpose to capture what shopping entails from the perspective of these social agents. They demonstrate how actions are in essence multimodal since customers and salespersons mobilize gaze, talk, and body postures in an interplay with the physical shopping environment to make their actions recognizable and relevant to others who witness their conduct. Importantly, they also demonstrate how customers and salespersons orient to the multimodal details of each other’s actions in responding turns. Buying decisions may be initiated by customers’ attention being drawn towards a specific merchandise. De Stefani (2013, 2014; see also Stukenbrock and Dao, 2019) show how couples achieve joint attention towards merchandise, with one party monitoring the other’s change in bodily orientation, posture, and gaze direction, listening simultaneously to the way the merchandise is referred to, and the other party coordinating his or her own bodily orientation, gaze, and talk accordingly. Furthermore, he shows that the attended merchandise may engender topics for conversation and be used as landmarks in the shopping space, in addition to playing a part in buying decisions.

6  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen Shopping spaces include many non-commercial objects, such as fridges, shelves, tables, desks, wrapping papers, and payment terminals. For example, Richardson and Stokoe (2014) illustrate how non-commercial objects in a bar become essential resources in organizing buying and selling encounters. Specifically, they describe how bartenders operate the till to link table numbers to the registration of drinks and foods that have been requested by the customers, while the customers, for example, orient to tables and table numbers prior to, or simultaneously with, answering questions about table choice. The bartender may even treat the till as the primary agent requesting information from the customer. Kristiansen and Rasmussen (in press) show how free single-use shopping bags serve as a resource for organizing the closure of buying-selling encounters in coordination with talk. They describe how closures are routinely initiated by salespersons handing over the bag with the items purchased but also how customers’ avoidance of the bags, for the sake of the environment, contributes to changing the routines. It goes without saying that the body is crucial in visits to brick-andmortar shops. De Stefani and Mondada (2018) show, for example, how conversations amongst shoppers ensue from the shoppers creating specific bodily configurations in space. Additionally, De Stefani (2013) describes how coupled shoppers result from shoppers’ coordination with each other’s embodied conduct (e.g., by walking jointly through the store or jointly standing still) and with talk. The talk may, for instance, concern products in a remote space that is used to bring about a shift from a stationary posture to jointly moving to that space. In the same way, Rasmussen and Kristiansen (2022) find that customers in self-service supermarkets coordinate embodied actions to give each other space while avoiding getting socially involved. Similarly, Clark and Pinch (2010) reveal how shoppers and salespersons achieve a common understanding of whether a service encounter is relevant or not (for example, through customers’ bodily orientation towards shelves with products displays), whereas Mondada and Sorjonen (2016) demonstrate how salespersons may respond to customers’ requests in encounters by turning around to pick up the requested merchandise. Mondada and Sorjonen also describe how the customers may then add further requests; for example, after the salesperson has turned around again. Finally, in a series of studies, Lorenza Mondada describes how customers’ senses may become interactionally relevant (Mondada, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2021). She shows how customers may, for example, request or be offered to touch, smell, and taste food items in accordance with the shops’ normative regulations that are formed in relation to the items’ specific features. For instance, practices of touching specific types of cheese may generate palpating, practices of smelling cheese sniffing, and practices

Introduction 7 of tasting cheese sucking and working around the food in the mouth. Mondada’s studies exhibit, in other words, how customers use their bodies as instruments for assessing and evaluating the quality of sales products. Her studies supplement EMCA studies in showing, for example, how normatively controlled human sound, such as coughing, yawning, and sniffing, may be interactionally exploited (see Broth, 2011; Hoey, 2020), and how sensorial experiences may be objectivized (Liberman, 2013). 4.2.  Social semiotics

Social semiotic approaches to analyzing shopping go back to a handful of key studies which have all focused on the functional elements of shopping, on modelling shopping, as we say today. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Mitchell (1957: 178ff) analyzed buying and selling on markets in terms of five functional elements: ‘salutation’, ‘enquiry as to the object of sale’, ‘investigation of the object of sale’, ‘bargaining’, and ‘conclusion’. Building explicitly on Mitchell’s work, Hasan’s study of buying and selling in a small vegetable shop (1985: 61ff) distinguished eight functional elements: ‘service initiation’ (“Who’s next?”); ‘sales request’; ‘sales enquiries’, resulting from an inspection of the goods and sometimes resulting in negotiation (e.g., about the quality of the produce, ‘sales compliance’, ‘sale’, ‘purchase’, ‘purchase closure’, and ‘finis’). Some of these functional elements are ‘obligatory’, others ‘optional’, and some functions or sequences of functions are recursive. Ventola’s (1987) study of service interactions in Finnish and Australian post offices, shops, and travel agents, modelled service encounters in the form of a complex flowchart covering eight pages. This brought out how functional elements can be realized in different ways, depending on factors such as whether buyers want to inspect the goods on their own or in dialogue with the seller, whether they know the price or not, and whether or not they need change or not. Although this allows the creation of “a text governed by the interactants’ individual or common needs” (Ventola, 1987: 3), it is still a schema, a template, a “regular and habitual, socially shared patterning” (Ventola, 1987: 48). None of these studies were multimodal. They focused only on verbal interactions, even though Mitchell did recognize that participants may be “silent in the performance of their tasks or talkative mainly on topics without any apparent connection with what they are doing” (Mitchell, 1957: 169) and even though Ventola acknowledged that “Many nonverbal actions form a vital part of service encounters” (Ventola, 1987: 50; for instance, wrapping the goods and operating the cash register) and that proxemics plays a key role; for instance in queueing (Ventola, 1987: 48). Similar accounts were also, and at the same time, developed in artificial intelligence. Schank and Abelson’s (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and

8  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen Understanding, a collaboration between a psychologist and an AI scientist, presented a generic schema of restaurant interaction, with functional elements such as ‘entering’, ‘ordering’, ‘eating’, and ‘exiting’ taking the form of detailed flowchart-like activity sequences. They saw their ‘restaurant script’ as both representing the knowledge needed to understand stories about restaurant (inter)action and the ability to perform roles, such as customer, waiter, and cook; and they then sought to program a computer to understand and perform such roles. In subsequent decades, many more scripts of this kind were written by human-computer interaction engineers, describing (and then automating) practices such as the work of receptionists (Falzon et al., 1986). Clearly, describing shopping has heralded prescribing, designing shopping, and the latter has led to online shops becoming increasingly similar in their generic structure, even if their visual style may allow for diverse and distinct forms of branding (van Leeuwen et al., 2022). Today, there are even ready-made templates available for designing your own e-commerce website. As Fairclough (2003: 68) has argued, such formats are not only powerful tools, they are also tools of power, “social technologies that can enhance social control and lead to the homogenization of practices, and, because of their global distribution, to what Giddens (1991) has called the ‘disembedding’ of social material from particular social contexts”. Insights of this kind have recently engendered critical studies of semiotic technologies, initially focusing on the design of digital resources for the production of texts, such as Microsoft Word (Kvåle, 2016) and PowerPoint (e.g., Djonov and van Leeuwen, 2018a; Zhao et  al., 2014), later also on the design of digital resources for enacting social practices, such as meeting friends on social media (Eisenlauer, 2014; Jones, 2009), teaching mathematics (van Leeuwen and Iversen, 2017), performing academic work (Djonov and van Leeuwen, 2018b), or indeed, shopping, as in chapters in this volume by Poulsen (Chapter 9) and van Leeuwen (Chapter 10). As mentioned, earlier social semiotic studies of buying and selling have focused mainly on language. The social semiotic work of Ravelli (e.g., 2000 and 2022; Chapter 8 in this volume), however, focused on the ‘spatial discourse’ of shops, on the basis of a detailed framework for analyzing the functionalities of spaces as well as the way they facilitate or restrict social interaction and position the people who use the spaces. Her analysis of the Queen Victoria Building, a large shopping centre in Sydney, for instance, showed how the different levels of the building house different kinds of shops, with lower-end brands and fast-food outlets on the lowest level and art galleries, antiques, and precious jewellery on the highest level. This structures the building in terms of social class. Yet escalators—the only modern element in a building that is otherwise meticulously restored in art deco style—create social mobility between the levels. Andersen and van Leeuwen (2017, 2019) have analyzed the virtual space of the fashion

Introduction 9 website Zalando as well as drawn on social semiotics to analyze the use of language and images on this site. 5.

Summary and outlook

As a whole, then, our volume covers a variety of forms of buying and selling which, together, bring out how shopping changes, in terms of multimodality and social interaction, as it moves from the face-to-face encounters of shops, marketplaces, auction houses, and even supermarkets to online shopping, while yet also demonstrating that different forms of shopping continue to exist side by side. In doing so, it brings together two distinct approaches to the study of social communication which, to our knowledge, have so far not partnered in a single volume. We hope that our multimodal and multidisciplinary approach will inspire studies of other social practices and other forms of social interaction that are also moving online, and lead to further reflection on the gains and losses which this brings. In the age of COVID-19, this is, in our view, an important and urgently needed area of research. Note Section 4 of this Introduction partially reworks the introduction of ‘The human touch—Analysing online and offline shopping’ (Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022). Acknowledgement This book is one of the outcomes of the research project ‘The digital resemiotization of buying and selling interactions (RESEMINA)’, conducted at the Department of Language and Communication of the University of Southern Denmark and funded by the Velux Foundation. References Andersen TH and van Leeuwen T. (2017) Genre crash: The case of online shopping. Discourse, Context & Text 20: 191–203. Andersen TH and van Leeuwen T. (2019) Multimodal meaning-making in online shopping. In Höllerer MA, van Leeuwen T, Jancsary D, Meyer RE, Andersen TH and Vaara E. (eds) Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 140–161. Broth M. (2011) The theatre performance as interaction between actors and their audience. Nottingham French Studies 50(2): 113–133. Clark C and Pinch T. (2010) Some major organisational consequences of some ‘minor’ organised conduct: Evidence from a video analysis of pre-verbal service

10  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen encounters in a showroom retail store. In Lewellyn N and Hindmarsh J. (eds) Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140–171. De Stefani E. (2013) The collaborative organisation of next actions in a semiotically rich environment: Shopping as a couple. In Haddington P, Mondada L and Nevile M. (eds) Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 123–151. De Stefani E. (2014) Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self service store. In Nevile M, Haddington P, Heinemann T, et  al. (eds) Interaction with Objects Language, Materiality, and Social Activity. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 271–294. De Stefani E and Mondada L. (2018) Encounters in public space: How acquainted versus unacquainted persons establish social and spatial arrangements. Research on Language and Social Interaction 51(3): 248–270. Djonov E and van Leeuwen T. (2018a) Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: The case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice. Social Semiotics 28(5): 641–664. Djonov E and van Leeuwen T. (2018b) The power of social-semiotic software: A  critical multimodal perspective. In Flowerdew J and Richardson J (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge pp. 566–581. Eisenlauer V. (2014) Facebook as third author—(semi-)automated participation framework in social network sites. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 73–85. Fairclough N. (2003) Analysing Discourse—Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Falzon P, Amalberti R and Carbonell N. (1986) Dialogue control strategies in oral communication. In Hopper K and Newman IA (eds) Foundations for HumanComputer Interaction. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publications BV, pp. 73–98. Garfinkel H. (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Garfinkel H, Lynch D and Livington E (1981) The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11: 131–158. Giddens A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Hoey EM. (2020) Waiting to inhale: On sniffing in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 53(1): 118–139. Jones RH. (2009) Technology and sites of display. In Jewitt C. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, pp. 114–126. Kristiansen ED and Rasmussen G. (in press) Would you like a bag for that? Environmental awareness and changing practices for closing buying and selling encounters in retail shopping. Pragmatics & Society. Kvåle G. (2016) Software as ideology: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of Microsoft Word and SmartArt. Journal of Language and Politics 15(3): 259–273. Liberman K. (2013) The phenomenology of coffee tasting: Lessons in practical objectivity. In Liberman K (ed) More Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: SUNY, pp. 215–266.

Introduction 11 Mitchell TF. (1957) The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: A situational statement. In Mitchell TF. (ed) 1975 Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London: Longman, pp. 167–200. Mondada L. (2018) The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops. Discourse Studies 20(6): 743–769. Mondada L. (2019a) Participants’ orientations to material and sensorial features of objects: Looking, touching, smelling and tasting while requesting products in shops. Gesprächsforschung 20: 461–494. Mondada L. (2019b) Contemporary issues in conversation analysis. Embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 145: 47–62. Mondada L. (2019c) Rethinking bodies and objects in social interaction: A multimodal and multisensorial approach to tasting. In Kissmann UT and van Loon J. (eds) Discussing New Materialism: Methodological Implications for the Study of Materialities. Berlin: Springer. Mondada L. (2021) Sensorial explorations of food: How professionals and amateurs touch cheese in gourmet shops. In Cekaite A and Mondada L. (eds) Touch in Social Interaction. Touch, Language, and Body. London: Routledge. Mondada L. (2022) Appealing to the senses: Approaching, sensing and interacting at the market’s stall. Discourse & Communication 16(2): 160–199. Mondada L and Sorjonen M-L. (2016) Making multiple requests in French and Finnish convenience stores. Language in Society 45(5): 733–765. Rasmussen G and Kristiansen ED. (2022) The sociality of minimizing involvement in self-service shops in Denmark: Customers’ multi-modal practices of being, getting and staying out of the way. Discourse & Communication 16(2): 200–232. Rasmussen G, Kristiansen ED and Poulsen SV. (under review) The World of Daily Life: Doing a Search for (e-)shopping Purposes. Rasmussen G and van Leeuwen T. (2022) Editorial. The human touch—Analysing online and offline shopping. Special Issue of Discourse & Communication 16(2): 149–159. Ravelli L. (2000) Beyond shopping: Constructing the Sydney Olympics in threedimensional text. Text 20(4): 489–515. Ravelli L. (2022) Ode to a lost icon: David Jones. Discourse & Communication 16(2): 269–282. Ravelli L and McMurtrie R. (2016) Multimodality in the Built Environment. London: Routledge. Richardson E and Stokoe EH. (2014) The order of ordering: Objects, requests and embodied conduct in a public bar. In Nevile M, Haddington P, Heinemann T, et al. (eds) Interacting with Objects: Language, Materiality, and Social Activity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 31–56. Schank R and Abelson R. (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding—An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Stukenbrock A and Dao AN. (2019) Joint attention in passing: What dual mobile eye tracking reveals about Gaze in coordinating embodied activities at a market. In Reber E and Gerhardt C (eds) Embodied Activities in Face-to-Face and Mediated Settings. Hoboken: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 177–213.

12  Gitte Rasmussen and Theo van Leeuwen van Leeuwen T, Boeriis M and Dakwar, JR. (2022) Functionalization and informalization in the design of an online fashion shop. Special Issue of Discourse & Communication 16(2): 148–159. van Leeuwen T and Iversen DL. (2017) Semiotiska teknologier och lärender -exemplet Mathletics. In Insulander E, Kjalländer S, Lindstrand F, et al. (eds) Didaktik I  Omvandlingens Tid—Text, Representation, Design. Stockholm: Liber, pp. 52–66. Ventola E. (1987) The Structure of Social Interaction—A Systemic Approach to the Semiotics of Service Encounters. London: Frances Pinter. Zhao S, Djonov E and van Leeuwen, T. (2014) Semiotic technology and practice: A  multimodal social semiotic approach to PowerPoint. Text and Talk 34(3): 349–375.

2 Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice An inquiry into the multimodal and linguistic repertoires in markets in Sydney Dariush Izadi 1. Introduction An Anglo-Australian customer walks into a Persian ethnic restaurant at Parklea Markets and sees an open box of dates resting on the counter. Asking if this is a free sample, the restaurant owner tells her she can have one, but that—following Iranian Islamic tradition—the dates were placed there as a memorial for someone who had recently passed away. “What a silly tradition!”, she says while sniggering and then sneering at the owner. She then eats one and says, “They’re delicious.”

The Persian dates story is one of the millions happening throughout Australia each day: a rich source of observable data for advancing our understanding of Australia’s multicultural and multilingual diversity. Yet previous studies have not adequately examined such everyday interactions (see Noble, 2011; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015; Wise and Velayutham, 2009) and everyday uses of linguistic and semiotic resources (e.g., dates, in the example earlier) in markets and ethnic shops. Traditional sociolinguistic studies have tended to remove a recorded dialogue from its surrounding context, overlooking the cultural/religious and historical background of the participants, what signs a participant can see and in what language, what smells and sounds fill the air, what items are on display, and all the other rich array of contextual and cultural information that is crucial in correctly getting a sense of what is going on in an encounter. Without this type of contextual data, we cannot make sense of the Persian dates example, as we simply do not have the full picture. While previous studies on such interactionally and culturally coconstructed social practice have usefully shed light on processes of interaction in markets and ethnic shops, they have tended to be overattentive to socially minimal service encounters—interactions mostly consisting of talk focused strictly on business-oriented negotiations—without paying much attention to these ethnic shops and markets as places where a lot DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-2

14  Dariush Izadi more happens than simply transactional buying and selling (Blackledge and Creese, 2020; Izadi, 2017, 2020; Mondada, 2016; Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022; Hua et al., 2017). For this chapter, I propose to investigate the underexamined, everyday interactions of a market, known as Parklea Markets in Western Sydney, one of the most culturally diverse regions of Australia, the place where generations of migrant and refugee families have made their home and enriched the fabric of Australian life. 2.

Research on ethnic businesses and markets

More than any other city space, ethnic businesses and markets engender human engagement with a difference (Hiebert et al., 2015)—with different people, different clothes, different goods, and different ways of speaking. While these encounters may occasionally take place between people from discrete ethnic communities, these suburbs have also undergone degrees of cultural appropriation and intermarriage that, although people might identify with singular ethnic categories, are likely to be categorized as ‘hybrid’ (Noble, 2011). Therefore, these sites also seem to be places where the construction of difference (moving from ‘ethnicity/hybridity’ as a ‘category of analysis’ to a ‘category of practice’ (Brubaker, 1996: 15)) takes place not just as an encounter with difference, but the ‘differences’ themselves might be complex and hybrid. Previous studies of interactions in ethnic shops and markets have brought to the fore the complex relations of people, goods, and interactions, and the dynamism of particular social spaces. The day-to-day practices of buying and selling in the market are usually good-humoured and convivial, as people overcome differences to get on with other people (Izadi, 2017, 2020). Indeed, as these studies have foregrounded, it is not so much the transactional dimension of such interactions that matters but rather the complexity of social, spatial, cultural, and semiotic relations (Izadi, 2015, 2020; Goebel, 2015; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015; Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022; Scollon, 2001b; Hua et  al., 2017). They are spaces of everyday intercultural, social, and economic interaction, or what Noble (2009) refers to as “cornershop cosmopolitanism”. To get a handle on how cultural and linguistic diversity as well as semiotic resources are negotiated and experienced on the ground in everyday situations—referred to as ‘multiculturalism from below’—we need a grounded analysis of the contingent nature of our encounters with difference, the “walking round a corner and bumping into alterity” (Massey, 2005: 94), which is typical of urban life. For Wise and Velayutham (2009), everyday multiculturalism is understood as “a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter” (3). Rather than the top-down approaches to multiculturalism that view ethnic groups in terms of rights, entities, and social groupings (Noble,

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 15 2011), the attempt here is to get at everyday practices; at the ways, for example, that people work their way through cultural diversity in multicultural cities and suburbs; at the small-scale local encounters of “intercultural ‘rubbing along’ in the public spaces of the city” (Watson, 2009: 126). From this point of view, we can only understand everyday multiculturalism and linguistic practices “in its local sociocultural specific city” (127). These encounters are different from context to context, from the workplace to neighbourhood streets to public transport. A focus on culturally and linguistically diverse interactions in markets enables us to see how everyday practices and identities are rooted in the trajectories of the multiple communities to which individuals belong, and how they develop and transform. While it is clear, then, that ethnic and linguistic affiliations play an important role in the places people make purchases and sell goods, we also need to “complicate this picture” (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015: 37) to include parameters of repertoires (people exploit ethnic repertoires as part of these processes of affiliation) and mobility (people move in and around the ethnic shops and markets). The focus on metrolingualism is also part of my attempt, following Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), to show how everyday multilingualism operates in markets. The term ‘metrolingualism’ was originally developed by encompassing the notion of metroethnicity to refer to “creative linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history and politics, as a way to move beyond current terms such as multilingualism and multiculturalism” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010: 244). Rather than assuming connections between language and culture, ethnicity, hybridity, or geography, metrolingualism “seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction” (246). One such context is urban markets, which Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) characterize as “sites of layered multilingualism in which different language resources are mobilised within a flow of other practices” (177). An example of this is Parklea Markets in the Western Sydney region, which constitutes a highly diverse urban context, bringing together people from a large range of social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. My aim here is to develop an understanding of the relationship among the use of such diverse linguistic resources (drawn from different languages, varieties, and registers), the repertoires of such participants (clerks/sales assistants and customers), the activities in which they are engaged, and the larger space in which this occurs. This focus brings together metrolingual practices and multimodality (van Leeuwen, 2005a; i.e., the use of more than one semiotic mode in meaning making, communication, and representation generally or in a specific situation), mediated action (an action carried out by a social actor at a site of engagement through mediational means; Scollon, 2001b), and social semiotics (a broad construct where all communication in a

16  Dariush Izadi particular social group is realized through the use of semiotic resources, such as “signifiers, observable actions and objects”; van Leeuwen, 2005a: 12). Such modes and resources include all forms of verbal, nonverbal, cultural tool, and contextual communication; it is about getting things done, everyday language use, and local language practices in relation to urban space. 3.

Conceptual orientation

The current paper offers a complex and detailed analysis of service interactions taking place at the cash registers at Parklea Markets, which applies mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Scollon, 2001a) and nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) as its primary framework but also integrates insights from social semiotics (van Leeuwen, 2005b). At first glance, interactions at the cash registers can be seen as relatively rudimentary social practices, which can be characterized as being highly predictable, realized by a constrained set of scripted actions known as “a genre of activity” (Scollon, 2001a), and engaging clearly defined social roles (e.g., sales assistants and customers). However, as will be demonstrated in this chapter, there are occasions where cultural and relational concerns are inextricably implied and often involve multiple social practices and, thus, are far more complex and unpredictable than they are often imagined. In fact, just to say that the interactions at the cash registers are instances of service encounters overlooks the complexity of all the other practices pertinent to and necessary for their accomplishments. From this perspective, interactions between clerks/shop owners and customers can be considered a very relevant domain of investigation for MDA. Indeed, the social practices imbricated in service interactions are mediated by various types of verbal and nonverbal conduct and references towards material objects available in the physical environment. MDA is an action-oriented approach to critical discourse analysis that views sociocultural activity as its primary focus, which uses a mediated action as a unit of analysis rather than a strip of language. In this way, every action is simultaneously co-located within a far-reaching nexus of practice, defined as the “mapping of semiotic cycles of people, discourses, places, and mediational means involved in the social actions” (Scollon and Scollon, 2004: viii). These practices are linked to other practices, discursive and non-discursive, over time to form nexus of practice or, in Schatzki’s words, a “nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 1996) which can give rise to an understanding of a phenomenon (Heidegger’s notion of thrownness, 1962) and all the enactments of a practice in time and space. In this sense, the term ‘practice’ (as non-count and count) as a social ontology is the most fundamental and the smallest unit of analysis, defined as a routinized type of bodily behaviour enacted by an inherent form of practical knowledge (Reckwitz, 2007). Therefore, the main concern here is what individuals do with discourse and how these doings work to create and

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 17 produce individual identities and communities of practice (e.g., the use of credit cards in Iran and in Australia). At the core of MDA is the mediated action that is carried out by social actors through mediational means. These mediational means include everything; for example, from concrete palpable objects, such as the till, coins, and dates, to symbolic or representational objects (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021), such as units of speech and writing. For instance, within an interaction order of shopping at Parklea Markets, my audio recording device used to record service interactions exists as a separate tool but impacts and is impacted upon by the interaction. The recording device is designed for recording spoken data and only becomes a mediational means once it is appropriated (Scollon, 2001b) to fulfil the task of the recoding of spoken data. This means that mediational means belong to the category of objects in the world but become mediational means only when they are appropriated within a social practice (e.g., recording social interaction). In the same vein, Wertsch (1998) argues that these (cultural) tools incorporate a whole range of practices, identities, objects, as well as discourses and utterances. These tools reveal certain patterns of affordances and constraints that are concerned with the actions that can be taken through their use, facilitating certain kinds of action and messages and at the same time limiting others. Understanding mediational tools, therefore, entails taking into account both the sociocultural histories of one’s historical body and the sociocultural histories of mediational means. These actions and social practices occur at a site of engagement. A site of engagement is a social space at which a mediated action can take place (Scollon, 1998, 2001a, 2001b). I  take this notion of the site of engagement as an understanding of the methods and of the types of interaction that the individual forms to produce social interactions among themselves in a site of engagement. Scollon sees the site of engagement as the realtime window that is opened through an intersection of social practices and mediational means that make that action the focal point of attention of the relevant participants (Scollon, 2001b). Drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics, the site of engagement focuses on “practice/activity theory the insistence on the real-time, irreversible, and unfinalizable nature of social action” (4). According to this definition, action is situated in a unique historical moment and material space when separate practices (i.e., in a service encounter context), such as exchanging greetings, asking for the availability of an item, and handing the credit card to the cashier, come together in real time to construct an action. Each of these sites of engagement is a combination of the patterns of orientation towards space and time that participants bring with them to these moments and locations of social settings. As my data suggest, the interactions at the cash registers can be seen as examples of the sites of engagement that encompass cultural resources

18  Dariush Izadi available for meaning making exclusively tied to specific spaces. These sites are not objective moments but the outcomes of orientations towards time and space that individuals bring to the interaction, mediated through cultural tools. This approach contributes to an understanding of the spatial dynamics of the site as socially co-constructed, historical, symbolic, and material, but not an individualistic perspective, and it investigates the subtleties of distinct elements in the accomplishment of tasks and in the meaning-making process. For instance, in Extract 2.2, I analyze the interactions between the Persian-speaking customers and the restaurant owners at Parklea, where they have introduced semiotic resources that are recognized as Persian to the restaurant. These resources consist of both cultural objects (i.e., the use of credit cards in Iran and in Australia) and language (e.g., speaking Persian) that are now enregistered (Agha, 2005) into parts of everyday communication. Resources in a site of engagement can be manipulated based on individuals’ competences, experiences, and needs. Therefore, the site of engagement can be considered as a semiotic meaning potential available to individuals to draw upon semiotic resources, such as language, objects, material, and olfactory elements. However, the meaning of cultural and semiotic resources can vary according to the specific context as they are socially multifunctional (Appadurai, 2006: 19). For example, eating at the restaurant in question may index exoticness, home country, cosmopolitanism, the Iranian regime supporter, or a user-friendly owner. 4.

The research field: Parklea Markets

This chapter focuses on a market in a Western Sydney suburb of Sydney, Australia, Glenwood, known as Parklea Markets (see Figure 2.1), with trading hours from Friday to Sunday, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. In the 2016 Census, it was reported that 49% of Glenwood’s residents were born outside Australia, with 33.5% born in India, 4.8% in the Philippines, 2.8% in Sri Lanka, 2% in China, and 1.9% in Fiji. An interesting demographic, nonetheless, is that the crowd is overrepresented by senior citizens and families. Parklea Markets, therefore, is diverse not only in terms of the products stacked up alongside each other but also in terms of the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the people who shop there. Today, the market has become a local shopping place for people from the neighbourhood and all over Sydney. The market turns from a nursery (Parklea pots and plants, plastic flowers) into a weekend flea market selling meat, fruits and vegetables, framing, juice, flavours of Fiji, Asian food, leather jackets, shoes, wigs, Australian souvenirs, and daily commodities on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, attracting people of various backgrounds. The products at Parklea Markets are cheaply produced and cheaply sold that make their way to such outlets through the diverse pathways of grassroots globalization.

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 19

Figure 2.1  Parklea Markets: Entrance number 1

5.

Linguistic ethnography as a research methodology

Linguistic ethnography (LE) is an interdisciplinary research approach that studies social, cultural, and linguistic practices through a comprehensive analysis of situated language and communication, utilizing a combination of discourse-analytic and ethnographic research tools. It is an orientation

20  Dariush Izadi towards specific epistemological and methodological traditions in the study of social life (Creese, 2008: 232) reality and experience that are viewed as socially and historically constructed, and consequently, have multiple realities and interpretations (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). In this respect, LE attempts to combine meticulous and close attention to the details of local interactions with the observation of macro-processes to situate linguistic action as embedded in the wider social world. The tenets underpinning LE are expressed by Rampton (2007) and Rampton et al. (2015), who make two important statements concerning the beliefs of those who ascribe to an LE approach. The first point is that rather than assuming the contexts in which communication is taking place, they ought to be examined since meaning is constructed and understood between participants “within specific social relations, interactional histories and institutional regimes” (Rampton, 2007: 585). Secondly, meaning is more than just the “expressions of ideas with biography, identifications, stance and nuance” being extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine grain of discourse data (Rampton, 2007: 585). LE thus emphasizes that linguistics can gain from the “processes of reflexive sensitivity required in ethnography” (Creese, 2008: 232). Meanwhile, ethnography can be enhanced by the analytical frameworks established by linguistics. LE provides researchers with analytical and descriptive tools to seek communication, as it reveals social processes, including the participants, the situation in which they are involved (site of engagement), and the “institutions, networks and communities of practice” (Rampton, 2007; Rampton et al., 2015) in which they are located. LE aims to link what is occurring on the “meso and macro-levels of contextual and social structure” and the micro-level (Tusting and Maybin, 2007: 580). This interdisciplinary view of my current study has urged me to embark on other disciplines beyond ethnography and linguistics (i.e., sociology, social semiotics, anthropology, and so forth). As Tusting and Maybin (2007) convincingly argued, the socially ingrained nature of such structures cannot be captured by just simply analyzing linguistic or ethnographic data, as they are not readily available and identifiable for the participants. It is here that Scollon and Scollon (2007) urge the analyst to explore a nexus analysis by which they can widen their horizons beyond linguistics and bring in all resources accessible in the field under study. 6.

Data and methods

The study is part of a larger project, “Everyday multilingualism in ethnic shops and markets in Sydney”. The data for this study were collected in the scope of that project. The data analyzed in this paper were primarily obtained from transcriptions of the audio/video recordings (around five hours of naturally occurring data) that were recorded between May 2021 and May 2022

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 21 on multiple market days at the fruit and vegetable stalls and a Persian restaurant as well as from a three-month participant observation that I carried out at the aforementioned stalls and in the Persian restaurant at Parklea. Throughout my fieldwork, I made repeated visits to the research site and observed the types of ‘interaction order’ units (Goffman, 1971), utilizing fieldnotes and participant observation. This has resulted in both macro (signage in the shop, newspapers, etc.) and micro (interviews, participant observation, and fieldnotes) data. These data, actually, were not possible to capture by simply interviewing or questioning my participants but needed to be positioned in the lives of their everyday activities at the markets, which may resemble Malinowski’s “the imponderabilia of actual life” (1922) by which he means the detailed observation of what is actually going on with all its subtlety of form and expression, which will then turn into a collection of texts of significant statements (i.e., the “real stuff of the social fabric” (Garbett, 1970: 214)). Such ‘real stuff’ at Parklea Markets includes the routine and details of the working day, the existence of intimate, strong relationships between the owners/sellers and the customers or between customers and customers. To examine the ethnographic data, I adopt Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics conventions to indicate how participants mean what they say when they socially position themselves and others. In particular, I draw from “conversational inference” (Gumperz, 1996: 375) as interactively accomplished with reference to various mediational means and semiotic repertoires available (discourses in place, Scollon and Scollon, 2004) in a site of engagement. Gumperz’s construct of repertoire goes beyond merely counting the number of languages to incorporate other semiotic resources. He defined the notion of “verbal repertoire”, which is linked to a particular speech community, as “contain[ing] all the accepted ways of formulating messages” (1964: 137). Recent work in linguistic anthropology/sociolinguistics and other related disciplines has expanded the repertoire to include “communicative repertoire” (Rymes, 2010), defined as “the collection of ways individuals use language and literacy and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, or accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate” (528). This analytical tool allows the analysts to go beyond the linguistic analysis (speech event) and include whatever linguistic and semiotic resources participants have at their disposal to make sense of the role language plays in constructing their everyday life. Gumperz’s contextualization cues (1982) and Goffman’s (1974) framing also offer a key “structural basis” for analyzing communicative repertoire and indexicality. They shape each other in the sense that they both help us get a sense of the micro level (contextualization cues) and the macro level (framing) of the interaction. Contextualization cues are linguistic and non-linguistic features that participants use to make sense of what they mean when they carry out a social action. Participants in turn evaluate

22  Dariush Izadi these tools to make sense of the definition of the situation they are in and to make sense of it. Although Gumperz limits contextualization cues to verbal, lexical, and grammatical signs, here, I broaden the notion to incorporate gestures and mediational/cultural tools which are frequently strategically exploited to contextualize speech events. To sum up, in the following, I will engage with meaning making in an urban market, known as Parklea Markets, specifically recording the interactions taking place at the cash registers of a Persian restaurant and a Hindi market stall. I analyze what meanings transpire and how they are co-constructed, produced, and made available. This involves language and non-linguistic elements, all part of the spatially located potential, and I explore how language and mediational means often co-signify. 7.

Coloured plastic bags as a mediational means

In Figure 2.2, I demonstrate how actions are embedded in material objects and how they are linked to discourses and social practices, which can ultimately give rise to identity elements. The interactions taking place

Figure 2.2  Yellow and aqua plastic bags as a frozen action

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 23

Figure 2.2 (Continued)

at the cash register at the fruit and vegetable stalls occur in a very limited area (as observed in Figures  2.2–2.5), surrounded by other customers equipped with a cash register that can accommodate a very limited number of customers in a queue and a monitor. Apart from these physical objects that are constitutive of the institutional roles of service providers and service requesters, the customers and the cashier are aware that the interaction starts officially once the customers place the items on the table. Mediational means, such as the EFTPOS and the monitor on the counter, form what Goffman calls the “ecological huddle”; that is, an emic organization of human bodies and objects establishing a shared locus of attention (Goffman, 1963, Canagarajah, 2021: 214). The EFTPOS, the monitor, the body and gestures, and their physical configuration function as semiotic repertoires for paying at the cash register, as important as linguistic resources. However, what is worthy of attention here is the use of coloured plastic bags as a mediational means. As previously discussed, the spatial layout

24  Dariush Izadi of the fruit and vegetable stalls at Parklea Markets is revealing in that they are separated by partitions which allow free passage of customers and which help identify the owners of each of the stalls. Customers browse in the front and back sections of the different stalls and then walk up to the tills to be served. As there is this vast expanse of fruits and vegetables sold through the markets, customers move around, check the quality of the fruits and vegetables, assess prices, and take chosen items to the cash register. One way to find out at which cash register the purchased items need to be paid is through the use of the coloured plastic bags, as seen in Figure 2.2 (yellow and aqua plastic bags). One could argue that this particular use of the coloured bags, to index boundaries of different market stalls, can be seen as a frozen action (Norris, 2004), entailed in the material artefacts at this site of engagement, which has been carried out by the owners/cashiers at an earlier time than the real-time moment of the interaction. This is an important observation that reveals the indexicality of the coloured plastic bags, which is oftentimes backgrounded and left unnoticed, and creates boundaries. These boundary objects (coloured plastic bags) are rather fixed to be taken up by the customers, at least in this context, and are sufficiently recognizable as different. However, it is evident that the coloured plastic bags carry with them a sociocultural history. While they do not in themselves define the fruit and vegetable stalls as a place where a unique use of plastic bags is practised, they are, in essence, a cultural tool that is inherent in the practice of the social actors’ shopping experience at Parklea, as it materially embodies and reproduces a social structure (van Leeuwen, 2005b) embedded in that practice of the participants. As a semiotic structure, the coloured plastic bags display much about its use and practice at least at the vegetable and fruit stalls. This history and social structure are presented to the customers as given in this small action of purchasing. As such, to that small extent, it can be argued that the customers have internalized them as mediational means in their practice. Hence, it should be noticed that the appropriation of the coloured plastic bags employs just some part of what Halliday (1978) might have called the meaning potential of the objects (plastic bags) in that it is not at all the expected meaning. In this, we can see that the plastic bags as a mediational means are appropriated by the customers through practice. Therefore, it can be argued that the coloured plastic bags have caused certain semiotic resources to become enregistered and transformed into this spatial repertoire (Canagarajah, 2021). Through this mediational means, which shows how frozen actions are embedded in objects, the analyst can get a sense of how the historical body of the

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 25 participants can enable them to be selective about which parts of a social action require their attention. 8.

Mediated action and language use at Parklea Markets

The core actions at the fruit and vegetable stalls are the kinds of service encounters between service providers and customers that take place at the cash register with the type of interactional pattern previously observed. As I attempt to demonstrate throughout my analysis in Extract 2.1, we see a prime example of what Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) have termed “metrolingual multitasking,” where the participants’ (the cashier, the grand mum, and the child; see Figure 2.3) everyday multilingualism, on the one hand, consists of a mixture of linguistic resources drawn mainly from Persian and English (with a Persian accent) and, on the other hand, draws upon various mediational means (wearing masks, the till, the credit card, the plastic, and the new computer) to carry out paying at the cash register successfully: The routine nature of the core actions, their interactional competence, the use of artefacts, and the resources in their multilingual repertoires are also part of the social practice of paying at the cash register and the other resources, such as the counter, that are part of the spatial repertoire of the fruit and vegetable stalls. Language guide Regular font: English Italics: English Bold ((in brackets)): researcher’s ethnographic notes S: the staff (the cashier) GM: Grand Mum K: the customer’s kid M: the kid’s mum Extract 2.1

  1 GM  hello (.) how are you↑   2 S hi↓ ((making quick eye contact))   3 K ((GM is putting her chosen items on the counter while K is approaching his grand mum)) salam↑ hi   4 GM salam esh:::gham↓ ((while putting the items on the counter)) hello my love

26  Dariush Izadi

Figure 2.3  Grand mum and grandchild chatting at the counter

  5  K 

 ((returning to his mum at the counter)) mum↑(.)cheese sticks dare↑

   mum   do they have     cheese sticks  6 M    chi dare ↑   what do they have   7  K     cheese (.) sticks↑ ((pronouncing one by one for the mum))   cheese   sticks  8 M     cheese stick↑ ((turning to the corns next to them)) = che corn haye↓        Cheese sticks   how amazing   these corns are   9  K     mum(.)mum(.)cheese sticks dare↑(.)cheese stick↑ ((the kid is making some noises))     mum   mum do they have cheese sticks cheese sticks 10  K  porteghal kharidi↑         have you bought oranges 11  M   (1.0) you got a new system↑ (Figure 2.4)

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 27 12 S  ((turning to the customer)) yeah↓ (Figure 2.5)

Figure 2.4  Mum asking about the new monitor

13 M w:::ow 14  S (1.0) credit card↑ 15 GM  nodding ((swiping credit cards)) The practice of paying at the cash register is continually repeated numerous times during a regular workday at Parklea Markets and becomes a wellingrained routine for the cashiers and the customers. This is because the term ‘practice’ suggests norms and patterns (including repetition) that have the potential to sediment and contain flow and fluidity. Furthermore, the communicative activities imbricated in the paying at the cash register with this sort of interactional pattern observed in Extract 2.1 required to perform the core action include a very limited set of actions, such as formulaic expressions of greeting and farewell and, frequently, negotiation of business. Due to their

28  Dariush Izadi

Figure 2.5  The cashier turns back and responds

routine sequential development and the participants’ historical bodies, the core actions and their constitutive discursive actions may be easily appropriated by the participants at Parklea. However, the success of accomplishing the core actions does not exclusively rely on the cashiers or customers. The successful completion of the core actions is ensured by the ability of all the participants to coordinate their interactional competence (Hall et al., 2011). This ability is illustrated in Extract 2.1, where a grand mum accomplishes the core action of paying at the counter with an overall minimal competence in English. The dyadic relationship between the cashier and the customers in lines 1 and 2 is short-lived and made up of a routine greeting, however monetarily, and may not be relevant for the quality of the relationship with

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 29 the customer. As observed in Extract 2.1, the greeting is not stretched and is limited to “hello” and “hi”. This fleeting interaction is very common in my data, particularly at the cash register of the fruit and vegetable stalls, which helps account for the importance of ritual in marking the beginning of the encounter and a host of joint activities. This access ritual between the cashier and the customer (the grand mum) provides an arena for further communication, allowing the participants to negotiate the move from unfocused to focused interaction while monitoring their spatial movement (e.g., gaze) for their entextualization (see Silverstein, 2014). The smooth management of interwoven social practices and linguistic resources is very evident in this rather mundane interaction in Extract 2.1: The child approaches the grand mum at the cash register, and they greet in Persian (lines 3–4). Note that this meaning of the utterance “hello” in line 3 does not do the work of greeting the grand mum but indexes the level of closeness and familiarity (see Garfinkel, 1967). The child then returns to his mum and asks if cheese sticks are available (lines 5–9) at Parklea, where the mum has difficulty understanding the way the child pronounces “cheese sticks” (the “s” in cheese is combined with the “s” in “sticks”) in rather lengthy turns; and the mum asks the cashier if they have a new computer (“system” in line 11) in place, indexing her identity as a regular customer. In this extract, we observe an “assemblage” (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2019) of objects (coloured plastic bags, a new computer system, cheese sticks, corns), of people (a child born in Sydney, the grand mum and mum born in Iran, and a Hindi-speaking cashier), and the particular linguistic resources (Persian and English) made possible by the simultaneity of these everyday activities. Note there is also “distributed practice” (Canagarajah and Minakova, 2022: 26) between the participants but also between the semiotic resources that contribute to meaning making in this encounter. Of importance here is how the mediational means and semiotic resources are at play in mediating and establishing their indexicality in this site of engagement. Despite the fact that much emphasis has been laid on the importance of the “co-textual signs” (Wortham and Reyes, 2015: 16) for enregistering indexicals, one should also incorporate the role of material objects and spatial repertoire for creating such meanings. For instance, in line 1, when the grand mum approaches the encounter, there is no exchange of “phatic communal” (Malinowski, 1922: 150) between the cashier and the grand mum nor does there seem to be much involvement in the intersection on either the grand mum’s or the cashier’s part, but they both monitor their spatial movement (e.g., gaze) for their entextualization (see Silverstein, 2014).

30  Dariush Izadi The communicative modes analyzed in this section have shed some light on the multiparty interactions and emphasized that while one would have understood that the mode of spoken language would define the relevant interactions, the analysis demonstrates that relevant actions are not necessarily made up of language as the primary mode. As demonstrated in the example earlier, in such settings, joint actions are not undertaken exclusively through language use but pointing to the fact that the spoken language is only one part of a multimodal environment. 9.

Doing ethnicity at Parklea Markets

In this section, I  present one extract from an interesting encounter at the cash register of a Persian restaurant at Parklea Markets, where the participants’ heritage and cultural backgrounds become relevant. In the encounter in question, the restaurant owners (a Persian-speaking couple) stand behind the counter, and the Persian-speaking customers come up to them. In Extract 2.2, the linguistic features recognized as Persian are used, and the mediational means (the credit card) is essential for the understanding of what happens, and space becomes meaningful through its different relations. The interaction in Extract 2.2 is taking place in a Persian restaurant at Parklea Markets which is run by a Persian husband-wife team and, at times, with the help of their children, one of whom is pursuing his PhD in physics at a university in Sydney. The restaurant is open three days a week from 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., when Parklea closes. In this segment, a couple, who seemed to be in their early 30s, after having dined in the restaurant, was paying at the counter, and the owner of the restaurant was recounting a narrative about the use of a PIN (personal identification number) for credit card transactions in Iran. To make sense of this narrative, I draw upon mediated action as well as tools and techniques from linguistic anthropology, in particular, Jakobson’s (1957/1971, in Wortham and Reyes, 2015) “narrated event” (event of speaking) and “narrating event” (discursive interaction) in analyzing the following narrative. Here, the mediated action can also help us expand the discourse analysis to the inclusion of nexuses of practice, ones that are always mediated by material, organized around recognizable activity, and the outcome of a specific culture and history on short and long timescales (Lemke, 1993). These tools allow us to unpack indexical signs that give off messages and information about social action taking place in the narrative being recounted. In fact, as Extract 2.2 unveils, through small stories (see de Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008), the members of the Persian community have used narratives as invaluable tools to achieve a variety of goals. As Scollon

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 31 (1998, 2001a, b) argues, all actions that social actors are performing in a site of engagement are identity telling. The actions, for example, embedded in the use of credit cards used by the participants are just as telling of identity as those actions that participants carry out in the situated context. Thus, various actions that are telling of a variety of the participants’ identities observed in Extract 2.2 are embedded in the narrative being told and in how credit cards (as a mediational means) are presented within the site of engagement of the participants. Extract 2.2

A couple: wife (W) and husband (H) The restaurant owner (O) Language guide Regular font: English Italics: Persian Bold: researcher’s ethnographic notes 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

O

hala ( . ) inja ke ma ( . ) um ( . ) romoono mikonim invar ye vaght ( . ) well ((looking at both)) here we turn our faces to the other side ((turning her face towards the shelves behind her)) so that W ahan oh I see O kart estefade mikonan=har ki estefade mikone=ya man ya Reza(.) when they pay by credit cards anybody who pays by credit cards me or Reza ((SO)) soratemoono bar[migardonim we turn our faces to the other side W    bale↓]   yes O ye khanomi az Iran omad goft(.)soratetoono chera barmigardonin↑ we had this female customer ((a visitor)) coming from Iran and she said to me why I turn my face ((SW means when the customer enters the PIN)) H =too Iran mi [gan in Iran they say O     oon az      someone from H pinet chande↑      what’s your PIN O  hamoon] posht mige ke (.)ram[zet    behind the counter says your PIN W     hhh hhh     hhh hhh (giggling))

32  Dariush Izadi 11

O

12

W

13

O

14

W

15

O

16

H

17

O

18   19   20

W

21

O

23

W

24

O

25

W

O W

chiye↑]   what is hhh hhh khub↑ well are hhh Iran hehe hamintore↓ yes hhh ((exactly)) it sounds like Iran asan man bavarm nemishod I couldn’t believe it at all =are too [Iran yes in Iran     age] khub ramze  =pas [chera        if you’re using a PIN then why hhh hhh   miporsi chiye]         are you asking what the PIN is are hhh exactly hhh az hamoon tah dad mizane ramzet chiye oonam mige from behind the counter the shop owner shouts what the PIN is and the customer says the PIN out loud =mige hhh and he says it out loud jolo hame ba seday boland mizanan↓engar chale meydone↓ and they enter the PIN in front of everybody in the shop out loud as if it were an inner-city slum hhh daghighan↓ Hhh  exactly

The interaction in Extract 2.2 includes descriptions of the use of PIN in two different countries, namely Iran and Australia; descriptions of what the restaurant owner and the customers (the couple and the visiting customer from Iran) are themselves doing in the narrating event; and the descriptions of how the shop owners in Iran carry out their everyday transactions. This narrated event can offer essential analytical resources that can help the analyst make sense of how participants position themselves and others in the interaction when the restaurant owner transfers a category, such as “chale meydoni” (meaning slum; in line 24), from the narrated to narrating events, using it to exclude herself from such practice. In Extract 2.2, we see two types of indexical signs (reported speech and evaluative indexicals, see Wortham and Reyes, 2015) that indicate relevant context and offer some account of the social action taking place. In line 5, the restaurant owner begins her narrative with an indirect reported speech to show her surprise at the use of a PIN for credit cards

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 33 by the shop/restaurant owners in Tehran (capital of Iran). The restaurant owner’s reported speech can have implications both for interpreting the shop owner as the person who is narrating this event and for the visiting customer whose narrative is being reported. For example, when the restaurant owner says that the visiting customer was surprised when she turned her face while the customer was entering her PIN (line 5), she criticizes this action by saying, “I couldn’t believe it at all” (line 15) and “if you’re using a PIN, then why are you asking what the PIN is” (lines 17 and 19) and “they enter the PIN in front of everybody in the shop out loud as if it were an inner-city slum” in line 24. The evaluative term “chale meydoni” in line 24 consists of two words: “chale”, literally meaning “pit”, and “meydone”, meaning “square/roundabout”, therefore referring to a district where poor, low-cultured people or slums lived in Tehran in the past. The reason why they were called “chale” was because these flat areas gradually turned into a kind of valleys after much of their soil was taken for building walls and gates of the city. The evaluative term “chale meydoni” is a recognizable social class in Iran (and in particular, in Tehran) or what Agha (2005) would call a “figure of personhood” (40). By using a very strong evaluative indexical, such as “chale meydoni” (line 24), the restaurant owner could be occupying a recognizable social position (Bakhtin, 1981; Agha, 2005) here. Because of their historical bodies, many Iranians may associate this voice with certain types of spatial locations (e.g., downtown in Tehran) and historical periods (during the Pahlavi dynasty). This evaluative indexical sign presupposes a voice (the uneducated, lower-social-class people) that is indeed being ascribed to the visiting customer and the shop/restaurant owners in Iran in the narrated event. Here, the restaurant owner and the customers (the husband-and-wife team) are interactionally positioning themselves as entirely different from the visiting customer, as more civilized than the visiting customer. By doing so, the restaurant owner establishes a voicing contrast between two types of shop owners: the “chale meydoni” shop owners who “enter the PIN in front of everybody in the shop out loud” (line 24) and the rather civilized ones, like herself and her husband, “when they pay by credit cards anybody who pays by credit cards me or Reza (her husband), we turn our faces to the other side” (line 3). She, therefore, evaluates the visiting customer’s voice negatively and positions herself and her husband as civilized people who are different from the “chale meydoni” group. The analysis has demonstrated that providing a rich account of multimodal shopping exchanges will increase our understanding of the ways in which everyday transactional encounters are at the core of wider transcultural engagements and flow. From an MDA perspective, as observed in Extract 2.2, all service interactions are mediated through

34  Dariush Izadi material objects/cultural tools. Key to the application of such an approach is how these cultural tools afford and constrain the types of social actions that the restaurant owners and customers, for instance, in the restaurant can carry out and the kinds of social identities with which they can be affiliated, and the kinds of relationships they are able to construct, and ultimately, the kinds of societies they are able to create. In this segment, the restaurant owner’s narrative and the use of the PIN in the restaurant have been internalized at some point in the life cycle of the customers and the restaurant owner. The use of a PIN has, in fact, allowed for the identities of the participants and the various meanings each participant is making. 10. Conclusion The chapter has reported the findings of an ethnographic study carried out at a highly diverse urban market in Sydney, Australia, known as Parklea Markets. The cultural and linguistic diversity at Parklea Markets has offered a fertile setting to explore the social practices of shopping and the interactional dynamics among people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, where we have observed how semiotic resources, products, and space are intertwined and interwoven in the process of cultural and interactional exchange. The study of such settings offers a finer understanding of the context-specific use of spatial repertoires in different communicative practices and the social aspects behind them. Perhaps, a distinct feature of such diverse urban spaces is that they bring together people of different social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, and make possible different types of activities and communication drawing upon the linguistic, embodied, and disembodied resources that participants have at their disposal. These approaches to analyzing everyday language have enabled us to understand what resources participants deploy for meaning making and communication. Such interactions occur in zones where community members make use of whatever linguistic and non-linguistic resources are at their disposal. The ethnolinguistically based analysis focusing on Parklea Markets has also offered insights into the market activities and the linguistic and embodied practices formed by the market context and its diverse settings. Such physical and social spaces create (and oftentimes, recreate) a spatial repertoire specific to the context of the markets. Additionally, they engender different social dynamics and social interactions within the market community through a wide range of cultural and linguistic repertoires that are employed to create meaning and get things done. Through the multifunctional use of its spatial repertoire (e.g., the coloured plastic bags),

Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 35 Parklea Markets creates a social space which is created and reconstructed both as a gathering place where community members obtain information and reinforce their social connections and, at the same time, as a commercial institution. Perhaps such intricacies and complexity encourage us to reevaluate our understanding of the relationship between a market and its multiple discourses in a specific site of engagement. For MDA, the answer lies in how, in the historical body of the customer, for instance, service interaction discourse is constructed and interacts with overlapping other discourses and practices, and how, when it emerges in a moment of interaction, it is connected with other discourses and practices that are brought back to the historical body and to the interaction order. If the service encounter and its site of engagement are viewed as a nexus analysis, it will then be conceived as a moment of social and cultural transmission (e.g., the use of a PIN for credit card transactions in Iran). As participants employ their agency in a site of engagement in the markets, they make claims about their ability and expertise to perform changes, which may be ratified or not. The interpretation of meaning, therefore, appears to derive from the complex “material semiotic coupling” (Lemke, 1993: 251). Nevertheless, the findings shown in this chapter only partially reveal the diversity of Parklea Markets as a shopping place. The interpretations and observations are somewhat influenced by my own subjectivity as a researcher, while other researchers may observe and find other interesting aspects of the market interactions. Certainly, Parklea Markets has more to offer for ethnographic studies, and there are more points to gain with respect to social interaction and linguistic practices in highly diverse contexts than one could possibly address in one single chapter. References Agha, A. (2005) ‘Voice, footing, enregisterment’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38–59. Appadurai, A. (2006) ‘The thing itself’, Public Culture 18(1): 15–22. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2020) ‘Interaction ritual and the body in a city meat market’, Social Semiotics 30(1): 1–24. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canagarajah, S. (2021) ‘Materialising semiotic repertoires: Challenges in the interactional analysis of multilingual communication’, International Journal of Multilingualism 18(2): 206–225.

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38  Dariush Izadi Scollon, R. (2001a) ‘Action and text: Towards an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action, mediated discourse analysis and the problem of social action’, In R. Wodak and M. Meyer eds. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: SAGE Publications. Scollon, R. (2001b) Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. New York: Routledge. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. New York: Routledge. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. New York: Routledge. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2007) ‘Nexus analysis: Refocusing ethnography on action’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(5): 608–625. Silverstein, M. (2014) ‘Denotation and the pragmatics of language’, In N. J. Enfield, P. Kockelman and J. Sidnell eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–157. Tusting, K. and Maybin, J. (2007) ‘Linguistic ethnography and interdisciplinarity: Opening the discussion’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(5): 575–583. van Leeuwen, T. (2005a). Introducing Social Semiotics. New York: Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. (2005b) ‘Modality, genre and design’, In S. Norris and R. H. Jones eds. Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. New York: Routledge, pp. 73–93. van Leeuwen, T. (2011) ‘Multimodality and multimodal research’, In E. Margolis and L. Pauwels eds. The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 549–569. Watson, S. (2009) ‘Brief encounters of an unpredictable kind: Everyday multiculturalism in two London Street markets’, In A. Wise and S. Velayutham eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–139. Wertsch, J. V. (1998) Mind as Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wise, A. and Velayutham, S. eds. (2009) Everyday Multiculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wortham, S. and Reyes, A. (2015) Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event. New York: Routledge.

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Exploring the phenomenology of shopping as social practice 39 (.) ]

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3 Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason Accepting or rejecting sellers’ offers to taste at the market Lorenza Mondada 1. Introduction Offers, as an action enabling the transfer of services or objects from one person to another (Schegloff, 2007: 82), are routinely made in commercial encounters. They can take many different formats, target different objects, and occur in different sequential positions within the interaction. They are an example of a situated verbal and embodied action that is central to the accomplishment of economic transactions. In this sense, offers can be understood as a phenomenon that enables us to connect the details of social actions in situ with broader socio-economic processes. In this paper, I focus on a specific type of offer: offers to taste a sample of a product sold in a shop. Typically made in gourmet shops but also at food stalls at the market, offers to taste represent an action appealing to the senses of the customer to attract them and possibly to secure a purchase. Crucially, offers to taste focus on the product in its unicity and materiality. In this regard, they combine materiality and sensoriality with decisionmaking, gifts, and economic interests—given that the offer of a small gift is understood in an economic context in which the practical purpose of the participants is to buy and sell. Focusing on offers to taste, this paper aims at providing a double contribution: First, it elaborates on actions as building blocks of social life, their recognizability, multimodal formatting, and sequential organization; second, taking seriously the specific design of offers in institutional settings, it aims to reflect the embeddedness of actions in the ecology of the commercial site and how the institutionality of some activities is crucially shaped by (and shaping) specific actions and their accountability in situ. The chapter begins by reviewing previous studies of offers to taste in various commercial settings, showing that they can be produced at various moments in the shop encounter. They can be uttered in the middle of the transaction, embedded in specific sequences of actions, such as questions about the products or requests for advice. They can also be uttered at the DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-3

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 41 very opening of the encounter and become the reason for engaging in a transaction with the seller. The latter case is further analyzed in this chapter, based on video-recorded encounters at the market, where offers are produced by sellers to attract pedestrians passing by on the street, transforming them into possible customers stopping at their stalls. In this context, the offer to taste is an appeal to the senses of the candidate customers, inviting them to engage in an interaction with the seller and, possibly, to buy something. In particular, I will show how offers to taste are produced and the contingencies that affect them as well as the responses given by the passers-by, who, if they accept, stop, and engage in the tasting and, possibly, the purchase of the item versus if they refuse, continue to walk. More broadly, the chapter shows how offers to taste and their responses cast light on contextual issues in action formation and the formatting of actions, as well as about different modalities of selling and consuming food, addressing, more broadly, economic interests and sensorial engagements. 2.

State of the art

Commercial encounters have been described abundantly in the literature within various disciplines, ranging from anthropology and sociology, to linguistics and communication studies, interested in them as places of everyday sociality as well as contexts in which fundamental economic exchanges happen in their simplest form. This paper is interested in how the minutiae of social interaction tailor economic opportunities, which are crucially based on how people connect with one another. Social interaction in economic encounters does not happen in a vacuum: The ecology of these encounters—that is, their material environment and its specificities—has implications for how they are organized. In shops organized around the counter, the service providers occupy a fixed “serving post” (Merritt, 1976: 321; Mondada and Sorjonen, 2016), and the customers address them in order to request products to buy, contrary to supermarkets in which customers navigate autonomously in search for their products (De Stefani, 2013). Different ecologies enable different modes of navigation: Whereas shops constitute a closed space in which the customer is established by the very fact of entering (Harjunpää et al., 2018), at market stalls in public open places, the passer-by might become a customer or not, depending on how their mobility is stopped by a vendor or a product (Hochuli, 2019; Mondada, 2022a). Within the conversation analytic and ethnomethodological perspective, the shop encounter has been approached following its sequential order (Fox et al., 2022). Once initiated by the openings (Aston, 1995; Harjunpää et  al., 2018; De Stefani, 2019), the economic encounter progresses with key actions, such as requests (see Fox and Heinemann, 2015, 2016;

42  Lorenza Mondada Mondada and Sorjonen, 2016; Sorjonen and Raevaara, 2014), as well as requests for information and requests for advice; it can also progress with offers, proposals, and suggestions, which will eventually lead to the decision to buy and pay (Llewellyn, 2015). While requests are initiated by the customer, offers are produced by the seller. Thus, these two actions build very different relations to the products and the purchase. Both requests and offers are actions that enable the transfer of objects or services: In the conversation analytic literature, they have been differentiated, as the former concerning an action done by the recipient and benefitting the speaker, and the latter an action done by the speaker and benefitting the recipient (Couper-Kuhlen, 2014). However, this distinction has also been discussed, for instance, in terms of felicitous calculus by Clayman and Heritage, who highlight that “offerers may work to downplay the burden of offered actions, thereby reducing the perceived debt that an acceptance of the offer may engender” (2014: 26–27). Likewise, the idea that offers are a preferred action over requests (Levinson, 1983: 343–364; Sacks, 1992: 207; Schegloff, 1979: 49) has been relativized by considering that, often, offers are a disguised request (Haugh, 2016; Kendrick and Drew, 2014; Schegloff, 2007: 83–34). Offers can be formatted in different ways, which foreground either the recipient’s needs (do you want X) or the speaker’s willingness to carry on the action (Curl, 2006). Subtle variations in the production of a format (such as, between do you want/you want/wanna in American English, Raymond et al., 2021) express lower versus stronger expectance of acceptance. Last but not least, offers can also be formatted in an embodied way (Kärkkäinen and Keisanen, 2012). In this paper, I focus on multimodal formats for offers, articulating a verbal turn and an offering movement of the hand manipulating an object. The materiality of the object matters for the way it is handled; that is, for the embodied engagement of the offerer as well as for the value, meaning, and implications of the object. This characterizes offers concerning manipulated objects here and now (vs. offers for future actions). Offers in institutional settings are relatively understudied by comparison with, namely, offers in telephone conversations. However, the way offers work in different institutional contexts and the relevance and variations of their formats in these contexts show that offers are sensitive to the categories of participants, their rights and obligations, and the specificities of the context (see, for example, Raymond et al., 2021, differentiating between commercial, medical, and everyday contexts; Hofstetter and Stokoe, 2015, discussing different types of offers in a political context; Heritage and Sefi, 1992, showing the specific delicacy of offers for advice in health visitors’ encounters with parents).

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 43 Offers to taste are specific offers routinely produced in food shops and stalls. They constitute a commercial gesture towards the customer, giving a small sample of a product, that the customer ingests and tastes in situ. Although consisting of giving an object for free, these offers are used by sellers to progress the economic transaction and are seen by customers in that way: Tasting followed by positive assessments of the tasted sample can be interpreted as leading to a decision to buy (Mondada, 2022c). However, the precise accountability and interpretation of what is accomplished by the offer to taste depend on the sequential environment in which it is uttered. For instance, in cheese shops (Mondada, 2021, chapter  5), offers to taste are mostly produced in the middle of a transaction, when the customer is already engaged in purchasing an item but is confronted with selecting between several options, inquiring about the taste of particular products or just displaying not knowing a proposed item. Thus, the offer to taste is produced in specific sequential environments, after actions in which the customer displays trouble, uncertainty, or lack of knowledge; tasting is followed by an assessment, which, if positive, is conducive to buying. These offers (generally accepted) contrast with other offers to taste, uttered in the opening of the encounter (generally rejected), where they are seen as pushing people to buy. This latter environment is precisely the one explored in this chapter, although in a different ecology, an openair market along a street. Whereas in shops, the person entering the door and walking to the counter presents themselves as a customer, in open-air markets, passersby walking in the street are not yet customers and become so only when engaging in some kind of interaction. This is also the case of customers targeted by mobile vendors intercepting people in the street (Clark and Pinch, 1995; Lindenfeld, 1990; Llewellyn and Burrow, 2008; Mondada, 2022b). In this case, the opening of a possible encounter is crucial for creating a window of opportunity that will be used to initiate a possible sale. This involves the bodies of the sellers and passers-by, in particular their gaze (at each other, at the stall, at the products, prefiguring a possible engagement in the transaction), their body posture, their movements, and their position and trajectory in space. 3. Methods The chapter proposes a systematic analysis of offers to taste at the market, building on recent developments of multimodal conversation analysis (Deppermann, 2013; Goodwin, 2017; Mondada, 2018a), which have expanded the study of embodiment towards materiality (Day and Wagner, 2019; Nevile et al., 2014) and sensoriality (Mondada, 2019, 2021).

44  Lorenza Mondada 3.1. Data

The data studied in this chapter are part of a larger corpus of commercial encounters, including food shops (Mondada, 2021), market encounters (Mondada, 2022a), and mobile vendor encounters (Mondada, 2022b). These video-recorded data collected in authentic settings across Europe have been gathered within multiple interests in the sequential organization of the transaction, the interactional ecology of economic exchanges, the embodied engagement with the materiality of products, multisensorial practices related to food, and the organization of fundamental actions, such as requests, offers, questions, and requests for advice, that are highly recurrent in these settings. Specifically, the data analyzed here come from a Christmas market, situated in the town of Alsace (France). The data were video recorded at a small stall constituted by a counter facing the street (Figure 3.1), in which one salesperson sells regional food items, in particular, Munster cheese and locally produced alcohols (wine, whisky, and gin). The particular design of stalls at the Christmas market puts them in direct contact with a lot of people walking down the street. The challenging task of the vendor is to transform some of these passers-by into customers stopping at his counter. The data were filmed with two cameras, one on the seller (Figure 3.1) and the other on the customers (Figure 3.2 later), and additional microphones on the counter. The filming was publicly visibly displayed and participants’ informed consent was requested.

Figure 3.1  The stall at the market—the object of this study

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 45 3.2.  Outline of the analyses

Offers to taste are the main action through which the seller holding the stall addresses passers-by, who, in accepting the offer, can become customers and possible buyers. Within one hour of recordings, among approximately 100 short encounters, 82 of them are initiated with an offer to taste, which is preceded either by a greeting (12/82) or more frequently by a summons (67/82). These offers to taste are initiated by the seller monitoring the pedestrians in the street passing by his booth. The offer to taste is performed by handing over a board with samples of the local cheese, Munster. Passers-by might either reject or accept the offer: In the former case, they continue to walk by; in the latter case, they stop at the stall. The offer to taste is, thus, a practice that, by appealing to the senses, literally attracts possible customers. The opening of the encounter by the seller offering a taste represents more generally a perspicuous case of initiation of social interaction with people walking in the street and being, until then, merely co-present in the public space, without yet engaging in any focused interaction (cf. Mondada, 2022b, for another engagement of this type). The analysis is organized as follows. First (§4), I focus on the multimodal format of the offer to taste as well as the cases in which it can be either accepted or rejected, highlighting the different trajectories of action they enable in both cases. Second (§5), I focus on negative responses, showing how they respond to an action that is adjusted to the contingencies of the passers-by’s mobility, although not succeeding in transforming it into a momentary stop at the counter. This enables me to reflect on some recipient-designed variations of the multimodal formatting of offers, including incremented and expanded versions, and a gendered recipient-designed format. Third (§6), I focus on offers that receive a positive response, leading the customers to engage in tasting and, possibly, in buying the product. 4. The multimodal format and sequential trajectory of offer sequences Offers are multimodally formatted (§4.1), and this contributes to their intelligibility in situ. Moreover, they are recipient-designed in such a way that, upon their acceptance, passers-by are constrained to stop in order to take a sample (§4.2). This transforms them into customers. By contrast, when the offer is rejected (§4.3), passers-by continue their walk. 4.1.  The multimodal format of offers

The seller’s offers to taste are formatted in a multimodal way: He produces a verbal offer while handing over a board with some small samples of

46  Lorenza Mondada cheese, as in the following extract, transcribed according to Mondada’s (2018a) conventions: (1) (COL_MUNST_6.48)

Figure 3.2  (A) Rejecting palm-up gesture and (B) detail

The seller spots a passer-by gazing in his direction and opens the interaction, summoning the group of three pedestrians coming from his right (2). The establishment of a mutual gaze is crucial at this point: In this case, the seller exploits the gaze orientation of the passers-by towards the products to choose the moment at which he summons them (in alternative cases, the gaze on the products is generated by the summons). The summons uses the expression messieurs dames, literally “gentlemen and ladies”, which is a more informal version of the formal address mesdames et messieurs (“ladies and gentlemen”). This informal version is systematically used in the collective summons across the data. Next, the seller immediately progresses by uttering the offer (4), while extending his left hand holding the board with the samples to taste. The

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 47 verbal offer is syntactically built on a noun phrase (NP) (un p’tit bout d’Munster) and a circumstantial subordinate clause (with the preposition pour and the verb in the infinitive form). There isn’t any verb in the principal clause (vs. can I give you, do you want, would you like), which would linguistically mark the offer (Couper-Kuhlen, 2014). The offer concerns tasting, which is mentioned in the subordinate, and contains a formulation of the object to taste (un p’tit bout) as a small sample to be ingested in situ. The embodied format of the offer includes grasping the board, extending it towards the recipient, possibly following the recipient, and withdrawing the hand. In this case, the board is withdrawn at sequence completion, put to an end by the rejection gesture of the passer-by (Figures 3.2A/B). Together, the verbal offer and the embodied offer form a multimodal gestalt: The verbal offer, in its concise format, is made reflexively recognizable by the co-occurring embodied offer. Both mutually contribute to the intelligibility of the action. The recognizability of the embodied offer is demonstrated by instances in which the embodied offer precedes the verbal one, as in the following two extracts. Extract 2 is a case of early acceptance and Extract 3 of early rejection: (2) (COL_MUNST_00.28.18_Cl45)

Figure 3.3  Un petit bout d’munster

48  Lorenza Mondada

Just after the summons, the seller presents the board with the samples (2). Before he begins to verbally utter the offer, the passer-by has already begun to move her hand towards the board. The embodied conducts constitute initiating and responding actions that continue (the client takes a sample) while they are initiated and responded to again in a verbal way (3–5, Figure 3.3). This early temporality is even more observable in early rejections, as in the following extract: (3) (COL_MUNST_00.27.10_CL38)

Figure 3.4  Passer-by puts hand on stomach

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 49

Figure 3.5  Un petit bout d’munster

50  Lorenza Mondada

Figure 3.6  Passer-by turns head and smiles

The seller extends the board early on, even before the summons (2). The passer-by responds to the presentation of the samples by putting her hand on her stomach (Figure 3.4), in an embodied account foreshadowing her verbal rejection, with merci followed by a verbal account, uttered in a suffering voice with several out-breaths. So the account is embodied both in the gesture and in the prosody. The verbal offer is produced afterwards (6), (addressed to and) rejected by the second passer-by (8, Figure  3.5). An extension of the offer is then produced, attracting the gaze of a third passer-by (9–10) who just smiles, without stopping (Figure 3.6). So the multimodally formatted offer and its subsequent versions enable the seller to successively target three customers (see later, §5.2). In the next sections, I detail the trajectories of action characteristics of the acceptance versus rejection of the offer to taste and their consequences for the local emerging definition of ongoing activity. 4.2.  Offers and their acceptance

Positive responses to the offer include the recipient accepting a taste. This constrains the trajectory of their walk and eventually leads the passer-by to stop in order to take the sample. This opens up opportunities to consolidate the tasting into a purchase.

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 51 In the following excerpt, the passer-by’s change of trajectory is particularly observable: (4) (COL_MUNST_00.32.23_cl53_b)

Figure 3.7  Passer-by looks at other stands  Figure 3.8  Looks at seller Figure 3.9  Seller offers sample  Figure 3.10  Passer-by looks at sample

Figure 3.11  Seller offers sample to taste  Figure 3.12  Passer-by takes sample and ingests it

52  Lorenza Mondada

The seller monitors the passer-by walking along the street (Figure 3.7), looking intermittingly at the stall (1–3, Figure 3.8). When she redirects her gaze from the products to the street (Figure 3.9), the seller extends his hand with the board (3) and utters a summons (4). Hearing the summons, she turns towards the stall (Figure  3.10); the seller immediately continues with the offer in the form of a simple NP, orienting towards her gaze, in such a way that now she sees the samples presented to her (Figure 3.10). He pauses after the NP, and during this pause, she stops and turns towards the stall, standing at some distance from it. The seller orients this as a decisive/opportune moment and adds an increment to the offer (6). She continues to stand for a long moment (Figure 3.11) and, finally, moves closer to the counter (7), uttering an acceptance token in a very low voice, almost self-addressed (8). Moving towards the counter, she also extends her arm projecting to take the sample (Figure  3.12). Thereby, she accepts the offer. The progressive multimodal design of the offer and the stepwise movements and gaze of the customer are reflexively and responsively adjusted. At this moment, the seller proffers the price of the product(s) (10). The fact that the price is uttered at that precise point, when she is tasting, achieves the juxtaposition of the sample that she can appreciate in her mouth and the product that she can buy. This temporal juxtaposition of the two objects demonstrates the close relationship between the gift (offering to taste the sample) and the purchase (buying the product). 4.3. Offers and their rejection: mobility and the refusal to become a customer

Offers can also be rejected. In this case, the passer-by continues to walk, uttering a negative response. Here is an instance:

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 53 (5) (COL_MUNST_00.26.00_CL34.1/2)

Figure 3.13  Seller takes board

Figure 3.14  Seller extends board

54  Lorenza Mondada A couple of passers-by walk along the stand, looking at it. The seller notices them, and they engage in a mutual gaze (Figure 3.13). He modifies his posture: He stands up and grasps the board, extending it towards them, and utters the offer (2–3). The offer is rejected early on by a toss of the head then verbally by a “no thanks” by both members of the couple in overlap (4–5, Figure 3.14). Moreover, they look away at this point. During the short interaction, they continue to walk. Their mobile progression does not change during the encounter: They progress slowly but without stopping. By continuously walking, the passers-by maintain their membership in this category and resist becoming a customer. So there is only a short window of opportunity for the seller to get a passer-by to stop (or not). The concise format of the offer adjusts to that temporality. 5.  Offers and negative responses: mobility and rejection The verbal format of the offer is routinely produced in a very similar way: un petit bout de Munster pour goûter (a little bit of Munster to taste). Within one hour of recordings, 82 such turns were produced, after either a greeting or a summons. However, despite their high recurrence, we shall see that these offers are particularly tailored to the temporal and mobile environment in which they are uttered (§5.1). Moreover, the temporal adjustment of these offers can result in their expansion in subsequent offers (§5.2). These expansions are recipient-designed in a way that involves a categorization of the passers-by—more specifically, an orientation towards their gender (§5.3). 5.1. The format of the offer adjusts to the mobile trajectory of the recipients

Despite the routine uniformity of the turn format, offers are specifically adjusted to the trajectory and body orientation of the passers-by, precisely timed with them. Here is an apparently simple example: (6) (COL_MUNST_00.27.22_CLI39.1/2)

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 55

Figure 3.15  Passer-by turns to left  Figure 3.16  Passer-by looks at stand

Figure 3.17  Seller extends board

56  Lorenza Mondada As soon as the seller raises and shifts his gaze to the left, seeing the incoming couple (PB1 and PB2) (Figure 3.15), he proffers the summons (2), while his gaze follows them passing by. Responding to the summons, they turn towards him (Figure  3.16), still walking forward. As soon as they look at him, the seller produces the offer (4). At the beginning of his turn, he puts his hand on the board, which he extends at the end of the NP and before the subordinate. The couple responds early: She has already opened her mouth before the seller has uttered the name of the product, projecting a negative response (5); then both look away again after the NP (and before he shakes his head) (Figure  3.17). This shows that the action of offering is intelligible very early on, as a multimodal gestalt, in which the emergent turn is co-produced while handing over the board—irreducible to just the verbal turn. The intelligibility of the offer(s) is also produced by the fact that passers-by can oversee and overhear the offering sequence addressed to other pedestrians. This is observable in cases in which a rapid series of offers are proffered to different pedestrians passing by, as in the following case (in which four offers are addressed successively within less than 30 seconds): (7) (COL_MUNST_00.06.17CL6/06.21CL7/06.23CL8/06.29CL9)

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 57

Figure 3.18  First offer

Figure 3.19  Second offer Figure 3.20  Third offer

Figure 3.21  un p’tit bout d’Munster Figures 3.22, and 3.23  pour goûter? non merci

58  Lorenza Mondada We can notice here some variations in the openings and the format of the offer:

• The opening can be achieved verbally by a greeting sequence (1–4), by a summons constituted by the term of address (9, 14), or just by visual contact (11). • The offer is often produced using the same verbal format (6, 14) or silently, by handing over the board (7, 11). • In all the cases, the response is negative (rejection).

The timing of the turns-at-talk and the walking trajectory of the passersby are precisely coordinated within a complex and dynamic participation framework. The seller looks to his right and greets a woman coming from that direction (1), who responds with a greeting (2). The greeting is also overheard by another woman coming from the left, who turns towards the stand and softly, quietly greets the seller (4) before quickly shifting her gaze in the direction of her walk. This greeting sequence shows how the summons and the greeting can be heard by different people in this public space. The seller continues with an offer addressed to the first woman (6, Figure 3.18), which he proffers while handing over the board with the samples. The offer is rejected (7). However, the offer is overheard by another passer-by (PB2) who turns her head towards the seller (7). This is exploited by the seller, who is still standing with his extended arm: At this point, he minimally reorients the arm while producing a summons (9) addressing PB2 and the man walking beside her (PB3)—this constitutes an offer targeting them (Figure  3.19). The fact that the seller does not repeat the offer again relies on him seeing that PB2 has looked at him while overhearing the previous offer. Likewise, the fact that PB2 rejects the offer displays that she understood his action as such. Moreover, another overhearing passer-by (PB3) walks just behind the couple and looks at the stand during the previous sequence. When the seller sees him, while he is retracting the board after the previous rejection, he just suspends his retraction and does minimal movement, reorienting the board in the direction of passer-by 3 (Figure  3.20). The latter sees it and understands it as an offer, to which he responds negatively, too (12). So these three offers (Figures  3.18–3.20) are serially built one on each other, with minimal adjustments from one to the next, exploiting

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 59 the public character of the previous action for redoing and reorienting it towards the next recipient. The next sequence happens a few seconds later (14) when the seller spots a woman occupied with her bag (PB4, Figure  3.21). He utters a summons and continues with the offer. She responds by turning towards him (Figure 3.22) and rejects it, before looking again in the direction of her walk (Figure  3.23). This sequence is produced in a way that does not build on a previous action but initiates it in a situation in which the passer-by is close to the stand, although at the same time busy with another focus of attention. In sum, despite the frequent repetition of the same turn initiating the interaction, establishing a possible interlocutor as customer, and offering a taste (un petit bout de Munster pour goûter/“a little bit of Munster to taste”), the way in which this offer is multimodally and temporally sequentially implemented adjusts in subtle ways to the ongoing changing context, namely to the local public ecology and the mobility of the pedestrians addressed to. 5.2.  Expansions of the offer

The offer can be limited to one product only or be expanded in subsequent offers (cf. (Davidson, 1984), mentioning other products. This happens in almost half of the cases (over a total of 82 offers, 38 are expanded by a subsequent offer). The following is an instance of a subsequent offer, expanding the first offer by adding other products after a rejection: (8) (COL_MUNST_00.06.29_CL9)

60  Lorenza Mondada

The offer (1) is rejected (2) by the passer-by who also gives an account (4), mentioning her food preferences. The seller registers the response with a change-of-state token (6) and then offers another product (8), also rejected (10). This occasions a repair (12), in which the passer-by confirms the rejection and produces another account (13), responded to by the seller in a humorous way (15). A very similar environment has been studied by Davidson (1984), examining subsequent offers after a rejection, where she highlights the sensitivity of the production of offers (and other actions) to possible rejections. She shows various practices through which the doer produces subsequent versions of the same action, which “provides a next place for some sort of response, presumably an acceptance, but possibly a rejection” (1984: 111). Some of her cases are advertisements by shop owners. In the cases examined here, the subsequent versions propose other regional products, shifting from the cheapest one, cheese, to more expensive ones, alcoholic beverages. The subsequent offer, which, unlike Davidson’s cases, is not a new version of the same offer but another offer, is prosodically produced as a continuation and takes the form of a list, which retrospectively recasts the initial offer (which was pragmatically complete) as a first offered item, now followed by others. This expansion of the offer can take a more compact format as in this case: (9) (COL_MUNST_01.00.30)

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 61

Figure 3.24  Passers-by look at seller

After the summons (1), several passers-by shift their gaze towards the seller, as they walk along the stand, without stopping and without saying anything. The increment of the seller’s turn is sensitive to these multiple looks, prolonging the opportunity for further responses (Figure  3.24). This compact, continuously incremented format addresses the absence of verbal responses, the dynamic trajectory of the pedestrians walking along the stand, and in this particular case, the fact that the seller is also busy with another customer tasting whiskey (visible on the right of Figure 3.24). Another compact incremented format is the following: It also temporally adjusts very precisely the trajectory of the passer-by:

62  Lorenza Mondada (10) (COL_MUNST_00.26.49)

Figure 3.25  Passer-by looks towards his right

Figures 3.26, 3.27, and 3.28  m’sieur  un p’tit bout d’Munster  pour goûter

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 63

Figure 3.29  Seller points with knife

Figure 3.30  Passer-by looks away

After a mutual gaze exchange (Figure 3.25), the pedestrian passes by the stall, keeping his gaze on the stall until the last syllable of the expanded offer (3). The seller’s offer progresses as the passer-by walks straight and the extended board follows his trajectory (Figures 3.26–3.28). At the completion of the first offer, the passer-by neither slows down nor stops; he

64  Lorenza Mondada just shifts his gaze from the products to the seller. At this point, the seller continues his turn with an increment, a subsequent offer of alcohols (3–4, Figures 3.29–3.30), continuing to follow his trajectory. The passerby never responds vocally/verbally; he makes a late refusal gesture, visible on the camera but not seen by the seller, who also looks away. So the incremental format of one/more offers is systematically tied to the temporality of the pedestrians’ walk. The progressivity of the turn and the progressivity of the walk reflexively shape each other. 5.3.  Expansions: a gendered format?

The production of expanded subsequent offers seems not only to orient to the progressivity of the recipients’ walk but also to their fine-grained categorization (Sacks, 1992) besides the category of passers-by which the seller aims at transforming into customers. These categorizations are emergent and closely related to the participants’ actions/responses: (11) (COL_MUNST_00.11.32_cli16)

Figure 3.31  Passer-by makes rejecting gesture

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 65

Figure 3.32  Passer-by 2 looks away and passer-by 3 stares at stall

A group of four people is spotted by the seller, coming in from his left. PB1 walks ahead and quickly withdraws her gaze from the stand (1). PB2 looks at the seller after the summons and, as the seller is in the middle of his turn (2, Figure  3.31), responds with a rejecting gesture (moving his open horizontal palm). PB3 comes last and looks intermittently at the stall but stares at it when walking by, when the seller is uttering the name of the second alcohol, “gin” (4, Figure 3.32). So the seller orients to the fact that the group is progressing in a disparate way, with some people moving ahead and one walking last: He produces the second offer in a way that targets PB3, who is the only one who hasn’t yet produced any rejection. PB3 seems to respond to the second offer: He also does so with a big toss of the head after the first two mentioned alcohols (in a way that acknowledges rather than rejects them). So at this point, the offer of alcohol might be related to the last person in the group rather than to a passer-by characterizable by his gender.

66  Lorenza Mondada However, the orientation to men passing by while uttering the expanded version of the offer targeting alcohol is a regular feature of this format, constituting a form of gender stereotyping. In the next extract, the offer of alcohol tasting is distributed among the man of the first couple and another man walking by himself. In this case, the production of the double offer is successively addressed to a plurality of persons belonging to different “vehicular units” (Goffman, 1971): After the refusal of a passer-by (PB1), her husband (PB2) turns to the seller, as well as another pedestrian (PB3) following them: (12) (COL_MUNST_00.16.46_CL24)

Figures 3.33 and 3.34  passer-by 1 shows her cheeks  passer-by 3 looks at stall

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 67

Figure 3.35  Passer-by nods and smiles

The seller extends his board as soon as he establishes a mutual gaze with a couple passing by and before uttering the summons (2). Just after the summons, PB1 produces an early response by pointing to her cheeks (3) just before the verbal offer is uttered (4) (Figure 3.33). Her embodied response is intelligible as a rejection and an account. She also rejects the verbal offer (5) and then looks away. The seller orients early to the rejection since he withdraws his board while still uttering the offer verbally. In the meanwhile, shortly before the completion of the initial offer, PB2 turns his head towards the seller. The seller sees him and follows him with his gaze. At this point, he utters the second offer (7), showing the bottles on the counter. PB2 smiles and continues to look at the stand (Figure 3.34). The smile shows a positive recognition of the product, even though the participant does not stop to accept the taste. PB2 continues to walk, and his gaze is not available any more on the camera (hence the interrogative marks “????” in the transcript). Possibly, he also exits the visual field of the seller. While producing his subsequent offer, the seller also shifts his

68  Lorenza Mondada gaze from PB2 to PB3, a man walking behind the couple. So his second offer is addressed not only to PB2 but progressively also to this man, who responds with a smile and a nod (8, Figure 3.35). As in the previous extract and for the previous passer-by, the response, although not accepting the offer, expresses a positive stance. The fact that the offer to taste alcohol products is addressed by the seller looking at men and that men look at the seller when he mentions alcohol tasting, is a first hint manifesting a category-bound relationship between gender and a type of product. Further evidence of the seller’s orientation to gender are observable in the fact that the rare cases (two in total) in which he offers only alcohol to taste are both addressed to men: (13) (COL_MUNST_00.12.24_CL17)

This offer to taste alcohol (degustation is consistently used by the seller in relation to drinks and not to cheese, for which he uses the verb goûter, which can be translated as “taste” but also as “test” or “try”, and not déguster) is addressed to monsieur (sir) and, upon his rejection (3), expanded in an offer of alcohol as a present (5). The next similar case begins with the routine summons messieurs dames (2) but is clearly bodily oriented towards two men approaching: (14) (COL_MUNST_00.30.24_CL47)

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 69

Figure 3.36  Passer-by looks at seller with large smile  Figure 3.37  Then looks away

The seller spots a group passing by and extends the board (1), uttering a summons (2). One of the passers-by responds with an account (4) that is treated by the seller as a rejection, as can be seen in his withdrawal of the board. However, the seller persists by uttering a second offer (6), while showing the bottles on his counter. The passer-by rejects with a large smile and laughter (7, Figure 3.36) and looks away. But a second passer-by who is following him shifts his gaze to the seller and also smiles (Figure 3.37): The seller addresses the third offer to him (8), and this is understood as

70  Lorenza Mondada such, with him responding (also with a rejection). A further expansion is produced by the seller (10), but the passer-by looks away. So in this case, both men are specifically addressed by the seller, who parses and times his offer in a way that perfectly adjusts to their gaze shifts and their mobile trajectory. Both men respond with a positive stance, although declining the offer. Finally, further evidence of the seller orienting to gender in the design of his offers is a variation in the order of the subsequent offers. In the expanded offers (38 in total within 1 hour), the most frequent order in which the products are mentioned is cheese first and then alcohol (35 cases), whereas in 3 cases, all addressing men, this order is inverted. Here are two instances: (15) (COL_MUNST_00.05.31)

(16) (COL_MUNST_00.37.23)

In both cases, the passer-by is addressed by a summons, categorizing him as monsieur. The first offer is for a taste of some alcohol, which is rejected. The second offer targets the cheese (Munster), and this is also rejected. The categoric relation between masculinity and alcohol is also mobilized by third parties, in this case, by a wife calling her husband to accept a taste of whiskey. Both have passed by the stand at some distance and whereas the husband has continued on his way, the wife departs from their trajectory to accept the offer to taste the cheese (Figure 3.38):

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 71 (17) (COL_MUNST_00.02.52_CL4)

Figure 3.38  Passer-by extends hand towards cheese

72  Lorenza Mondada

Figure 3.39  Passer-by turns to other passer-by

Figure 3.40  Passer-by turns to his right

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 73 The seller first spots a woman, whom he summons (1) and offers a cheese sample (3). She accepts (5–6) and grasps a sample. She also contrastively claims that she would not have accepted an offer of wine (9), which prompts the seller to offer whiskey (10). She rejects the offer (12) but contrastively (with a right dislocation) refers to whiskey as a product for men (12). She turns towards her husband (who turned back to her just before) while saying this (Figure 3.39) in a way that is perhaps designed to be overheard. The seller turns to his right, although he cannot see PB2 from that position, but understands that the woman is part of a couple and invites him to taste (14). PB1 mediates between the seller and her husband, repeating the offer (15, 17) twice, after a repair initiation by him (16). Consequently, he walks back to the stand (Figure 3.40). In this case, an alcoholic product, whiskey, is associated with monsieur; that is, masculinity. This categoric relation is established by madame and exploited by the seller to pursue an acceptance of his offer to taste. Therefore, the establishment and recognition of this relation are shared among various categories of persons, such as the seller, the men passing by, and the women accompanying them. For the seller, it gives extra relevance to his subsequent offers: These are designed not only for enhancing participation in the interaction he initiates, for adjusting to the ongoing trajectories of people who rejected the first offer, and for proposing a new opportunity to accept it, but also for targeting a specific type of possible customer, maximizing the chances to sell them a product categorially bound to them. 6.

Offers and positive responses: stopping and tasting

Positive responses to offers build a course of action leading to tasting and, possibly, to buying. Within 1 hour, approximatively 100 encounters take place, of which 82 begin with an offer. The offer is responded to by passersby stopping in only 15 cases. Out of them, in 11 cases, passers-by accept the offer to taste the product, and only in 3 cases is the tasting followed by a purchase. This goes to show that selling/buying requires quite some interactional work to happen and that just accepting the offer to taste is not per se automatically conducive to buying. This final section examines the conditions at which tasting is followed or not by the purchase. Passers-by positively responding to the offer stop at the counter and engage with the seller and his products, then buying them or not. The projectability of a sale, once the offer to taste is accepted, is observable in the fact that the seller announces the price (often pointing and touching at the product) when the passer-by is still tasting the sample (see preceding Extract 4). In this way, the gratuitous gift and the paying product are matched, one leading to the other. The fact that passers-by orient to

74  Lorenza Mondada this relation and, thus, to the offer to taste as not completely gratuitous is variously displayed by the participants. Indeed, some rejections of the offer produce a misaligned response, resisting the tasting and rather claiming they are “just looking” (je regarde/“I look”, as in Extract 13). In this way, they oppose one sensorial access with another: While tasting relies on a closer and personalized relation to the object, actually consuming it, looking enables distant access, preserving the integrity of the object. Therefore, looking is considered less binding than tasting: The senses are relevantly differentiated in response to the seller’s presumed and ascribed project. Another way to resist the implications between tasting and buying consists of adopting an ambiguous form of responsiveness, observable in specific mobile trajectories. A solution consists of accepting the offer of a tasting while continuing to walk: This is a way to display that tasting is not a way to engage in continuing the exchange nor a preliminary action to some further action, such as buying. This solution is observable in the following case, in which a couple walks by: After she rejects the offer, he accepts it but does not stop: (18a) (COL_MUNST_00–12–41)

Figure 3.41  Seller moves board towards passer-by

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 75

The seller presents his board pretty early (1), before the greetings (2), orienting to some intermittent gaze of the couple towards the stand. While greeting, he also moves the board in such a way that it is continuously directed towards PB1 while she walks forward (Figure 3.41). When the seller utters the offer (4), she responds in overlap (5), showing that she anticipated it, orienting to the embodied offer. She also looks away, continuing to walk straight and looking straight along the road. So the first member of the couple clearly rejects the offer. The second member of the couple responds differently: (18b)  (COL_MUNST_00–12–41) (cont.)

Figure 3.42  Passer-by slows down

Figure 3.43 Munster  Figure 3.44  pour goûter:?  Figure 3.45  avec grand plaisir

76  Lorenza Mondada

The second passer-by, having seen how the first passer-by has responded and following her, is now presented the board (Figure 3.42). As a first early embodied response, he slows down and takes his hand out of his pocket (6, Figure 3.43), projecting a possible acceptance of the offer (stopping and taking the sample). As the seller utters the offer (7), the passer-by brings his hand towards the samples and takes one while responding verbally (8, Figure 3.44). So the passer-by accepts the offer and tastes the product. However, he also accelerates his walk (at the completion of his verbal acceptance, Figure 3.45): He adopts a mobile body-torqued position (Schegloff, 1998), orienting with his upper body towards the seller and closing the encounter (10–11) and, at the same time, walking away from the counter. This defines a way of tasting, literally, en passant, in a fleeting way, that displays accepting the offer to taste but not the transformation of the passer-by into a customer. This way of tasting en passant has consequences on the format of tasting itself. In Extract 18b, the passer-by does not really engage in tasting but rather merely eats the sample. That contrasts with other ways of tasting: Accepting the offer can be followed by tasting in a distinct way, not just taking the sample and putting it into the mouth but properly engaging in tasting, stopping, and focusing on the sample. This is the case of the next extract: (19) (COL_MUNST_00–38–26/CLI70)

Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason 77

Figure 3.46A/B  Same moment from two different camera angles

Figure 3.47, 3.48, and 3.49  0.5)

(2.3) (0.2)

[très bien [>eine für sechs,
-->* termination of continued (embodied) action across more turns -->1 beginning of one of multiple to-be-continued actions across more turns tw towards

106  Gitte Rasmussen 3.

Research on shopping

In the course of history, practices of buying and selling have undergone dramatic changes (Blondé et al., 2005; Stobart and Damme, 2010). What used to be a system of barter (Smith, 1976 [1776]) developed into a system involving peddlers and travelling salesmen, which evolved into general stores (in the US) and department stores; sales in open markets converted to sales in closed shops with large glass display windows; tills and online payment replaced the engagement of cashiers; and face-to-face interactions with trusted shopkeepers who knew the names of the customers transformed into anonymous online shopping. Furthermore, buying what was considered essential for living grew into shopping as a leisure-time enjoyment and for the purpose of showing off (Veblen, 2001 [1899]) and, in doing so, creating the culture of consumerism (Siegrist et al., 1997). According to social scientific research, these developments in business and shopping structures result from reorganisations of the interplay between customers, retailers, and manufacturers (Rudrabasavaraj, 2010), and from rapid changes in consumer demographics, lifestyles, and spending patterns (see, e.g., Jayashree Ramanan and Ramanakumar, 2014; MacKenzie et al., 2013), to which retailers and manufacturers have responded by establishing different types of retail outlets that sell products at different prices and different qualities through different channels, such as brick-andmortar shops and contemporary webshops. Retail competition stemming from overcapacity has resulted in an increase in modern customer demand for quality in services and the range of goods available, and, recently, possibilities of channel integration (Mou et  al., 2018). Customers may, for instance, return online purchases to local shops (Mahar et  al., 2014) or demand possibilities for showrooming conduct2 and then buy the products they have viewed in physical shops online (Bell et al., 2014). Additionally, according to Kotler and Armstrong (2012), the services and range of goods available become increasingly alike, which has led to a growing number of specialty shops focusing on niche markets and to new marketing tactics to attract and retain customers. According to authors, such as Tang and Lim (2008), a unique in-store experience continues to be a key goal. Multimodal research on shopping has described how retail shop types, customer behaviour, and changes in buying and selling practices resulted from a complex interplay between provided product types and displays, shop decoration, payment methods, types of actions and interactions, and the virtuality of the world in which online buying and selling is conducted (Poulsen, 2022b; van Leeuwen and Boeris, 2022; Rasmussen et al., forthcoming; Hua et al., 2017). EMCA studies of multimodality in brickand-mortar environments have demonstrated how buyers and sellers locally orient towards the shopping environments and product qualities

Multimodal engagement and interaction 107 (Mondada, 2018, 2020), and, recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Mondada, 2022). The studies have also shown how the change in selling practices is brought about locally by orienting towards, for example, climate change (Kristiansen and Rasmussen, in press) and how buying and selling interaction results from customers’ and shop assistants’ prior, local, multimodal interaction and engagements to become (or avoid becoming) involved in talk (Clark and Pinch, 2010). Furthermore, studies have shown how customers’ decisions to buy are achieved in supermarkets through couples’ social negotiating interactions (De Stefani, 2013) and how product displays are used as opportunities to engage in talk (De Stefani, 2014). Finally, Rasmussen and Kristiansen (2022) have shown how (unacquainted) customers accomplish self-service by engaging in local, multimodal practices to minimise social involvement. With an EMCA interest, this chapter aims at describing and analysing how a specialty shop (cf. Kotler Armstrong, 2012) manifests itself as a ‘non-traditional little fun coffee bar’ through multimodal engagement and interaction. It illustrates how contemporary shopping may be done for pleasure and leisure (cf. Veblen, 2001) and form an alternative to consumerism (cf. Siegrist et al., 1997). 4. Analyses The analyses will focus on a) how displays of second-hand products and specialties are ordered, b) how conduct and interaction are ordered in a multimodal interplay with the environment, and c) how an exploring approach seems to be a key feature of customers’ and shop assistants’ engagement with it. 4.1.  The orderliness of the coffee bar environment

The interior and product displays of the coffee bar appear to be designed to look messy on purpose. Most products differ in design (Figure 5.1); oneof-a-kind second-hand products are for sale, as well as standardised new ones, and whereas new products are ordered according to their standardised packaging designs and product types (Figures 5.1c and 5.1d), secondhand products are, at least in part, placed on top, under, and in between each other (Figures 5.1a and 5.1b). Finally, it adds to the messiness that everything in the coffee bar is for sale, even the chairs on which customers sit to enjoy a cup of coffee and a bite to eat (Figure 5.1b). Most of the products, whether they are one-of-a-kind or not, relate to the social activity of popping in for a cup of coffee or tea, or alternatively a beer, to enjoy oneself with others—the concept which in Denmark is referred to as hygge. They include foods (e.g., bread, cookies, snacks),

108  Gitte Rasmussen

Figure 5.1 (a) Children’s furniture and toys; (b) furniture for sale and use; (c) liquorice, chocolates and beverages; (d) teas and cookies

Figure 5.2 (a) Coffee bar; (b) coffee to have in or take away; (c) iced latte; (d) shelf mead (herbal mead), forest mead, pure mead

beverages (e.g., coffee, tea, cognac, liquor, snaps, beer, juice, lemonade), and materials (e.g., cups, glasses, cutlery, vases, furniture, art, board games, toys)—and, non-materially, conversation. The shop’s products are ordered by reference to these categories as well as according to colour. Shelves with second-hand bowls, vases, platters, and cups are located to the left along the wall behind the customers (Figure  5.1b), and handles and doorknobs for dressers and cabinets to the right. Second-hand board games are displayed and organised in a purposefully messy style and located close to the second-hand tables and chairs for sale and use in the coffee bar. In addition to category and colour, the products are ordered by age. Second-hand products are primarily located and arranged in the middle and the back sections of the shop (Figure  5.1a and 5.1b). Standardised new products, such as specialty drinks and foods, are in the front, near, or behind the counter (Figure 5.1c and 5.1d). Although age is visibly an ordering principle, efforts are, demonstrably, made to blend old and new (features of) products. Even the name of the shop and the way it advertises its products invite engagement with this blend of the old and the new (Figure 5.2). The kaffebar (coffee bar) was introduced to Denmark in the 1930s. Apart from coffee, coffee bars originally served open-faced sandwiches and a special of the day but rarely beer and spirits (Boyhus, 2021). They were preceded by coffee carts, which were introduced by the Danish temperance movement with the aim to reduce alcohol consumption amongst industrial workers. The period from 1955 to 2002 saw a reduction in the number of coffee bars. In Copenhagen alone, the number dropped from 114 to

Multimodal engagement and interaction 109 8 (Biering, 2005: 21). The coffee bar analysed in this chapter sells coffee to-go/stay as well as modern beverages, such as ice latte, iced chai, and organic fizzy drinks. In addition, organic beers and cognacs are available, though the range is comparatively very small. The shop’s products are advertised with chalk on a blackboard (Figure 5.2c), which blends the old-fashioned board with the names of contemporary specialty products. The product names are themselves constructed in a blend of Danish and English. As mentioned, the coffee bar provides second-hand furniture for drinking and eating contemporary (standardised) specialties and playing old as well as new board games. Contemporary products are contained and offered in old-fashioned, nostalgic packaging, and some of the contemporary products on offer are based on very old recipes, such as mead.3 To sum up, to achieve coffee hygge, this coffee bar offers standardised specialties, standardised old-fashioned, and nostalgic but newly produced materials, and blends one-of-a-kind second-hand products with off-theshelf contemporary products. 4.2. Dynamic engagements with and interactions within the coffee bar environment

Blends of old and new may also be achieved through customers’ and shop assistants’ ordered activities across shop sections. 4.2.1. Ordering activities in relation to specialties and second-hand products

From the front door, customers enter the specialty section and then stroll up to the second-hand section at some point, where they may have a look at and/or pick up products before returning to the front section. Alternatively, specialties may be picked up or ordered to enjoy in the café before or after entering the second-hand section. In Example 1, two customers (A and B) are about to order biscuits and coffee to enjoy in the lounge section. While the assistant (C) prepares the coffee, the assistant and customers discuss the different types of tea displayed behind the counter (Figure  5.3). C disentangles herself from the interaction, while A  and B continue to discuss this topic. The transcript starts when A initiates the closure of the conversation. Example 1 1 A ∆øj der er mange med roibush wow there are many with rooibos 2 B ∆>shelves with tea

110  Gitte Rasmussen

Figure 5.3  Discussing tea

3 Ps 4 A 5 Ps 6 A 7 B 8 A

(0.2) intens med lakrids det kan jeg jo godt lide intense with liquorice I like that (.) turns around, gazes tw C gazes tw teas ∆nå (.) jeg ska lige se hvad de ellers har her okay I just need to see what else they have ∆turns around tw second-hand section

In line 4, A closes the conversation by evaluating the taste of a rooibos tea as ‘intense with liquorice I like that’. She then turns around and gazes in the direction of the shop assistant, who is preparing the coffee. She puts the sequence of ordering, paying, and receiving coffee and biscuits on hold as she turns towards the second-hand section with a ‘nå’ (okay) which indicates ‘now on to something different’ (Heineman, 2017), followed by ‘I just need to see what else they have’. The inserted activity concerns browsing second-hand products. The lounge section, the name kaffebar (coffee shop) at the shop’s entrance, and the coffee machine behind the counter give the front area a nice ambiance which invites customers to order specialties, whereas the area at the back of the shop offers second-hand items and invites customers to bargain. Example 2 illustrates how a customer brings a piece of art from the purposefully messy second-hand section to the tidy specialty area and

Multimodal engagement and interaction 111

Figure 5.4 (a) A  picks up second-hand art, (b) A  holds up artwork, (c) A  reads price label, (d) bargaining: A holds on to artwork, and B leaves counter to serve coffee

begins to bargain with the shop assistant (Figure 5.4b). Figure 5.4a illustrates how she picks up the item that she has provisionally put on a table in front of the counter: 1 A 2 B 3 A 4 B

ved du hvor meget I vil ha for den how much do you (2nd person plural) want for it? ∆mutual gaze with B ∆holds up the art piece (Figure 5.4b) ∆er ∆ der ikke pris på ∆shakes head∆ doesn’t it say a price? det ved jeg ik jeg har stået og kigget I don’t know I had a look jamen det finder jeg lige ud af ok, let me check it out

A initiates the exchange by asking whether B knows how much they (you) want for it (line 1). As it turns out, B doesn’t know and invites A to look for a price on a label while she continues preparing coffee for other customers. In response to A’s statement that she did as a matter of fact look for it, B announces that she’ll check it out. However, before B can follow up on her promise, A succeeds in finding the label (line 5): (7 lines of transcript omitted) 5 A   ∆kan det passe der står trehundredefemoghalvfjerds?   does it say three hundred seventy-five for sure?   ∆gazes at price label-->   *holds on to piece-->   (Figure 5.4c) 6 B   (X) *walks to the counter, bends over it-->1

112  Gitte Rasmussen 7 A de:t jo dog mange penge that’s a lot of money lifts piece up for B to see 8 B det gør der it does —>*1 9 A det er jo mange penge that is a lot of money 10 Ps (.) 11 A for den for this *gazes at piece-->2 12 Ps (.) 13 A så mange penge havde jeg ikke regnet med at jeg sku gi I did not expect to pay that much for it 14 B walks away towards the coffee machine 15 Ps (0.3) 16 A det havde jeg godt nok ik I certainly did not —>*2 Having found the label (Figure 5.4c), A inquires whether it does indeed say 375 while gazing at it. The question ‘kan det passe’ (does it say for sure) may be understood to a) recruit help to read the label (Kendrick and Drew, 2016) and b) question the price of the item. B walks towards the counter and bends over it, while B evaluates (line 7) the price (‘that is a lot of money’). A’s action makes it relevant to evaluate the (possible) price as a next action (Pomerantz, 1984). B, however, skips a response to the evaluation (Sacks, 1992) to answer the question of the price (line 5) and establishes it at 375 kroner. While B walks back to the coffee machine, A  remains standing in front of the counter, now with her back turned on B, and gazes at the item while pursuing responses to her assessment (line 7) in four different ways (lines 9, 11, 13, and 16). In doing so, she invites B to engage in bargaining and treats 375 as a starting price. Importantly, she holds on to the item, thus relating her talk to it, while indicating that bargaining will continue and that the price is not accepted. After a 0.7-second pause (line 17 later), B finally responds by asking A, ‘how about 300 then’ (line 18 later). A does not accept B’s bid, which she indicates with a prolonged ‘ja:::’ (yes), and places a new bid (line 22). The bargaining continues till B initiates termination (lines 29 and 30) and accepts A’s final bid (line 27) through this action: ‘it’s a deal, then’ (line 30):

Multimodal engagement and interaction 113 17 Ps (0.7) 18 B ∆er du mere til trehundrede, how about 300 then? ∆*handles coffee machine-->3 19 Ps (0.3) 20 A ∆ja::: yes ∆puts art piece on the counter *gaze at label--> 21 Ps (0.2) 22 A tohundredehalvtreds kroner? 250 Kroner? 23 B ∆var det det du har tænkt= was that what you were thinking? ∆smiles ∆leaves coffee machine and walks away from the counter area -->*3 (Figure 5.4d) 24 A =det var det jeg stod og tænkte på that was what I was thinking 25 B var det det du ↑havde tænkt was that what you were thinking? smiles 26 A ha ha 27 B ∆jeg tænkte ellers på to femoghalvfjerds I was thinking of 270 ∆stands at shelves behind A 28 Ps (0.3) 29 A ∆ved du hva= tell you what? ∆turns tw B 30 A = så siger vi (.) top= it’s a deal, then 31 B walks tw the counter in front of A 32 A =ha ha ha 33 B ∆(X) ∆smiles 34 A .hh ved du hvad så: skal jeg ∆også: (.) bruge noget te you know what I also need some tea ∆-->* releases grip on art piece

114  Gitte Rasmussen 4.2.2.  Exploring as a key to shop activities and interactions

A feature of second-hand products is that they somehow differ from all other comparable and non-comparable products in the shop, and a feature of the specialties is that they differ from ordinary, mainstream products. Hence, almost every item in this coffee bar is special, unexpected, and novel in one way or another.4 The orderliness of the shop is treated by the customers as an invitation to explore the shop environment and its produce to find out what an item is, what it contains, what it tastes like, how much it costs, and whether it is for sale at all. Put differently, exploring is a feature of most activities and patterns of conduct in the shop, some of which will be described later. 4.2.2.1.  EXPLORING UNKNOWN SHOPPING TERRITORIES

As seen in Example 1 earlier, customers may start to explore the shop and its produce while ordering and waiting for drinks. Finding out about products may, however, also be the very first thing customers do upon entering the shop. In Examples 3 and 4 (later), coupled customers immediately split up upon entering the shop. One of them walks into the second-hand section, gazing around the shop area, while the other engages with items in the first section (Figure 5.5):

Figure 5.5 (a) A  enters the second-hand section, (b) A  slowly turns the corner, (c) A almost stops, (d) B joins A

The pictures illustrate how A walks slowly into the middle section to the point that she almost stops at specific points and continues towards the next section before B enters the section (and enjoys the fan, Figure 5.5d). Approximately 12 seconds pass between Figure  5.5a and Figure  5.5d. While walking slowly, A  glances from a distance at shelves in front of her and to her left and right, including shelves behind other customers in the shop (Figure 5.5c). Through her conduct, she observably indicates that she is exploring the shop area; that is, finding out what this place is all about. Exploring the area usually also entails looking at the shop’s products up close, still without looking for anything in particular. Example 4 (later) is meant to illustrate how looking at products becomes not looking for

Multimodal engagement and interaction 115 anything in particular (i.e., browsing). A mother and her daughter enter the shop and split up (Figure 5.6):

Figure 5.6 (a) A and B separate, and A glances at the lounge chair; (b) A glances at the dresser, and B grasps the tea caddy; (c) A and B talk about lamps; (d) A and B separate again

Within approximately 10 seconds, B glances at several things, some of which are shown in the pictures: a green lounge chair, a wooden dining chair, a wooden dresser, and a multicoloured lamp, which she eventually picks up to inspect, before calling for B to have a look at it, too (Example 4, excerpt 1 later). In other words, she is looking at things which, apart from being second-hand items belonging to the coffee hygge theme, have seemingly little in common. Looking at items whose features and functions diverge within a short period of time shows that she is not looking at anything in particular (i.e., browsing). This may change, at least for a short period of time, when the customer starts glancing at and picks up different items of the same kind. The mother, A, for instance, grasps a tea caddy (Figure 5.6b) and continues to pick up caddies she catches sight of while walking through the shop. By comparison, her conduct appears as looking for tea caddies in particular. None of the two customers buy anything. It seems to be a feature of not looking for anything in particular that couples split up at least for a while (recall also Examples 1 and 3). Interestingly, couples continue to orient towards each other while looking at items in specific sections, through embodied coordination with each other (De Stefani, 2013). Notice also how A and B (Figure 5.6b) stand at each side of the same wall and occasionally achieve joint attention for specific products and elicit talk about them (De Stefani, 2014) which, of course, entails attending to something in particular (cf. Stukenbrock, 2018; Stukenbrock and Dao, 2019). This is illustrated in a few instances from Example 4, continued (excerpts 1–3): Example 4 Excerpt 1

1 A 2 Ps 3 A

∆prøv o’ se her mor come and see this, Mum ∆gaze at lamp (0.2) ∆de er pæne

116  Gitte Rasmussen 4 B 5 A 6 B

they are neat ∆manipulates the lamp walks up to A det er- det er sådan lige som de der træskaller jeg lavede= it’s like those wooden shells that I made =i klubben at the club (Figure 5.6c) jo (.) jo yeah

Excerpt 2

1 A 2 B

den her den ville os være pæn udenfor this one would also look nice outside (Figure 5.6d) walks up to A, grasps tea light lamp

Excerpt 3

1 A e::j mor det er det er os pænt=så noget gammelt noget (.) det her oh, Mum, this is it is also nice such old things this one 2 B walks up to A 3 ja yes 4 gazes to the right, walks to the right 5 Ps (0.3) 6 B man kan jo bare få for meget af det jo ik one can get too much of it, right 7 coughs 8 A ∆walks to the right 9 ∆hva si’r du what do you say? 10 B coughs 11 A man ka bare få for meget af det it’s just that one can get too much of it 12 B ∆na men hvis man bare har én ting altså for eksempel well, if you only have one thing for example 13 Ps (0.1) 14 B ∆sådan en gammel et eller andet such an old thingy ∆walks towards other section 14 Ps (0.1)

Multimodal engagement and interaction 117 15 B

sådn en mælkekasse for eksempel a milk crate for example

While the couples in this shop systematically split up, they remain within hearing distance. In this case, A  initiates talk with her back turned on B while calling to B (‘mo:ar’, excerpt 2 and 3) and produces response cries (Goffman, 1978) in response to what she is looking at (‘e::j’ (oh), excerpt 3, line 1; and ‘prøv o se her mor’ (come and see this, Mum), excerpt 1, line 1) and/or initiates an evaluation (excerpts 2 and 3, line 1; and excerpt 1, line 3), making use of deictic expressions which necessitate B to walk over to find the reference. Thus, each item in the shop presents structures and features, (some of) which may catch the customers’ eyes and be used as resources for initiating exchanges of talk about each newly found item. Each exchange of talk is then terminated by a new uncoupling (e.g., Figure 5.6d). Couples’ talk is accompanied by item manipulation (Day and Wagner, 2019) and concerns the item’s structures, features, and functions. In line 5, excerpt 1, Example 4, A’s talk seeks to compare a lamp with lamps that she made at her youth club: ‘it’s it’s like those wooden shells that I made at the youth club’. In excerpt 3 (line 1), her talk makes it possible to discuss how the found item is old and what the thing is: ‘it is also nice such old things’. In other cases, coupled customers ask one another what an item is. Furthermore, they may attempt to work out in interaction what kind of place this is, as illustrated in Example 5 as follows: Example 5 1 A ∆det er sådan en hel café it’s like a whole café ∆turns tw B 2 B ∆ja yes ∆walks tw the section at the back of the shop, past A 3 A sniffs 4 B (jeg tror nok det var sådan noget) spil I guess it was game like 5 A nå var det det det var så var det ikke en kaffebar måske oh so that is what it was then it was not a coffee bar perhaps The talk topicalises the unknown or unexpected nature of the products and the shop itself and contributes to making the customers’ browsing (not looking for anything in particular) conduct witnessably exploratory (cf. Example 3 earlier).

118  Gitte Rasmussen Exploring may occasionally exclusively draw upon item manipulation. Single customers’ visits, too, may be characterised by this kind of exploratory conduct. Or they (and couple customers) may ask the shop assistant for help. This is the topic of the final section. 4.2.2.2.  REQUESTING INFORMATION AND RECRUITING ASSISTANCE

Customers may request shop assistants’ assistance in many kinds of shops. In this shop, however, the customers overwhelmingly request help to categorise unfamiliar or unrecognisable products and their features, including whether the (second-hand) products are for sale or not and at which price.5 In doing so, they assert that the information is in the assistants’ epistemic domain (Heritage, 2012); however, as we shall see, this is not always the case (cf. also Example 2 earlier). The assistant’s lack of knowledge confirms the unrecognisability and strangeness of the produce (and place). When the assistant is, as a matter of fact, able to describe the produce, customers may respond with actions that reestablish the relevance of the request and the strangeness of the product. In Example 6, line 1, the customer’s (A’s) request concerns specialties: Example 6 1 A 2 B 3 4 5 6 A 7 A 8 B

hvad er det her for noget what’s this? ∆gazes at small tube ∆ holds up tube ∆jamen de:t er øh ø (.)h jeg ved ik= well, it’s eh eh I don’t know ∆wraps paper around tea, gazes at tea =∆det faktisk ikke hvad der er for alkohol der er i actually, what kind of alcohol ∆glances at tube andet end det er femogtredive procent og så er der lidt honning but it’s 35 percent and then there is some honey og så ligger der en melorm i også and then there’s a meal worm in it too wow wau lifts container up in front and in between herself and B ja det gør der også (.) klamt ha ha so there is (.) disgusting ha ha ha ha ha

Multimodal engagement and interaction 119 While B wraps paper around tea specialties on the old-fashioned grocery counter, A requests information about a small tube and its content. B delivers some information (‘it’s a meal worm in honey and alcohol’) and indicates that she does not know everything about it. B responds (line 7) by assessing it as somehow strange (‘disgusting’), which is followed by laughter. B joins her in laughing (Jefferson, 1979) (line 8). In Example 7, customer A  requests information about what monk’s tea is: Example 7 1 A hva er munkete for noget what is monk’s tea? 2 gaze tw container with label stating, ‘monk’s tea’ 3 B det er sort te med appelsin og nelliker og kanel it is black tea with orange and cloves and cinnamon 4 puts cake on the counter 5 Ps (.) 6 B en smule ∆juleagtig men (.) det er faktisk en som (.)= a bit Christmassy but it’s actually something ∆waving gesture = folk drikker he:le året people drink all year round 7 Ps (0.4) 8 C ∆det har jeg sgu aldrig hørt om før I have never heard of that before man 9 ∆turns slightly tw A 10 A hmhm hmhm Upon B’s description of the tea, C responds to the detailed description delivered to A, by assessing the tea as unknown to him (‘I have never heard of that before man’. Sgu is a swear word in Danish). In this case, then, C reinforces the relevance of A’s request for information. In Example 6, this was achieved by A and B aligning and affiliating with each other (Steensig, 2020). As illustrated in Examples 8 and 9, the assistant (B) may also respond to requests by helping to search for relevant information: Example 8 1 A

hvor er den lavet så where was it made then?

120  Gitte Rasmussen 2 3 B 4 A 5 Ps 6 A 7 C 8 A

gaze tw liquor ja likør øh ∆men hvor ligger den henne men det er i hvert fald yes, liquor eh but where is it located but anyway ∆*reads label on bottle--> en der hedder Rasmus her (.) i (.)byen it is someone called Rasmus from town nå well (.) det ku da godt [være that might work gaze tw C ∆ja yes ∆nods [udvalgte træer på vestsjælland selected trees from West Zealand reading voice —>beyond transcript

Example 9 1 A

Artur spurgte om den blå urtepotte ude på: toilettet Arthur inquired about the blue flowerpot in the bathroom den med de gule streger i er den til salg

Figure 5.7  B goes to check flowerpot

Multimodal engagement and interaction 121 2 B Com 3 A 4 B

the one with yellow stripes is it for sale mutual gaze with B ha det er jeg da ret overbevist om ha I’m pretty sure it is leaves section and walks to another section lines of transcript omitted follows B to the bathroom (Figure 5.7) returns with flowerpot

In Example 8, B is unable to deliver the requested information concerning the origin of the liquor but attempts to assist A in finding out. In Example 9, B indicates that she is not sure but is convinced that a blue flowerpot is for sale and walks to the bathroom where the flowerpot is located to check it out. In and through the recruiting and assisting actions (Kendrick and Drew, 2016), the participants in examples like 8 and 9 join forces in finding the requested information. While interactional phenomena in terms of requesting information and recruiting help may occur outside this shop, some aspects of them and their aligning responses are intrinsically dependent on and ‘are of’ (Goffman, 1963: 22) this specific type of environment and its immediate context. While they may resolve problems, they address strangeness, funniness, oddness, and unusualness as key features of the products and the place and exploring as a key activity in the shop. All examples earlier illustrate how customers and the assistant align and affiliate when these features are addressed. The features may, as a matter of fact, occasion customers to comment on the shop itself, as illustrated as follows (lines 1): Example 10 1 A 2 3 4 B 5 6 A

∆det var sjovt at se hvaffor noget man havde (.) sådan= it was fun to see what one had like ∆walks up to B =dengang rigtigt then in real life gaze tw product displayed on shelves ∆hm hm ∆gaze tw product displayed on shelves i forhold til nu compared to now

122  Gitte Rasmussen Example 11 1 A 2 B

∆det var da en fin forretning den her hva? it is a nice shop this one, eh? ∆gaze tw B behind counter ∆tak thanks ∆preparing to serve ordered coffees and biscuits ∆tw biscuits

Shop assistants, too, may comment on the activities in the shop along these lines (line 9): Example 12 1 B så en gang imellem (.) je jeg tror jeg har solgt stolene then from time to time (.) I I think that I have sold the ∆derover i dag chairs over there today ∆points tw chairs 2 A nå for pokker oh, bother (Three lines of transcript omitted) 6 B ∆så: ingen (0.1) [ja så kommer jeg til at mangle] stole= so no well then, I’ll be needing chairs ∆mutual gaze with A =senere later ∆gaze tw smartphone ∆swipes payment app 7 A [så har du nok og-(.) ja ] then you have enough to yes 8 A åh det oh it 9 B .hh ha ha men det er jo det der er det sjove ik ha ha but that’s the fun of it, right Thus, shop assistants and customers orient through engagements with the environment and bodily conduct as well as talk about the fun of not knowing products, their features, their prices, and whether they are for sale and sold or not, and thus, to the fun of having to engage in exploring and learning about them.

Multimodal engagement and interaction 123 5. Conclusion Customers’ and shop assistants’ patterns of shopping and buying/selling engagement are contingent on how they individually and interactively draw on the environment that sellers construct and design for multimodal engagement and interaction. The nature and type of shopping emerge from their concrete systematically organised actions, which draw on talk and embodied actions, which in turn draw on products, technologies, and furniture as resources. The chapter has shown how customers and shop assistants organise actions and interactions in ways that recognisably blend old and new items that all contribute to coffee hygge. Activities are organised sequentially and ordered in dynamic interplay with the environment, types of products, and the location of product displays. All products are in some way categorisable as one-of-a-kind products. Any given second-hand product differs from everything else in the shop and is inexpensive compared to new products for sale in this and in other shops. Specialties are high-quality foods sold at prices that are high compared to similar ordinary, mainstream foods in other shops. When blending these two kinds of products and their related activities, customers and assistants treat each in the context of the other, such as when coffees and teas are served and enjoyed in the lounge section, prices of second-hand products haggled over while putting specialties on the counter, secondhand products and specialty foods wrapped in the same kind of paper, and both kinds of products paid for in one and the same transaction. The blend of actions and interactions results in a form of buying and selling that is altogether unusual, extraordinary, special, and exclusive. The chapter’s analyses reveal that customers demonstrably walk around, browsing the shop, manipulating products, and initiating talk about them to figure out what kind of product it is and what kind of place they find themselves in. The talk amongst customers and between customers and assistants overwhelmingly concerns how to categorise items in terms of their history, function, and flavour. It may also concern, of course, price. Interestingly, shop assistants may not know all the requested information and treat customers’ initial information requests as requests for recruiting assistance in finding the information so that assistants may partake in the activity of exploration, which is a key aspect of shopping in this coffee bar. Not much time is spent on each item or on the visit. But importantly, customers do demonstrably take time to engage in exploring and in not having anything particular in mind. In other words, they shop for leisure and pleasure, as described in previous literature on consumerism (cp. to Siegrist et al., 1997; Veblen, 2001), and they do so in environments that

124  Gitte Rasmussen invite ascribing value and quality to recycled second-hand produce and specialties. Through customers’ and assistants’ patterns of multimodal engagement with the environment, time to explore the unpredictable and unusual becomes key to the shopping experience. In these ways, the shop’s identity is non-traditional and funny, as also formulated by some of the customers, and the customers become socially categorisable as the kind of people who take time to explore and value recycled items and other specialties and who oppose anonymous mass purchase and purpose rationality. Declaration of conflicting interests The author declares no conflicts of interest. Notes 1 The data are treated in accordance with GDPR as approved by SDU’s Data Protection Office. 2 Customers may also engage in webrooming; that is, searching for and viewing products online to buy them in brick-and-mortar stores (PwC, 2015). 3 A mead recipe was found in Olaus Magnus’s 1555 book. See Magnus O (1998 [1555]) A Description of the Northern Peoples, Rome. London: Routledge for the Hakluyt Society. 4 Compare, for example, to long shelves of similar or identical products in supermarkets and other retail shops. 5 The shop assistant may, of course, anticipate and offer help, too; following is an example:

1.  A:  ∆I siger til ik’ os? Please let me know if you need help ∆walks up to customer

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6 Trust, transparency, and transactions Revealing participation in collocated and hybrid auction sales Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff 1. Introduction Auctions are an institutional solution to a social problem; how to determine the price and exchange of goods of uncertain value. Traditionally, auctions have been used to transact a broad range of merchandise that is subject to significant price variation including, for example, agricultural produce and livestock, seafood, machinery, bankrupt stock, and household goods and chattels. In recent years, auctions have also been increasingly used to transact non-material merchandise, such as telecommunication licenses, television rights, and the like, and increasingly exploited the Internet to enable remote bidding. Alongside these initiatives, we have witnessed a growing interest in the development of sophisticated auction mechanisms and the introduction of new ways of participating in sales, such as online timed auctions. Despite these developments, the English or Roman model of sales by auction, characterised by an ascending price that increases in response to bids from prospective buyers mediated by an auctioneer, remains the most pervasive and widely used mechanism. In this system, auction houses collect a percentage of the money paid by the buyer—the buyer’s premium—and therefore, both auction houses and auctioneers have an interest in selling at the highest price. Economic sociology acknowledges that intermediaries in economic exchanges are never neutral (Bessy and Chauvin, 2013), and auction houses and auctioneers have even been categorised as ‘profiteers’ (Ahrne et al., 2015). In this light, it is not surprising to find that auction houses, auctioneers, and indeed, auctions have long been subject to comment and criticism and that questions of trust and legitimacy continue to pervade the process and in some case the transactions that arise. In this chapter, we wish to explore the ways in which trust and transparency are established at sales by auction. Building on prior work (e.g., Heath, 2013), we consider the case of conventional, collocated auctions and then explore some of the transformations that occurred with the shift to hybrid auctions; that is, sales where a majority of participation is online. Indeed, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the massive growth of online bidding, DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-6

Trust, transparency, and transactions 129 with bids that are often largely inaccessible to all but the auctioneer and their assistant(s), has changed the ways in which contributions are issued and publicly available. These changes raise some interesting issues with respect to how auctioneers seek to show and reveal bids that are issued online, as well as how online platforms and the virtual environment for remote bidders are designed and used to also reveal sources of bids and thus support trust and legitimacy. Thus, our analyses focus on auctioneers’ embodied action on the one hand—how talk, gesture, various forms of bodily conduct and orientation to objects or persons are used to organise and reveal bids—to show that the contributions of particular participants are bids by genuine bidders and on how auction houses use bidding platforms to complement auctioneers’ work and enhance online participants’ access to the sale on the other hand. 2.

Theoretical background

Within economics and econometrics, we find a substantial corpus of studies on auction mechanisms and a longstanding commitment to the design and development of auction theory and models. Indeed, it is argued that ‘auction theory is one of economics’ success stories’ (Klemperer, 2004: 1). By contrast, in sociology, as Geismar (2003) suggests, there are relatively few studies of sales by auction, but in different ways, they all touch a number of important issues that bear upon our understanding of economic behaviour and, indeed, matters of trust and integrity (e.g., Boeck, 1990; Jarvenpa, 2003; Bestor, 2004). There, in different ways, our attention is drawn to how the operation and trustworthiness of auctions and the transactions that arise are inextricably embedded within a dynamic complex of social relationships and communities of practices and participation. Perhaps the most important contribution in this regard is Smith’s (1989) analysis of the social construction of value and, in particular, the ways in which ‘establishing and maintaining . . . a sense of community’ (1989: 13) is critical to the legitimate determination of the price at auction; legitimacy that arises by virtue of the public manner in which price is determined. Smith (1989) continues by suggesting that the legitimation of auctions and the ability of sales to enable the trustworthy valuation and exchange of goods are grounded in a social context, and the ‘process is totally dependent on the social interactions intrinsic to the auction and cannot be explained in terms of individual self-interest or rationality’ (1989: 90). Whilst Smith’s wide-ranging ethnography is not primarily concerned with the interaction at auctions per se, in a Goffmanesque and insightful analysis of the show, Smith provides a range of observations into the ways in which auctioneers conduct sales and attempt to maintain control over the participation of buyers and prospective buyers. Smith draws attention to the critical matters of order, trust, and participation, and the ways in which the characteristic forms of interaction that arise

130  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff in auctions enable the fair valuation and exchange of goods, and support the legitimacy of the sale. There are a small number of studies that have focused in more detail on the action and interaction that arises at auctions. These have primarily addressed the curious character of the speech or discourse that is used in particular types of auctions (Kuiper, 1992, 1995; Kuiper and Haggo, 1984; Kuiper and Tillis, 1986; Dargan and Zeitlin, 1983). Like other forms of market activity, auctions and the transactions they accomplish do not solely rest upon characteristic forms of language use and talk but rely upon a range of visible and bodily actions and the use of various tools and technologies. For instance, bids are routinely produced through gesture, head nods, and the manipulation of artefacts, such as bidder numbers. The visible orientation and gestures of the auctioneer are critical to the invitation to bid, to the announcement of bids, and to displaying a state of play during pauses between bids. Embodied action, bodily conduct, and the interplay of visible conduct and talk are critical to the auction’s accomplishment and the interaction through which the price of goods and their exchange are produced. Matters of trust, transparency, and legitimacy are critical in this regard, achieved and sustained in and through the conduct of the auctioneer, buyers, and all those who happen to participate in the event. These matters of trust and legitimacy derive mainly from the recognition that whilst auctioneers hold a critical role in the auction’s accomplishment, they are also the principal source of information that potential buyers and bidders receive concerning who is bidding and at what price. Auction houses and auctioneers themselves gain substantial financial benefits from the sale of a lot, in some cases more than 25% of the selling price from both the vendor and the buyer. There is, therefore, longstanding debate concerning the legitimacy of some of the strategies used by auctioneers to encourage bidding and inflate the price of merchandise. And yet the legitimacy of auctions, their ability to determine the price and exchange of goods, and even the ways in which their results influence the art market and the career of artworks and artists rest upon the principle and the practice that auctions provide open and fair competition between potential buyers, with goods sold to the party who is willing to pay the highest price. Whilst the social networks, shared understandings, and communities of practice that surround and enable auctions are of some importance to the trust and commitment that potential buyers give to the process (see Coslor et al., 2020), sales by auction are accomplished in and through the interaction of auctioneers and potential buyers. They also rely upon intense and dynamic forms of interaction, interactions that repeat over and over again as each lot of variable character, quality, value, and price is put up for sale. In this chapter, we show that it is within this dynamic, this moment-bymoment interaction, that trust and legitimacy and, for that matter, order, are ongoingly and contingently accomplished.

Trust, transparency, and transactions 131 The legitimacy of auctions and their ability to determine the price and exchange of merchandise relies upon the integrity of bids, that bids are genuine contributions issued by or on behalf of prospective buyers. Buyers and all those present and participating in the auction largely rely upon the auctioneer for the information they receive concerning bids. It is the auctioneer who is responsible for eliciting, ordering, and announcing bids, providing participants with the resources, amongst other matters, to determine the current price of the merchandise and the source of the bid. The integrity of each and every contribution is accomplished in and through the interaction that arises during an auction. This is not to suggest that participants do not believe in, or take for granted, the integrity of particular contributions but, rather, that the very ways in which bids are elicited, announced, and ordered enable prospective buyers as well as all those involved in the sale to trust the process and its outcomes. Trust is reflexively accomplished, for the practical purposes at hand, in and through the interaction that arises at auctions. Despite some scepticism and doubt, the integrity of particular sales or their outcomes is rarely called into question. One recent development of sales by auctions further complicates the matter. One of the basic traditions of auctions is that they involve gatherings, in some cases of large numbers, of potential buyers. As explored in earlier studies of auctions, such as Boeck’s (1990), Jarvenpa’s (2003), and Smith’s (1989), the very gathering of potential buyers was an important aspect of the ways in which trust and legitimacy were established. For example, potential buyers could witness who else had an interest in a particular lot and, in some cases, the interaction between the auctioneer and particular bidders. In the 1950s, we saw the introduction of telephone bidding at some auctions with sales assistants in the room bidding on behalf of remote clients. In the 2000s, as part of the general development of the Internet and the digital transformation of auction houses and of the art market, live online bidding was introduced (Ball, 2021). The proportion of potential buyers in sales joining through the Internet grew slowly, remaining a minor form of participation until 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic started and auction houses had to turn to remote bidding only. In this period, we have witnessed auction houses experimenting with spatial and technological arrangements that aimed to better integrate online participation, enhance online participants’ access to the live sale, as well as support the auctioneer’s work in this development. This evolution goes along with those in shopping practices, with less shopping in brick-and-mortar shops and more shopping online (Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022). The pandemic period has durably transformed auction sales with regard to forms of participation, technological systems in use, and the saleroom ecology. This, in turn, raises some important issues regarding the ways in which trust and legitimacy are sustained where potential buyers and, indeed, the auctioneer have limited access to bidders and the actions they perform.

132  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff Our research focuses on auctions of fine art and antiques. In this chapter, we bring together longstanding research on conventional, collocated auctions and more recent research on the transformation of sales, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, towards more online bidding and the increased reliance on bidding platforms. Thus, our findings draw from two sets of data. One dataset, used in the first empirical section, is a substantial corpus of video recordings of sales by auction gathered in the UK, mainland Europe and North America, augmented by field studies and interviews of auctioneers, saleroom personnel, and buyers. The second dataset, used in the second and third empirical sections, includes auctions of art and antiques recorded online from the standpoint of potential buyers, using one of various commercial or in-house platforms, as well as extensive fieldwork, including direct observations of hybrid auctions sales and interviews with practitioners. The empirical section is thus organised in three parts. The first part focuses on auctioneers’ practices in traditional, collocated auctions; the second part on how these practices were partly transformed for online bidding; and the last part on how bidding platforms and broadcast can complement auctioneers’ work and, thus, be used to enhance trust and transparency. 3. Auctioneers revealing the source of bids in conventional, collocated auctions 3.1.  Declaring the source of bids

It is not uncommon to find auctioneers making explicit reference to the source of bids during a sale. For example, they may refer by name to sales assistants bidding on behalf of prospective buyers: ‘Eight five your bid Stephen’ and ‘Twenty fou::r (.) back with Clemence’. Auctioneers may also describe the source of a bid by virtue of the gender or location of the bidder in the room: ‘Two twenty with the lady’ and ‘At eighty-five on my right’. They may also characterise the bid in terms of the medium through which it is issued and, on occasions, couple it with a description of the bidder: ‘On the telephone now at three hundred thousand pounds’, ‘It’s with Ami on the telephone’, and ‘six hundred dollars it’s here on the book with the absentee bidder’. These explicit references to a prospective buyer or their representative enable the particular participant to know where they stand with regard to the bidding and the current price. They also provide the resources, in principle, for anyone present to know of and, in some cases, discover the source of the bid for themselves. In practice, it is relatively rare for members of the audience to turn towards and look at the particular buyer. Rather, the ways in which the reference is produced enable all those present to take it on trust that the bid is a genuine bid issued by, or on behalf of, a particular participant.

Trust, transparency, and transactions 133 Explicit references to bids and bidders often arise at transitions within a run when a current bidder withdraws and a new one comes in. Runs consist of alternating sequences of bids issued by two potential buyers and enable auctioneers to efficiently escalate the price through a series of standardised increments. Transitions in a run arise where one of two potential buyers declines to bid the next increment, occasioning a break in the run and leading the auctioneer to look for a new bidder. In those transition spaces, auctioneers may go to some trouble to reveal significant changes in the participation of particular individuals, both to the bidders themselves and to all those who happen to be participating in the event. These more explicit references to particular participants are often accompanied by gestures that show the source of the bid—the location of the bidder or their representative within the saleroom. In the following transcripts of fragments, bidders are identified in terms of the source of the bid and the order in which they enter the bidding; for example, ‘SA’ for a sales assistant bidding in the room on behalf of a remote participant via the telephone, B.1 for the first room bidder, or OL for an online bidder. The acronyms between square brackets indicate the moment they show their intention to bid. Consider the following instance. The auctioneer finds a new bidder at £2,400 [B.3] and a second at £2,600 [SA.1].

134  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff The auctioneer receives a bid, announcing the increment, ‘Two thousand six in the room’. He simultaneously looks at and gestures towards the new bidder. The gesture and hand are held outstretched towards the bidder during ‘thank you sir’, and repeating the increment, the auctioneer specifies the location of the bidder in the room, ‘at the back’. The auctioneer then looks for a second bidder and, rotating his hand as he turns, searches the saleroom. He receives a bid from a sales assistant and, ceasing the rotation of the hand, gestures towards the source of the bid. As the auctioneer announces the bid, he turns back to the previous bidder and, continuing to gesture towards the sales assistant, describes the source of the competing bid: ‘Two thousand eight on the telephone and against you’. The voicing of the increments, coupled with the auctioneer’s gestures and alignment of orientation, enables two particular individuals, in this case, a prospective buyer at the back of the saleroom and a sales assistant, to know that they have successfully bid at a particular price. It also enables all those within the saleroom to know the whereabouts of the new bidders and the price they have bid. The voicing of the increments and their location, coupled with the accompanying bodily orientation and gesture, reveals the source of the bids and the whereabouts of the buyers entering a run. The gestures that accompany these more explicit references to bids and bidders serve to display the source of the bid, but they rarely involve specifically pointing at a particular buyer. They do not encourage those gathered within the room to turn and look at the particular buyer, and they rarely provide the resources that would enable anyone to easily or unambiguously locate the individual to whom they refer. The bodily comportment and gestures of the auctioneer, coupled with the reference to the location, gender, or actions of the bidder, instantiate and reveal the bid while preserving the anonymity of the buyer. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the guidelines for auctioneers for one leading auction house suggest, ‘use open handed gestures and do not point at bidders’. Preserving buyers’ anonymity is a fundamental principle, pervasive in auctioneers’ practices. Some individuals may go to some trouble to avoid being identified as the bidder on, or the buyer of, a particular lot. Even in making these more explicit references to the buyer, therefore, we find auctioneers balancing two almost competing demands—on the one hand, they reveal the source of the bid and, in many cases, provide the resources with which to seemingly discover the bidder; on the other hand, they preserve the anonymity of the prospective buyer. 3.2.  Rendering the run visible

The organisation of the run and the ability of the auctioneer to secure bids and efficiently escalate the price of goods are dependent upon the ways in which auctioneers announce, elicit, and attribute bids through their talk

Trust, transparency, and transactions 135 and bodily comportment. The actions of the auctioneer and prospective buyers as they bid during the course of a run rely upon an organisation that informs the production, coordination, and intelligibility of the participants’ actions and serve to render those successive contributions visible and, in principle, witness-able to all those who happen to be present. In turn, this organisation enables the extraordinary economy of behaviour that we find within auctions, with the most minimal of actions—head nods, waves, hand movements, and the like—serving to perform economic actions, namely, bids, actions that in some cases will secure the purchase of goods worth many millions of pounds. Consider the following fragment. It involves the sale of an early Egyptian figure. A run is established between [B.1] and [B.2], with [B.1] eventually securing the figure for £2,200.

136  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff If we focus on a section of the run, we can begin to see the ways in which the auctioneer’s bodily comportment provides a critical resource in the production and coordination of a rapid succession of bids from two protagonists, whilst simultaneously rendering that run and the participation of potential buyers visible to all those within the room and those watching the sale online. The auctioneer alternates between gestures with his right hand and those with his left. The gestures are accompanied by successive shifts in his visual alignment as he turns from the bidder on his right [B.2] to the bidder on his left [B.1]. As he announces the ‘eleven here’ bid by [B.1], he turns and gestures towards [B.2]. The moment he looks at and gestures towards the underbidder, as he announces the current increment ‘eleven here’, the competing bidder raises his catalogue, agreeing to the next increment of £1,200. The auctioneer turns from [B.2] to [B.1]. As he turns, he transforms his gesture, flipping his hand up and then down to acknowledge the bid issued by [B.2]. The auctioneer announces the increment ‘twelve hundred’ and, with the announcement, withdraws his right hand and begins to gesture with his left towards B.1. By the beginning of the word ‘hundred’, he is looking at and gesturing towards [B.1], who, in turn, nods her head to accept the invitation to bid. As it is raised, the auctioneer turns from his left to his right and flips his left hand up and down to acknowledge the bid. The run is accomplished through alternating sequences of action in which two specific participants are provided with consecutive opportunities to bid. Each sequence consists of the auctioneer issuing an invitation to one of the two participants within the run, namely, the underbidder, to bid the projected next increment. The auctioneer’s action serves to identify a particular participant amongst many gathered in the saleroom and projects a sequentially relevant next action, to accept or decline the invitation, an action that properly, and routinely, occurs immediately following the invitation. The structure of increments, coupled with the sequential organisation that alternates the opportunities to bid between two principal protagonists at any one time, underpins the systematic and transparent escalation of the price at auction. It enables particular participants to know and to know with some certainty when it is their turn to bid, what it will take to advance the price of the goods, and the source of bids with whom they are competing. It also allows all those present to witness the actions of the principal protagonists by virtue of the conduct of the auctioneer, the embodied announcements serving to display bids, and the participation of particular buyers. In other words, it is not necessary to see for oneself the actions of the protagonists but rather to witness those actions through the conduct of the auctioneer. In this way, the social and interactional

Trust, transparency, and transactions 137 organisation of bidding and the run enables both the principal participants and all those present to take it on trust that the contributions are indeed bids on behalf of actual buyers, buyers that, in many cases, are present and participating from specific locations within the saleroom—locations shown but not necessarily revealed through the action of the auctioneer. 3.3.  Declaring a bidder’s withdrawal

As much as the entry of a new buyer may allow the establishment of a run, a bidder withdrawing from a lot is an important change of participation, with consequences on the organisation of the sale, which the auctioneer clearly exhibits. The party is already located in the saleroom; thus, the issue for the auctioneer is to make their contribution recognisable as a withdrawal, through talk and gesture—discarding the bidder and bodily comportment—turning to the room to find a new competing bidder for the run. An underbidder willing to withdraw from the competition for the lot would show it to the auctioneer, typically with a shake of the head or a lateral gesture. An underbidder’s withdrawal marks the end of the run and prefigures a search for a new bidder. In the following sale of a Doulton Bunnykins at £6, we join the action at £14.

138  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff B.1 declines the next increment, namely £20. The auctioneer not only announces the bidder’s withdrawal, ‘Out at eightee(n)’, but simultaneously waves his hand from side to side as if dramatically discarding the bidder. As he glances around the saleroom, he receives a new bid. He voices the increment, ‘twenty (.) fresh bid twenty’, gesturing towards the new bidder. The gestures, visible orientation, bodily comportment, and talk of the auctioneer that accompany the announcement of increments serve to demarcate and display significant shifts in the participation status of specific individuals, informing and revealing the exit and entry of prospective buyers, the standing of the run and its principal protagonists. In this section, we have shown how transitions in the run, the exit and entry of particular buyers, the distribution of opportunities to bid, and the revelation of significant changes in participation in the auction are accomplished in and through the embodied conduct of the auctioneer. The transformation of the participation status of particular individuals as they exit or enter the run is rendered visible both to the buyers themselves and to all those who happen to be in the saleroom. The ways in which the auctioneer articulates each increment indicate a location within the room which distinguishes a particular participant from the many gathered in the saleroom, but they do not single them out in ways that would allow members of the audience to identify them. In this regard, the ways in which auction sales are accomplished and the way trust in the process is generated and maintained appear to rest upon the saleroom as an ecology of copresence. And yet auction sales outlived the rise and sudden predominance of online bidding. In the next two sections, we explore similar but also different practices through which this is done in hybrid auctions. 4.

Auctioneers revealing the source of online bids

To maintain their activity during the Covid-19 pandemic, auction houses turned to online bidding and platforms. We saw the emergence and rapid spreading of hybrid auctions where some potential buyers or their representatives on the phone are co-located in the saleroom but a majority of participants join through the Internet. Online bids appear to the auctioneer as flashing notifications on one or several screens, at the back of the saleroom, and/or on the auctioneer’s private screen on the rostrum. Whilst online bidders can watch the auctioneer live on the bidding platform web page, they are invisible to auctioneers, to participants in the saleroom, and to each other. None of the possible arrangements display personal information about online bidders to either auctioneers or any participant in the sale so that online participants’ anonymity is built into the very design of online bidding systems. The absence of an audience and the dominant presence of artefacts—both mediating remote participants’ actions and allowing them to follow the proceedings— have changed the ecology of the saleroom. More directly relevant for matters of trust and legitimacy, online and remote participants’ limited access to one

Trust, transparency, and transactions 139 another generates considerable challenges for auctioneers and requires that they adapt the practices unpacked in the previous section. Indeed, CSCW research on media spaces in the 1990s identified some of the challenges that remote participants encounter in video-mediated communication, particularly in being able to point and reference objects in the other’s domain and in getting some sense of another’s orientation to the surrounding objects and environment. Interaction mechanisms and resources are differentially distributed among participants (Crabtree and Rodden, 2008), with, for instance, one participant seeing the other’s direct environment and the other not so that these spaces were called ‘fractured ecologies’ (Luff et al., 2003). Despite technological improvements since then, most of the challenges remain. In this section, we show some of the ways in which auctioneers have transformed their verbal and embodied practices to reveal the source of online bids. As they would with ‘on the telephone’ or ‘in the room’, auctioneers commonly make explicit reference to the source of online bids with ‘from the Internet’, ‘from the online bidder’, or ‘online’. This reference to the medium is limited, and auctioneers would also seek to refer to particular online bidders, as they would in naming a particular sales assistant or referring to a room bidder with gender or location. In many arrangements, the technology is designed to provide additional resources for auctioneers to give a sense that the online bid comes from a genuine bidder. In Fragment 4, the auctioneer first restates the current bid from the commission (‘here we are two thousand eight hundred dollars’, line 1).

After he has pursued a bid from a sales assistant (‘come back with three?’, line 2), the auctioneer takes an online bid with ‘three thousand now in France’ (line 3), using the bidder’s geographical location displayed with the flashing notification showing the online bid. This is a key resource

140  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff for auctioneers to make explicit reference to largely inaccessible online bidders1; both specific enough to give a sense of authenticity to the bid and generic enough to preserve the bidder’s anonymity, similar in this respect to copresent bidders’ gender or location in the saleroom. In addition to explicit reference, as he takes the online bid, the auctioneer gestures with his left hand towards the screen where online bids appear, which happens to be aligned with the camera—ahead of and slightly above the auctioneer. This location becomes recognisable as the source of online bids, for online bidders themselves and for all participants in the sale, remote and collocated. Coming from a specific place in the saleroom, online bids can be readily distinguished from other sources of bids. However, in this arrangement, auctioneers cannot differentiate several online bidders by referring to space, through body orientation and/or gesture, which is one major challenge compared to bidders in the room. It makes any additional resources to differentiate online bidders, such as their geographical location, all the more critical. In Fragment 5 (originally in French, translation in italics), we join the action during a run between an online and a telephone bidder, started earlier at €900. The auctioneer has been referring to the online bidder simply as ‘online’, and she has been gesturing alternatively towards the sales assistant on her left with her left hand and towards the screen, ahead of her and higher up, with her right hand. As the fragment starts, she takes an online bid for €2,200. As she turns again to the sales assistant, she asks, ‘we’re stopping?’ (line 1), thus announcing the telephone bidder’s withdrawal, which foreshadows the search for a new competing bidder.

Trust, transparency, and transactions 141 The auctioneer then turns to the screen again and announces a new online bid with ‘two thousand four hundred’ (line 2). She then makes the source of this bid explicit and also describes a state of play with ‘you are two bidders online’ (line 3), thus directly addressing online bidders but also announcing to all witnesses that a second online bidder has now joined the run. The announcement is also made in English; the auctioneer thereby orienting to both the international character of online participation and the indeterminacy of the online bidder’s nationality. With this announcement, the auctioneer also creates a new run between the previous online bidder and the new one. As she takes the bid from the second online bidder, the auctioneer gestures towards the screen with her right hand, which she was previously using to refer to the first online bidder. However, shortly after, she also brings her left hand up, which she formerly used to gesture towards the sales assistant, this time to gesture towards the screen. And while announcing, ‘you are two online bidders’, she makes four quick, consecutive gestures with either hand as if animating the competition between the two online bidders. As she ends her utterance, she sustains her left arm towards the monitor, thereby distinguishing the second online bidder currently holding the bid from the first, whom she referred to with her right hand. Here, the arrangement is similar to that in Fragment 4: Online bids appear on a screen, and thus, their source is one and the same location in the saleroom. This does not allow the auctioneer to use spatial reference, either explicitly or embodiedly, to distinctively refer to two different online bidders. In Fragment 5, the auctioneer does not seem to be able to rely either on the geographical location of these two online bidders to refer to one of them in particular and uses the same generic term for both online bidders.2 To solve this problem and clearly distinguish them nonetheless, she uses instead a feature of the human body and an otherwise common resource auctioneers use for all sorts of bids and especially in runs: alternating left and right hand to take bids (with subtle body movements, too) from the two competing online bidders, towards the same location and embodying the distinction. Online bidding can be integrated into the saleroom in many different ways. Varying sorts and numbers of technological artefacts, as well as sales assistants or clerks, are also variously distributed in space. Whilst in Fragments 4 and 5, online bids were displayed to the auctioneer on a screen in the saleroom, in Fragment 6, they are mediated by clerks. Moreover, online bidders can access the sale through two platforms, the in-house platform and a commercial platform which we pseudonymised respectively as Gerry’s Live and TheBidders. Each platform is operated by a different clerk, and the two are seated in different places in the saleroom.

142  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff The clerk operating Gerry’s Live is on the auctioneer’s fore, and the clerk operating TheBidders is on his left. The sales assistants taking bids from the telephone are distributed in the room, from the auctioneer’s fore to his right; and on the auctioneer’s right are also a few co-present bidders. The camera is framed on the auctioneer alone so that none of these other parties are visible to online viewers. We join during a run between a bidder in the room and an online bidder from TheBidders. The auctioneer states the current bid at £850 (line 1) with a sustained gesture towards the underbidder in the room on his right and towards the clerk operating TheBidders on his left.

The auctioneer announces the withdrawal of the bidder in the room with ‘we’re out in the room now’ (line 3) and is, therefore, now looking for a second bidder to compete with the online bidder from TheBidders. He reannounces the state of play (‘so it’s on TheBidders at eight fifty’, line 4) to emphasise where the current bid is and encourage a new bidder. Instead of looking around, however, he seems to be looking specifically ahead of him and, indeed, shortly after a new bid comes from Gerry’s Live. The auctioneer announces, ‘nine hundred on Gerry’s Live’ (line 5), while redirecting his right arm and gesturing towards the clerk operating this platform. Here, the sale’s reliance on two bidding platforms operated by different clerks located in different places allows the auctioneer to use both explicit reference and gesture to not only reveal the generic source of bids—the medium, Internet—but also distinguish two consecutive online bidders. However, as one may well foresee, this arrangement, by multiplying the source of online bids alone, can also considerably complexify the auctioneer’s work to coordinate and order bids. With the earlier fragments, we showed the main practices through which auctioneers can reveal the source of online bids and refer to particular bidders. Each practice is adjusted to a particular spatial, technological, and

Trust, transparency, and transactions 143 organisational arrangement. The spatial distribution of devices for online bidding as well as the information about online bidders made available to auctioneers appear critical in this regard. In doing this, we focused mainly on the challenges that online participation poses for auctioneers. We now turn to online participants’ perspective, showing how bidding platforms can be designed and operated so as to provide them with additional resources to identify the source of bids, thus somehow complementing auctioneers’ work. 5.

The contribution of bidding platforms and livestream

Auctioneers, bidding platform providers, and auction houses are well aware that online viewers’ limited perception of action in the saleroom constrains their ability to follow the proceedings in real time, in particular, to keep track of incoming bids. Here, we focus on two ways in which auction houses can seek to support this: designing the bidding platform so that it displays the generic source of past and current bids; and livestreaming with multiple cameras. The captions included in the transcript of Fragment 7 include a larger section of the platform web page than in previous fragments. Above the auctioneer’s video, each new bid appears in written form, with its generic source (‘Advance bid’, ‘Room’, ‘Phone’, or ‘Online’) and price; and the previous two bids remain visible. We join the sale during the opening of a lot. After placing several commission bids, the auctioneer invites further bids with ‘the bid is with me at forty-five on my book’ (line 1), while pointing to his book (Fragment 7, Image 1).

144  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff

Shortly after, the auctioneer takes a new bid from a sales assistant, which appears as ‘Phone 48,000 GBP’ above the video, while the auctioneer is still withdrawing his gesture from the sales assistant (Fragment 7, Image 2). He re-announces the current bid (lines 6–7) and, after a short silence, takes a new bid from the Internet, ‘hh fifty thousand onli:ne, thank you’ (line 9), which almost instantaneously, as the auctioneer is still gesturing towards the camera, appears as ‘Online 50,000 GBP’ above the video (Fragment 7, Image 3). As the auctioneer orientates towards the sales assistant to pursue a new bid (Fragment 7, Image 4), the series of previous bids and their generic source remain in view for online participants and prospective bidders. This feature of the bidding platform is far from redundant with the auctioneer’s work to reveal the source of bids. Firstly, whereas auctioneers’ announcements happen at once and sometimes require repeated announcements, the inscriptions remain, not only after the bid has been

Trust, transparency, and transactions 145 taken but even after the next two bids, providing online participants with a short history of previous bids. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, because they require little bandwidth, these inscriptions can be trusted for appearing in real time, without delay, as the sales proceed. Indeed, it is extremely common that the video broadcast to be delayed by all sorts of technological problems at any point in the chain, making the auctioneer’s conduct an unreliable source of information for online participants. Thus, by providing written information about current and previous bids, auction houses seek to enhance online participants’ trust in the information they are provided with on the platform and circumvent potential concerns regarding the reliability of the live broadcast. Meanwhile, by indicating the generic source of bids only (‘Room’, ‘Phone’, ‘Online’, etc.), this feature does not identify particular bidders like auctioneers seek to do and, thereby, does not replace the auctioneer’s interactional work. The real-time display of successive incoming bids in a written form neither replace auctioneers’ efforts to identify particular bidders nor does it convey any experience of a live encounter, integral to auction sales and, in particular, to stimulating competition. In this regard, a further development of online participation through platforms is the livestream format, in practitioners’ phrasing; that is, a live broadcast format that involves multiple cameras and live editing (see Camus, 2017; Perry et al., 2019). From a separate room, video professionals can control the cameras, select which camera to broadcast when, and, in some cases, such as the one later, use a split screen to juxtapose several views. In Fragment 8, there are two rows of sales assistants for telephone bidding on each side of an empty space in the middle; the clerk managing the bidding platform is seated near the sales assistants on the righthand side, and a few members of the public are seated behind those (see Fragment 8, Image 1). In contrast to the rest of the saleroom, the audience is kept in the dark in a way that seeks to preserve the individuals’ anonymity. This layout is typical of sales that were undertaken during and in the aftermath of the pandemic when an overwhelming majority of participants were joining online. In this particular sale, the saleroom is also connected with remote teams of sales assistants located in four other major cities worldwide; however, we do not focus on this in our analysis rather on how the multiple cameras, live editing, and split screen are used to show and sometimes even anticipate the source of bids. As the auctioneer opens the lot with two consecutive commission bids (lines 1–2), the broadcast shows a view of the saleroom (Fragment 8, Image 1).

146  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff

Trust, transparency, and transactions 147

The view zooms in on the auctioneer (Fragment 8, Image 2) as he announces the next increment: ‘looking for ten’ (line 3). On overlap, a sales assistant asks to take the next bid (‘ten million from New York please’, line 4), which the auctioneer takes, making explicit reference to her with her surname: ‘there it is Andrea has it at ten million’ (line 5). A few seconds later, as the auctioneer is looking for another bidder, the screen is split in two to show the auctioneer and the sales assistant (Fragment 8, Image 3), thus giving a sense of the protagonists. The auctioneer is leaning towards another bank of sales assistants on his right. After two further bids from the commission (line 10) and from the previous telephone bidder (line 12), the view shifts to the saleroom (Fragment 8, Image 4), giving a sense that the floor is now open to a new bidder, wherever they may be. A sales assistant on the auctioneer’s right,

148  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff who coincidentally happens to be within this camera frame at this point, raises her hand. Shortly after the auctioneer has taken her bid (‘eleven million with Elena’, line 18), the view zooms in on this particular sales assistant whose hand is still up (Fragment 8, Image 5). The auctioneer turns back to the previous sales assistant to pursue the next increment: ‘Andrea would you like eleven fi:ve’ (line 21), thus starting a run between the two bidders on the phone. Shortly after, this competition is rendered visually as the screen splits in three, with the large image on the left showing the auctioneer, intermediary and animator of the run, and the two competing sales assistants in smaller images on the right (Fragment 8, Image 6). In the livestream format, thus, video operators tend to zoom in on the source of the current and previous bids, and to juxtapose their images on the screen. This format is particularly suitable for hybrid sales that involve a number of sales assistants and monitors since it allows the video to show and zoom in on them without revealing the bidders’ actual identity. It allows online participants to follow the action closely and gives them a sense of the current situation at any moment. This format thereby provides online participants with additional resources to identify the source of a bid after it has been accepted by the auctioneer and, thus, to potentially participate in the sale. The livestream format and the way it is done do not replace the auctioneer’s work to reveal the source of bids in any way; the auctioneer remains equally central as an active protagonist in the action. By shifting views to where the action is, seeking to anticipate where the next bid might come from, showing a potential source even before a bid has been issued, and presenting the protagonists involved and/or competing with each other, using multiple cameras and split screen, also emphasise and seek to reveal action as it emerges within the saleroom. In doing so, auction houses seek to bring remote viewers as close—or even closer—to the action as if they were present in the saleroom, to recreate for them a live experience akin to that of bidders in the room. Live editing is crafted so as to engage online bidders by building drama and creating a narrative, which emphasises (and sometimes seeks to create the illusion) that there is competition for the current lot. In other words, with the livestream format, auction houses also create an additional and unique narrative for online viewers. Whilst this format has been criticised for emphasising the spectacle at the detriment of the sale itself (e.g., Brown, 2021), it seems fair that auction houses, wary of losing customers lacking the live experience, seek new ways of captivating them through the screen. 6. Conclusion Auction sales are a conspicuous case of a century-old form of market and economic encounter that underwent drastic changes within just over a decade with the developments of Internet and even more so since the Covid

Trust, transparency, and transactions 149 pandemic and the massive shift online that followed. In this chapter, we sought to address those changes with a specific focus on the issue of trust and transparency in auction sales of fine art and antiques. We highlighted both changes and continuities between two contrasting ecologies: the conventional, collocated saleroom, populated with participants in the flesh, and the hybrid saleroom, populated with artefacts that mediate the actions of remote participants. The successful shift certainly owes in part to how auctioneers transposed their interactional practices into the new ecology. In the first analytic section focusing on conventional, collocated auctions, we showed that auctioneers revealed sources of bids using talk and embodied conduct to refer to particular individuals within the collocated ecology. Instead of inviting the other participants in the saleroom to actually identify a particular individual, auctioneers give subtle indications that allow all participants to simply take it upon trust that the bid is issued by an actual person in the room. Through alternating gesture, head orientations, and bodily configurations, auctioneers can also render visible a run between two competing bidders as well as discard a withdrawing bidder and show that they seek new bidders in the room. Indeed, displaying participants’ changing statuses on a moment-by-moment basis is critical to not only allowing timely contributions but also rendering the process transparent. In the second analytic section, we moved on to the recent developments of auction sales towards hybrid ecologies, new spatial and technological arrangements that create new challenges for auctioneers but also new resources to overcome the issues. Whilst all online bids often come from one and the same source in the saleroom, auctioneers can use the information displayed with the online bid: bidders’ geographical location. They can also refer gesturally to different devices, in particular the camera through which they also address them and the screen on which online bids appear. They can also refer through gestures to the same device and still different several online bidders by alternating arms, moving their body sideways. They can use talk to make explicit the active presence of several online bidders for all other participants or to describe actions in the saleroom for online viewers. In the third and final section, we explored some of the ways in which auction houses use online bidding platforms to reveal the source of bids. Some of them display in written text previous and current bids, their amount, and generic source, on the web page. With livestream, the camera view can focus on a sales assistant whose client on the phone holds the current or previous bid; it can also show an open state of play in the saleroom. A split screen can be used to show two competing sales assistants side by side and even include the auctioneer as the central protagonist. Whilst platforms provide useful means to support auctioneers’ efforts at revealing the source

150  Sylvaine Tuncer, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff of bids, they do not replace their work in any way, instead highlighting the subtleties and effectiveness of their practices. During the Covid-19 pandemic, not only did most auction sales clients turn to online participation unproblematically, but the increased reliance on platforms also attracted whole new ranges of clients (Coslor, 2020). Since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the newcomers and some of the prior clients continue to participate online, many in both groups now join the saleroom. Because of the considerable advantages of relying exclusively on online bidding and the success of online timed auctions, auction houses have questioned the need to maintain live sales with an auctioneer. Their clients’ behaviour during and after the Covid pandemic gave them good reasons to maintain them. Hybrid auction sales are distinctive from the more massive shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping. They both enable remote participation when the cost of joining physically is too high and allow full participation in person. The economic exchange is still enacted in an encounter, through synchronous interaction, albeit in a virtual space for some of the participants. Notes 1 While all online bidding systems include bidders’ location, online bidders can refuse to have it displayed. Besides, auction houses have various policies regarding whether it appears on the auctioneer’s screen with the flashing notification. In any case, all auctioneers we spoke valued this as a key resource for interaction. 2 Knowing that this particular auctioneer, whom we interviewed, makes extensive use of bidders’ geographical location and laments that some online bidders refuse that it be displayed, we can assume that in this case, the reason why she does not refer to the bidders’ geographical location is that it was not available.

References Ahrne, G., Aspers, P. and Brunsson, N. (2015). The organization of markets. Organization Studies 36(1), 7–27. Ball, M. (2021). Online bidding: The key moment. The Antique Trade Gazette, 22 March. Bessy, C. and Chauvin, P.-M. (2013). The power of the market intermediaries: From information to valuation processes. Valuation Studies 1(1), 83–117. Bestor, T. C. (2004). Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boeck, G. A. (1990). Texas Livestock Auctions: A  Folklife Ethnography. New York: AMS Press. Brown, K. (2021). Screen culture, online auctions, and art market spectacle. Visual Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2021.1915176

Trust, transparency, and transactions 151 Camus, L. (2017). Attendre le signal. Une analyse des pratiques de synchronisation de l’événement avec sa retransmission télévisée en direct. Réseaux 202/203(2), 341–372. Coslor, E., Crawford, B. and Leyshon, A. (2020). Collectors, investors and speculators: Gatekeeper use of audience categories in the art market. Organization Studies 41–7, 945–997. Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2008). Hybrid ecologies: Understanding cooperative interaction in emerging physical-digital environments. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 12, 481–493. Dargan, A. and Zeitlin, S. (1983). American talkers: Expressive styles and occupational choice. The Journal of American Folklore 96(379), 3–33. Geismar, H. (2003). What’s in a price? An ethnography of tribal art at auction. In Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (Eds.) The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 289–306. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489–1522. Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91(3), 481–510. Heath, C. (2013) The Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and Antiques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarvenpa, R. (2003). Collective witnessing: Performance, drama, and circulation of valuables in the rural auction and antiques trade. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(5), 555–91. Klemperer, P. (2004). Auctions: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kuiper, K. (1992). The English oral tradition in auctions speech. American Speech 67, 279–9. Kuiper, K. (1995). Smooth Talkers: The Linguistic Performance of Auctioneers and Sportscasters. London: Routledge. Kuiper, K. and Haggo, D. C. (1984). Livestock auctions, oral poetry and ordinary language. Language in Society 13, 205–34. Kuiper, K. and Tillis, F. (1986). The chant of the tobacco auctioneer. American Speech 60, 141–9. Luff, P., Heath, C., Kuzuoka, H., Hindmarsh, J., Yamazaki, K. and Oyama, S. (2003). Fractured ecologies: Creating environments for collaboration. HumanComputer Interaction 18(1–2), 51–84. Perry, M., Broth, M., Engström, A. and Juhlin, O. (2019). Visual narrative and temporal relevance: Segueing instant replay into live broadcast TV. Symbolic Interaction 42(1), 98–126. Rasmussen, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2022). Special issue: The human touch— Analyzing online and offline shopping. Discourse and Communication 16(2), 149–159. Smith, C. (1989). Auctions: The Social Construction of Value. Berkeley, CA: California University Press.

7 Checking before checkout How customers deal with trust and accountability in grocery shopping in online and brick-and-mortar shops Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen 1. Introduction Shopping has long been a topic of interest for researchers interested in social practices and interaction. Research has described the structure of service encounters (Ventola, 1987; Aston, 1988) as well as the interpersonal relations displayed and developed between staff and customers (Placencia, 2004; Kuiper and Flindall, 2000) and among customers (Gram, 2015; Rasmussen and Kristiansen, 2022; Keller and Ruus, 2014) in brick-and-mortar supermarkets. However, many studies of shopping interaction describe traditional shopping settings (Zhu et al., 2017), such as local markets (Blackledge and Creese, 2020), convenience stores (Mondada and Sorjonen, 2016; Haakana and Sorjonen, 2011; Raevaara, 2011) or retail shops (Traverso, 2001; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2006; Kristiansen and Rasmussen, forthcoming). Fewer studies have looked into the structure and practices of supermarket shopping from an interactional perspective. These studies have investigated how pairs of shoppers, for example, move around the supermarket (De Stefani, 2013); how they search for, locate and categorize objects in the supermarket (De Stefani, 2014; Gram, 2015); and how they meet acquaintances (De Stefani and Mondada, 2018). Other studies look into the interaction between the customer and staff at the checkout counter (Kuiper and Flindall, 2000). A  few studies describe single shoppers’ social practices in supermarkets (e.g., doing maths during grocery shopping) (Lave, 1988), routines of grocery shopping in deprived neighbourhoods (Thompson et al., 2013) and practices for minimizing interaction during supermarket shopping (Rasmussen and Kristiansen, 2022). In online supermarkets, customers do their shopping by navigating the supermarket website, moving their eyes across the computer screen, moving and clicking the mouse, and typing words on the keyboard to move on and between web pages (Adami, 2015). When they have selected all the products they want to buy, the customers click the basket icon and begin the payment procedure which requires them to state their name and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-7

Checking before checkout 153 address and their credit card information before they can buy the products and then wait for the goods to be delivered to their door. A sizeable number of studies of online shopping focus on how consumers use the electronic shopping basket, measuring, for instance, basket value, basket composition and basket stability; that is, the extent to which shoppers add items by using previous orders or saved favourites (Munson et al., 2017). Studies have also looked into reasons why shoppers place items in their shopping baskets (Close and Kukar-Kinney, 2010) and why they leave the webshop without purchasing the products placed in the shopping basket (Egeln and Joseph, 2012, Kukar-Kinney and Close, 2010), often with the aim of solving the problem of shopping cart abandonment, thus contributing to increasing the profit of webshops. The study reported here aims to contribute to increasing our knowledge of consumers’ organization of shopping as a mundane social practice. It does so by providing detailed empirical descriptions of how shoppers make use of the basket in online and brick-and-mortar supermarket shopping. Further, the study discusses how shoppers’ organization of the check before checkout in online and brick-and-mortar supermarket shopping reveals their different orientations to trust and accountability in these different shopping environments. This study draws on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1986; Mondada, 2014; Hazel et al., 2014). In this context, accountability may refer to the intelligibility of members’ actions; that is, how members produce their actions so as to make them recognizable to others as those specific actions (Garfinkel, 1967), but it may also refer to the related notion of members’ moral responsibility to recognize, understand and act in accordance with normative expectations (Robinson, 2016) which is particularly relevant for this study and its interest in customer’s actions in the shared space of the supermarket and the normative patterns of conduct that they orient to. In EMCA research, trust is understood as members’ mutual expectation that they will recognize, understand and act in accordance with normative patterns of reasoning and conduct (Robinson, 2016); that is, that their actions are accountable. Trust is, therefore, a seen-but-unnoticed basis for every social action, and topicalizing trust may indicate that it is treated as problematic in the situation (Rawls, 2008). Research has shown that participants in social interaction carry out their business with minimal adjacency sequences when they take trust and intersubjectivity for granted but expand the sequences to ensure mutual understanding when uncertainty arises (Kuroshima, 2010). Expansions may include, for example, repair sequences (Schegoff et al., 1977, Schegoff, 1992). Research in trust in online commerce shows that consumers facing both system-dependent and transaction-specific uncertainty deal with this by finding information that

154  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen may help them reduce the uncertainty and that trust may be a means for reducing the complexity of human conduct when people have to cope with uncertainty (Grabner-Kräuter and Kaluscha, 2003). This indicates that the expansion of activities online may also indicate a lack of trust. 2.

Methods and data

The approach of the study falls within the realm of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1986; Mondada, 2014; Hazel et  al., 2014). EMCA uses sequential analysis to detail how participants in interaction use available resources to develop and maintain mutual understanding on a turn-by-turn basis (e.g., Schegoff, 1992; Mondada, 2019). Further, EMCA enables analysis of individual conduct in public spaces; for example, supermarkets (Rasmussen and Kristiansen, 2022), shops (Kristiansen and Rasmussen, 2021) or museums (Vom Lehn et al., 2001), based on the assumptions that actions are publicly available for observation and understanding by co-present others and that people, therefore, conduct their actions so as to be observed and understood by others (Garfinkel, 1967). EMCA is also used for studies of online interaction, including video calls, messaging and comment threads on social media (e.g., Andersen, 2017; Nielsen, 2020; Petitjean and Morel, 2017; Licoppe and Morel, 2012), where the assumptions of the public availability and observability of our actions also apply. Further, EMCA methods have been applied to solitary online activities; for instance, in studies of repair and sequence organization in web searches (Moore and Churchill, 2011; Moore et al., 2011). These studies are based on analysis of screen capture videos overlaid with eye-tracking data, and they show how humans and computers collaborate in sequentially organized interaction to, for example, form inquiries and repair them. The use of eye-tracking data as a means of gaining access to information about the movements and fixations of the user’s eyes on the computer screen permits an analysis of online activities based on how the participants move on and between web pages both with their eyes and with the mouse and/or the keyboard since these are the resources participants use to experience and organize their shopping activity. Eye-tracking recordings have also been used for studies of face-to-face interaction, especially with a focus on how gaze behaviour contributes to, for example, speaker selection (Auer, 2018), the establishment of joint attention (Stukenbrock and Dao, 2019) and referential practices (Stukenbrock, 2018). Eye-tracking data have also been used in EMCA studies with a focus on social interaction (e.g., in supermarkets) (Rasmussen and Kristiansen, 2022).

Checking before checkout 155 One study combines data from online shopping activities and shopping in brick-and-mortar shops in a study of searching practices in shopping (Rasmussen et al., forthcoming). The study describes how customers carry out search actions by drawing upon elements available in the (e-)environment, turning them into resources for search activities. The study reported in this chapter also combines eye-tracking and video data of both online and face-to-face shopping interaction, but the analytic focus is on how supermarket shoppers deal with the transition between searching for and selecting products and engaging in payment and checkout. The study draws on data collected as part of the Velux-funded research project ‘The digital (re)semiotization of buying and selling interaction’ (RESEMINA) housed by the University of Southern Denmark. RESEMINA investigates practices of buying and selling interaction in brick-andmortar as well as online shops and supermarkets in Denmark. The project also aims to explore possibilities for a dialogue between EMCA and social semiotic research in multimodality (Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022). The data were collected in 2018/2019 and consist of approximately 30 hours of recordings. The dataset comprises video recordings as well as eye-tracking recordings with detailed information about the shoppers’ eye movements and fixations, captured using the Tobii Pro X3 eye-tracking equipment for online shopping activities and the Tobii Glasses for brickand-mortar shopping activities. The analyses reported in this chapter are based on a collection of 17 shopping activities in Danish brick-and-mortar supermarkets and 9 in Danish online supermarkets. The participants recorded in brick-and-mortar supermarkets were approached outside of the supermarket and asked to participate in the research project. The shopping, thus, took place independently of the researchers’ interests. The recordings of the online shopping activities were arranged in advance, but the participants are doing shopping that they would have done anyway; that is, independently of the researchers’ interests. 3. Analysis Most shoppers deal with the transition from searching for and selecting products on supermarket shelves or web pages to paying for their goods before ending the shopping activity by exiting the shop by carrying out an inspection of the contents of their shopping basket; that is, a check before checkout. The exception is shoppers in brick-and-mortar supermarkets who buy very few products and carry them in their hands instead of using a shopping basket. In brick-and-mortar supermarkets, shoppers may check before checkout in various ways: In and as interaction, by glancing into the basket or cart or by

156  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen browsing the shopping list. The online customers all inspect their digital shopping basket by browsing the list of items provided on the Basket web page which customers must go to for initiating the checkout process. 3.1.  Checking before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets

A first illustration of how the transition may be organized is found in Example 1, subsequently, in which a mother (Mum) and her teenage daughter (Dau) are shopping in a brick-and-mortar supermarket. Stills from the video recording are presented in the large picture with the corresponding stills from the eye-tracking recording in the small overlay at the bottom left. Eye fixations are indicated by a circle, and eye movements are indicated by a line. Eye movements or fixations may not be available in every still because the Tobii equipment does not always register eye movements and fixations at every moment during the recording. Example 1

The mother and daughter are moving around the store. At one point, the mother looks into a fridge, turns away from it and starts walking. Then she says, ‘was that it’ (line 1), turning her torso and head to her right and looking towards fridges and freezers in that area of the shop, seemingly without looking at or for anything in particular. The mother’s question addresses the practical matter of whether they have all the products they intend to buy, and by formatting the turn as a question, she treats the decision as a shared one and invites the daughter to provide her assessment of the situation. The mother slows her pace and keeps her head and torso in the same position (line 2), indicating that the is waiting for the daughter’s assessment before making her next move. The daughter gazes into the basket, which has come to a halt (line 2), treating the basket and its contents as relevant resources

Checking before checkout 157 for answering the question. She answers in the affirmative (line 3), and in response, the mother speeds up again, turns her head and torso forward (line 4), and after a pause, answers, ‘okay’ (line 5). Her forward movement and her turn at talk work to acknowledge the daughter’s assessment and close the sequence, and they move towards the checkout area to pay. In this example, the transition between selecting products in the supermarket and getting ready to pay and exit is organized as a sequence of interaction between the pair of shoppers. It is initiated by the mother’s question and followed by a suspension of the couple’s movement through the shop during the daughter’s inspection of the basket and subsequent assessment, and closed by the mother’s acknowledgement. The mother’s initial turn indicates that the check is performed in order to make sure that they have all the things they intend to buy in the shopping basket before they proceed to the checkout area. Individual shoppers carry out a similar transition from searching for and selecting products to paying and exiting the shop, although it is organized differently. Example 2 illustrates how an individual customer may check before checkout. A customer is standing at a shelf, and she selects a jar of potatoes and places it in the shopping basket hanging over her right arm. As she places the jar, she glances into the basket. Next, she moves her hand and arm away from the basket, but her gaze remains on the contents of the basket (Example 2, image 1). The eye-tracking recording does not show her glance into the basket at this point because she is looking underneath the glasses, but it is evident from the video recording that she is gazing into the basket. Her head and gaze remain in that position for one second, before she straightens up and takes a step backwards. She turns her head and gaze towards the end of the aisle and the checkout area and remains in that position for almost a second (Example 2, image 2): Example 2

158  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen Next, the customer starts walking towards the end of the aisle nearest to the checkout area. Her eyes fixate on the area at the end of the aisle rather than the products on the shelves she passes, and she walks quite slowly; it takes her almost five seconds to walk the short distance to the end of the aisle (Example 2, image 3). Just before reaching the end of the aisle, the customer stops and stands there for one and a half seconds, looking forward but seemingly not looking at anything in particular (Example 2, image 4). She then turns her head to her right and downwards, looking into the basket (Example 2, image 5). Again, she is looking underneath the glasses, but we can see from the video recordings that her head and gaze are in that direction. Her gaze remains within the basket for four and a half seconds before she straightens up and starts moving forward, towards the checkout area (Example 2, image 6). The customer in Example 2 is not looking at the products on display but at products that are already in her basket; and even though she moves slowly forward or stands still, she does not engage in browsing or searching among the products displayed (cf. Kristiansen and Rasmussen, 2021), as she has been doing previously and as customers are expected to do. When not looking into the basket, the customer seems to be gazing straight ahead, her eyes not fixating anything in particular (Example 3, images 2–4) which suggests that she may be ‘doing thinking’ (cf. Goodwin’s description of a ‘thinking face’ associated with speakers doing a self-directed word search (Goodwin, 1987)). The customer’s first gaze into the shopping basket (Example 3, image 1) is followed by the ‘doing thinking’ and may, thus, be understood as occasioning the thinking. After gazing forward, the customer looks into her basket again (Example 3, image 5) for quite a long time, which may indicate that she is still ‘doing thinking’, now aided by visual access to the products in her basket. The transition in Example 2 shows several similarities with the transition in Example 1: 1) the customer slows down and stands still; 2) she does not engage in gaze behaviour otherwise associated with slowing down or standing still in a supermarket (i.e., searching for or examining products); and 3) she gazes into the basket as the daughter did in Example 1. Further, the customer’s ‘doing thinking’ comes off as doing similar work as the question-answer sequence between the mother and daughter in Example 1 through which they establish that ‘that was it’; that is, that they have all the products they need in the shopping basket and are, thus, ready to proceed to the checkout counter to finish the shopping. While the customer in Example 2 carries out an elaborate check before checkout, other individual customers accomplish their checks before checkout very quickly. Nevertheless, they share the characteristics described earlier: 1) slowing down and/or stopping; 2) not engaging in searching or browsing; 3) orienting their head and body to the basket and looking into it, remaining in that position for a moment; and then 4) straightening up and moving forward towards the checkout area without engaging in further searching or browsing.

Checking before checkout 159 The check before checkout is the only time customers look into their cart or basket, except for very brief glances in connection with placing things in the basket or cart. The only exception to this is a customer who looks into his basket twice, in both cases doing a brief check before checkout as described earlier: The first time, he checks the basket and next leaves the food section of the supermarket, and the second time, he checks the basket prior to approaching the checkout area. The customer’s two checks indicate that he treats supermarket shopping as a sequentially ordered activity where the preference is to move on from section to section without going back to sections already traversed. The first check then serves to establish that he has all the food items he intends to buy before moving to the next section of the shop. The second check serves to establish that he has all the products he intends to buy before proceeding to the checkout area to avoid having to go back to the product display areas once he has approached the queue or the checkout counter. The single checks before checkout in the rest of the data may indicate a similar orientation to supermarket shopping as a sequentially ordered activity where the normative expectations are that customers have to collect all the products they intend to buy before approaching the checkout counter. Shoppers who use a shopping list for their grocery shopping orient to their shopping list as a relevant resource for checking before checkout instead of looking into their basket. In the subsequent example, the customer uses her own shopping trolley for transporting the selected products, so she does not have visual access to the majority of the products. In the example, she is standing at some shelves, and she selects a product and places it in her trolley. She is holding the shopping list in her right hand while doing this (Example 3, image 1): Example 3

160  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen Having placed the product in the trolley, she straightens up (Example 3, image 2) and takes hold of the shopping list with both hands, her eyes fixating it (Example 3, image 3). She remains in that position for 2.3 seconds. During this time, her gaze and bodily orientation are towards the note, and she is not engaged in actions in relation to the material environment, such as moving, browsing, searching for or examining products. This is similar to the checks before checkout described in Examples 1 and 2, though the customer in Example 3 engages with the shopping list rather than the contents of the trolley. The eye-tracking recordings show that she focuses mostly on the middle of the paper and does not read every single item on the shopping list. She focuses mostly on the word ‘is’ (ice cream); and after the end of the extract, the shopper moves to a freezer, selects some ice cream and then proceeds to the checkout counter without looking at the list again. Next, the customer looks up again, folds the paper (Example 3, images 4–5) and places it in her pocket and then moves away. The shopping list has been in her hand throughout the shopping activity, but after checking the list (Example 3), she puts it in her pocket. We may, thus, understand the consultation of the shopping list as a type of check before checkout since it marks a final inspection which works to establish that only one more item needs to be found and placed in the shopping trolley. Further, the shopping list is treated as a sufficient resource for getting an overview of the current status of the shopping process which renders visual inspection of the contents of the trolley superfluous. The analysis has shown that shoppers systematically check before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets. The shoppers carry out the check by a) stopping or slowing down; b) orienting bodily and with their head and gaze either to the contents of their cart or basket or to their shopping list if they use one; c) straightening up and facing forward; and d) moving towards the checkout area without engaging in further searching or browsing behaviour. If the check is accomplished by a pair of shoppers, these actions may be distributed among the two participants, as demonstrated in Example 1, and the check also includes verbal contributions. All the checks before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets are accomplished quite quickly. This indicates customers’ orientation to the normative understanding of supermarkets as spaces where customers move forward, adjusting their shopping actions to the order in which products are displayed on the supermarket shelves rather than going back to previous areas of the store; for example, to find a product or to put something back. In such spaces, decisions about whether to buy a product are made at the shelf displaying the product because revisiting a previous section of the store to put back a product you decided not to buy anyway would be a breach of normative expectations; that is, an accountable action.

Checking before checkout 161 Consequently, it is not relevant for customers to consider removing products from the basket during the check before checkout, which means that a brief glance provides a sufficient overview to establish whether any more products are missing before proceeding to checkout. The speed with which the checks before checkout are done also indicates that trust is not treated as problematic since there is no slowing down to deal with uncertainty or trouble of understanding. 3.2.  Checking before checkout in online supermarkets

In online supermarkets, shoppers search for and select products using a mouse and a keyboard to navigate the supermarket website which they have access to via a computer screen. They add products to their shopping basket, a web page displaying a list of the products they have selected. The items on the list are ordered according to product categories, such as ‘vegetables’ or ‘dairy products’, and the list includes information about origin, price, and price per kilo, and discounts similar to what is displayed on the shelf label in a brick-and-mortar supermarket for each product. The list also shows how many of each product the customer has selected and allows customers to adjust this or delete the item from the list. The customers can access the Basket page at any time during the shopping process, but in the data, shoppers usually access the Basket page when they believe they have selected all the products they intend to buy. They may express this verbally if more than one person is present as in Example 4 later. On the supermarket websites in the data, the Go to Payment button is immediately visible on the Basket page. It is, thus, possible to proceed directly from the Basket page to the payment section without inspecting the list of selected products, and eye-tracking recordings show that customers briefly fixate on the Go to Payment button and the total amount to be paid before moving their eyes to the list of products and inspecting it. Customers notice the Go to Payment button, but they do not make use of the possibility to proceed directly to payment. Instead, they move their eyes to the list of items displayed on the Basket page, checking the products in their digital shopping basket before initiating checkout. Example 4 illustrates how a couple shopping online together checks the list of items in the digital shopping basket before clicking Go to Payment. The large images in the example feature the shoppers sitting at a table with the laptop in front of them. The small images on the top left are screen recordings of the shopping. The recordings capture everything that happens on the screen, including clicks, keystrokes and mouse movements; and the eye-tracking information has been added with the following: dots for eye fixations and lines for eye movements.

162  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen The couple has searched for and added products to the digital shopping basket while checking shopping lists, planning meals for the coming week and discussing what they already have in stock at home. At one point, Sam, who is operating the laptop, initiates an assessment sequence, leaning back and saying, ‘jeg tror det var det’ (I believe that was it) (Example 4, line 1), to which the other participant, Ann, agrees (Example 4, line 2). Sam responds by asking for confirmation (line 3), which Ann provides (line 4), and the couple, thus, comes to agree that their current activity is finished. Next, Sam clicks on the Basket icon, and the Basket page loads. Example 4

The assessment sequence in Example 4 resembles what transpires in Example 1, where a mother and daughter also co-construct an assessment of the current activity as finished. However, in Example 1, the mother and daughter’s assessment sequence works to accomplish a check before checkout; Sam and Ann’s assessment sequence, in contrast, constitutes the closing of the searching and selecting activity (Schegoff and Sacks, 1973) but makes it relevant to access the Basket page, thus initiating a check before checkout. Sam scrolls down the list of selected products, and the couple talks about some of the products on the list. The transcript in Example 4 includes two instances of such talk. The first instance is Ann assessing a product, ‘ej det fint’ (no that’s fine) (line 9), and adding further information to substantiate the validity of her assessment: They already have a couple of these in the basement (line 9). The second instance is Ann directing Sam to ‘ta en mere

Checking before checkout 163 af de almindelige’ (take one more of the ordinary ones) (line 18), adding as an argument in favour of this that this is the only reasonable thing to do (line 19). In response, Sam clicks the Plus button next to the ‘ordinary’ frozen fries, adjusting the number of bags of fries that they have selected. The couple, thus, scrolls through the list, adjusting it as they go and discussing the relevance of certain products and other matters. All in all, checking the list on the Basket page takes the couple 120 seconds. This is the longest check in the data, but the online checks in the data range from approximately 20 seconds to 120 seconds, which is in all cases far longer than the longest check before checkout in the data from brick-and-mortar supermarkets. The online checks before checkout are organized as inspections of a vertical list, scrolling down the page to make more products visible and fixating on each product briefly before moving the eyes to the next item on the list. This differs from checks before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets where customers gaze briefly into the cart or basket (or at the shopping list) to gain an overview at a glance. Online customers use the check before checkout to evaluate the contents of the list and adjust it, as in Example 4, to scrutinize information regarding specific products, as in Example 5 later, where a customer is inspecting information about discounts, and to find more information about products. In Example 5, the shopper glances at the green Go to Payment (Til Kassen) button (Example 5, image 1) before moving his eyes to the list of products (Example 5, image 2). He moves his eyes from product to product, focusing on the product images in the list, scrolling down so that more products become visible on the screen. Example 5

164  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen At one point, the shopper’s eyes fixate on several juice bottles on the list (Example 4, image 3). In the text column next to the product image, the text with yellow highlighting indicates that there is a discount on these products, and his eyes fixate on the highlighted text, and he stops scrolling (Example 5, image 4). For ten seconds, the customer moves his eyes between the discount text, the price of the products (in the right column) and the number of products selected. He seems to be trying to make sense of the discount in relation to the price listed. Eventually, his eyes move to a calculation of the discount which is listed separately below the price of the products (Example 5, image 5). This seems to provide the information he was searching for because he returns to the scrolling activity, making his way through the rest of the list. The shopper does not make any changes in the basket, but he spends time looking at the information and making sense of it. In that way, looking for and engaging with information seem to work to establish enough trust in the system to progress towards accomplishing the purchase. As shown in Examples 4 and 5, customers in online supermarkets, thus, engage with the items in the digital shopping basket in various ways. The affordances of the virtual shopping basket make it relevant for them to engage in further evaluations of the products in the basket during the check before checkout since the Basket page provides possibilities for adjusting its contents. As discussed earlier, this possibility is specifically not relevant for customers in brick-and-mortar supermarkets who engage with the products they consider during the searching and selecting stages of the shopping activity but not during the check before checkout since they organize their shopping activity to fit the normative expectation of forward movement which means that for all practical purposes, the contents of the shopping basket are fixed at the time of the check before checkout. The different organizations of the physical and virtual supermarket spaces, thus, make for different organizations of the check before checkout. At one point, the shopper in Example 5 looks down and to his right (Example 5, image 6), gazing at a shopping list on the table next to the computer. Almost all online shoppers use a shopping list, and they cross out items on the list as they are added to the basket, as shoppers in brickand-mortar supermarkets do. Despite this, online customers also carry out a detailed check of the items listed in the digital basket before proceeding to checkout. For online supermarket shoppers, the shopping list is, thus, not a sufficient substitute for a visual inspection of the products in their basket. This indicates that online shoppers also use the check before checkout to ensure that the information on the Basket page is correct; for example, that discounts are registered correctly, as in Example 4 earlier, and that the correct number of each product has been selected. They do not

Checking before checkout 165 seem to trust that the contents of the digital shopping basket correspond to what they believe they have added to it. Customers in brick-and-mortar supermarkets, in contrast, trust this to be the case, as evidenced in their organization of the check before checkout. 4. Discussion and conclusion: trust and accountability in online and brick-and-mortar supermarket shopping The analyses earlier have demonstrated that customers in brick-and-mortar and online supermarkets organize the transition from searching for and selecting products to paying and exiting the supermarket as a check before checkout—an inspection of the contents of their shopping basket. The analyses have also made it clear that the checks differ in various ways as a result of the different organizations of online and brick-and-mortar supermarkets. The analyses have established that the check before checkout in brickand-mortar supermarkets is quick and usually does not result in changes in the contents of the shopping basket, and it has been argued that this is due to the normative expectation that decisions about products are made by the product displays and not changed later. That is, the organization of the check before checkout reflects the accountability of movement in the public space of the supermarket. Further, the brevity of the check before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets may display the customers’ orientation to the checkout process as offering a final possibility for reviewing and negotiating the purchase. The actual purchase of the products placed in the shopping basket takes place at the checkout counter where all the products are placed on a conveyor belt and registered by the sales assistant. At the checkout counter, the cash register displays information about price, discounts and so on as the products are scanned, and by not challenging the information displayed, the customer displays acceptance of the price of each product. When all products have been scanned, the total price is announced, and the customer pays, which means that they own the products and may take them out of the store. The checkout process, thus, organizes the final decisionmaking with regard to the purchase and as face-to-face interaction. This means that the customer’s acceptance of the purchase is built incrementally with each action and turn-at-talk, as the absence of indications of trouble in each turn amounts to an acceptance of the checkout process so far (as has been amply demonstrated by EMCA studies of repair practices; e.g., Schegoff et al. (1977), Schegoff (1992)). Overall, checks before checkout as well as checkout encounters are accomplished unhesitatingly and routinely in brick-and-mortar shops which indicates that accountability and trust are not oriented as problematic in the situation.

166  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen The check before checkout conducted by shoppers in online supermarkets, in contrast, is characterized by careful attention to detail and work to assess the contents of the digital basket in terms of relevance, amounts, price and discounts. The online check before checkout displays customers’ understanding of online supermarkets as independent of the constraints imposed by the physical space of the brick-and-mortar supermarket. The virtual supermarket space is private in the sense that it is not shared with other co-present customers in the supermarket who may witness and observe one’s movement. Further, adding and removing items to and from the basket does not involve physically moving products back and forth, so decision-making related to products is not restricted to the space near the relevant product display. Customers fit their check before checkout into this overall organization of the virtual supermarket space by making use of the check before checkout as another opportunity to assess the products in their virtual basket. Since the supermarket space is private, adding or removing items from the basket is not accountable in the sense of observably breaching normative expectations regarding decision-making and movement in supermarkets, and customers systematically utilize this opportunity. Moreover, customers in online supermarkets use the check before checkout to review the information displayed about the products in the basket, including information about the number of each product and calculations of discounts. This attention to detail may indicate not just utilizing the affordances offered by the digital basket but also that customers do not take it for granted that the information displayed on the Basket page corresponds to what they believe they have seen and accepted previously in the shopping activity. Customers do not seem to trust that the digital basket guarantees a straightforward connection between previous shopping actions and the contents of the shopping basket, which is taken for granted in brick-and-mortar shopping. The lack of trust may be related to the perceived potential for technical problems in web-based forms of shopping (Grabner-Kräuter and Kaluscha, 2003), and it may also display an orientation to the organization of the checkout process in online supermarkets. In online supermarkets, the checkout process is organized as a series of web formulas that must be filled in before the customer can proceed to the next stage, and it is initiated by clicking the Go to Payment button on the Basket page. The checkout process in online supermarkets is, thus, accomplished by the customer by providing input into the digital system— information necessary to ensure the successful completion of the purchase in terms of payment as well as delivery. When all the forms have been filled in, the customer can click Pay to complete the checkout process. To

Checking before checkout 167 confirm the completion of the transaction, a web page opens which confirms the transaction and summarises the details of the purchase. From the initiation of the checkout process to the appearance of the Confirmation page after the completion of the payment, the customer does not have access to the list of products they are about to buy. This means that the check before checkout is the last possibility for the customer to review and evaluate the products before the purchase. This contrasts with brick-and-mortar supermarkets where the checkout process involves the customer handling each item in the basket to place it on the conveyor belt and handling them again to pack them into carrier bags after the purchase. Further, the Basket page also constitutes the last possibility for customers to review prices and discounts. This information is available to customers in brick-and-mortar supermarkets during the scanning of products at the checkout counter, which offers the possibility for customers to challenge prices and potentially refuse to buy products if they find that the price is incorrect. Unlike the checkout process in brick-and-mortar supermarkets which provides for an incrementally developed agreement on the contents and the price of the purchase which is co-constructed in interaction and implicitly confirmed by the customer’s continued participation in the checkout, the checkout process of online supermarkets requires that the customer formally and explicitly agrees to the contents and the price of the purchase by clicking the Go to Payment button. The terms of the agreement are stated on the Basket page in terms of price, amounts, discounts and so on, and the customer has no chance to challenge them, only to accept them or remove the product from the list. This may account for the item-by-item inspection of the list on the Basket page, and it may also account for such inspection despite the customers’ use of a shopping list, which is treated as sufficient for doing a check before checkout in brickand-mortar supermarkets. In conclusion, the check before checkout in brick-and-mortar supermarkets is organized as a brief glance into the basket or at the shopping list, which displays the customers’ orientation to the accountability of movement in the supermarket and their orientation to the checkout process as presenting the final possibility for decision-making and negotiation of the purchase in and as interaction. Hence, the check before checkout is primarily treated as establishing the relevance of proceeding to the checkout area. The check before checkout in online supermarkets is organized as an item-by-item inspection of the list of products provided on the Basket page, including critical inspection of information and adjustments of the items on the list. This displays customers’ orientation to reviewing information as a basis for decision-making as a central component of the check

168  Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen before checkout. Customers treat the verification of information on the list as their own responsibility and as a prerequisite for initiating the checkout process. The lack of ‘human touch’ (Rasmussen and van Leeuwen, 2022) in online supermarket shopping means that there is no assumption of mutual trust or accountability in the online supermarkets akin to the fundamental trust and accountability which customers assume to operate in brick-and-mortar supermarkets. References Adami, E. 2015. What’s in a click? A social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity. Visual Communication, 14, 133–153. Andersen, E. M. 2017. Typing yourself accountable: Objectifying subjective experiences in an online health forum. Linguistik Online, 87, 43–68. Aston, G. (ed.) 1988. Negotiating service: Studies in the discourse of bookshop encounters: The Pixi project. Bologna: CLUEB. Auer, P. 2018. Gaze, addressee selection and turn-taking in three-party interaction. In: Bröne, G. & Oben, B. (eds.) Eye-tracking in interaction: Studies on the role of eye gaze in dialogue. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Blackledge, A. & Creese, A. 2020. Interaction ritual and the body in a city meat market. Social Semiotics, 30, 1–24. Close, A. G. & Kukar-Kinney, M. 2010. Beyond buying: Motivations behind consumers’ online shopping cart use. Journal of Business Research, 63, 986–992. De Stefani, E. 2013. The collaborative organisation of next actions in a semiotically rich environment: Shopping as a couple. In: Haddington, P., Mondada, L. & Nevile, M. (eds.) Interaction and mobility: Language and the body in motion. Berlin: De Gruyter. De Stefani, E. 2014. Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self-service store. In: Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. & Rauniomaa M. (eds.) Interacting with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. De Stefani, E. & Mondada, L. 2018. Encounters in public space: How acquainted versus unacquainted persons establish social and spatial arrangements. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51, 248–270. Egeln, L. S. & Joseph, J. A. 2012. Shopping cart abandonment in online shopping. Atlantic Marketing Journal, 1, 1. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Garfinkel, H.  & Sacks, H. 1986. On formal structures of practical actions. In: Garfinkel, H. (ed.) Ethnomethodological studies of work. London: Routledge. Goodwin, C. 1987. Forgetfulness as an interactive resource. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50, 115–130. Grabner-Kräuter, S. & Kaluscha, E. A. 2003. Empirical research in on-line trust: A  review and critical assessment. International Journal of Human-computer Studies, 58, 783–812.

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8 Curating a lifestyle experience How Pottery Barn makes it so Louise Ravelli

1. Introduction The everyday experience of shopping varies in relation to many factors but not least the nature of the store (or market) being visited. Shoppers wishing to purchase homewares (beds, linen, furniture, tableware, decorations) might do so in a department store, a dedicated chain store, an individual boutique, at certain markets, and so on. Each of these provides different ranges of goods and services, different options for sociability, and different experiences for the shopper. It is common to find goods organised and grouped according to function (cushions vs. lamps, for example, perhaps on separate shelves or in different areas of the store), but it is also not uncommon to find diverse goods within this category contextualised by replicating how a particular selection of homewares (cushion + lamp + table + vase) might look if co-located in the home: an installation. One store which is particularly adept at this practice is Pottery Barn (potterybarn.com), a homewares store originating in the USA but with a large international footprint. In this chapter, I  use Spatial Discourse Analysis (SpDA; Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016) to identify how specific semiotic resources of the built environment are used in the store as a whole and the installations themselves, and how these contribute to the overall impact of the installations. I first outline the nature of SpDA and its origins within social semiotics, and second, provide an introduction to Pottery Barn and some of its history. 2.

Spatial Discourse Analysis

Spatial Discourse Analysis applies a social semiotic view to the built environment; that is, seeing the built environment as being a multimodal text, arising in a particular social, cultural, and historical context. The built environment is also seen to be a communicative text, communicating meanings about what is being represented (representational meaning), DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-8

Curating a lifestyle experience 173 about the way social actors are positioned in relation to each other and how they are made to feel (interactional meaning), and about the ways in which these meanings are made to combine and cohere (organisational meanings). Such an approach draws heavily on Halliday’s metafunctional approach to the social semiotics of language (Halliday, 1978, 1994) and on Kress and van Leeuwen’s extension of this approach to the analysis of images (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). The analysis proceeds on the same text three times to account for the three different types of meaning and to identify how these strands operate both separately and together. Identification of meaning is tied to specific material resources; that is, there needs to be an explicit link between observed materiality and interpretation, and any interpretation is in turn tied to context, including the reader’s own positioning within that context. There is no claim, therefore, to this being a sole or accurate reading; rather, the aim is to account for a likely and predictable reading, given the cultural context of the time and the heavy influence of the analyst’s own sociocultural context. While the analysis builds on social semiotic traditions of linguistic and visual analysis, there is no suggestion that the built environment is structured in the same way as language, nor that a two-dimensional analysis can be simply mapped onto a three-dimensional space through which people move. Rather, SpDA draws on key insights of these approaches, including that meaning is of multiple types which are co-present, which arise within and contribute to social context and which are realized in concrete and specific ways. Within SpDA, any one semiotic resource, such as the spatial layout of a room, may have implications for each of the metafunctions simultaneously, but also, there are typical correlations of resources with specific metafunctions. For representational meanings, the semiotic resources that a shop (usually) has to hand include first and foremost the selection of goods: What is it that is being sold? Clothes, homewares, antiquarian books, power tools, or perhaps, some combination of these or other items? Also included in representational meaning are the roles that social actors (shop owner, assistant, customer) are able and enabled to play, defined both by conventional roles (assistants sell, customers buy) and by the nature of the inclusions and layout of the shop (is there anywhere for the customer to sit, for example?). Interactionally, the visual design of a store, such as the height of the ceiling, quality of the fittings, or accessibility of goods, can change how a shopper is made to feel (intimidated or welcome, for example) and the way in which the authenticity of the shop is experienced (as everyday or fantastical, for example). Organisationally, the layout of the store and its goods can separate or unify the items within the store (in clearly differentiated sections or more randomly), and displays and lighting can focus attention on some sections or items rather than others.1

174  Louise Ravelli The analysis can zoom in or out (Boeriis and Holsanova, 2012) in terms of degrees of detail: Different options and patterns arise (across each of the metafunctions) when considering the store as a whole or a section within it, a particular display, or even the store within its larger context (a street, a mall, a town). Such an analysis does not account for all elements of meaning making within the built environment, but what a Spatial Discourse Analysis does reveal are the ways in which the built environment can be seen to express a range of meanings, through varied use of material resources, and how these in turn shape and influence the identity of the store. 3.

Pottery Barn and its installations

Pottery Barn was opened by brothers Paul and Morris Secon in 1949 (Home Stratosphere, 2018), after Paul Secon ‘drove a car full of discontinued and slightly damaged ceramics from a factory in upstate New York to Manhattan’ (Genovese, 2020: n.p.). They subsequently opened a store in Manhattan and expanded to seven shops, eventually selling to Gap and then Williams-Sonoma Inc. The brand now has an international footprint of more than 150 stores and is allied with partner stores Pottery Barn Kids, West Elm, and Williams-Sonoma. The store’s Australian website defines its story thus: Pottery Barn is a multi-channel retailer with a vibrant ecommerce site, inspiring catalogues, and brick-and-mortar stores all over the world. We got our start in 1949 in Chelsea, New York, where we got into the homewares business by selling slightly imperfect pottery and tabletop closeouts. Today, we’re proud to call San Francisco our home. We’ve expanded into every room of the house, and passionately infuse quality and comfort into everything we create. www.potterybarn.com.au/about-us Retail analysis regularly refers to the success of Pottery Barn, as a ‘dominant’ home brand (Sloan, 1997: n.p.), and one which frequently anchors store offerings in new and upmarket ‘lifestyle centers’ (Hardwick, 2015). A  senior editor at One Trade Weekly, Carole Nicksin, says that Pottery Barn ‘has built a furniture brand into a lifestyle brand in a way that nobody else has done’ (quoted in Tischler, 2003: n.p.). Post-pandemic, Pottery Barn is one of two homewares companies in the USA to lead market share increases (Marks, 2022: n.p.). The success of Pottery Barn is attributed to a range of factors (both by the store itself, through its website, and by commentators), including ‘The company’s smart yet accessible product mix, seductive merchandising, and first-rate customer service’ (Tischler, 2003: n.p.). In its early days, Pottery

Curating a lifestyle experience 175 Barn buyers would acquire merchandise from outside providers to resell in the store, but now, 95% of products are designed in-house, with a very strong design philosophy and design team in charge of this (Tischler, 2003: n.p.). Part of the store’s early success is attributed to its strong merchandising through print catalogues, complemented today by its online presence, and both of these strategies continue alongside the physical stores. Former senior executive Gary Friedman says that merchandising in the physical stores ‘still has to look the same as it does in the catalog’. He adds that Pottery Barn does not work in a typical retail format of classifications and categories: ‘We’re not a Bed Bath & Beyond in our assortments. We’re a lifestyle’ (cited in Sloan, 1997: n.p.). Pottery Barn recognizes that the physical stores bring particular qualities: Williams-Sonoma president, Laura Alber, says, ‘We know that our customers value the tactile experience that a retail store provides .  .  . they can sit on the furniture, feel the highquality linens and view the extensive line of bathroom fixtures’ (cited in Duff, 2006: n.p.). Alber continues: ‘The stores are small and intimate . . . with a format dominated by multiple bedroom and bathroom vignettes’. Together, the multiple retail strategies of Pottery Barn produce a physical retail environment which promotes a ‘casual lifestyle’, telling ‘a more compelling story than the competition’ and having ‘some of the more creative approaches to home furnishings retailing’ (Friedman, in Sloan, 1997: n.p.). The question arises: What is creative about this approach, and what story is it that Pottery Barn is telling? The focus of the analysis here will be predominantly on the installations or vignettes that are so typically used in Pottery Barn stores, and this is what Pottery Barn excels at. These terms can be used interchangeably; both imply ‘a harmonious tableau made from a variety of items, rather than a large collection of similar articles’ (Dunn, 2019: n.p.). ‘Installation’ refers to this arrangement on a larger scale, a whole living room scene, for example, and will be the predominant term used here; whereas ‘vignette’ implies a smaller-scale arrangement, such as a display of items on a coffee table. Examples of both are shown in Figure 8.1. Installations are characterized by a number of features. The grouping of different items is fundamentally functional; that is, the items belong together in relation to some overarching function, such as what you need to sit down and eat, what you need in order to sleep, or what you need to relax in a living room. So an installation for the dining room generally would not include a pillow for a bed. Additionally, the installation demonstrates that multiple kinds of items are needed to fulfil the relevant function: To dine requires not just a table but chairs, table setting, candles, napkins, flatware, and more. A dining table on its own is not enough. The items are not just present and co-located, they are arranged as if they might be in real life; that is, with verisimilitude: A plate sits on a placemat, with

176  Louise Ravelli

Figure 8.1  Typical installations/vignettes in Pottery Barn stores

a napkin beside it, for example, candles down the centre of the table, and so on. Stylistically, the multiple items belong together—there is either unity or complementarity of colour, style, shape, material which means that the disparate items give a sense of being coherent in relation to each other. As with all semiotic choices, these features of functionality, relevance, verisimilitude, and coherence are construed, not inherent, and hence, it can be entirely acceptable to see a dining table fully redecorated with Halloweenthemed tableware in one season and Easter-themed tableware in another. 4.

Representational meanings

Representationally, the installations provide a marked contrast to more conventional display strategies. In an analysis of an Australian department store, David Jones (Ravelli, 2022), I noted that the retail strategies of the department store were falling behind those of a store such as Pottery Barn. A classic retail display in a department store, as well as in many others, is to group products together by type and separate them from each other, on different shelves, or in different sections of the store, for example. In terms of representational meanings, this is what Kress and van Leeuwen refer to as conceptual structures, creating ‘hyponymical (‘kind of’) relations between

Curating a lifestyle experience 177 participants’ (2021: 76), specifically a taxonomic relation where the subordinates in such a grouping are realized visually by symmetry. Spatially, taxonomic relations are realized by separation (from other products) and by similarity (with those products within the group). Both separation and similarity may be in terms of functional categories (cushions vs. rugs) or visual/tactile categories (different colours, materials). In some stores, such taxonomic groupings may be overt, being marked with signs which indicate the relevant store section (‘kitchen’, ‘living’), or may be covert, with no explicit signage present. Whether overt or covert, strong taxonomic groupings within a store suggest that that store is a ‘provider of pre-selected goods—a place . . . to go to find a specific item’ (Ravelli, 2022: 277). Pottery Barn certainly has its share of taxonomic displays. Particularly around the periphery of the stores, and also placed to help divide the store as a whole into smaller sections, there are shelves with similar products grouped together: wineglasses and flatware in one section; photo frames and desk accessories in another. As will be discussed further below, these groupings help to frame and differentiate particular sections, and together, they create a kind of overarching taxonomy for the store, suggesting that a home is made up of a bedroom, living room, and dining room, for example (and most definitely not a garden storage shed). But taxonomic structures do not drive the presentation of installations. In representational terms, many of the installations do enable actual narrative processes—shoppers can sit on a chair if they wish or pick up a wineglass, as Alber says above. However, these are not fully functional narrative processes; they are only suggestions of activities. Not only is there nothing to facilitate actual narratives (there is no kitchen which provides food for the table, for example), a customer who did so (bringing in their lunch to sit at the Pottery Barn table) would likely be asked to move on. Thus, the installations are primarily conceptual, rather than narrative, saying, ‘this is what a lounge room looks like—these are its features’ (Ravelli, 2022: 276). Conceptual processes include structured analytical processes and symbolic suggestive processes. The former has two participants, a carrier, representing the whole, and its attributes, representing the parts. Interpreting the installations in this way would mean that the carrier is the lounge room or the dining room, but is this what the customer is buying, a part of the lounge room? The answer to this needs to be both yes and no. Yes, in that the multiple components do make up a larger whole, and so the purchase of any one of them is a purchase of a part of the whole. But no, in that if the customer buys just one cushion, they are taking home not just a part of a lounge room but a part of Pottery Barn itself. In this sense, the installations are not a larger whole made up of parts, but the whole and the parts are fused inseparably together. That is, there is only one participant, the carrier,

178  Louise Ravelli and the qualities of the carrier ‘are coming from within, as deriving from qualities of the Carrier themselves’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021: 105; see also Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 90). The representational function of these installations is, thus, symbolic—specifically, symbolic suggestive processes—defining the grouping of items in terms of ‘what they are, or what they mean’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021: 76). By purchasing one component, the shopper purchases the carrier itself; in this case, the essence of Pottery Barn. What Pottery Barn sells is that lifestyle factor, a certain but ineffable aesthetic. This ineffable aesthetic is now so well-established that it is even lampooned in popular culture; for example, in plays which comment on how ‘being gay . . . means shopping for the right kind of lamps (at Pottery Barn)’ (Lippert, 2010: 42). Importantly, the essence of Pottery Barn is a suggested feature, not an explicit one: There is rarely any obvious branding or logos on Pottery Barn products. And as will be seen later, each of the metafunctions has a role to play in contributing to this effect. 5.

Interactional meanings

In terms of interactional meanings, I will begin by zooming out here to the rank of the store as a whole. An important part of the layout of Pottery Barn stores is a sense of openness in the pathways afforded the shopper into and out of the store, and through the different sections. Numerous Pottery Barn stores (though it may not be true of them all) have multiple entry and exit points, including to partner stores, such as West Elm or Pottery Barn Kids. (That is, the shopper can enter one store and go from there into the next, without exiting to the shopping centre or street again.) Within a specific store, the multiple sections are placed seemingly randomly, enabling multiple pathways to and between them, facilitating a ‘free flow’ path for the shopper (Eby, 2017). This means that the interactional value of control is afforded to the shopper. Control refers to ‘the relative freedom or otherwise afforded to the users of a spatial text by the institution, typically defined by the degree of literal control over pathways’ (Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 60). Thus, while the layout is created by Pottery Barn, the shopper chooses how to move through it. The layout doesn’t predetermine the pathway (as is well-known in IKEA, for example) nor even strongly suggest one (as may be the case in a conventional supermarket). The store layout, thus, functions as a kind of invitation, enabling the shopper to wander through according to their interests, perhaps visiting just one section, or perhaps every section, in the order that makes sense to the shopper. A sense of invitation or welcome in the store is further facilitated by other interactional choices. The store design creates a minimal sense of power for itself: While airy and generally light, a sense of heightened spaciousness on the ceiling plane, which might attribute power to the store, is

Curating a lifestyle experience 179 reduced by the height of sectional shelves, giving a more domestic sensibility to the overall space. The potential for power on the horizontal plane (realized by the usually generous size of the overall floor space) is reduced by dividing the store as a whole into smaller sections, thus giving that sense of being ‘small and intimate’, referred to by Alber earlier. The social distance between the store’s products and the shopper is minimised, and shopper involvement with products maximised, as all products are in easy reach of the shopper: Items can be picked up and/or put down again; chairs can be sat on if so desired. While the store does have multiple sections, contact (eye lines) throughout the store remains open, and staff are visible both behind counters and moving around. Interactionally, then, the shopper is invited to wander around, pick up products or not, enter and exit as they wish, and approach staff if needed. Additional interactional meanings are achieved through the systems of binding and bonding (Stenglin, 2004, 2009). Binding ‘is concerned with the relationship between space and emotion while Bonding explores the patterns of interaction between the occupants of a space as well as theoretical resources for solidarity building and affiliation’ (Stenglin, 2009: 42). Binding is particularly interesting in relation to the installations. The sectional shelves create an intimate sense of space within the larger whole of the shop itself and serve to define and frame the installations. The installations themselves are invariably further bound by soft rugs anchoring the space and multiple layers of items creating a sense of intimacy (a couch layered with cushions and throw rugs; a coffee table before the couch set with candles, books, photo frames). The binding brings the multiple items together as a whole and invites the shopper to rest their attention here. This binding is intertwined with the representational choices: The inclusion of multiple items which one might find in a lounge room and their placement as if in an actual loungeroom (cushions on the sofa, rather than on a shelf; framed photos on the coffee table). Together, then, the interactional and representational choices combine to create a sense that the installation is authentic and valid (Aiello and Dickinson, 2014; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). It may not be any individual’s actual installation, but the point is that it could be. The installations also have an important role to play in terms of bonding. While bonding is more usually achieved through explicit icons (flags, team colours), it can also be achieved through symbolic suggestive processes (Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 90). In this instance, and as noted earlier, the installation functions as a whole, and the shopper bonds with its essence or atmosphere. The installation is, thus, a bonding icon (Stenglin, 2009) with which the shopper identifies; the icon becoming ‘self perpetuating’, as shoppers ‘bond with something that is essentially an extension of themselves’ (Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 92).

180  Louise Ravelli Together, then, interactional resources have a fundamental role to play in the compelling story that is Pottery Barn’s retail success. The installations bind the shopper to that space, even if momentarily, and their nature enables them to function as a bonding icon, aligning the shopper with the store’s identity. 6.

Organisational meanings

The overall information values of the store are construed by a combination of the free-flowing navigation path through the store, framing of sections within the store, and salience within those sections. At the rank of the store, the shopper’s whole journey can be read as before/after (Ravelli, 2008); that is, if the shopper enters and moves through the store, there is the potential for a transformative experience; namely, arriving without the Pottery Barn lifestyle aesthetic and leaving with it (whether or not that includes an actual product purchase; cf. McMurtrie, 2011; Ravelli, 2000). Generally, however, information values are integrated (Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 107); that is, there is no overt polarisation (between ideal and real, for example; see Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). At the rank of sections, the installations take on salience (see further later), and this makes them the informational centre of the shopping experience, underscoring their value as symbolic suggestive processes. At the margins are the shoppers themselves, the shelving and products, and the service counters. That is, the store is not about the individual products, nor the sale of those products, nor even about the customer themselves (in contrast to a clothes boutique, for example, where mirrors can make the customer the focal point). It is about the lifestyle which Pottery Barn curates. However, part of this lifestyle is in fact about fusing the identity of the customer with that of the store, and if the installations function successfully as bonding icons—through the self-perpetuating symbolic suggestive process—then this helps explain some of the store’s undeniable success. The role of the shelving in dividing and separating the stores into different sections has already been noted, but it is important to add that while the shelves themselves provide an impermeable frame (Boeriis and Nørgaard, 2013), this impermeability is offset by permeable space around the shelves (via the open pathways and generous distances and sight lines between displays). Hence, the categorisation of sections is both strong (that is, distinct) and weak (that is, traversable), and this cross-classification is also reflected in the installations, which might focus on an area of a home (such as the loungeroom), but include, say, a desk accessory on the coffee table, which might otherwise be found in the office section of the store. The repetition of similar colours, textures, and materials across the store and the different installations contribute to the cohesion between different areas through visual rhyme (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021).

Curating a lifestyle experience 181 At the rank of the store, some installations have salience by virtue of being closest to the main entry. These are typically aligned frontally with the entrance, creating a strong sense of involvement in interactional terms.2 Other than this placement, however, no installation has greater salience than another. There is no special lighting, size of area allocated to the installation, or special features which make one area stand out above the others. (Shoppers’ attention might be directed to one more than another because of their own interests, but the store does not provide this direction.) Within the sections, however, the installation itself is salient over the sectional shelving and, therefore, over the individual products. This is because the shelves focus attention inwards into the space which they frame, making the installation the centre of that section in terms of information values (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). In addition to this salience, there is a contrast in product selection between the installation and the shelves; the former is multiple, the latter singular, and combined with the free-flowing navigation path through the store, the installations thereby create points of stasis during the shopper’s traversal of the store, ‘foreground(ing) significant points along the way’ (Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016: 108). 7. Discussion The use of artfully arranged tableaux, vignettes, and installations is hardly unique to Pottery Barn: It is a retail strategy used by many different stores, especially those selling homewares (Figure 8.2). Nor is the strategy restricted to the physical store itself: In addition to the tradition of printed catalogues and magazine layouts, social media is now used to show not just the displays themselves but also the process of arranging them (Figure 8.3). Why then focus on Pottery Barn? Store design is only one of their retail strategies, but—as acknowledged by their own executives and by industry commentators—it is recognised to be a key element of their success. Using Spatial Discourse Analysis, I have argued that resources across each of the metafunctions work together to create that elusive lifestyle element: An identity with which the shopper can align themselves and which may be materialized by purchasing a whole interior design service or just one lamp. Or perhaps even by walking out without making a purchase but taking inspiration to use at some point in the future. Representationally, it is a given with installations that the cross-classification of product categories enables multiple items to be grouped together rather than separating them into product types. Thus, consumption, and preferably consumption of multiple products, is foregrounded. Importantly, pleasure and comfort are also foregrounded, not just functionality. That is, a home is not a home unless it can be enjoyed, and it requires more than a bed, chair, and table. A home is also defined in terms of what

182  Louise Ravelli

Figure 8.2  (a) Suzie Anderson Home and (b) Highgate House on Instagram

is seen; that is, it is not about what’s inside the cupboards (in contrast to some other stores, which might emphasise organisation). Additionally, the arrangement itself evokes verisimilitude, and even though the installations suggest the potential for narrative processes, they function within the store as symbolic suggestive processes, conferring the shopper with the values that arise with and from such an installation. This also means that when at home, installations created by the customer are not about eating a meal or resting but about expressing that particular identity—about being a certain way and being seen to be that way. Interactionally, shoppers are invited, rather than compelled, to engage with the installations through a variety of features, including the degree of control afforded the shopper in their movement through the store,

Curating a lifestyle experience 183

Figure 8.3  Pottery Barn on Instagram: arranging a work-from-home space

184  Louise Ravelli minimised power to the store, and minimised social distance between the shopper and the goods. The gentle binding of the installations, through features such as soft rugs defining the space, enable the shopper’s attention to rest on the installations, and the symbolic suggestive processes mean that the installations function as bonding icons with which the shopper is both fused and affiliated. Thus, consumption of the identity offered by Pottery Barn is presented as a free choice for the customer, something taken up through their own volition and, hence, individual and individuated, even if multiple customers take home the same kinds of products. Organisationally, installations are made the salient focal points within the store, and multiple sections are both differentiated and connected by the navigational pathways, with unity ensured by the permeability of the framing and cohesiveness of design elements. Emphasis is, thereby, placed on these installations, indicating that this is what the customer needs to replicate, in whole or in part, by drawing from the wide range of resources that the store offers. The ideal Pottery Barn customer would be one who replicates the effect of the installations at home, with the effect spread throughout the home. Multiple resources from each of the metafunctions, thus, work together to contribute to the overall effect and success of these installations: They are the lynchpin of the store’s identity and the focal point for shoppers’ affiliation. The installations succeed in defining the lifestyle and aesthetic which Pottery Barn is selling. But what exactly is this? As van Leeuwen (2022: 20) argues, lifestyle identities are ‘semiotically expressed, through setting, appearance and manner’, and they ‘focus on leisure time activities and on consumption patterns. They seek to give meaning to our personal life and connect us with like-minded communities’. Clearly, the multiple products required for an aesthetically pleasing installation require and encourage actual consumption. This simultaneously indicates the purchasing power of the customer. Their economic capital is further indicated by the leisure time they have to both create and enjoy such installations in their own home. Yet more than that, installations are not just a mechanistic placement or grouping of items: It requires a certain stylistic or aesthetic skill, which Pottery Barn has professionalised through their large in-house design team (Tischler, 2003), controlling the seasonally told stories and the products which constitute these stories. In turn, the customer requires their own skills to retell this story at home, so much so that there are articles on the ‘ABCs of arranging vignettes’ (Dunn, 2019), not to mention social media influencers who demonstrate their personal skills in this regard for others to follow. The true skill for the customer is not just selecting which lamp to buy but knowing how to place it at home along with other items and so to tell their own story. Putting an installation together—getting their home to look like

Curating a lifestyle experience 185 Pottery Barn—is, thus, also a way of controlling the narrative of one’s life. The customer is in charge and knows how to position themselves among competing and ever-increasing choices (new Scandinavian, mid-century modern, funky retro, cool classic). And through their own skills, they also know how to demonstrate this narrative, to display it. Pottery Barn claims to ‘passionately infuse quality and comfort into everything we create’ and ‘into every room of the house’ (Pottery Barn Australia) and, ipso facto, so should the customer. A home that is messy, stylistically undefined, or just functional indicates a lack of time, money, or consideration to the narrative of one’s life. In this way, it is narrative—story in the very general sense of an overarching discourse—that enables an individual to position themselves within the huge diversity and potential chaos of options that are now available to consumers. Even though Pottery Barn customers are purchasing from the same range of products, they are in control of, and telling, their own stories. Notes 1 These are just some examples of how specific metafunctions are instantiated through material resources. See Ravelli and McMurtrie (2016) for a more detailed description. 2 Though, as McMurtrie notes (2013: 111), frontal angles can be alienating for some users.

References Aiello, G. and Dickinson, G. 2014, ‘Beyond authenticity: A visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores’, Visual Communication, vol 13, no. 3, pp. 303–321. Boeriis, M. and Holsanova, J. 2012, ‘Tracking visual segmentation: Connecting semiotic and cognitive perspectives’, Visual Communication, vol 11, no. 3, pp. 259–281. Boeriis, M., and Nørgaard, N. 2013, ‘Architectural discourse: The material realization of framing and discourse in a university building’, RASK, vol 38, pp. 71–100. Duff, M. 2006, ‘Pottery Barn rolls out bed and bath concept’, Retailing Today, vol 45, no. 22, p. 6. Dunn, J. 2019, ‘Decorating 101: The ABCs of arranging vignettes’, Houzz, Accessed 1 July 2022, ;. Eby, K. 2017, ‘The essential guide to retail store layouts that shape the customer experience’, Smartsheet, Accessed 1 July  2022, . Genovese, D. 2020, ‘Who founded Pottery Barn?’ Business Leaders, Accessed 1 July 2022, . Halliday, M.A.K. 1978, Language as Social Semiotic, Edward Arnold, London.

186  Louise Ravelli Halliday, M.A.K. 1994, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Arnold, London. Hardwick, J. 2015, ‘Lifestyle centers: Reinvented communities or dressed-up shopping malls?’, The Conversation, March 3. Accessed 1 July 2022, . Home Stratosphere 2018, Accessed 1 July, 2022, . Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 2001, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Arnold, London. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 2021, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 3rd Edition, Routledge, London. Lippert, L. 2010, ‘ “How do you think we get to Pottery Barn?” Mainstream Gay Drama, homonormativity, and the culture of neoliberalism’, South Atlantic Review, vol 75, no. 3, pp. 41–59. Marks, J. 2022, ‘HomeGoods, Pottery Barn lead in gobbling up market share’, HFN, GREENSBORO, Accessed 1 July, 2022, . McMurtrie, R. 2011, ‘The meaning of [exiting]: Towards a grammaticalization of architecture’, Text & Talk, vol 31, no. 6, pp. 706–731. McMurtrie, R. 2013, Spatiogrammatics: A social semiotic perspective on moving bodies transforming the meaning potential of space, PhD Thesis, School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Pottery Barn Australia. 2022, Accessed 1 July, 2022, Ravelli, L. 2000, ‘Beyond shopping: Constructing the Sydney Olympics in threedimensional text’, Text, vol 20, no. 4, pp. 489–515. Ravelli, L. 2008, ‘Analysing space: Adapting and extending multi-modal frameworks’, in L. Unsworth (ed), Multimodal Semiotics—Functional Analysis in Contexts of Education, Continuum, London, pp. 17–33. Ravelli, L. 2022, ‘Ode to a lost icon, David Jones’, Discourse & Communication, vol 16, no. 2, pp. 269–282. Ravelli, L. and McMurtrie, R. 2016, Multimodality in the Built Environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis, Routledge, London. Sloan, C. 1997, ‘Pottery barn raises up home’, Home Textiles Today Minneapolis, vol 19, no. 7, pp. 8–22. Stenglin, M. 2004, Packaging curiosities: Towards a grammar of three-dimensional space, PhD Thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Sydney. Stenglin, M. 2009, ‘Space odyssey: A guided tour through the semiosis of threedimensional space’, Visual Communication, vol 8, no.1, pp. 35–64. Tischler, L. 2003, ‘How Pottery Barn wins with style’, Fast Company, vol 71, n.p. van Leeuwen, T. 2022, Multimodality and Identity, Routledge, London.

9 Going shopping A social semiotic study of resources for walking offline and online Søren Vigild Poulsen

1. Introduction Literature in website design and information architecture regularly compares websites to buildings (see, e.g., Lynch and Horton, 2016; Rosenfeld and Morville, 2015). This chapter seeks to elaborate this analogy by exploring how the essential functions of walking in physical buildings, of moving from place to place as part of getting things done, translate into online movements. The motivation for this study is both empirical and theoretical. The empirical interest came from my involvement in the RESEMINA project, which explored what happens when social practices are transformed digitally, using the transformation of shopping in stores to online shopping as a case study. In making videos of shoppers going about their business, the team that I was part of soon observed that walking constitutes an essential part of shopping in stores, which made us wonder what happens when the same work is done in shopping online. The motivation is also theoretical. As mentioned in this book’s introduction, studies in the RESEMINA project employed both multimodal social semiotics (MSS) and multimodal ethnomethodological conversation analysis (MEMCA). While MEMCA research has paid considerable attention to walking, both as a common practice and in relation to shopping specifically, walking has less often been studied in MSS. Thus, inspired by MEMCA studies of walking, I want to use a MSS framework to systematically map ways that store shoppers walk and investigate how they are transformed when shoppers go online. The guiding research question, therefore, is as follows: To what extent and how is walking reconfigured when people shop online? Defining walking as the footwork that people do when they perform social practices, I  will begin by mapping ways of walking in physical space, such as pace and duration, which can express “who we are, what we are doing, how we want others to relate to us” (van Leeuwen, 2005: 4),

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-9

188  Søren Vigild Poulsen realizing functional aspects of shopping, such as strolling when inspecting goods and undergoing step-by-step progress when advancing in a queue but also through walking styles, expressing styles of shopping, and coordinating how couples or groups walk together. Evidently, moving one’s feet is done in combination with body posture and head and arm movements as well as in interaction with the designed environment which will allow some types of walks, while limiting others. However, in this study, I concentrate on how people move their feet. Next, I ask how these ways of walking may be represented and enacted online. I  define ‘online walking’ as using the cursor to scroll, click, and navigate (Poulsen, 2022a, 2022b) in order to move between virtual spaces and interact with and manipulate web page elements. On this basis, I attempt to identify different types of online walking and how they relate to the different actions that constitute shopping; for example, (online) window shopping/browsing, inquiring about a product, and buying a product. The concept of online walking incorporates, but is not limited to, hypertextuality (Aarseth, 1997), hypermodality (Djonov, 2007; Lemke, 2002), and interactivity (Adami, 2015). To study walking on websites, this chapter revisits the concepts of resemiotization (Iedema, 2001, 2003) and recontextualization (Bernstein, 1981, 1986; van Leeuwen, 2005) which have been developed in multimodal social semiotics. This will allow me to describe how walking is constructed semiotically on websites—how it functions and how it is used in search strategies (Boeriis, 2021), in orienting oneself as being virtually present, in navigating and finding one’s way online, and in conducting one’s business. To illustrate and elaborate on these theoretical points, I will use data examples from a comparative study of in-store and web shopping in an electronics store. 2.

Literature review

In MSS, the semiotics of walking is relatively under-researched. A search for ‘walking’ in the three main journals (Visual Communication, Social Semiotics, and Multimodal Communication) that publish many multimodal semiotic studies shows that walking tends to be a secondary subject and only described in relation to other analytical objects. For instance, in Adami’s (2018) study on the experience of sign design in marketplaces, in Fuller’s (2002) research of wayfinding at airports, in the exploration of Merlino et al. (2022) of the experience of sound and noise in a city setting by people with psychosis, and in Knowles’s (2017) study of spaces where plutocratic live, walking (and walking bodies) is an integrated part of the locomotive experience of wealthy neighbourhoods, but it is not made into an object of study itself.

Going shopping 189 Social semiotic studies of architecture (O’Toole, 2004; Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016) have shown that walking is embedded in using spatial resources. McMurtrie’s (2017) innovative study of movement in buildings demonstrates how the way people orient themselves and navigate as they walk around in museums and public buildings is based on resources for the movement that are instantiated in the buildings’ design. In this study, too, I will seek to explore how people use walking as a way to engage with the designed environment of stores and in relation to the people and objects in these commercial spaces, and how, in doing so, they rely on the specific, embodied resources for walking that enable actions of movement to take place in these spaces. As mentioned in the introduction, this present study is directly inspired by van Leeuwen’s (2005) reflection on walking as a semiotic phenomenon as well as his study of movement in artefacts (van Leeuwen, 2021) that draw on Han’s (2021) studies of movement as style. Also, I draw on Andersen and van Leeuwen’s (2017, 2018) research on genres and registers on the clothes company Zalando’s website which mapped the possible online walking paths of that site. Looking beyond social semiotics, this study found inspiration in literature, art, and historical studies. For instance, walking plays a significant role in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985–1987). In the first of the three books of this trilogy (City of Glass), the storyteller (Quinn) walks the streets of New York and, afterwards, maps the route to discover that the walking path forms a word (a name) that plays a significant part in the plot. Fiction writers, artists, and philosophers have for centuries reflected on walking and its effect on cognitive and emotional states of mind. Sociologists and historians, too, have also studied the activities of walking for a long time (e.g., Lefebvre, 2004; Solnit, 2010). MEMCA studies of walking in public spaces have provided a more detailed insight into ways of walking (e.g., Due, 2022; Edensor, 2010; Ingold, 2004; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Lee and Ingold, 2020; Ryave and Schenkein, 1974), often in relation to shopping, where they showed how walking is used as a resource for different phases and aspects of the practice of shopping: the initial phase of becoming a customer (Mondada, this volume); the phase of creating a shopping route using artefacts, such as grocery lists (Cochoy, 2008); the management of one’s behaviour and movements in relationship to other customers and staff (De Stefani, 2013; Hausendorf and Mondada, 2017) (e.g., forming a queue (Kärrholm, 2009)); the phase of initiating an inquiry or order (De Stefani, 2019); and interactions with personnel at a counter (Harjunpää, Mondada and Svinhufvud, 2018) or checkout (Clark and Pinch, 2010); as well as the action of leaving the store (Kristiansen and Rasmussen, in press). Walking has also been studied from the perspective of the staff; for instance, by investigating how passers-by

190  Søren Vigild Poulsen become customers (Hochuli, 2019) or how staff determine when to approach a customer (Svinhufvud, 2018). Where such studies explore how resources are used in situ, for different specific purposes and in relation to different specific interactions, MSS, with its systemic-functional approach, explores the resources of walking, the qualities and aspects of walking that allow customers to fulfil these purposes and enact these interactions. In other words, where MEMCA is concerned with social actions (cf. Due et al., 2019), MSS takes an interest in semiotic means and how these are used to make meaning in social settings (van Leeuwen, 2005). In this, the two approaches complement each other, as resources are needed to realize the act of walking and observations of the act of walking are needed to identify the resources that allow them. In addition, this study is informed by theatrical studies of how actors express emotions and character. Ever since Stanislavsky (2020 [1950]: 264 ff), a principal method to get in character for an actor has been to figure out how they walk. More specifically, the description of resources for walking takes inspiration from Laban Movement Analysis (e.g., Bartenieff, 1980; Laban, 1980 [1950]). Dividing movement into four categories (body, effect, shape, and space), Laban’s framework is useful for describing what the body is doing to produce different efforts or qualities (e.g., floating, pressing, and gliding) of movement, how it may change shape, and how it relates to space. 3. Methodology In this section, I present the methods for data collection and analysis as well as the theoretical framework that informs the analyses. 3.1.  Data collection

The analysis of ways of walking is based on data collected in a subproject on offline and online shopping for electronics that was part of the RESEMINA project. Purchasing electronics is an ordinary activity that most people are familiar with. Thus, this context provided an opportunity to study the object of study. I was part of a team of three researchers that conducted a one-day field study in an electronics store. We observed six cases of customers’ shopping activities. In four instances, customers bought one or more electronic products. Data on online shopping was produced over a 20-day period where 25 web users were instructed to use electronics webshops. Ten online users would pay for or order products. In four examples, there are data on online and offline shopping in the same electronics company. The data material consisted of photos, videos, and eye-tracking recordings of offline and online trading practices.

Going shopping 191 3.2.  Analyzing resources for walking in a store

Following van Leeuwen (2005), social semiotics can be defined in terms of three activities: documenting and mapping semiotic resources, studying their use in specific social contexts, and contributing to discovering new resources. Semiotic resources can be defined as (embodied and distributed) materials that have a meaning potential and that are used to communicate and interact in the context of social practices with their own norms and customs for doing so. I, therefore, begin by mapping the resources of walking, based on video recordings from a physical electronics store, to then reflect on what happens to walking as an essential part of shopping practices when people shop online. In mapping walking resources, I will use a systemic approach (van Leeuwen, 1999, 2005), documenting the observable visual features of people walking in the electronics store and describing these analytically as resources within a multimodal social semiotic framework. To constitute shopping actions, each walking resource is typically used in combination with other walking resources and, indeed, with other embodied resources, such as gaze, head position, gesture, and speech—most studies of walking include some of these other features in their description of different walks. However, here, I  will isolate what people can do with their steps, describing what meanings the distinct features of walking contribute to the overall walking action. For instance, walking slowly or fast not only is a property of locomotion but also signifies that one is strolling or in a hurry. Walking resources will be described paradigmatically, as a set of possible choices, organized not as structural oppositions but as a scale of values that afford different meaning potentials. This approach is inspired by Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2002) description of a colour grammar, which, in turn, was inspired by Jakobson and Halle’s (1956) distinctive feature theory of phonology. 3.3.  Analysis of resources for walking or movement in a webshop

After mapping the resources for walking in a store, I will turn to studying the use of the resources in context by reflecting on what happens to walking when people shop online. To advance the analysis, I will first consider the analogy between walking/movement in a physical and virtual space that builds on the analogy between buildings and websites. Second, to unfold this perspective, I  will draw on the concept of recontextualization; that is, the representation of one social practice in another social practice (Bernstein, 1981, 1986; van Leeuwen, 2005, 2008). With this perspective, I discuss to what extent resources for walking can be applied to the movement in the virtual space of the electronics webshop. This discussion

192  Søren Vigild Poulsen foregrounds a reflection on shopping as practice and on the resources needed for doing shopping (including walking) that I will consider as the fourth and final part. To do so, I employ the concept of resemiotization (Iedema, 2001, 2003); that is, “how meaning making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of a practice to the next” (Iedema, 2003: 41). 4. Analysis 4.1.  Resource for walking in a store

The following section presents a tentative description of the semiotic resources of walking employed as part of shopping in an electronics store. The described resources may be transferable to other contexts and practices, but I will concentrate on resources found in the shopping context. This section seeks to contribute with a framework for a distinctive feature analysis of walking. The list is not intended to be exhaustive but intended as a first attempt for mapping resources systemically, and it invites discussion and critique of the presented features. 4.1.1. Pace

The first distinctive feature of walking concerns the speed of walking (i.e., how quickly one takes steps), and it can be described as a scale from fast to slow (and thus, ultimately stopping). At this end of the scale, I would also include standing and turning; that is, standing still on the spot or walking around the same area while one is waiting for something (e.g., to talk to sales personnel). This feature is similar to Laban’s (1980) so-called ‘time’ effort, where he distinguishes between slow or fast movements. It is also similar to ‘velocity’ in van Leeuwen’s (2021) framework of resources for movement. The walking pace is highly coordinated with different phases of a walk and different speeds, and it depends on various purposes. To take an example, at the beginning of a shopping walk, people move more slowly, whereas they pick up speed when they have found the goods that they were looking for or when they have conducted their business and are heading for the checkout. The speed of walking also depends on how familiar people are with the store. Pace may also refer to the length of the steps taken when walking. On a secondary scale, the length of pace goes from a short step to a long step. Combining speed and length of steps, the pace can be used for different walks in a store. In the data, there are examples of customers picking up an item and then needing to go to the other end of the store, taking longer and

Going shopping 193 quicker steps (or in the extreme case, run, as when items are on a special sale; e.g., on Black Friday). Strolling involves taking longer steps but going at a slower tempo in order to wander around the store. Inspecting an item is also done slowly and with small steps, sometimes stopping to explore. This contrasts with standing and waiting in a line, where one moves by taking one single step at a time in order to advance in the queue. 4.1.2. Duration

A walk may be either brief or long. A short walk typically happens when people walk into the store, steering directly towards a product, or when they conduct a simple task, leaving the store quickly upon completion A  longer walk may be enacted in two ways: either by walking (slowly) around the shop, covering the entire area and, thus, spending a long time strolling; or by focusing on a specific space in the store, eventually passing the same locations several times to get a second look at products on display. In both cases, it takes time to complete the walk. Evidently, the duration of a walk also depends on the size of the store and the area for walking that the interior design allows for. The duration of walking in a store is related to different socially constructed walking practices. For instance, strolling suggests that the walk takes some time. When one enters a store expecting that one can walk around the store for some time and see all it has to offer, only to find that there is not much to see or that the walk is over all too soon, one is often disappointed as a result. Furthermore, this feature can be used for evaluating the walk. The perception or expectation of how long a walk is or seems to be can limit one’s interest in doing the walk. If a person enters the store, stops, and considers that they have to go through the whole store to get to the point where they need to go, they may decide to leave the store. 4.1.3. Consistency

This aspect has to do with how a walk is done. On one end of the scale, one is moving the same way during the whole walk; on the other end of the scale, one would shift between different ways of moving during the walk. In the first case, the walk could be termed ‘stable’; in the latter, walking is unstable or disruptive. Consistency is often coordinated with the speed of moving, so the same kind of walk is done at the same pace throughout the whole tour in the store; whereas different phases of walk are typically performed in different tempos. This feature is inspired by Laban’s (1980) so-called flow effect that describes differences between doing never-ending movements and flicking between different movements.

194  Søren Vigild Poulsen 4.1.4. Directedness

Adopted from van Leeuwen (2021) and Han (2021), the feature concerns taking the shortest route towards an intended goal versus deviating from the route one way or another. In the first case, one goes straight to one’s destination, with no or few stops on the way; for example, when one quickly enters the store, does one’s business, and then exits the store. In the second case, a walk consists of multiple small movements with many stops and deviations from the intended route during the walk. 4.1.5. Activity

This feature relates to the complexity of actions involved in a walk. It may be analyzed as a scale that goes from doing one simple action, just walking, to doing other things beyond locomotion while moving; for example, talking, humming, and looking at a shopping list or mobile phone. In addition, these other things may rapidly but unproblematically shift during the walk (cf Hausendorf and Mondada, 2017). 4.1.6. Sociality

Walking can be done alone or with others, and so, walking can be used as a way to regulate how people engage with each other. Walking alone is very different from walking alongside somebody (or in a group). So the sociality of a walk can be described as a scale going from walking by oneself to walking alongside or towards others. In social walking, people synchronize their way of walking with each other. In the data, there are multiple examples of people walking together with others; their walk may be side by side or in line/behind each other. This also depends on how much room for social walking the store allows. How social one can be while walking with others also changes in relation to speed. Typically, walking is slower when people move side by side and quicker when they walk in line. Sideby-side walking allows for more talk. Social walking could also involve going alone to a particular spot in the store to have an interaction; for example, asking a salesperson a question or inquiring about a product. In the data from the electronics store, I found that walking to different areas during a sales interaction is an essential part of the activity. In one case (see Figure 9.1), two customers want to buy a Mac computer. They first walk to the sales desk to ask a question about the computer. Then a member of the sales staff suggests walking together to the displayed computer, saying, “Should we go and have a look?”, while pointing to the area in the store where computers are displayed. After talking about computers in the computer section, they go to another sales desk

Going shopping 195

Figure 9.1 Walking to different areas of the store is a prerequisite for enacting a sales interaction

to talk about prices. This suggests that walking is incorporated into the different phases of a sales interaction; that is, different stages of a ‘genre’ if the term is functionally defined as “staged, goal-oriented social processes” (Martin, 1992). In sum, the combined use of the previously listed resources for walking1 enables people to do different types of walking, like strolling and queuing (including turning on the same spot or walking back and forth in the same area, usually while waiting for one’s turn). Resources for walking can be used to enact practices like shopping (initiate a shopping tour or signalling to sales personnel that one would like assistance or engage in an interaction). The opposite—that is, avoiding interaction (Rasmussen and Kristiansen, 2022)—could be signposted by not slowing down or altering one’s route in the store to avoid encountering other people. I also found examples of this in the dataset. In the electronics store, the interior design invites visitors to go through the whole shop to get to the checkout, but a shortcut near the entrance offers a direct path to the checkout that lets customers avoid possible encounters with sales personnel. Furthermore, it seems that the listed resources serve different purposes. Some resources are purely functional, whereas others seem to be used to express style or different concepts of walking (cf. van Leeuwen, 2005, 2021). I will return to this perspective in the final section of this chapter.

196  Søren Vigild Poulsen 4.2.  Reflections on resources for walking in webshops

In this second part of the chapter, I  will reflect on what happens to the role of walking as an essential part of store shopping when people shop online. This raises questions like the following: Does walking simply become irrelevant when online shoppers do not have to go to physical stores, supermarkets, or other spaces of commerce? And if not, if walking remains an indispensable part of shopping, how are the functions of walking differently realized online? 4.2.1. On the analogy between the architectural design of a store and webshop design

In the introduction, I  touched upon the analogy between buildings and websites used in web design and information studies. Applying this analogy to the present study, an argument can be made that a webshop is an analogue of the brick-and-mortar shop and that, consequently, there must also be analogues between the activities that take place in these settings, including walking. In this perspective, one would, for instance, compare a webshop to a physical store and compare switching between two or more browser windows with physically going to different stores. It follows that the time spent walking from store to store is eliminated by not being constrained by one’s embodied presence in a physical space. If one aligns a building with a webshop, one finds more similarities in how buildings and webshops are designed for shoppers/users to move around in these spaces. Here, I draw on the significant work on spatial semiotics (e.g., McMurtrie, 2017; Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016). If one talks about buildings from a social semiotic framework, the design of a building can be described metafunctionally, so spatial resources that inform walking and movement may be mapped in terms of nodes and vectors, spaces and transitions, actions and connections. This applies equally to websites. In the work of Lemke (2002), Djonov (2007), and Andersen and van Leeuwen (2018), one can find descriptions of the resources for the navigation of websites and the ways these either allow or constrain online movement. With this approach, one can do a comparative analysis of the paths of customers walking in the brick-and-mortar store and the path they use to navigate in a webshop. Figure 9.2 shows the mapped routes of two informants from the dataset. First of all, Figure  9.2 documents the actual movements of the shoppers. This is interesting in relation to the intended routes laid out; that is, the structural organization of the settings for walking and navigating in the interior design and web design, respectively. It shows how shoppers actualize (some of) the meaning potential of the spatial design. Second,

Going shopping 197

Figure 9.2 Map of the paths people take in the electronics store compared to the webshop

198  Søren Vigild Poulsen Webshop homepage

Kitchen

House

Wellness

Foto

Kitchen machines

Tv

Tv screens

Kitchen products

Sound

Computer

Ear phones Air pods

Other websites Figure 9.2 (Continued)

in continuation of the first point, it shows that online shoppers navigate much more freely and anarchically in the webshop. Their movements are much more complex. They find their way to online products in many different ways compared to the physical store where there is a limited number of ways they can get to an item due to physical constraints. Shoppers can find their way to products (product web pages) via Google or other search engines, by affiliated links from other sites, and by following the global navigation of the webshop. Furthermore, in the virtual space of the webshop, there is always the option to click on another web page. Third, Figure 9.2 can be used to identify more specific similarities and differences between shopping offline and online at the same company. One could do a detailed comparative analysis of the interior design of the store and the website page design to explore how the two spaces are designed for the customers/users to engage with while they move through the store and webshop. This would involve asking questions like the following: What products are presented in a store versus in the webshop? In what order do details about items appear when walking/navigating the electronics shop? How do these settings organize and distribute resources as “sites of engagement” (Scollon, 2001)? Answers to these questions inform us about how merchandise is differently displayed and ordered on the two sites. However, the analogy between buildings and websites remains focused on the designed environments and the semiotic resources instantiated in these, so the comparison has only limited explanatory power in regard to the digital reconfiguration of embodied resources for walking. For this

Going shopping 199 reason, a different approach to the question of walking online is taken by discussing online movement as a digital recontextualization of walking offline. 4.2.2.  Online movement as a recontextualization of offline walking

In addition to exploring an analogy between stores and webshops, and looking for signs of walking in the webshop (the webshop user is not walking but sitting in front of a screen), one could also draw on social semiotic discourse analysis (van Leeuwen, 2005, 2008) to argue that walking as a part of store shopping is recontextualized when it is represented on a webshop. Discourse is defined as socially constructed knowledge about how people think, communicate, and act in social practices. In Poulsen (2022a, 2022b), I  argued that shopping actions (e.g., inspecting an item) are recontextualized (and transformed) in the webshop’s interaction design (in addition to images and texts that also represent elements of shopping as a practice). If one applies this perspective to store walking, it becomes interesting to ask how the experience of a store (and moving through this space) is represented online—what is represented, how it is represented, and in what order the store is presented to users when they click and scroll through the webshop. This argument would align with the analogy between buildings and websites presented in the previous section. Also, what becomes interesting about this recontextualization perspective in terms of walking is how discourse transforms the represented (store) shopping practice. So the question is what resources of walking are transformed online and how. van Leeuwen (2008) lists multiple ways that discourse can transform represented practices. Of these, deletion and substitution are particularly interesting in this context. The argument would be that resources for walking are transformed into resources for navigating and pathfinding, and thus, walking is substituted by actions of interacting with the website design. So in the context of a webshop, physical in-store navigation and pathfinding are replaced with hypertext elements that, on an input-output basis, project a response to users’ mediated actions. More specifically, the experience of shopping as an embodied constrained activity is removed and replaced by (and reduced to) digitally mediated interactions with computer hardware and software. This way, online walking turns into operating a cursor that produces and represents movement on the screen that represents a store. This is not a simple shift but a total discursive transformation and a completely different semiotic modus operandi. With this perspective, I  will return to the list of resources for in-store walking, using the description of resources for walking in a store to reflect on practices of the online shopping movement and the means it

200  Søren Vigild Poulsen incorporates. The following discussion is based on data from online shopping recordings and the analysis of the electronics webshop’s interface design. 4.2.2.1. PACE

This aspect refers to how fast or slow users scroll web pages as well as how they interact with web pages. In the data, there are examples of users scrolling the home page quickly, whereas they scroll product pages more slowly. Also, there are data on how users dwell on some parts of the web design, while they rapidly engage with other parts of the design. Evidently, the pace of interaction depends on the content and the complexity of the website. On product pages, users usually dwell on specific sections and elements of the web pages; for example, reading the product details or viewing images of products. Furthermore, the speed of interacting with the web design can influence how users perceive the web design as good or bad with regard to the task they want to perform, and thus, pace becomes an important dimension when evaluating the overall web design. 4.2.2.2. DISTANCE

This aspect concerns both scrolling and the number of interactions that are necessary to do a task, like placing an order. So it concerns the time it takes a user to scroll between the top and the bottom of a web page as well as the distance the cursor must travel in an interaction; for example, from the home page to the Checkout page. This can vary between one click and many clicks. Again, it depends on the type of task, but in most cases, the user has to click a number of times to complete a task. 4.2.2.3. DIRECTNESS

Directness concerns how users interact with the webshop. They may interact as straightforwardly as possible to complete a task or take their time to explore numerous items in the webshop (in principle, an infinite number of goods). If the user is familiar with the webshop and has the page or even a product as a favourite in the browser, they can click directly through the needed web pages to buy the item. But they might also prolong the online shopping experience. As long as the browser window is open, the user does not need to leave the webshop. That being said, some webshops delete items added to the shopping basket if a purchase is not completed within a certain timeframe. Also, directness may be complicated by the fact there is often more than one way to reach the same page; for example, via the navigation menu’s

Going shopping 201 hierarchical path or via a direct link. Furthermore, directness also depends on how easy it is to interact with the website, a factor that is similar to the distinction between effective and efficient web design in usability testing (Nielsen, 1993). 4.2.2.4. ACTIVITY

Activity concerns different kinds of walking in a store (e.g., transitioning, surveying, walking for its own sake); translated to an online setting, it has to do with different types of cursor movement—the first two exist on shopping sites, but the latter is less relevant for webshops. 4.2.2.5. CONSISTENCY

Closely related to activity, consistency has to do with the type(s) of cursor actions required for an interaction. A given interaction can involve the same or different types of cursor activities. It may, for example, be a matter of simply clicking or involve shifting between clicking, scrolling, dragging, or texting, with each having different meaning potentials (Poulsen, 2022a). The focus is not on the particular cursor action but on the processes that moving through web pages and links involves. 4.2.2.6. SOCIABILITY

Online shoppers are alone in the webshop, and so there can be no synchronizing of one’s actions with other people. In other words, each shopper moves around the webshop in solitude. The only example of social online movement I  could find in the data is the automated responses from the webshop system; for example, a chatbot that pops up and asks if shoppers need help when they have scrolled halfway down a product page. This is similar to customers walking slowly around the same area in a store, which sales personnel might see as an invitation to engage with the customer and ask if they can be of assistance. 4.2.3.  Online resemiotization of going shopping

While the use of recontextualization may enrich the description of the study, one must also ask if it is the most precise concept to apply. Using recontextualization implies that the semiotic means may be the same (e.g., written language) but the contexts different; that is, one social practice is represented in another practice (e.g., the representation of an interview in a newspaper article) (cf. van Leeuwen, 2008). But the question is whether offline and online shopping are considered to be different practices or if they are essentially one and the same practice.

202  Søren Vigild Poulsen A second issue with the recontextualization perspective is that it becomes difficult to map how resources for walking in an offline setting are represented and distributed in an online setting; that is, how one differentiates resources for online walking from resources for other types of interactions with the website. For instance, clicking through a series of web pages may be understood as a representation of walking in a brickand-mortar shop, but it may also be described as an action of inspecting or checking out. So the question is, what delineates moving the cursor as online walking from its use for other actions? This remains an analytical challenge. Given these issues, it is perhaps more accurate to frame the relationship between store shopping and web shopping as resemiotization (Iedema, 2001, 2003). If so, practices of shopping offline and online may functionally be the same but differently realized, as different semiotic resources are available and relevant to shoppers at the various stages of the activity. However, as for walking as part of a shopping practice, customers still have to move to inspect or obtain items on sale, regardless if it is an offline or an online environment. A study of online resemiotization of offline shopping (with special emphasis on resources for walking) brings attention to i) the practice of shopping (what constitutes and delineates this practice) and ii) semiotic means needed for this practice in-store versus on a webshop. If a practice is transformed by eliminating walking, this raises the question of what parts and activities of a shopping practice are indispensable. In a store, walking is indeed indispensable. This is not the case online, yet other actions for movement are. In other words, what are the essential parts of shopping? To answer this question, we can look at functions in a shopping practice. van Leeuwen et al. (2022) suggest five functional steps in online shopping: (1) Orientation (an overview of what the site offers and what sections it consists of) (2) Search (selecting an item or kind of item of interest) (3) Inspection (investigating the item(s) of interest) (4) Selection (choosing one or more items) (5) Checkout (purchasing the item or items). p. 7 In connection to online movement, we explored online movement in relation to each of these functions. Figure  9.3 shows a mapping of an informant’s online moves (scrolling and clicking forwards and backwards between product web pages), as he is inspecting an electronic bicycle. If we turn to the offline and online semiotic means that are used in a shopping practice, it, firstly, becomes relevant to consider that while shopping online and offline is basically the same practice, they are semiotized

Going shopping 203

Figure 9.3 Map of online movements made while inspecting an electronic bicycle in the webshop

differently—and this difference is significant. One important difference is that in a store, customers can interact physically with items, whereas the qualities of items are only represented online. A tactile quality, like texture, as Djonov and van Leeuwen (2011) have shown in their study of the PowerPoint software, cannot be sensed online, so it must be replaced with other means (e.g., visual features). But the resemiotization of going shopping is not only a question of engaging with different materialities. It is two different semiotically constructed realities because different semiotic resources create different meanings and, thus, experiences (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). Secondly, in the store, one has to move to the area where products are displayed. In a webshop, users do not have to move physically to get to the products, but they do move between web pages to interact with elements of the web design. To do so, users have to move the cursor around the web page, and different action potentials become available depending on what web element the cursor hovers over (e.g., navigation, images, and text). 5. Conclusion Walking is a vital part of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. One walks to the store, walks into the store, and walks around in the store. One can walk just for looking or follow a particular route to get to certain items.

204  Søren Vigild Poulsen But one can even get lost, if the store is designed badly, and one loses one’s sense of direction. Shopping online transforms this part of a practice. In this chapter, I have presented reflections on how resources for walking are reconfigured online. First, I have elaborated on walking in relation to the analogy between buildings and websites (and the activities that take place on these sites). Second, I  have employed the concept of recontextualization and resemiotization to develop a perspective on resources for walking in an online setting. In Poulsen (2022b), I used these two concepts to propose that interactive webshop design is a material discourse that recontextualizes (and transforms) the actions of store shopping. The present study elaborates on this approach in relation to walking when shopping offline and online. If websites may be conceptualized as buildings, and if one stretches the analogy to include the activities done in buildings, it would be possible to talk about walking around the virtual building of webshops. In other words, following the analogy between stores (and their interior design) and webshops (with their interaction designs), walking in a store would be an activity that may be recontextualized on the webshop. However, I have argued that walking as an essential aspect of store shopping is not only recontextualized but also fundamentally resemiotiziated in webshops so that walking as an embodied activity is replaced with and reconfigured into other digitally mediated actions and resources for people to perform mundane practices of online shopping. Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Julia Rytter Dakwar, Morten Boeriis, and Theo van Leeuwen for helpful feedback and input during the writing of this chapter. Note 1 ‘Weight’ is feature singled out in Laban’s terminology. Described on a scale, this aspect of walking goes from stepping lightly (e.g., tiptoeing) to stepping hard (e.g., stomping). In the dataset, I was not able to find any significant differences in the ways people walk around the store, but I recognize that this feature is vital in theatre and dance.

References Aarseth, E. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Adami, E. (2015) ‘What’s in a click? A social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity’, Visual Communication, 14 (2), pp. 133–153.

Going shopping 205 Adami, E. (2018) ‘Shaping the social through the aesthetics of public places: The renovation of Leeds Kirkgate Market’,  in  Tønnessen, E. S. and Forsgren, F. (eds.) Multimodality and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, pp. 97–120. Adami, E. (2020) ‘Shaping public spaces from below: The vernacular semiotics of Leeds Kirkgate Market’, Social Semiotics, 30 (1), pp. 89–113. Andersen, T. H. and van Leeuwen, T. (2017) ‘Genre crash: The case of online shopping’, Context and Text, 20, pp. 191–203. Andersen, T. H. and van Leeuwen, T. (2018) ‘Hvorfor og hvordan ‘betyder’ nethandel? Om blandingen af teksttyper i Zalandos netbutik’, MedieKultur, 34 (64), pp. 138–164. Auster, P. (1990) The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin. Bartenieff, I. (1980) Body Movement. New York: Gordon & Breach. Bernstein, B. (1981) ‘Codes, modalities, and the process of cultural reproduction: A model’, Language and Society, 19 (3), pp. 327–363. Bernstein, B. (1986) ‘On pedagogic discourse’, in Richardson, J. (ed.) Handbook for Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education. Westport: Greenwood, pp. 205–290. Boeriis, M. (2021)  ‘Structural meaning in shopping environments: A  social semiotic approach to analysing multimodal structure in designed on- and offline environments’, in Ravelli, L., van Leeuwen, T. and Hoellerer, M. (eds.) Organizational Semiotics: Multimodal Perspectives on Organization Studies. London: Routledge. Clark, C. and Pinch, T. (2010) ‘Some major organisational consequences of some ‘minor’ organised conduct: Evidence from a video analysis of pre-verbal service encounters in a showroom retail store, in Llewellyn, N. and Hindmarsh, J. (eds.) Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140–171. Cochoy, F. (2008) ‘Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: Shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer’, Marketing Theory, 8 (1), pp. 15–44. De Stefani, E. (2013) ‘The collaborative organisation of next actions in a semiotically rich environment: Shopping as a couple’, in Haddington, P., Mondada, L. and Nevile, M. (eds.) Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 123–151. De Stefani, E. (2019) ‘Ordering and serving coffee in an Italian Café: How customers obtain ‘their’ coffee’, in Day, D. and Wagner, J. (eds.) Objects, Bodies and Work Practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 113–139. Djonov, E. (2007) ‘Website hierarchy and the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design: A systemic functional hypermedia discourse analysis perspective’, Information Design Journal, 15 (2), pp. 144–162. Djonov, E. and van Leeuwen, T. (2011) ‘The semiotics of texture: From tactile to visual’, Visual Communication, 10 (4), pp. 541–564. Due, B. L. (2022) ‘Guide dog versus robot dog: Assembling visually impaired people with non-human agents and achieving assisted mobility through distributed co-constructed perception’, Mobilities, pp. 1–19. Due, B. L. et  al. (2019) ‘Den andens ansigt: Afdækning af deltagerorientering via multimodal interaktionsanalyse’,  Nydanske Sprogstudier NyS, 56, pp. 10–51.

206  Søren Vigild Poulsen Edensor, T. (2010) ‘Walking in rhythms: Place, regulation, style and the flow of experience’, Visual Studies, 25 (1), pp. 69–79. Fuller, G.  (2002)  ‘The arrow-directional semiotics: Wayfinding in transit’, Social Semiotics, 12 (3), pp. 231–244. Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. (1999) Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition. London and New York: Continuum. Han, J. (2021) A social semiotic account of music-movement correspondences. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of New South Wales. Harjunpää, K., Mondada, L. and Svinhufvud, K. (2018), ‘The coordinated entry into service encounters in food shops: Managing interactional space, availability, and service during openings’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 51 (3), pp. 271–291. Hausendorf, H. and Mondada, L. (2017) ‘Becoming the current client: A study of openings at Swiss railway station counters’, Arbeitspapiere des UFSP Sprache und Raum (SpuR), 5, pp. 4–88. Hochuli, K. (2019) ‘Turning the passer-by into a customer: Multi-party encounters at a market stall’, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52 (4), pp. 427–447. Iedema, R. (2001) ‘Resemiotization’, Semiotica, 137. Iedema, R. (2003) ‘Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice’, Visual Communication, 2 (1), pp. 29–57. Ingold, T. (2004) ‘Culture on the ground: The world perceived through the feet’, Journal of Material Culture, 9 (3), pp. 315–340. Ingold, T. and Vergunst, J. L. (eds.) (2008)  Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Jakobson, R. and Halle, M. (1956) Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton. Knowles, C. (2017) ‘Walking plutocratic London: Exploring erotic, phantasmagoric Mayfair’, Social Semiotics, 27 (3), pp. 299–309. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2002) ‘Colour as a semiotic mode: Notes for a grammar of colour’, Visual Communication, 1 (3), pp. 343–368. Kristiansen, E. D. and Rasmussen, G. (in press) ‘Would you like a bag for that? Environmental awareness and changing practices for closing buying and selling encounters in retail shopping’, Pragmatics and Society. Kärrholm, M. (2009) ‘To the rhythm of shopping: On synchronisation in urban landscapes of consumption’, Social and Cultural Geography, 10 (4), pp. 421–440. Laban, R. (1980 [1950]) The Mastery of Movement (Edited by L. Ullmann). 4th edn. Plymouth: Macdonald and Evans. Lee, J. and Ingold, T. (2020) ‘Fieldwork on foot: Perceiving, routing, socializing’, in Locating the Field. London: Routledge, pp. 67–85. Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (Translated by S. Elden and G. Moore). London: Continuum. Lemke, J. L. (2002) ‘Travels in hypermodality’, Visual Communication, 1 (3), pp. 299–325. Lynch P. J. and Horton, S. (2016) Web Style Guide: Foundations of User Experience Design. 4th edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Going shopping 207 Martin, J. R. (1992) English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. McMurtrie, R. J. (2017) The Semiotics of Movement in Space. A User’s Perspective. London: Routledge. Merlino, S., Mondada, L. and Söderström, O. (2022) ‘Walking through the city soundscape: an audio-visual analysis of sensory experience for people with psychosis’, Visual Communication, pp. 1–25. Mondada, L. (2023) ‘Between sensorial pleasure and economic reason: accepting or rejecting offers to taste at the market’, in Rasmussen, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (eds.) Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping. London: Routledge, pp. 13–35. Nielsen, J. (1993) Usability Engineering. Boston, MA: Academic Press. O’Toole, M. (2004) ‘Opera ludentes: The Sydney Opera House at work and play’, in O’Holloran, K. L. (ed.) Multimodal Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, pp. 11–28. Poulsen, S. V. (2022a) ‘Website interactivity as representations of social actions? Developing a social semiotic discourse approach to interaction design’, in Moschini, I. and Sindoni, M. G. (eds.) Mediation and Multimodal Meaning Making in Digital Environments. New York/Oxon: Routledge, pp. 67–82. Poulsen, S. V. (2022b) ‘The same but different: A social semiotic analysis of website interactivity as discourse’, Discourse and Communication, 16 (2), pp. 249–268. Rasmussen, G. and Kristiansen, E. D. (2022) ‘The sociality of minimizing involvement in self service shops in Denmark: Customers’ multi-modal practices of being, getting and staying out of the way’, Discourse & Communication, 16 (2), pp. 200–232. Ravelli, L. and McMurtrie, R. J. (2016) Multimodality in the Built Environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis. New York and London: Routledge. Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P. and Arango, J. (2015) Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. 4th edn. New York: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Ryave, A. L. and Schenkein, J. N. (1974) ‘Notes on the art of walking’, in Turner, R. (ed.) Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings. Baltimore: Penguin Education, pp. 265–274. Scollon, R. (2001) Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. London: Routledge. Solnit, R. (2010) Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Penguin. Stanislavsky, K. (2020 [1950]) Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage. London: Faber. Svinhufvud, K. (2018) ‘Waiting for the customer: Multimodal analysis of waiting in service encounters’, Journal of Pragmatics, 129, pp. 48–75. van Leeuwen, T. (1999) Speech, Music, Sound. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. van Leeuwen, T. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Leeuwen, T. (2021) ‘The semiotics of movement and mobility’, Multimodality and Society, 1 (1), pp. 97–118. van Leeuwen, T., Boeriis, M. and Dakwar, Julia R. (2022) ‘Functionalization and informalization in the design of an online fashion shop’, Discourse and Communication, 16 (2), pp. 233–248.

10 Community or commerce—the story of eBay Theo van Leeuwen

1.

Social semiotics and technology

In earlier work, I described social semiotics as a set of three interrelated practices (van Leeuwen, 2005a: 3). They are, in a slightly rephrased form, as follows:

• Systematically describing the meaning potentials of semiotic resources and their cultural and historical contexts

• Investigating how these resources are used in specific sociocultural practices and how people talk about them in these contexts—plan them, teach them, justify them, critique them, and so on • Contributing to the discovery and development of new semiotic resources and new uses of existing semiotic resources Since then, the question of digital technology has been added to the social semiotic agenda. Many digital technologies are semiotic technologies, resources for making meaning that can be studied in the way we study the linguistic system in terms of what can be said with these resources, rather than in terms of what is said with them. The study of online communication has, by and large, focused on the way people use digital technologies—for instance, on how they use social media to share interests and form communities—rather than on the technologies that facilitate this. But it is also important to focus on the technologies themselves, to ask how media technologies and companies structure social interaction and how they communicate with their users (as opposed to the way users communicate with each other). Such an approach can “denaturalize” digital technologies (Machin and Mayr, 2012) and show how they “engineer sociality” into “formalized inscriptions” which “once embedded in the large economy of the wider public take on a different value” (Van Dijck, 2015: 3,7).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284123-10

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 209 Djonov and van Leeuwen (2018) studied PowerPoint in this way, looking not only at how it defines the role of presenters and functions as a resource for structuring the activity of presenting but also at how it embodies a set of values that derive from its origin as a tool for corporate communication. Kvåle (2016) studied Microsoft Word and Microsoft SmartArt in the same vein, to give just two examples (Poulsen et al., 2018, discuss the ‘semiotic technology’ approach in more detail). Such studies focus not only on the semiotic regimes built into the technologies but also on their history, on how they have been deliberately designed, with specific aims in mind. PowerPoint, for instance, was created by engineers in the Bell laboratories to pitch ideas for funding to management (Gaskin, 2012). Since then, it has been used for many other purposes, including education and even sermons (especially in evangelical churches, such as Hillsong), and in the process, it radically changed lectures, sermons, and many other forms of presentation, turning “information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers” (Tufte, 2006: xx) PowerPoint, Word, and SmartArt are resources for creating multimodal texts. More recently, social semiotics has also begun to study digital resources that structure the way we perform everyday practices— resources for working online, learning online, playing online, socializing online, dating online, and so on. The present book is one of the outcomes of a research project conducted by the University of Southern Denmark and focuses on online shopping and its differences from earlier forms of shopping, such as markets, corner shops, supermarkets, and department stores. In this chapter, I focus specifically on online auctions as designed by eBay. I will discuss how eBay structures the practice of auctioning and how this differs from traditional auctions, and I will analyze the language the company uses to communicate with its users and how this differs from traditional ‘consultative style’ (Joos, 1961). But first, I will briefly sketch the history of eBay. 2.

eBay: from community to corporation

Like many social media, eBay started out as a platform for peer-to-peer interaction, inspired by grassroots forms of buying and selling, such as garage sales and flea markets. Today, it operates in 32 countries. In Australia and New Zealand alone, it had, in 2021, $74.2 million in revenue and a profit of $13.6 million (Koehn, 2022). Over time, it has increasingly prioritized power sellers and businesses over occasional sellers, regulated what people should and should not sell and how, and aggressively marketed its own brand. How did this come about? When Pierre Omidyar started eBay (then called AuctionWeb) in 1995, he wanted the site to be a community, a modern

210  Theo van Leeuwen equivalent of the town square, where people would not only buy and sell used goods and collectibles without the intervention of middlemen but also socialize. For this reason, there would, for instance, be no consumer support service—in fact, the term ‘consumer’ was deliberately avoided (Cohen, 2002: 41). People would share information, help each other with advice on writing listings or bidding effectively, and deal with complaints on message boards and feedback forums. As Omidyar wrote in a founder’s letter, “you guys work it out yourself” (Cohen, 2002: 27). And they would socialize on sites with names such as “The eBay town square”, “the Homestead”, and “the Front Porch”. Bunnell (2000: 65) quotes extensively from the kind of messages people exchanged in the eBay Cafe towards the end of the 1990s: Here are the pictures of my cats. Love must be based on mutual friendship, respect and trust, Bill. An internet relationship can start the ball rolling, but you have to spend time together. Gotta go! Time to do the laundry and start the dinner. But eBay was never just a community of ordinary people, even when it was run from Omidyar’s home computer, with listings that “looked like classified ads rather than the glitzy, full-colour sales pitches that would come later” (Cohen, 2002: 66). It was always also a business, and as soon as it began to charge an insertion fee for listings and a percentage of every sale, its income began to grow rapidly, the more so since, unlike Amazon, it did not need to invest in infrastructure—warehouses, inventory, distribution, costly advertising, and so on. The community did all the work, and the company only needed to concern itself with the website interface and the auction software. As Cohen commented (2002: 8), “the very things Omidyar did to make his site less corporate were in the end, what made it the most successful business on the Internet”. Despite its founder’s communitarian idealism, eBay would, step by step, lose its innocence and corporatize. Two years after its inception, Steve Westly was appointed as vice president for marketing and business development, bringing two team members with him, like him Stanford business school educated. Cohen tells it as follows (2002: 81): In a T-shirt-and-shorts office, they came to work in jackets, crisp blue shirts and dark dress pants. While old-timers like Omidyar and Mike Wilson talked endlessly about “community” and “empowerment”, the Westly team packed their conversations with phrases like “cash flow” and “click-through rates”.

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 211 Not long after, Meg Whitman was appointed as the company’s first CEO, and a year later, eBay went public, now having to prioritize the concerns of investors and Wall Street analysts over those of the community. A number of other changes were introduced as well. Lawyers were appointed to establish the principle that eBay was “only a venue and therefore not legally responsible for items sold on its site” (Cohen, 2002: 91), and data analysts began to collect information about user interactions—a 2012 study reported that eBay at that time already processed 50 petabytes each day (Goul, 2012). Increasingly, sellers were no longer individuals but businesses who used eBay to move online, and gradually, the number of fixed-price transactions began to supersede the number of auctions. Today, more than 90% of eBay sales are by businesses and are fixed-price. Omidyar attempted to reassure the community: “Ebay is what you have made it and will always reflect your attitudes and activities”, but “he was forced to tack on, at the end of a breezy letter, a lengthy and distinctly un-Pierre-like morass of legal technicalities” (Cohen, 2002: 134) And the community did not like it, as detailed in Robinson’s study of the resulting feedback bombing in 1999 (Robinson, 2006: 127–128): One reason why we are all so angry is that so many of us bought into the eBay rhetoric about this being a community. In a community, decisions are made after discussion, when some consensus is reached. eBay is not a community, friends . . . . We have been chumps to believe that this is a community . . . . eBay’s just betrayed the trust of all eBay users and showed its contempt for bidders as well as sellers . . . and hurt a lot of us in the process. I believe it is unconscionable. Their excuses for instituting changes were bogus and unsupported by facts. Their manner of dealing with this has been inept, rude and insulting to any intelligent person. I believe they are just greedy. And Cohen (2002: 252) quotes a reaction from the Online Auction Users Association, a non-profit association representing small sellers and buyers, in that same year: Where once users competed equally with their hard work, ingenuity, knowledge and skills, now big businesses are welcomed to eBay and use their marketing savvy and deep pockets to take larger and larger number of bidder dollars away from the person-to-person sales that have built eBay. Users’ anger had many reasons. Shares in the company had not been made available to community members, many of whom felt they had put in

212  Theo van Leeuwen countless hours of unpaid work tutoring new users on message boards. “We realized then”, as the owner of an eBay toyshop wrote, “that we had done all this to feather someone else’s nest” (Cohen, 2002: 256). Omidyar had, in fact, wanted to reserve shares for the community, but this has been resisted by investment bankers and lawyers who wanted to restrict the number of investors and ensure that shares would only go to sophisticated investors; that is, investors with a brokerage account. Other grievances included the introduction of advertising on the site and deals with big companies, such as Disney, who were then provided with privileged access options on the site. In subsequent years, eBay lost some of the lustre of its early years, occupying a distant second place to Amazon among US shopping sites. Most recently, it has tried to remodel itself by focusing on areas reminiscent of its 1990s roots: used items, last year’s popular toys, and collectibles, including sneakers, luxury watches, and trading cards (Ovide, 2021). In Australia, the site now opens with a kind of flea market (second-hand books, vintage cameras, second-hand clothes, etc.), which, however, offers only 131 items; whereas, to give just one example, a search I conducted for a specific item (a music stand) yielded 3,800 items, only 4 of which were preloved and listed by occasional sellers, rather than brand-new and listed by businesses, with much more attractive, professional-looking photos. There are also new social sites with well-designed home pages (Community Spirit—“Talk with fellow members about non eBay related topics”, Cat Rules—“Let’s post funny cat pictures”, Fun  & Games—“Join the fun and play some games”). Sales have been going up, and, with nearly 11,000 employees and a net income of US$13,700  billion, eBay remains a major global corporation, and a key example of the shift from the eclectic communitarianism and geek libertarianism of the dot-com startups of the late 1990s to multinational e-commerce. Yet it continues to market “the age-old idea of a communications utopia”, in which “immediacy of communication is associated with the achievement of shared consciousness and mutual understanding” and in which “the illusion of transparency and consensus sustains the communitarian myth” (Lillie, 2006: 99). 3.

Auctioning according to Mitchell

There is a history of research on shopping in systemic-functional linguistics, the approach to linguistics which has most deeply influenced social semiotics. It originated in Mitchell’s (1957) still excellent work on buying and selling in Cyrenaica (today’s Libya). This was taken up in Hasan’s work on corner shop shopping (Hasan, 1985) and Ventola’s work on service encounters (1987).

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 213 All this work essentially understood shopping as a genre, analyzing it in terms of the actions necessary, in their particular sequence, for successfully performing the activity of buying and selling. Hasan and Ventola refined Mitchell’s analysis by introducing optional activities and recursivities; Ventola in the form of intricate flowcharts. Shopping was also almost exclusively described in terms of linguistically realized exchanges, although Mitchell had recognized that participants “may be silent in the performance of their task” (Mitchell, 1957: 169), of which he gives many examples. Elsewhere (van Leeuwen, 2005a, 2005b), I have shown how genres, as conceived in this way, are multimodally realized and how a focus on language alone may leave out activities that are essential elements of the practice. Hasan, for instance, dealing with a fruit and vegetable shop, does not mention visual and haptic inspections of the goods or the packaging of the purchases. Unlike Hasan and Ventola, Mitchell included auctions. The generic stages he distinguished in doing so describe the functional stages of buying and selling in traditional auctions and the minimal elements needed for such auctions to successfully result in a sale, and his descriptions show that they are realized by linguistic utterances as well as non-linguistic actions: (1) Opening The auctioneer’s opening, a standard phrase translating as “No one has yet bid and a generous opening bid is called for”. Interested buyers and onlookers, Mitchell tells us, then gather around the auctioneer and the object of sale, while the owner places himself in the background but within earshot (Mitchell, 1957: 176). (2) Inspection Next, the buyers inspect the object of sale. This may be silent, by looking and touching, or, for instance in the case of animals, a prospective buyer may say “Show us his age” (by opening his mouth) or the auctioneer may lead the animal around to show how it walks. The auctioneer may also offer verbal descriptions, which “are invariably in the nature of a song of praise”; for instance, “she’s a good milker, free from defect(s) and placid. She’s only calved once” (Mitchell, 1957: 177). (3) Bidding Next, there will be an opening bid, always framed as an amount of money, as are subsequent bids. The bidding goes up by fixed amounts set by the auctioneer. Bidders may then say, “Raise it”, to indicate a bid and remain silent or say, “Carry on”, to indicate they are not bidding further.

214  Theo van Leeuwen When the bidding stalls, the auctioneer cries, “haráaj, yárbaħ, yáksab”, the equivalent of “going . . . going” followed by “What further offers am I made”. (4) Conclusion Finally, the auctioneer knocks down the object of sale to the last bidder with the same cry of “haráaj” (Going . . . going . . . sold at 210) and congratulates the purchaser. He then seeks the agreement of the owner, after which the transaction is concluded. 4.

Auctioning according to eBay

The work of the engineers who design online shopping sites can also be analyzed in this way. But here, descriptions turn into prescriptions, protocols. Genres become algorithms—computer-coded step-by-step rules that stipulate how specific activities are performed. Mitchell still recognized that buyers and sellers come with biographies which make every instance of even highly ritualized activities different and distinct. To understand these differences, he said, the “category of personality” must be employed in the analysis (1957: 168–169). But this dimension disappeared from later accounts of shopping, and programmed activities, such as online shopping, are by nature fully standardized, even in the options they provide—although users can become skilled in manipulating or even outwitting the categories and classifications that are programmed in. Mitchell was a pioneer. In the 1970s and 1980s, the design of protocols for highly ritualized activities became an important part of linguistic as well as AI research (e.g., Schank and Abelson, 1977). The two were part of one and the same move towards creating depersonalized, content-free formats for specific practices, with all the economic efficiencies they would bring, and describing social interaction in ways that normalized these new kinds of templatized practices. I will now analyze an eBay auction in the same vein—as a “goal-directed sequence of stages” (Martin, 1992: 505). I will do this from two perspectives, the perspective of the seller and the perspective of the buyer, because in an eBay auction, buyer and seller are not only located in different places and invisible to each other, but they also access distinctly different pathways through the site. I will start with the point of view of the seller. (1) Opening eBay: Tell us what you’re selling Seller: (types in) Letter scales

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 215 (2) Setting up for inspection eBay: C  an you be more specific? Extra details will optimise your listing. Seller: (types in—50-word limit) Vintage letter scales, Austrian, 1910s, brass, good working condition. (chooses a category from a dropdown list) collectables > historical > memorabilia eBay: Now add details to sharpen result Seller: (chooses from category-specific drop-down list) Original, Europe eBay: Add more details. Seller: (types) Vintage letter scales, Austrian, 1910s, brass, good working condition, dimensions 17 × 10 × 7 cm. eBay: Add a photograph. Seller: (uploads a photograph) After entering distribution details (collect, free postage, set postage amount), the seller clicks to list the item. Buyers can now inspect it (see Figure 10.1). (3) Profiling seller One further inspection option is added (in my case, automatically)—the identity of the seller and his or her rating (e.g., 100% positive feedback; 9 sales). Prospective buyers can also email the seller. And sellers can add extra profile information. (4) Bidding eBay: T  o attract buyers and increase competition for your item, consider a low starting bid. Seller: (types) $120. Buyers can now bid during a seven-day period by entering an amount. The site lists the number of views and bids that have been made and the time remaining (e.g., “3d 21h”) but not the identity of the bidders. (5) Offer (optional) eBay: T  o improve your chances of selling, we may send you offers from buyers that you can choose to accept or decline. (6) Conclusion eBay: ( by email) Great news—your item has sold and the buyer has paid. Make sure you send your item within the next 2 days.

216  Theo van Leeuwen

Figure 10.1  Auctioning letter scales

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 217 What can we conclude from this?

eBay does not act as an auctioneer. It does not sell the item on behalf of the owner. Sellers have to conduct their sales themselves—but without access to the traditional auctioneer’s devices for driving up the price and without being able to deal with bidders directly—the seller neither knows who the bidders are nor how eBay is communicating with them, as eBay is sending different, separate emails to buyers and sellers, communicating with each party now privately, now via the publicly accessible site. Despite not conducting the auction itself, eBay is in total control, directing every move of the seller via a strict protocol; though, to attract buyers, sellers will need to be skilled in using the site’s pre-programmed options to describe and classify the items they want to sell and to profile themselves. In this respect, business sellers have an advantage over occasional sellers, such as myself, as they can post well-produced promotional materials and have a greater opportunity to build up a record of sales that may induce prospective buyers to trust them. Finally, because of the fixed duration of the action, bidders can wait until the last minute, in the hope of obtaining the item for a low offer (sniping). Let us now look at the same event from the buyer’s perspective (1) Greeting eBay: G’day Theo (2) Orientation eBay: What would you like? Buyer: (Chooses category from menu) electronics  >  home appliances > small kitchen appliances (3) Category selection Buyer: ( chooses item from list of small kitchen appliances) Handheld blender (the buyer can select product features from a menu with item-specific binary and drop-down choices, such as used/new, brand, wattage, material, component, price range) (4) Browsing Buyer: (surveys photos of 96 handheld blenders)

218  Theo van Leeuwen (5) Inspection Buyer: ( Selects item and inspects photographs, description, seller profile, and current bid, e.g., $28.95) (6) Bid eBay: Buyer: eBay: Buyer: eBay:

Place your bid. Can also make offer. (types) $29.95 Enter address and phone. (types in address and phone number) When you bid it means you’re committing to buy this item if you’re the winning bidder. Your bid amount $29.95 Confirm. Buyer: (clicks Confirm button) (7) Elicitation (by email, four days after placing the bid) eBay: Y  ou recently bid on (picture of handheld blender) This item ends soon. The countdown has begun! Your bid is winning! Stay tuned so you don’t lose out. (8) Offer eBay: B  id on these similar sponsored items (followed by four pictures of handheld blenders) Or these are available to bid now (followed by four pictures of items in categories previously viewed by the buyer) (9) Conclusion eBay: ( by email, five days after placing bid) Congratulations, Theo! You won with a AU $29.95 bid! Next, make your payment, Buyer (clicks on Pay Seller button and makes payment). eBay auctions, then, differ significantly from traditional auctions. Entering the site is, in fact, more like entering a supermarket than entering an auction room, as buyers are greeted without there being anyone to greet back and have to find their way to products they want to inspect by best guessing between the pre-given categories and classifications the site offers. At this point, things begin to look more like an auction, as eBay goads the buyer to stay in the bidding. Yet eBay also acts like a spruiker on an

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 219 outdoor market, offering goods beyond what the buyer is bidding for— sometimes in competition with what the seller is trying to sell. Clearly, an eBay auction is a hybrid genre, mixing elements from different modes of buying and selling, and then we are not even talking about the many other genres that can be found on the site—announcements, discussion boards, answer centres, community feedback, Q&A with eBay, and much more. Neither the seller nor the buyer has access to every detail of the transaction as a whole. Although the buyer can email the seller, the two do not directly interact, and while the buyer knows the name of the seller, the reverse is not true. Sellers will learn who their buyer is only once eBay sends them a label for dispatching the purchased item to the buyer. Throughout, however, eBay tightly controls the entire procedure, acting as a kind of puppeteer behind the scenes—omnipresent yet faceless and invisible. 5.

Informalization and power

The design of an online auction involves not only its functional design but also the design of the language with which eBay is addressing buyers and sellers. It is here that eBay’s blend of community and commerce is at its most evident. Almost 30 years ago, Fairclough discussed what he called ‘synthetic personalization’, a process which he said, “can be seen as a colonization of the public domain by the practices of the private domain, but also as an appropriation of the private domain by the public domain” (Fairclough, 1993: 40). The informalization of public language which Fairclough drew attention to had in fact gone on throughout the 20th century. From the late 1920s onwards, broadcasting replaced formal speeches with casual and often dialogic chats and interviews (Cardiff, 1981), and politicians, too, began to address the public in casual ways, as in Roosevelt’s fireside chats of the 1930s and even Goebbels’s insistence that radio speakers should “sound like the listener’s best friend” (Leitner, 1980: 75). The impact of television, in the 1960s, accelerated this trend, making close-up non-verbal communication an important aspect of public communication. Not surprisingly, linguists and social scientists began to pay attention to informalization, and the 1960s work on this, in particular, that of Joos (1961) and Hall (1963, 1964), remains essential. Joos (1961: 23) distinguished five styles or clocks, as he called them: the intimate style, used between “intimates”, usually couples; the casual style, used with “friends, acquaintances, insiders”; the consultative style, used to “come to terms with strangers”; the formal style, used in formal contexts (for instance, meetings and classrooms); and the frozen style, “used for print

220  Theo van Leeuwen and declamation”. These styles are characterized by distinct configurations of six parameters: (1) the degree to which background information is shared and, therefore, does not need to be made explicit; (2) the degree to which “public information plays a role in the interaction”; (3) the degree to which listener participation (“unhuhn”, “I see”, “I know”, etc.) is continuous; (4) the degree to which communication relies on facial expression, gesture, and intonation; (5) the formality or informality of the lexis (e.g., the use of slang) and the completeness or incompleteness of the grammar (e.g., ellipsis, minor clauses); and finally, (6) the degree of advance planning. Table 10.1 shows the role of these parameters in Joos’s five styles. Not long ago, these styles were fixed. There were rules, some explicit, some unspoken, as to which styles were appropriate or inappropriate for which kinds of social relations and which kinds of occasions. Education gave access to more formal styles—not everyone had that access. Today, Joos’s parameters can be, and are, used as a resource for designing social relations so that, for instance, casual style can be used in public communication, planned in advance and scripted. This flexibility then allows relations of unequal power to acquire a veneer of equality, of us-ness, of community; for instance, in the relation between powerful tech companies and their billions of users. Looking at Joos’s style features one by one, in communicating with its users, eBay can in fact rely on background information because of the information it collects about its users. It can, for instance, advertise products which it knows “you will like” or “cassette players picked especially for you”—all this on the basis of stored information about the customer’s earlier searches and purchases. However, eBay contains less public information than some other sites. In a study of the online fashion site Zalando, Andersen and van Leeuwen (2017) found that product catalogue pages often contained a short history Table 10.1  The five clocks of language

Shared background Use of public information Listener participation Facial expression and intonation Casual lexis Incomplete grammar Advance planning Source: Joos, 1961

Intimate style

Casual style

Consultative style

Formal Frozen style style

high absent varying very high

high absent constant high

low present constant relatively high occasional low absent

low present absent low

very high high very high high absent absent

absent present absent absent

absent absent absent absent present present

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 221 of the product (e.g., a short history of women’s handbags) or other background information about the product. But eBay does, of course, include public information about itself and its history. As for listener participation, as the listener is actually a reader, there can be no listener participation, and this is one of the ways that eBay’s use of language is decidedly not casual and informal. However, casual lexis (“G’day Theo”, “congrats”, “top notch”) is frequently used and so is incomplete grammar (“Can also make offer”), contraction (“you’ll like this”, “we’ll let you know”), and so on. However, an email from the eBay Accounts Team requesting an update of personal information is signed as “Sincerely, the eBay Accounts Team”, and clicking on the fine print of privacy statements and user agreements reveals a far more formal use of language, including a sentence of 203 words, of which the following is only an excerpt and in which ‘you’ becomes ‘the user’: Without limiting other remedies, we may limit, suspend or terminate our service and user accounts, prohibit access to eBay services, delay or remove posted content, remove, delete, modify or not display listings, apply fees and/or recover our expenses for policy monitoring and reinforcement, and/or take technical and legal steps to keep users off the sites. Above all, finally, eBay’s language is planned in advance, designed, despite all its informalities. It is a hybrid of the informal and the formal, a prime example of Fairclough’s synthetic personalization. And clearly, the interaction between eBay and its users is also non-reciprocal, unequal in the resources available to the two parties. There are commands that allow no riposte (“Place your bid”, “Enter address and phone”, and “Confirm”) and questions that seem open (“What would you like?”) but can only be answered by clicks or selections from a range of pre-programmed answers or a drop-down menu. And interactions are almost always initiated by eBay. Cate Poynton has discussed the fundamental relation between this kind of linguistic inequality and power (Poynton, 1985: 79): The greater the equality between interactants, the more likely they are to behave linguistically in parallel or symmetrical ways . . . the greater the inequality between interactants, the more likely it is that their linguistic behaviour will be non-reciprocal. On eBay’s social sites, there can be equality between users, and users do in fact continue to disagree with eBay’s policies and practices. But this cannot and does not directly affect how auctions and other sales are conducted and is in any case itself subject to the format (“rules of engagement”)

222  Theo van Leeuwen imposed by eBay. Community and commerce remain cordoned off from each other. 6. Conclusion Mitchell (1957: 172) already knew that the actors in a marketplace “are not of equal importance. One has goods for sale, another wishes to buy; both seek the most advantageous price. These are essential conditions”. It may well be that, for instance, stamp collectors trading with each other on eBay do form a community of equals. But despite Omidyar’s intention (quoted in Cohen, 2002: 7) in 1995 to “give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer” and despite eBay’s ongoing community rhetoric, eBay is, in its organization of buying and selling, not a community of equals. This should and could have been evident from the start. In 1996, Omidyar published the following manifesto: eBay is a community that encourages open and honest communication among all its members, Our community is guided by five fundamental values: • We believe people are basically good • We believe that everyone has something to contribute • We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people • We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual • We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated As Jarrett (2006) has pointed out, there are two wes already in this early text. There is, on the one hand, the we of the community, united by a common ethos. And there is, on the other hand, the guiding hand of the we of the company which encourages and which tells community members what they should do. As Jarrett (2006: 110) analyzes it, the manifesto “responsibilizes individuals” in neoliberalist fashion and “dethrones society from its dominant position of a conceptual and moral framework of individual citizenship .  .  . to be replaced with the amorphous idea of community as a new territory for the administration of individual and collective existence”. eBay’s Feedback Forum played a particular role in this process of responsibilization. It soon introduced, top-down, a system allowing users to rate sellers on a three-point scale (−1, neutral, +1). Ratings now appeared after sellers’ names, and sellers with a rating of −4 were banned. But the

Community or commerce—the story of eBay 223 responsibility for these ratings was placed on the community. Omidyar wrote as follows when the measure was introduced (quoted in Cohen, 2002: 27): Some people are dishonest. This is true here, in the newsgroups, in the classifieds and right next door. It is a fact of life. But here those people can’t hide. We’ll drive them away. Protect others from them. This grand hope depends on your active participation . . . . Give praise where it is due; make complaints where appropriate. To Jarrett, this made the community into a “disciplining tool”, whereby collective surveillance of individual agency produces “safe trading” and so ensures the trust that is needed for the company to succeed (Jarrett, 2006: 108). Clearly, a sense of community can exist on social media. But even here, we need to remain critically aware of the guiding hand of the companies on whose platforms we interact as communities and of the power they exert through the language they use and through the protocols they provide us with. References Andersen, T.H. and van Leeuwen, T. (2017) Genre crash: The case of online shopping. Discourse, Context & Media 20: 191–203. Bunnell, D. (2000) The eBay Phenomenon. New York: John Wiley. Cardiff, D. (1981) The serious and the popular: Aspects of the evolution of style in the radio talk 1928–1939. Media & Society 2(1): 29–47. Cohen, A. (2002) The Perfect Store—Inside eBay. London: Piatkus. Djonov, E. and van Leeuwen, T. (2018) The power of semiotic software: A critical multimodal perspective. In J. Flowerdew and J. Richardson (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 566–581. Fairclough, N. (1993) Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse. Discourse & Society 4(2): 133–168. Gaskin, R. (2012) Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint. San Francisco: Vinland Books. Goul, M. (2012) How to build trust and improve the shopping experience. https:// news.wpcafrey.asu.edu/20120508-ebay-study-how-build-trust-and-improveshopping-experience Hall, E. (1963) A system for the notation of proxemic behaviour. American Anthropologists 65(5): 1003–1026. Hall, E. (1964) Silent assumptions in social communication. Disorders of Communication 42: 41–55. Hasan, R. (1985) The identity of the text. In M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan (eds) Language, Context and Text. Geelong: Deakin University Press, pp. 97–109.

224  Theo van Leeuwen Jarrett, K. (2006) The perfect community: Disciplining the eBay user. In K. Hillis and M. Petit (eds) Everyday eBay—Culture, Collecting and Desire. London: Routledge, pp. 107–122. Joos, M. (1961) The Five Clocks of Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace  & World. Koehn, E. (2022) eBay boom as shoppers bargain hunt. Australian Financial Review, 22 July, p. 29. Kvåle, G. (2016) Software as ideology: A  multimodal critical discourse analysis of Microsoft Word and SmartArt. Journal of Language and Politics 15(3): 259–273. Leitner, G. (1980) BBC English and Deutsche Rundfunksprache: A  comparative and historical analysis of language on the radio. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 26: 75–100. Lillie, J. (2006) Immaterial labor in the eBay community: The work of consumption in the “network society”. In K. Hillis and M. Petit (eds) Everyday eBay— Culture, Collecting and Desire. London: Routledge, pp. 91–106. Machin, D. and Mayr, A. (2012) How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage. Martin, J.R. (1992) English Text—System and Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mitchell, T.F. (1957) Buying and selling in Cyrenaica. In T.F. Mitchell (ed) Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London: Longman, pp. 167–200. Ovide, S. (2021) EBay’s survival lesson. New York Times, August  11. www.nytimes.com.2021/08/11/technology/ebay-survival-lesson.html Poulsen, S.V., Kvåle, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (eds) (2018) Social media as semiotic technology. Social Semiotics 28(5). Poynton, C. (1985) Language and Gender: Making the Difference. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Robinson, R. (2006) “Black Friday” and feedback bombing: An examination of trust and online community in eBay’s early history. In K. Hillis and M. Petit (eds) Everyday eBay—Culture, Collecting and Desire. London: Routledge, pp. 123–136. Schank, R. and Abelson, R. (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Tufte, E. (2006) The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Van Dijck, J. (2015) The Culture of Connectivity—A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Leeuwen, T. (2005a) Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. (2005b) Multimodality, genre and design. In S. Norris and R.H. Jones (eds) Discourse in Action—Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 73–94. Ventola, E. (1987) The Structure of Social Interaction. London: Frances Pinter.

Index

Abelson, R. 7 – 8 accountability 43, 81, 153 Adami, E. 152 age 108 alcohol 65 analogy between architecture and web design 191, 196 – 199 Andersen, T.H. 8 antiques 132, 149 art 110, 132, 149 assemblage 3, 29, 85, 86 – 89, 90, 92, 101 auctions 2, 128 – 129, 209; hybrid auction 128, 150; offline auctions 212 – 214; online auctions 214 – 219 Auer, P. 154 bargain 111 basket 156 – 161, 164; (online) basket page 161 – 165 beverages 108 binding 179 blend 109 bodily comportement 135, 137, 138 bodily conduct 122, 130 body movement 3, 4, 6; see also walking body posture 3, 5, 6, 43 Boeriis, M. 174, 188 bonding 179 boutique shops 1, 40, 43 café shop 2, 104 – 105 cash register interaction 22, 25 – 30 channel integration 106 cheese shops 43

chewing 80 Clark, C. 6, 107 Clayman, S. 42 coffee bar see café shop colour 108 conceptual product display 176 – 178 conversation 109 – 110 conversational inference 21 conversation analysis 5, 104 corner shop cosmopolitanism 85 corner shops 2, 85, 89 – 102 counter 41 cultural and linguistic diversity 14, 15 Davidson, J. 59 – 60 decoration 105 department stores 1 De Stefani, E. 5, 6, 41, 107, 115, 152 difference 14 distributed identity 90, 92 Drew, P. 42, 121 eBay 2, 209 – 212 ecology 41; ecology of the salesroom 138; fractured ecologies 139 economy of behavior 135 electronics stores 2, 190 – 204 embodiment 42; embodied conduct 104; embodied coordination 115; embodied offer 45 EMCA 5, 104, 153 – 154, 187, 189 – 190 environment 104, 106, 107, 109, 122, 123, 153; engagement with the environment 105, 109, 122; material environment 41,

226 Index 121; mobile environment 54; sequential environment 43 erHHeritage, J. 42, 116, 118 ethnic communities 14 ethnic identity telling 31 ethnomethodology 5, 104, 153 Fairclough, N. 8, 219 food stalls 40 formats 42 framing 21 frozen action 24 functional elements of shopping 7 – 8, 202 furniture store 2, 172 – 178 Garfinkel, H. 10, 29, 104, 153 – 154 gaze 5, 43, 154; see also looking gendered format 64 generic structure 7 – 8, 16, 102, 202; of eBay auctions 214 – 218; of offline auctions 213 – 214 gesture 3, 134 – 138 Giddens, A. 8 Goffman, E. 21, 66, 117, 121 Goodwin, C. 43, 158 gourmet shops 40, 43 Gumperz, J.J. 21 – 22 Halliday, M.A.K. 173 haptic 80 Harjunpää 41 Hasan, R. 7 history of shopping 1 – 2 Holsanova, J. 174 identity 31 – 34, 90, 92 Iedema, R. 86, 188, 192 indexical signs of social class 33 informalization 219 – 222 installation 174 – 176 institutional setting 42 interactional meaning of store design 173, 178 – 180, 187 internet 139; see also livestream; online shopping Jarrett, K. 222 – 223 Joos, M. 219 – 220 Kendrick, R. 42, 121 Kress, G. 173 Kristiansen, E. 6, 107, 152, 195

Laban, R. 190, 192 language of eBay interface 219 – 222 Latour, B. 3, 88 legitimacy 130 – 131 lifestyle 174, 178, 180, 188 linguistic ethnography 19, 20 livestream 143, 148 looking 114 – 117; see also gaze Luff, P. 139 manipulation 117, 118, 128 markets 2, 3, 13 – 35, 44 material 104, 108; material environment 41, 160; materiality 40, 43 Maybin, J. 20 McMurtrie, R. 172, 189 mediated discourse analysis 16, 17, 30 – 31, 35, 86 mediational means 17, 22 – 24, 26 – 30, 34 Merritt, M. 41 metrolingualism 15, 25, 85 Mitchell, T.F. 7, 212 – 214, 222 Mondada, L. 6, 41, 43, 80, 107 multiculturalism 14 – 15, 85 multimodality 15 – 16, 87, 104, 106, 187; multimodal conversation analysis 42; multimodal engagement 107, 121; multimodal format 43; multimodal gestalt 45; multimodal interplay 107 multisensoriality 43 navigating offline shops 180, 192 – 195; see also walking resources navigating online shops 196 – 201; see also ‘walking online’ resources nexus analysis see mediated discourse analysis Norris, S. 24 objects 6, 42, 85 – 89, 90 – 91; see also mediational means offer 40, 42, 44; embodied offer 45, 47; verbal offer 45, 47 online bidding 138 – 143 online community, (eBay) 222 – 223 online shopping 1, 3, 4, 8 – 9; in electronics store 191 – 211; in supermarket 152 – 153, 161 – 165

Index  227 ordering 107, 109, 114, 123 organisational meaning of store design 173, 180 – 181 Otsuji, E. 15, 25 passers-by 43, 52 – 59 Pennycook, A. 15, 25 permeable framing 184 Pinch, T. 6, 107 platform 141 – 143 pointing 3, 96 power 4, 219 – 222 Poynton, C. 221 practice 16, 28 – 29 Rampton, B. 20 Rasmussen, G. 6, 107, 152, 195 Ravelli, L. 8, 172, 176 – 177 Rawls, A. 153 reassemblage see assemblage recontextualization 86, 102, 188, 199, 201 – 202, 204 reflexive sensitivity 20 representational meaning of store design 171, 176 – 178, 187 request 6, 24, 41 – 42, 44, 99, 101, 118 – 121 resemiotisation 85, 86 – 87, 92, 96, 98, 99 – 101, 201, 202, 204 Richardson, E. 6 Sacks, H. 153 Salesroom 138 – 142, 145 Schank, R. 7 – 8 Scollon, R. 16, 17, 20, 30 – 31, 85 search strategies 188 second-hand 2, 104 semiotic technologies 208 – 209 senses 40 sequences of action 136 sequential environment 43 sequential order 41, 159 sequential organization 40, 136 shopping lists 93 – 99, 159 – 160, 164 site of engagement 17, 18 smell 6 Smith, C. 129 social semiotics 7, 8, 172 – 173, 187 – 189, 208 Sorjonen, M-L. 9, 41, 42 spatial discourse analysis 8, 172 – 174 spatial repertoires 90 speciality foods 104

specialty shop 107 Stenglin, M. 179 Stokoe, E.H. 6 store design 173 – 181, 188 – 189, 196 – 198 style 219 – 220 suggestive symbolism in store design 179, 180 supermarkets 1, 2, 155; online supermarkets 161 talk 5, 107, 115, 117, 130, 138, 160 taste 3, 6, 40, 43, 108 tasting ‘en passant’ 78 taxonomic product display 177 technology 139 telephone 138 – 140 touch 6, 206 transformation (offline to online) 202 – 204 transparency 130 – 131, 149 trust 4, 130 – 131, 137, 149, 151 Tusting, K. 20 van Leeuwen, T. 8, 16, 86, 90, 102, 173, 189, 199, 202 Velayutham, S. 13, 85 Ventola, E. 7 vintage products 104 visual rhyme in store design 180 voicing 134 walking 45 – 57, 114 – 116, 153, 192 – 193; see also navigating offline shops ‘walking online’ resources 199 – 201; activity 201; consistency 201; directedness 200 – 201; distance 200; pace 200; sociability 201 ‘walking online’ see navigating online shops walking resources 192 – 194; activity 194; consistency 193; directedness 194; duration 193; pace 192 – 193; sociability 194 webpages 154; see also online shopping Wertsch, J.V. 17 Wise, A. 13, 85 written bidding 143 zoom 174