Browsing by Subject "Service encounters"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    “Great to see ur staff are doing their job properly” : customer (dis)affiliation on corporate Facebook pages
    (2019-01-21) Palomino-Manjón, Patricia
    The emergence of new technologies has changed the way people communicate. Social media have allowed businesses to connect with customers and to market their products more efficiently. However, these platforms also allow customers to share information and o pinions with the company and fellow customers, diverting from previous online service encounters which only allowed the interaction between the service provider and the customer. This new digital space of communication is in need of research. Therefore, th e main objective of this paper is to analyze how customer (dis)affiliation is discursively realized on Facebook. To do so, a corpus of comments published by customers on the Facebook page of a British grocery chain was compiled. The data were analyzed draw ing on Appraisal T heory (Martin & White, 2005). The findings show that customers used a varied range of Appraisal resources to evaluate the company and express (dis)affiliation with it and fellow customers.
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    Open Access
    Requests in tourist information office service encounters : an analysis of directness and gender
    (2019-01-21) Salazar, Patricia; Orts, Sara
    Traditionally, the speech act of requesting has been regarded as a face - threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1987) due to the impositive nature on the addressee’s negative face. Yet, in specific service encounters, requests can no longer be seen as threateni ng (Antonopoulou, 2001). This is the case of tourist information offices, where mitigators may not be present due to the task - oriented nature of the exchange. This study aims to widen the scope of research on service encounters by examining 147 naturally o ccurring requests by native speakers of English in a tourist information office taking into account the variable of gender. Our findings suggest that females used more direct questions whereas men employed want statements to a much higher extent. These res ults have to be understood within the context of this specific service encounter, in which direct requests do not imply impoliteness or threats to the requestee’s negative face.