Would you like to do it yourself? Service requests and their non-granting responses

• Applying Conversation Analysis

In business, responding to a customer's request with anything less then a granting is a delicate matter. This study examines how employees in a local reprographics business produce non-granting responses to customers' requests. The findings show how customers' requests shape how employee's design their non-granting response; that is, how the grammatical formatting of customer requests constrain the grammatical construction of employees' responses. This study contributes to the body of conversation analytic research focused on the intersection of language, action and interaction.

citation

Vinkhuyzen, E. ; Szymanski, M. H. ; Moore, R. J. ; Raymond, G. T. ; Whalen, J. ; Whalen, M. Would you like to do it yourself? Service requests and their non-granting responses. In Applying Conversation Analysis, edited by K. Richards and O. Seedhouse. Palgrave Macmillan; 2004; 91-106.