Hurting and Blaming: Two Components in the Action Formation of Complaints About Absent Parties

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the action formation of complaints about absent parties—asking what makes them recognizable as such. It shows that recipient responses display their understanding that complaints comprise two components: a display of hurt (related to the impact of the complained-of events) and a blaming (attributing responsibility to an absent party). The setting, a bereavement support group in the UK, is perspicuous for this investigation because the group facilitators respond to the clients’ complaints by decoupling their constituent components, validating the hurt while avoiding affiliating with the blaming embodied in them. This makes visible these complaint-recipients’ distinctive orientations to the two components of complaints. The article advances understandings of the action formation of complaints; it documents practices whereby service providers can show compassion toward the hurt embodied in clients’ complaints; and it shows how principles of bereavement support are implemented in face-to-face interactions. The participants speak British English.

Complaining about absent parties

Complaining involves “express[ing] feelings of discontent about some state of affairs, for which responsibility can be attributed to ‘someone’ (to some person, organization or the like)” (Heinemann & Traverso, 2009, p. 2381). However, the label “complaining” covers types of action that differ in terms of structure, function, and sequential implications (see Schegloff, 2007, p. 61). In this article, I investigate a coherent set of complaints about absent (sometimes called “third”) parties in the context of a bereavement support group. For simplicity, I will refer to these as “complaints” henceforth; the points I will make apply to these rather than a broader range of actions we might call complaints. The complaints I examine display features that Günthner (1997) identified: The complaint-teller is the protagonist of the reported events; the complaint-recipients are not featured in them; and the complaint-target, who reportedly harmed the complaint-teller, is not present in the current interaction where the events are reported.

Prior research has identified practices that complaint-tellers use for complaining including announcements (Edwards, 2005) that provide a complaint frame (Mandelbaum, 1991/1992); morally charged negative characterizations of the absent party’s conduct (Drew, 1998); careful management of the teller’s own subject position (Drew, 1998; Edwards, 2005; Whitehead, 2013); reported speech (Drew, 1998; E. Holt, 2000), extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986); idioms (Drew & Holt, 1988); and displays of emotions conveyed through language, prosody, and bodily conduct (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Selting, 2010). Importantly, the complainability of some conduct can be made available explicitly, or implicitly through details of the telling (Drew, 1998; Drew & Walker, 2009; Mandelbaum, 1991/1992), leaving it to the recipient to infer that a complaint is underway. Embedding complaint aspects within a turn whose primary action is something other than complaining also gives recipients the option to disattend those complaint aspects by addressing the primary action instead (Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009).

Despite these advances in research on complaints, their action formation has not been explicitly addressed. Action formation refers to “the resources of the language, the body, the environment of the interaction, and position in the interaction fashioned into conformations designed to be, and to be recognizable by recipients as, particular actions” (Schegloff, 2007, p. xiv). Existing definitions suggest that complaints are recognizable as such because they include two components: a characterization of the negative impact of some reported events on the complaint-teller and an attribution of responsibility to some absent party for causing those events (Edwards, 2005, p. 8; Heinemann & Traverso, 2009, p. 2381; Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009, p. 2415). I will refer to these components as display of impact (or “hurt” component) and attribution of responsibility (or “blaming” component). Both are arguably necessary to recognize a complaint as such. By only negatively characterizing a party’s conduct without proposing that it had a negative impact on the teller, the teller might be heard as criticizing rather than complaining (Edwards, 2005, p. 8). By only reporting the personal negative impact of some events without blaming some party for causing them, the teller might be heard as engaging in troubles-telling (Jefferson, 1988) rather than complaining. In this study, I ask whether and how recipients’ responses display their understanding that a display of hurt and a blaming are constituent components that make complaints recognizable as such. Answering these questions is crucial to advance understandings of the action formation of complaints, but as I show in the next section, they have not been fully addressed in existing research.

Responses to complaints in mundane interactions

Research on mundane interactions has established that complaints make relevant for recipients to take a position by affiliating or disaffiliating with the complaint-teller, with affiliation being preferred (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Drew & Walker, 2009). Complaint-tellers can pursue affiliation when it is not forthcoming (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Selting, 2010). What exactly recipients affiliate (or do not affiliate) with has remained under-specified. We do not know whether, how, and in what measure recipients do so by addressing the hurt and the blaming embodied in a complaint. What has been established is that, by affiliating, recipients can be heard as supporting the blaming component of a complaint (Drew & Walker,2009). They can do so through affiliative negative evaluations of the complaint-target (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012); or by extending the complaint on the complaint-teller’s behalf (Drew & Walker, 2009), for example by proffering additional motivations or reasons for complaining (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012). How recipient responses might also embody appreciation of the hurt component of a complaint has not received as much attention.

Existing analyses suggest that recipient responses can embody appreciation of both components of a complaint concurrently, within the same turn-constructional unit (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Selting, 2010). An example are verbal affiliative responses delivered with prosodic matching or upgrading (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012), which “are not merely claiming understanding and affiliation with words, but are showing, or exhibiting it with the voice in ways which suggest that the affect is being experienced vicariously” (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012, p. 126; emphasis added). It thus appears that the prosodic realization of an affiliative response can embody appreciation of the affective side of a complaint, which manifests the impact that the reported events had on the complaint-teller (the hurt).

There is also evidence that recipients can devote separate turns to affiliating with the two components of a complaint. This can be seen in extract 1 (‘Sale at the vicarage’ from the Field corpus of phone calls), which has received attention in several studies.

(1) (from Holt, 2000, p. 445) “Sale at the vicarage”

Leslie complains about a common acquaintance who approached her at a jumble sale and made an insulting remark (lines 28–31; Drew, 1998; Edwards, 2005). Joyce, the complaint-recipient, produces a response cry (Goffman, 1981; Heritage, 2011; E. Holt, 2000) in line 33. Although this may imply affiliation with the attribution of responsibility embodied in the complaint (the blaming), it seems primarily devoted to showing appreciation of the impact of the events on the complaint-teller (the hurt). Indeed, the response cry “[mirrors] the kind of response a recipient would have had as the victim of an unprovoked surprise attack” (Heritage, 2011, p. 178). Analyzing this case, Couper-Kuhlen (2012) proposes that affiliation conveyed through response cries is fleeting and reliant upon subsequent verbal reinforcement. So Joyce “moves to ‘put into words’ the stance she has been displaying vocally” (p. 138) in lines 39 and 42—through a negative assessment of the complaint-target. I propose that the response cry (line 33) and the assessment (lines 39 and 42) actually attend to the two distinct (albeit concurrently conveyed) components of the complaint: the hurt, which the response cry empathizes with (Heritage, 2011), and the blaming, which the assessment supports and reinforces. Extract 1 shows that recipient responses can embody distinct orientations to these constituent components of a complaint. However, to the best of my knowledge no prior study has explicitly addressed whether and how recipient responses embody their understanding that the hurt and the blaming are constituent components that make complaints recognizable as such.

Responses to complaints in institutional interactions

It has been proposed that complaints can put recipients in a difficult position: Affiliation is preferred, but recipients may be reluctant to provide it because it can entail being heard as participating in blaming a complaint-target. This is evidenced in mundane interactions when complaint-recipients avoid taking a position toward a complaint, for example, by responding with equivocal laughter (L. Holt, 2012) or by responding to aspects of a telling other than its complaint aspects (Mandelbaum, 1991/1992). Studies of institutional interactions have consistently shown that service providers exhibit reluctance to affiliate with clients’ complaints. They do so by avoiding aligning themselves as complaint-recipients (Ekstrom & Lundstrom, 2014; Pino, 2015; Pino & Mortari, 2013; Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009); by redirecting the talk toward institutionally relevant activities (Ekstrom & Lundstrom, 2014; Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009; Weatherall, 2015); by reinterpreting (Feo & LeCouteur, 2017) or recontextualizing (Pino & Mortari, 2013) the reported events in ways that defuse their complainability; by shifting the focus to something positive (Feo & LeCouteur, 2017); and by disaffiliating with the complaint altogether, for example, by challenging (Feo & LeCouteur, 2017) or undermining (Pino, 2015; Pino & Mortari, 2013) its bases. These authors have proposed that in these ways service providers avoid siding with the complaint-teller against the complaint-target, thus abiding by norms of professional neutrality. More specifically, though, these studies show that service providers avoid affiliating with the blaming component of a complaint. Whether and how their responses also embody an orientation to a hurt component has not received as much attention.

Some studies have documented that service-provider responses can attend to the impact of the reported events on the complaint-teller (the hurt; Ekstrom & Lundstrom, 2014). One practice that appears to be specifically devoted to this is what we might call an impact formulation. Weatherall (2015) refers to it as a B-event statement, such as “so you are a bit exhausted by the whole process” (p. 172). This is “a practice that functions to recognise the caller’s affective stance without actually endorsing its legitimacy” (Weatherall, 2015, p. 156). It thus recognizes the display of impact featured in a complaint (the hurt) while avoiding supporting the attendant attribution of responsibility (the blaming). Similarly, an example shown by Heinrichsmeier (2021) suggests that an impact formulation (“[It]’s not funny int it,” p. 7) can be used to recognize the hurt while avoiding supporting the blaming. Like in other provider-client interactions, it is problematic for the service providers in both studies to take a position toward their clients’ blaming of absent parties (Heinrichsmeier, 2021; Weatherall, 2015); this arguably leads them to decouple the hurt from the blaming, so as to display recognition of the former while avoiding addressing the latter. This further suggests that some institutional settings, where service providers work to decouple the two components of a complaint and address them selectively (thus concurrently making their orientations to them observable), are perspicuous for analyses of the action formation of complaints.

Despite the findings summarized here, we still know little about how service providers can address the hurt embodied in a complaint. Although in several institutional settings service providers are bound by norms of neutrality (embodied in their avoidance of responses that would affiliate with clients’ blamings of absent parties), one would expect that practices exist whereby they can at least display recognition of the hurt embodied in a complaint—especially in settings where emotional support is relevant. Indeed, the overwhelming focus in the literature on service providers’ disaligning and disaffiliating responses may have created the impression in the readership that institutional representatives are bound to disattend the displays of hurt embodied in their clients’ complaints. In this study, I document ways in which complaint-recipients operating in an institutional setting can indeed recognize the hurt embodied in a complaint while carefully managing their position vis-à-vis the blaming also embodied in it.

The setting: Bereavement support

The setting for this study is a bereavement support group run by a UK charity. Bereavement refers to experiences people go through after a death. The group held fortnightly meetings facilitated by charity volunteers. The general purpose of the meetings was to give the clients opportunities to share experiences of bereavement with others in similar circumstances.

Each meeting was split into two parts. In the first part, the facilitator invited the clients to “check in” individually, sometimes using a prompt (e.g., “Are there any memories, any anniversaries, anything that’s happening in this particular month that’s significant for you that you feel like sharing?”). The clients then took turns at sharing recent life events and associated thoughts and feelings. They often shared memories of partners and family members who had died. The facilitators worked to validate the clients’ experiences, especially feelings of grief, proposing that these are universal experiences that are not time limited. They also worked to identify bereavement-related themes in the clients’ reports that could resonate with other clients and become the focus of further discussion. Additionally, they provided information about bereavement, often to dispel what they took to be common misconceptions. In the second part of the meeting, after a tea break, the facilitators introduced an activity (such as listening to music) or a prompt (such as a reading) related to bereavement and then invited the clients to discuss.

In the meetings I recorded, the clients complained about absent parties—mostly family and friends—for letting them down in various ways. One client also complained about some organizations (e.g., a mental health service). None of these complaints treated the facilitators or the charity as coresponsible for the complained-of events (by contrast see Ekstrom & Lundstrom, 2014; Pino & Mortari, 2013). The complaints were sometimes embedded within reports whose main focus was not complaining, whereas sometimes they were the main business of a client’s turn (Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009).

Unlike services where complaining is treated as secondary to the business of the interaction (Ekstrom & Lundstrom, 2014; Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009), complaining was treated as a relevant activity in the bereavement support group (see also Feo & LeCouteur, 2017). It nevertheless placed the facilitators in a delicate position. The facilitators observably worked to provide compassionate responses that validated the hurt embodied in the clients’ complaints. However, similar to other institutional interactions, they also refrained from affiliating with the clients’ blamings of absent parties. They thus faced the practical problem of providing a compassionate response that recognized the reality of the client’s predicament without being heard as joining in the blaming of the absent party. This makes this setting perspicuous for the analysis of how recipients orient and respond to the two components of a complaint.

The present study

In summary, despite significant advances in research on complaints, we know little about whether and how recipient responses embody orientations to the hurt and the blaming as constituent components of complaints. This has been compounded by prior research (both on mundane and institutional settings) focusing more on how recipient responses affiliate or avoid affiliating with the blaming embodied in a complaint, overlooking whether and how recipients concurrently orient to the hurt embodied in it. This has theoretical consequences because it limits our understanding of the action formation of complaints. It also has practical implications because we do not know how service providers can address the hurt embodied in a complaint while avoiding affiliating with the blaming also embodied in it. With this study, I aim to address these gaps. My aim is thus to examine responses to complaints in a bereavement support group, paying specific attention to whether and how they embody orientations to the hurt and the blaming as constituent components of complaints. The article advances understandings of the action formation of complaints; it documents ways in which service providers can recognize the hurt embodied in a complaint; and it contributes to understandings of how some principles of bereavement support are put into practice in face-to-face interactions involving volunteers and clients.

Materials and methods

This study employs conversation analysis (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). The data consist of four facilitated group meetings for bereaved people (lasting 6.5 hours in total). These meetings were audio-recorded because the clients preferred not to be filmed. All the analytic observations I make in this article take this limitation into account. I thus only make claims that can be grounded in the available data.

The meetings were run by a UK charity (the participants speak British English). Two or three volunteers were present in each meeting; one of them fulfilled the role of facilitator. The volunteers had received training within the charity, and the volunteers working as facilitators had also attended a two-day training on group facilitation. This covered communication skills and included some practice through role-play simulations. The facilitators did not use a manualized or formalized intervention, but they drew guidance from a textbook setting out general principles and skills for organizing and facilitating bereavement support groups (Graves, 2012).

The number of clients varied between five and eight. The majority of clients were aged 50 or older, and they were of White ethnicity. When I recorded the meetings in 2016, the group members used to gather twice a month in a room and sit around a large table. Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Ethics Approvals (Human Participants) Sub-Committee of Loughborough University (R16-P003). The participants provided written informed consent including permission to publish pseudonymized transcripts.

I collected all instances of client complaints about absent parties—amounting to 18 complaints. I transcribed these sequences according to Jefferson’s (2004) notation. Excluded from analysis in this article are two sets of cases. In the first, client complaints are disattended by recipients; one circumstance in which this happens is when a complaint is treated as tangential by focusing responses on other aspects of a client’s report. In the second, the facilitators produce forms of passive recipiency (Jefferson, 1981a) or actively discourage the progression of a complaint; one circumstance in which this happens is when a client has already engaged in several protracted complaints within a meeting. I aim to examine these cases in a future report. By contrast, this article focuses on six cases where the facilitators fully align as complaint-recipients; their responses display their understanding that a complaint is underway and concurrently treat it as a legitimate activity making relevant more-than-minimal responses. Common to these complaints is that they focus on family and friends’ withdrawal of support. These cases fit the purpose of the present investigation because they embody recipients’ understandings of what constitutes a complaint and of the responses that complaints make relevant in the context of the support group. The examples used in this article exemplify patterns identified across these cases.

Results

Client complaints emerge in the first half of the meetings, dedicated to a round of individual check-ins. The check-ins consist of reports of recent life events and are delivered through multi-unit turns that can occupy several minutes. The complaints examined here are either the main focus of those reports (e.g., Extract 4) or are embedded in reports whose main focus is not complaining (e.g., Extract 2). Regularly, the volunteer facilitator is the first to respond. The client can then elaborate the complaint further, thus occasioning additional responses from the facilitator and sometimes other group members, until their check-in is brought to a close and the focus moved to another client. Sometimes, subsequent clients’ check-ins link to prior clients’ check-ins, for example, by sharing that they have similar complaints about their own family members. The subsequent sections focus on responses to client complaints and how those responses display orientations to the hurt and the blaming as components of complaints.

Formulating the impact of the reported events

Regularly, the facilitators’ first response to a client complaint is one that recognizes the impact of the complained-of events on the client (on recognition, Voutilainen et al., 2010; on formulations, Drew, 2003) while avoiding affiliating with the attribution of responsibility also embodied in the complaint. Extract 2 and 3 come from the beginning of a meeting and exemplify the use of an impact formulation. The facilitator, Amy, has asked the clients whether they have death anniversaries in the present month (data not shown). As Extract 2 begins, a client, Joanne, starts to share about the recent anniversary of her husband’s death (lines 1–5).

(2) BRV1-1 5:41 “Joanne’s son”

C-Joa = Joanne (client). F-Amy = Amy (facilitator). Five other clients and two other bereavement volunteers are present.

Joanne shares that she has felt worse than with the previous anniversary, contrary to her expectations (lines 8–10), and attributes this to the absence of her son John (lines 10–14). Although Joanne does not frame this absence as a complainable matter, it can be available as such in the context of culturally available expectations (to which the members of a bereavement support group can orient) that a son support her mother on a death anniversary (and in the context of knowing that John had indeed been with Joanne on the previous anniversary, lines 12–14). It is also notable that Joanne does not mention circumstances that might justify John’s absence (line 17). Subsequent parts of Joanne’s report frame John’s conduct as insensitive—and thus complainable. This includes mentioning John’s iPad message requesting that she buy a flower on his behalf (lines 17–19). The direct quoting of John’s message characterizes it as a stern directive (“do not forget to get my flower”), particularly through the marked prosody on “not” (line 18). The emphasis on “my” further casts John’s conduct as insensitive and selfish (see E. Holt, 2000). This contrasts with Joanne’s characterization of herself as being sensitive to her son’s request (lines 24–26; Drew, 1998; Edwards, 2005). The resulting task of buying the flower is framed as an imposition: Joanne reports that she went “all the way into Blackpool” to get it (line 22; see Drew, 1998 on overdetermined descriptions of actions). The context of the death anniversary, where a bereaved person might expect messages of support from a close relative (rather than a message containing a demand), further contributes to casting John’s conduct as complainable.

Responding to Joanne’s turn is a delicate task. Because complaining is not the main business of her report, Amy could disattend its complaint-implicative elements (Mandelbaum, 1991/1992; Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009), but this could fail to acknowledge important aspects of Joanne’s described experience (Joanne herself presented John’s absence as contributing to her struggle in lines 10–14). At the same time, addressing the complaint-implicative aspects could make explicit something that Joanne’s report has only implied (see Drew & Walker, 2009; E. Holt, 2000): the blaming of her son. Extract 3 shows how Amy navigates this.

After Extract 2, Joanne has shared other aspects of the anniversary, including feeling isolated and being affected by the bad weather over the weekend (data not shown). Lines 1–2 of Extract 3 show the ending of Joanne’s report before Amy responds. Of all the aspects in Joanne’s report, it is notable that Amy addresses the impact of John’s absence, thus validating its importance.

(3) (1m34s after extract 2) “Joanne’s son”

Amy uses a formulation to convey her understanding (“I’m hearing,” line 5) of some aspects of Joanne’s report (see Beach & Dixson, 2001). Amy initially highlights Joanne’s agency in the reported events (lines 5–7), specifically her decision to go to the place where her husband’s ashes are (something that Joanne reported after Extract 2, in data not shown). Against that background, Amy formulates the impact of John’s absence on Joanne (line 10). The selective design of Amy’s impact formulation (“But you had to go on your own”) foregrounds the effect of John’s actions while avoiding mentioning him as the agent of those actions. It thus appears designed to avoid addressing matters of responsibility. Consistent with this, Amy does not comment upon the complainable matter of John’s stark request to buy a flower. After Joanne’s confirmation (lines 11–12), Amy shifts the focus to something constructive: what Joanne would have needed to support her through the anniversary (lines 14–15). Through the generic reference to “someone,” Amy once again ostensibly avoids referring to anyone who might have failed to support Joanne.

Amy’s formulation (line 10) selectively addresses the impact (or hurt) component in Joanne’s report, which it validates. The impact formulation also appears to be carefully crafted to avoid taking a position relative to matters of responsibility, indirectly displaying an orientation to their sensitivity (and thus their relevance). The impact formulation enables Amy to demonstrate understanding while avoiding being heard as judging Joanne’s son, thereby maintaining a degree of impartiality.

Amy’s impact formulation in Extract 3 exemplifies how the facilitators orient to the clients’ complaints as embodying two distinct components: the hurt and the blaming. In the extracts examined in this section, orientation to the former is apparent, whereas orientation to the latter is somewhat tacit, embodied in the design of formulations that selectively avoid addressing matters of responsibility. In Extract 3, avoiding addressing the blaming is facilitated by the fact that Joanne’s report does not include an explicit attribution of responsibility. Client reports containing explicit attributions of responsibility present additional challenges, as the next case exemplifies.

The next example comes from later in the same meeting as Extracts 2 and 3. Before Extract 4, Christine announced that she is having problems with her son. She then reported that her son and his family are not visiting her, that they say they have no time, and that this “hurts” (data not shown).

(4) BRV1-1 22:31 “Christine’s son”

C-Chr = Christine (client). F-Amy = Amy (facilitator). V-Ant = Anthony (bereavement volunteer). Five other clients and another bereavement volunteer are present.

Christine’s report contains explicit blaming components (e.g., see the reported excuse [E. Holt, 2000], in line 6, and its contrast to the circumstantial detail [Drew, 1998] in lines 14–15, which undermines that excuse and casts Christine’s son as insensitive and selfish). It also features explicit formulations of impact or hurt (“just horrible,” line 7; “absolutely awful,” line 12). Christine is also hearably upset (as shown in the transcript through the symbol “~” indicating wobbly voice; Hepburn, 2004). This type of complaint presents Amy, the facilitator, with the problem of how to provide a compassionate response without being heard as participating in blaming Christine’s son. The following analysis focuses on how she navigates this.

Amy first draws a parallel with another client (Donald; lines 17–20) who has complained about members of his family in the same meeting (data not shown). This parallel validates Christine’s experience by establishing it as shared. However, it also takes a step back from the specifics of Christine’s complaint. Amy goes on to formulate the impact of the reported events in terms of a “loss” for Christine (line 24). This impact formulation points out the effects that her son’s actions have on Christine (the loss of contact and support) while avoiding naming him or his actions. Through the selective design of her impact formulation, Amy avoids taking a position toward the blaming embodied in the complaint while concurrently validating the hurt displayed in it. Like Extract 3, this suggests that Amy treats the blaming as a delicate aspect to respond to.

Impact formulations enable the facilitators to validate the hurt embodied in the clients’ complaints while avoiding addressing the attributions of responsibility also embodied in those complaints. This shows how the facilitators decouple the hurt and the blaming components of a complaint to recognize the former while avoiding taking a position toward the latter (at least initially).

Promoting a shift in focus or perspective

Impact formulations display the facilitators’ orientations to the hurt embodied in the clients’ complaints. The selective design of impact formulations suggests that the facilitators also orient to the blaming embodied in complaints and that they treat it as a more delicate matter to address. More direct evidence that complaints are indeed understood as also involving an attribution of responsibility (or blaming) comes from instances where the facilitators do address it in their responses. One circumstance in which this happens is when the clients further expand their complaint (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Selting, 2010; Weatherall, 2015). These expansions feature further characterizations of the complaint-target’s conduct, highlighting their responsibility for the complained-of events. The facilitators respond to these in two ways, both of which address the blaming component of the complaint. First, they use responses that deindividualize the problem; these avoid dealing with the specifics of the client’s situation and rather situate it in a wider context. Second, the facilitators use responses that address the client’s circumstances in more individualized ways. Both sets of responses introduce an alternative focus or perspective on the problem situation—one that does not support the client’s blaming and rather disaffiliates from it to an extent. This further suggests that the facilitators work to avoid being heard as joining the clients in blaming the complaint-targets.

Deindividualizing responses

Responding to the blaming component of a complaint entails taking a position on the clients’ attribution of responsibility for the complained-of events. The facilitators do so by introducing a perspectival shift designed to defuse the blaming embodied in the complaint. The facilitators do not deny that the complaint-target’s actions had a negative impact on the client, but they introduce a more benign view of the motivations behind those actions—one that does not entail attributing malevolent intent (see Feo & LeCouteur, 2017). These responses thus disaffiliate with the clients to an extent. Deindividualizing responses enable the facilitators to do so delicately, without commenting on the clients’ cases directly and rather by introducing perspectives that apply to them by implication.

One type of deindividualizing response is a generalization (Pino, 2021), that is, a statement about bereaved persons in general. Extract 5 happens shortly after Extract 4. After Extract 4, Christine has reiterated that her situation is “terrible” and “just awful.” She has reported that her son seems to think that the situation is just her problem and that she has to “get on with it.” Asked by Amy to elaborate (data not shown), Christine reports that her son blames her for the death of her husband (lines 1–3)—another complainable matter. Thus, following Amy’s impact formulation validating the hurt embodied in the complaint in Extract 4, Christine has expanded her complaint, with additional details about her son’s complainable conduct, thus creating additional opportunities for Amy to address the blaming embodied in the complaint.

(5) (19s after Extract 4) “Christine’s son”

Amy starts to make another connection to something discussed earlier in the meeting (lines 5 and 7), thus taking a step back from the specifics of Christine’s individual situation. Amy suspends this turn when Christine overlaps (line 8) with a generalized expression of indignation (on expressions of indignation, see Drew, 1998), arguably about relatives or children (categories that include her son; lines 8 and 10). This makes it particularly relevant for Amy to now address the blaming (as opposed to the hurt) component of the complaint. Christine’s use of a generalized condemnation gives Amy an opportunity to respond with a generalization of her own (lines 13–15 and 17). She proposes that bereaved people (a category to which Christine’s son belongs) sometimes blame others for the death of a loved one (like Christine’s son reportedly does) to make sense of that loss. This is a more benign view of Christine’s son’s conduct, which can now be seen as a way of coping with his own grief rather than as the product of selfishness or malevolence (for other ways of reinterpreting a complaint-target’s conduct in more benign terms, see Feo & LeCouteur, 2017). Amy balances this with the recognition that the son’s blaming of Christine for the death of her husband is wrong (“it’s not true,” line 13). Amy thus acknowledges the reality of the son’s actions and their consequences for Christine, but she concurrently introduces a more benign way of characterizing his motivations. Previous research documented that complaints often frame the actions of the complaint-target as deliberate (Drew, 1998), and it is precisely this aspect that Amy’s generalization challenges.

Amy’s generalized explanation applies to Christine’s son by implication; Amy thus avoids speaking about him directly. This enables Amy to manage the delicacy of a response that does not fully support and rather disaffiliates to some extent from Christine’s perspective. Evidence that Amy orients to the disaffiliative implications of her response is that she counterbalances it with a statement (prefaced with contrastive “but”—end of line 17) recognizing Christine’s hurt (lines 19–20 and 23–24) and expressing regret for her situation (“I’m so sorry,” line 24). Importantly, Amy’s deindividualizing response embodies her orientation to the blaming as a distinct component of Christine’s complaint, which she works to defuse to an extent through a perspectival shift.

Another deindividualizing practice is the invocation of a parallel experience (Heritage, 2011). In Extract 6, Sarah, a client, complains about some friends who have dropped out of her life after her bereavements. This complaint has already been introduced, and Jeanne, the facilitator, has addressed it through the practices already examined in this article (a recognition of the impact of the events on Sarah and a generalized explanation; data not shown). Sarah is thus further expanding her complaint at the beginning of Extract 6. Lines 1–2 show the final part of this complaint before Jeanne responds. Sarah’s formulation of her friends’ conduct implies lack of sensitivity and therefore responsibility for hurting her. This creates an additional opportunity for Jeanne to address the blaming component of Sarah’s complaint.

(6) BRV3-1 13:18 “Sarah’s friends”

C-Sar = Sarah (client); F-Jea = Jeanne (facilitator); six other clients and another bereavement volunteer are present.

In response to Sarah’s complaint, Jeanne formulates the impact of her friends’ conduct in terms of “loss” (line 6). Jeanne then starts a possible generalization (line 8), but she abandons it in favor of invoking a comparable experience (from line 10): that of a client she is supporting outside this group. This parallel validates Sarah’s experience by implication: Jeanne’s client has been abandoned by her “best friend” (line 13), and Jeanne comments on this as “a bigger issue in her life at the moment” (line 18)—something that strongly resonates with Sarah’s circumstances. The parallel thus works to further recognize the impact of the complained-of events on Sarah. Additionally, it addresses the blaming component of the complaint. Jeanne proposes that, in the case of her client, the friend’s conduct was the result of their inability to cope with the client’s bereavement (lines 13–14). This is a more benign view compared to the lack of sensitivity that Sarah’s complaint attributes to her own friends (see lines 1–2). Jeanne’s response appears designed to defuse the blaming component of the complaint and thus disaffiliates with Sarah to an extent (although Sarah disattends this to expand her complaint in lines 21–22). The parallel enables Jeanne to do this indirectly, by commenting on someone else’s experience in a way that applies to Sarah by implication.

Deindividualizing responses evidence the facilitators’ orientation to the blaming as a constituent component of the clients’ complaints. With these responses, the facilitators walk the fine line between acknowledging the clients’ experiences and introducing a perspectival shift designed to defuse the blaming embodied in their complaints.

Individualizing responses

The facilitators also address the blaming embodied in the clients’ complaints in more individualizing terms. In these cases, rather than introducing arguments that apply to the clients by implication, the facilitators address the specifics of the clients’ individual circumstances. One context in which this happens is when the clients expand their complaints further. It thus appears that protracted complaints are treated as making relevant individualized treatment, assisting the clients in making sense of their particular problems or exploring possible solutions to them. Like with deindividualizing responses, the facilitators do not affiliate with the clients’ blamings and rather introduce an alternative focus or perspective on the problem situation (see Feo & LeCouteur, 2017). These responses are thus to an extent disaligning (Jefferson & Lee, 1992) and disaffiliative.

One type of individualizing response is one that focuses on possible solutions for the problem situation. The next example comes from the same meeting as Extracts 2–3 and 4–5. After Extract 5, Joanne has shared that she is in a similar situation as Christine because her sons do not visit or call her (data not shown). We are thus in a context of protracted complaints about Joanne’s sons (see Extracts 2–3), which Amy (the facilitator) and another volunteer have already addressed through the practices documented in the previous sections (data not shown). Extract 7 shows the final part of a complaint about one of Joanne’s sons only sending her one iPad message (lines 1–2 and 5) before Amy intervenes in line 7. Joanne’s negative characterization of her son’s conduct (lines 1–2 and 5) implies an attribution of lack of sensitivity (a form of blaming).

(7) BRV1-1 29:16 “Joanne’s sons”

C-Joa = Joanne (client). F-Amy = Amy (facilitator). Five other clients and two other bereavement volunteers are present. One of these volunteers is Antony (V-Ant).

Amy’s question in line 7 is advice-implicative (Butler et al., 2010)—that is, it introduces a course of action that Joanne could undertake to improve the situation (contacting her sons). This does not undermine Joanne’s complaint (Amy does not deny that the sons’ actions have serious consequences for her), but it promotes a shift in how Joanne can position herself within the problem situation: from powerless victim (a positioning that Joanne’s complaint has implied so far) to active agent who can undertake actions to ameliorate the situation. Unlike the generalized explanations and parallels exemplified in the previous section, Amy’s question addresses the specifics of Joanne’s situation. Like those responses though, it does so in a cautious way: Amy does not suggest what Joanne could do; rather she asks a question about it. Although Amy’s question does not address the matter of responsibility (the blaming) directly, it has implications for it. The question promotes a shift from an exclusive focus on the complaint-target’s actions to a focus on the complaint-teller’s possible actions. This implies a construal of the problem situation in which responsibility for outcomes can be shared rather than unilaterally attributed to one party. The next example shows another type of individualizing response addressing the blaming.

Extract 8 happens after Extract 6. After Extract 6, Sarah has complained that her friends failed to invite her to the sales on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas in the UK) and went without her, thus breaking a yearly tradition of going with Sarah (data not shown). We are thus in the context of a protracted complaint that the facilitator, Jeanne, has previously addressed through the practices documented in the previous sections. As Extract 8 begins, Sarah adds a negative characterization of her friends’ actions (lines 1–2), received with an empathetically intoned newsmark by client Joanne (lines 3–4; Jefferson, 1981b). Sarah adds a negative assessment of the situation (line 7), possibly in pursuit of affiliation. This gives Jeanne, the facilitator, another opportunity to address the blaming embodied in the complaint. She responds from line 10.

(8) (1m6s after Extract 6) “Sarah’s friends”

C-Sar = Sarah (client); C-Joa = Joanne (client); F-Jea = Jeanne (facilitator); five other clients and another bereavement volunteer are present.

Jeanne’s question about the friends’ motives (lines 10–11) introduces an alternative perspective. Whereas a complaint typically portrays the complaint-target’s actions as egregious (Drew, 1998), as Sarah’s complaint has done, Jeanne’s question alludes to the possibility that Sarah’s friends might have had understandable (if not legitimate) reasons for not inviting her. This does not deny that those actions had a negative impact on Sarah but introduces the possibility that they were not motivated by malevolence or lack of consideration. Following Sarah’s nonanswer (lines 12–13 and 15), which further contributes to casting her friends’ conduct as gratuitous, Jeanne makes explicit the alternative perspective that her question implied. This is initially built as a generalization (“sometimes it can be quite … well meant,” lines 17–18) but subsequently turns into a proposal about Sarah’s friends (from line 18). Jeanne tentatively suggests that Sarah’s friends may have acted upon a genuine (albeit erroneous) assumption: that it would have been inappropriate to invite Sarah because of her recent bereavements (alluded to through the idiom of “having enough on,” line 20). This is a more benign explanation for the complaint-targets’ conduct compared to Sarah’s attribution of deliberateness. It thus appears designed to defuse the blaming component of Sarah’s complaint (although Sarah roundly rejects this and pursues the blaming of her friends; lines 22–23).

Individualizing responses further display the facilitators’ orientation to the blaming component of the clients’ complaints. With these responses, the facilitators promote a shift in focus or perspective, moving away from blaming the complaint-target and toward a construal of the problem situation in which the complaint-target’s motivations can be seen in more being ways or where responsibility for outcomes is shared by the complaint-teller rather than being unilaterally attributed to the complaint-target.

Discussion

Action formation of complaints

This study started from a question about the action formation of complaints—asking what makes complaints about absent parties recognizable as such. To address this, I investigated how recipient responses display understandings of what the constituent components of a complaint are—something that to the best of my knowledge no prior study has systematically addressed.

My findings are that recipient responses display orientations to complaints as comprising a display of hurt (a characterization of the impact that the complained-of events had on the complaint-teller) and a blaming (an attribution of responsibility to some party for causing those events). Both make relevant for recipients to take a position. Detecting recipients’ distinctive orientations to these components has been facilitated by the setting, which is perspicuous for two reasons. On the one hand, like other service providers, the bereavement support group facilitators (the complaint-recipients in these interactions) exhibit reluctance to affiliate with the blamings embodied in the clients’ complaints. On the other hand, the facilitators orient to the relevance of validating the hurt embodied in the clients’ complaints. They navigate the intersection of these contingencies by decoupling the two components of complaints. Indeed, they appear to exploit the fact that complaints are made up of these two components to selectively validate the hurt while avoiding validating the blaming. This makes observable their orientations to the hurt and the blaming as distinct (albeit co-occurring) constituents of complaints. These orientations might be more difficult to detect in settings where complaint-recipient responses are not similarly constrained and recipients can affiliate with both components of a complaint concurrently in the same responding turn (see Couper-Kuhlen, 2012).

Findings from this study offer additional insights on the action formation of complaints. There are indications that the two components are synergistically codependent—that they come as a package—and that this produces particular constraints for recipients: Affiliating with one component (the hurt or the blaming) may imply being heard as also affiliating with the other. There are different kinds of evidence to suggest this. First, the facilitators’ impact formulations recognize the reality of the clients’ experience (their hurt) but stop short of fully affiliating by matching the affect embodied in the clients’ complaints¹ (something that, by contrast, Joyce’s response cry does in Extract 1, taken from a mundane interaction). One explanation for this is that affiliating with the hurt could be understood as implying affiliation with the blaming. Additionally, impact formulations (e.g., “you had to go on your own” in Extract 3, line 10) designedly avoid addressing the matter of who is responsible for the complained-of events. One explanation for this is that the facilitators are attuned to the risk that validating one component of the complaint (the hurt) is heard as validating the other (the blaming) unless additional measures are taken (i.e., carefully crafting impact formulations that specifically avoid naming the complaint-targets or their actions and exclusively focus on their impact).

A second source of evidence for the close link between the two components of complaints is that when the facilitators disaffiliate from the blaming embodied in a client’s complaint, they take additional measures to validate the hurt embodied in it (see Extract 5, lines 17, 19–20, and 23–24). This suggests an orientation to the risk that taking a position toward one component of a complaint (here, the blaming) can be heard as implying the same position toward the other component (the hurt) unless additional measures are taken. Complaints thus incorporate two distinct but closely allied components (the hurt and the blaming), both making relevant for recipients to take a position. This creates practical problems for recipients because validating the hurt can be heard as also supporting the blaming, and disaffiliating from the blaming can be heard as also dismissing the hurt. This investigation has thus advanced our understanding of the organization of complaining as action and of practical problems that this organization entails for recipients.

Recognition of impact

A practical implication of the present study has been to show how service providers can validate the hurt embodied in clients’ complaints. Earlier research in institutional settings had largely focused on service providers’ disaligning and disaffiliative responses, thus possibly generating the overall impression that institutional representatives are bound to respond to clients’ complaints in ways that fail to appreciate the reality of their hurt. By contrast, the present study has documented impact formulations, which service-providers can use to recognize the hurt embodied in their clients’ complaints. This is especially relevant for therapeutic and social-support settings, where compassion plays an important role.

Complaints and bereavement support

The study also contributes broader understandings of how principles of bereavement support are put into practice. The aims of the bereavement support group whose meetings I examined include giving clients opportunities to interact within a social space that legitimates the voicing of experiences related to bereavement. Theoretical treatments of bereavement have pointed out that grief expression is heavily constrained in Western societies, where experiences related to death (including perceived loss of control, vulnerability, and weakness) are repressed because they undermine core values of capitalism and patriarchy (Harris, 2009); it has been suggested that significant others contribute to enforcing such repression by discouraging bereaved persons’ manifestation of grief—largely because it is a reminder of their own mortality (Harris, 2009). From this systemic standpoint, social relationships are thus crucial in shaping individual trajectories of bereavement and grief (see also Machin, 2014). This perspective appears to be reflected in the ways in which the facilitators respond to the clients’ complaints by acknowledging the impacts that significant others’ actions have on them—specifically by framing them as additional losses (e.g., “you had to go on your own,” Extract 3, line 10; “it’s that loss for you,” Extract 4, line 24). The ways in which the facilitators respond to the clients’ complaints thus put broader principles of bereavement support into practice (acknowledging how social relationships affect grief trajectories) and also fulfill important aims of the support group (validating the clients’ experiences).

Despite the facilitators’ work to recognize the reality of the clients’ hurt, there are also indications of a mismatch in how the participants make sense of the complainable matters that the clients raise. This is evidenced in some of the ways in which the clients receive the facilitators’ responses to their complaints. For example, after the facilitators’ initial responses recognizing the hurt embodied in a complaint, the clients recurrently expand their complaint further. One possible explanation is that the facilitators’ impact formulations only recognize the hurt embodied in the complaint, and therefore the clients’ elaborations pursue recognition of the blaming also embodied in it. Some evidence for this is that the facilitators do address the blaming in their responses to the clients’ complaint elaborations (see “Promoting a shift in focus or perspective”). An alternative explanation is that the facilitators’ impact formulations recognize the hurt embodied in the clients’ complaints but do not affiliate with it, and the clients’ complaint elaborations therefore pursue affiliation. Some evidence for this can be found in how the facilitators respond to the clients’ complaint elaborations. For example, introducing a more benign view of the complaint-targets’ motivations can be designed to reduce the complainability of their actions, thus making affiliation less relevant. Either way, it seems clear that the clients’ elaborations treat the facilitators’ responses as failing to fully appreciate the nature of their predicaments. This is further evidenced in how the clients sometimes resist the facilitators’ attempts to introduce an alternative focus or perspective on their problems (Extract 7, line 9; Extract 8, lines 12–15) or plainly reject the facilitators’ attempts to characterize the complaint-targets’ actions in more benign ways (Extract 8, lines 22–23). What does this tell us about the relationship between complaining and bereavement support?

Complaining is an important resource enabling people to share relational difficulties and seek support (Emerson & Messinger, 1977). The clients do so by characterizing the people they complain about as being at fault for causing them harm (a typical feature of complaints as documented in the literature, e.g., Drew, 1998). However, this unilateral attribution of responsibility clashes with the more systemic perspective embodied in the facilitators’ interventions. Indeed, the facilitators offer more benign interpretations of the complaint-targets’ motivations, for example, by proposing that their actions are a product of grief (Extract 5, lines 13–15, and 17; Extract 6, lines 13–14)—that is, the same kind of emotional experience that the clients are going through—or by suggesting that those actions are the result of widespread misconceptions about bereavement (Extract 8, lines 17–18 and 20–21), for which the complaint-targets cannot be held individually accountable. It thus appears that a key part of the therapeutic work in the bereavement support group entails offering the clients alternative ways of making sense of their experienced relational problems—framing them as the result of wider societal and cultural patterns, which shape the ways in which people react to bereavement and grief, rather than being the product of someone’s ill will. It is interesting to note that these interventions are not immediately successful in shifting the ways in which the clients make sense of their relational problems. On the contrary, the clients resist or even reject the facilitators’ proposals and pursue the unilateral blaming of the complaint-targets (e.g., Extract 8, lines 22–23). It is possible that the effects of the facilitators’ interventions are only visible over time—something that the present study could not track.

As a final note, it is intriguing to observe that complaints have a somewhat paradoxical nature. The very features that are designed to mobilize solidarity (such as the unilateral blaming of a complaint-target) also make recipient affiliation difficult—at least in the bereavement support group. This is perhaps a feature that complaints present across settings because several studies across institutional interactions (e.g., Pino & Mortari, 2013; Weatherall, 2015) and mundane interactions (e.g., Holt, 2012; Mandelbaum, 1991/1992) have documented cases where recipients avoid affiliating with complaints. This is a theoretically important question for future research. The present study has advanced our understanding of how the internal anatomy of complaints affects the ways in which this paradox plays out in a particular setting. The hurt embodied in complaints mobilizes compassionate responses in the support group. By contrast, the blaming embodied in complaints attracts transformative interventions. These are aimed at reshaping the ways in which the complained-of events are to be made sense of, paradoxically working to erode the very bases on which the complaints had been built.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the volunteers and clients who consented to being recorded. The research leading up to the findings reported here benefited from a partnership with Cruse Bereavement Support, a UK charity providing free care and bereavement counseling to people suffering from grief. I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this.