Doing Introductions: The Work Involved in Meeting Someone New

Abstract

As the gateway to personal social relationships, introductions are critical to sustaining everyday social life. This article provides the first detailed empirical analysis of naturally occurring introductions, elucidating the interactional work participants do to achieve a sequence as an introduction. Close examination of video recorded introductions between English-speaking persons coming together to socialize and/or do work reveals that: when a known-in-common person is present, parties treat mediator-initiated introductions as preferred over self-initiated introductions; when launching introductions, offers of identifying information are strongly preferred over requests; in formulating introducible persons, speakers select from many possible name forms and social categories/identities; and parties hold themselves and others accountable for a display of remembering persons with whom they have worked through introductions. This research thus demonstrates that, during introduction sequences, participants locally manage social norms fundamental to the maintenance of “face,” interactional affiliation, and social solidarity.

Keywords:

• Introductions
• Unacquainted Persons
• Opening Face-to-Face Interaction
• Social Solidarity
• Preference Organization

Acknowledgements

I thank Galina Bolden for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and I am grateful to Manny Schegloff, John Heritage, Steve Clayman, and Gene Lerner for their encouragement and support. I also thank Tanya Stivers and Jeffrey Robinson for providing supplemental data sources for this study.

Notes

1. This article presents an analysis of how unacquainted persons who are “comembers of a subclass of proper conversationalists” (Sacks, 1975) begin interacting for the first time. For description of how “improper conversationalists” begin to engage in conversation (e.g., via use of a “ticket”), see Sacks (1975, p. 67).

2. “TCU” is the conversation analytic abbreviation for “turn-constructional unit,” a fundamental unit of speech (e.g., a sentence; a word) out of which a speaker may construct a turn-at-talk in conversation (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974).

3. Another case of a mediator choosing asymmetrical formulations of the introducible parties can be seen in Excerpt 1. Whereas Olexa formulates the man with whom she is arriving categorically as her “little brother,” omitting mention of his name (and thereby choosing to not offer her sorority sisters personal access to him), she formulates each of the women by first name only, treating “who” they “are” categorically (e.g., her sorority sisters) as transparently inferable from shared expectations about the local context.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Pillet-Shore

Danielle Pillet-Shore (PhD, University of California Los Angeles) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. Her research examines interactional phenomena critical to creating and maintaining human social and professional relationships in everyday life