Turning the Passer-by into a Customer: Multi-party Encounters at a Market Stall

ABSTRACT

Interactions at a fruit and vegetable stall in a public market are analyzed—focusing on the moments of configurative change as one sales encounter comes to an end and another begins. Market participants address the lack of structural regulation endemic to an open market stall by interactively achieving an order for sales. Participants’ role transformations from passersby to customers turn out to be finely intertwined with respective changes to the entire configuration at the market stall. The evidence demonstrates that various forms of interactions are at play in a public market that go beyond the boundaries of dyadic and focused sales encounters. Furthermore, the complex nature of multiple actors in informal settings managing divergent action trajectories can result in participants entering encounters “at the wrong moment,” thus lacking situational knowledge to interpret a constellation “correctly.” Overall, the findings connect conversation analytic studies on service encounters with sociological and ethnomethodological research on interaction in public spaces. The data are in Swiss German with an English translation.

Notes

¹ In contrast to classic works of figurational sociology (Elias, 1997) and anthropology (Benedict, 1934), in which the term “interactive configuration” was also used, I am analyzing interaction taking place in situ.

² A detailed list of symbols used for multimodal transcription can be found online in Mondada (2014a). Additional icons for walking (/\), looking (ʘ), and flower (♣) are used to make the transcript easier to read.

³ For a discussion about the differences of heavily, moderately, and weakly structured spatial settings and related consequence for participants “doing space,” see Jucker et al. (2018).

⁴ Notice also the presence of another market visitor standing by the flowers. In the following, she will be approached by the second seller, who has left to stall to get something.

⁵ Note, however, that they are by no means the only or even universal way to interactively establish an order at the market stall (cf. Hochuli, 2019).

⁶ In fact, it will turn out that Xenia is going to buy apples, which are placed right in front of where she is queueing.

⁷ When Claudia arrives at the market stall, Erich greets her saying: “I had already thought that you wouldn’t be coming anymore.” Moreover, the corpus contains footage of another sales interaction with Claudia taking place on another day.

⁸ Excerpts 4–7 directly connect to each other. Icons for walking (/\), looking (ʘ), and flower (♣) are used to make the transcript easier to read.

⁹ The beginning and end of the incomprehensible turn indicate that Claudia takes up Erich’s joke (“you’ll have a beetle at home”) and points to the fact that she would then at least have something at home.

¹⁰ Excerpts 7–10 directly connect to each other.