Servicing the body: placing glasses on the client’s head at the opticians

Abstract

Various forms of service work rely upon personnel undertaking activities that necessitate close, and in some cases potentially intimate, contact with a client’s body. In this paper, we consider the ways in which opticians place and position glasses on the head of their clients and how they avoid, or at least ameliorate, the problems and sensitivities that might arise in this close encounter with the co-participant. The paper is based on the analysis of a substantial corpus of video-recordings, augmented by field work, undertaken both in UK and Denmark. The analysis draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and contributes to our understanding of the interactional accomplishment of body work and embodied conduct and to the growing corpus of research concerned with ‘multimodality’ and the social organisation of service encounters.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly supported by the Danish foundation Synoptik-Fonden.

Notes on contributors

Brian L. Due

Brian Due, PhD, is associate professor at Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. He is the co-editor of Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality. He has published papers and books on social interaction and the use of technologies and objects-in-interaction using EMCA and video ethnography. He is particularly interested in perception.

Dirk Vom Lehn

Dirk vom Lehn, PhD, is reader in organizational sociology at Kings Business School, Kings College London. His research is primarily concerned with people’s experience of exhibits and exhibitions in museums and with occupational practice of optometrists. It draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) as well as on recent developments in the analysis of video-recordings.

Helena Webb

Helena Webb, PhD, is senior researcher at Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. She is interested in the ways in which users interact with technologies in different kinds of setting and how social action both shapes and is shaped by innovation.

Christian Heath

Christian Heath, PhD, is Professor of Work and Organisation, Kings Business School, Kings College London. He specializes in video-based studies of social interaction, drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, with a particular interest in multimodality; the interplay of talk, bodily conduct and the use of tools and technologies.

Johan Trærup

Johan Trærup, is consultant in the research company Nextwork. He is doing business anthropology in a variety of settings and has published specifically on interactions at the opticians.