Avslag och affekt

Hantering av utebliven service i svenska kundsamtal

Abstract

This article examines what happens in the unusual event of a staff member being unable to provide requested service to a customer in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish service situations. The study analyzes 25 cases (out of a corpus of 1,100 service encounters) where staff members reject a request, with focus on how such rejections are handled lexically, prosodically, and with embodied resources by both customers and staff. In the data, customers generally express some kind of affect – disappointment, surprise, frustration, and/or irritation – after staff members have delivered a rejection.
The study shows that affect is not only audible, but also highly visible. In fact, embodied expressions of affect often precede verbal ones, and the affect expressed by non-verbal resources (facial expressions with puffed cheeks, downturned mouths, wide eyes and bared teeth, selftouching, and various vocalizations such as clicking sounds and sighing) often convey greater affect than the immediately following verbal expression. The data suggest that nonverbal and lexical expressions of affect do slightly different things in interaction, and that bodily resources signal more intense feelings such as irritation and frustration, while lexical resources tend to signal disappointment. The affect-laden displays in the rejection sequences studied represent a sequentially ordered phenomenon and bear certain conventionalized, even stylized features.