Spatial Engagement in Persian Ethnic Shops in Sydney
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Dariush Izadi
Dariush Izadi is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is working on his doctoral dissertation which deals with Service Interactions in Persian Shops in Sydney. In his work, he applies MDA to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in the shops.
Abstract
Service encounters are a fundamental activity in everyday life whereby commodities and/or information are exchanged between a service provider and a customer. A service encounter is by nature a goal-oriented speech event. However, goals at service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions; on the contrary, they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. The current study focuses on the intersection of social action, practices and discourses produced and reproduced by the shop owners (husband–wife teams) and the customers within a site of engagement in Persian ethnic shops in Sydney and the way they are interactionally realized. Unlike prior studies, which have tended to focus on verbal exchanges as units of analysis without paying much attention to the site of engagement, research on service encounters has recently shifted its focus toward an understanding of the social processes that underpin such verbal exchanges. The present study is situated within the framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollon, 2001b) and Nexus Analysis (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) in that it focuses on how the social practices imbricated in service encounters are always mediated by a range of mediational means, of which wording and text is only one. In such settings, joint actions are not undertaken exclusively through language use, but frequently incorporate nonverbal conduct and references toward material objects available in the physical environment. The study concludes that a nexus analysis of the practices embedded in service encounters provides a finer understanding of specific social practices and actions and local material contexts, which serve to ascribe social identities for shop owners and customers.
About the author
Dariush Izadi is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is working on his doctoral dissertation which deals with Service Interactions in Persian Shops in Sydney. In his work, he applies MDA to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in the shops.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, the author would like to acknowledge and express his gratitude to his principal supervisor, Professor Christopher N. Candlin, who provided the support, encouragement and inspiration which enabled him to carry out this article. The author also wishes to extend his thanks to the shop owners and their customers for their participation and to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper. This research forms part of his doctoral thesis, which was conducted at Macquarie University. It was partially supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Analysing the Construction of Modal Configurations with Mediating Digital Texts in the Classroom
- “Every Teacher, a Caring Educator”: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Teacher Recruitment Video in Singapore
- Multimodal Thought Presentation in Chris Ware’s Building Stories
- Objects, Frozen Actions, and Identity: A Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis
- Spatial Engagement in Persian Ethnic Shops in Sydney
- Visual Essay
- Sign Categories Used in Islamic-Theosophical-Oriented Persian Carpets and the Order of Their Inter-semiotic Translation into Persian
- Book Review
- John A. Bateman: Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Analysing the Construction of Modal Configurations with Mediating Digital Texts in the Classroom
- “Every Teacher, a Caring Educator”: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Teacher Recruitment Video in Singapore
- Multimodal Thought Presentation in Chris Ware’s Building Stories
- Objects, Frozen Actions, and Identity: A Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis
- Spatial Engagement in Persian Ethnic Shops in Sydney
- Visual Essay
- Sign Categories Used in Islamic-Theosophical-Oriented Persian Carpets and the Order of Their Inter-semiotic Translation into Persian
- Book Review
- John A. Bateman: Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide
