In:Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking
Edited by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada and Maurice Nevile
[Not in series 187] 2014
► pp. 191–223
Managing multiactivity in a travel agency
Making phone calls while interacting with customers
Published online: 4 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.187.07tic
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.187.07tic
Participants in travel agency service encounters must manage attention among co-occurring actions and transitions from one activity to another. Intersecting activities that require the mobilisation of the same verbal modality, such as incoming and outgoing phone calls during an encounter with a client, require the initiation, suspension, and termination of one (or more) activity within another. But whereas outgoing calls allow for a gradual construction of the co-participants’ awareness of a (potential) suspension of the current interaction, incoming calls are inherently unexpected and so require a more sudden action to suspend the current activity and initiate the next one. Such multiactivity can lead to disruptions, as manifest in hesitations, syllable lengthening, self-repair, etc. Participants draw on multimodal resources to manage such multiactivity and its temporal constraints.
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