There is a need for a holistic perspective when considering aspects of natural interactions with robotic socially believable behaving systems, that must account of the cultural, social, physical, and individual (the context) features that shape interactional exchanges. Context (the physical, social and organizational context) rules individual’s social conducts and provide means to render the wo...

Music is sometimes compared to language as a system of communication, however this comparison is usually at a generic formal, cultural or social level. This paper explores this analogy at the detailed level of interaction: to what extent can musical contributions act as conversational turns? We explore this question through an ethnographic study of music lessons. We describe a new transcription...

This volume explores the relationship between gender and language through the analysis of discourse in interaction. Some chapters compare the discourse of females and males; others analyze interaction among fe­ males. All the analytic chapters both provide model analysis of conversa­ tional interaction and make significant theoretical contributions to the literature on gender and language. Of t...

The study of compliments has attracted the attention of many scholars (e.g., Goffman 1971; Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1978; Amouzadeh 2001; Golato 2002; Sharifian 2005) and has become a major issue in the area of interactional sociolinguistics. To date, many models of politeness have been put forward in the literature. In this study, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model was u...

Discussions concerning transsexual identities consider the self representations of transsexuals as either determined through medical discourses and practices, and thus as constructed and inauthentic or, alternatively, as expressive of an interior and thus ‘authentic’ essential self. In contrast to each of these arguments, this paper highlights the significance of social interaction to transsexu...

Thirty-six newly abstinent married male alcoholics, who had recently begun outpatient individual alcoholism counseling, were randomly assigned to a no-marital-therapy control group or to 10 weekly sessions of a behavioral marital therapy (BMT) or an interactional couples group. The cost-benefit analysis of BMT plus individual alcoholism counseling showed (a) decreases in health care and legal c...

This paper examines how a team of software professionals goes about estimating the effort of a software project using a judgment-based, bottom-up estimation approach. By employing a social practice perspective that highlights the distributed character of expertise and conceives actions as mediated by cultural tools, the paper analyzes the interactional process through which the estimation tasks...

Using a sample of 281 frontline service employees of a national retail bank, we test a social exchange model of antecedents of three dimensions of customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors suggested by prior boundary-spanning and services marketing/management literatures: external representation, internal influence, and service delivery. In support of our hypotheses, we identify fully media...