In this chapter, I reflect on how to go about applying Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA). When applying CA, we are concerned with the management of social institutions in interaction. However, the applied nature of our work means going beyond description, using the theories, principles, and methods of CA to address or ‘solve’ professional/practical ‘problems’ with roots or bases in interaction. For example, addressing public-health challenges, such as how physicians can resist ‘pressure’ for unwarranted antibiotic prescriptions during consultations for respiratory illnesses; or solving difficult or sensitive organizational tasks, such as how best to ask callers about their backgrounds in the service of ethnic monitoring on a telephone helpline. Here, the analyst is guided by professional/practical ‘problems’ or concerns. In the absence of existing guidance, I propose six key methodological steps for applying CA. These steps characterize the different kinds of ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ work that support our attempts to address such ‘problems,’ and to identify and share ‘solutions.’ Along the way I provide illustrative examples, both historical and contemporary. Finally, I highlight some of the ethical and moral dilemmas we might need to navigate in the service of such work.

Language use in the workplace setting has become an increasingly popular area of research within sociolinguistics. The original focus of analysis was conversations between professionals and laypeople (institutional talk), quickly extending to interactions between colleagues in their everyday workplace talk (workplace discourse). The major interest throughout this expansion can be summed up as the intersection between power and politeness. In line with wider developments in pragmatics, analyses adopting a (revised) Brown and Levinsonian approach are now outnumbered by interactional and discursive approaches to politeness and, more recently, impoliteness. In parallel with theoretical advances, the research agenda has moved from the enactment of speech acts at the level of utterance (notably directives, disagreements and aspects of meeting management) to the impact of interactional context/s (especially the workplace Community of Practice) and the role of wider discourses in the negotiation of meaning making between interactants. A focus on metapragmatics and ideologies extends these concepts even further, offering the opportunity for more nuanced reflections on sociopragmatic issues. The discussion is illustrated by analyses from workplace discourse scholars, including examples from our own research carried out over the past twenty years.

Commercial service encounters are broadly defined as everyday interactions in which some kind of commodity, be it goods, information or both, is exchanged between a service provider (e.g. clerk, vendor) and a service seeker (e.g. customer). Previous work has focused primarily on transactional and interpersonal aspects of service encounters, including issues of politeness and intracultural variation in face-to-face, telephone and online contexts. In this chapter, we examine current issues in service encounter discourse. After presenting some key concepts and predominant contexts of service encounters, we provide a critical review of theoretical models used to examine service encounter interaction, explain the distinction between interpersonal and transactional talk and describe some aspects of sociopragmatic variation in service encounter contexts. We end the chapter with a discussion of methodological issues and future directions.