Mediated Business Interactions

This is the first monograph to examine mediated business interaction in Spanish. It focuses on communication between native speakers of Spanish from different Spanish-speaking countries with a view to informing our understanding of intercultural communication in a contemporary business environment. Using elements of pragmatics with tools from conversation analysis, the book examines the various activities that telephone conversationalists engage in to supply and demand a service over the phone through the mediational means of Spanish by addressing the following questions.

• Do speakers of Spanish display similar communicative practices as those observed in other languages when requesting and being offered a service over the phone?
• Do specifically located activities such as the call openings and closings display similar coordination and ritualisation as that observed in other languages?
• Does the language seen as a cultural tool reflect a different orientation towards such activities?
• What strategies do telephone agents and (prospective) clients employ to obtain a sale and either procure the best value for money or obviate it, respectively? And, what role does intercultural communication play in the construction of these practices?