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3 - Preference Organisation and Turn Design as Interactional Resources for Persuasion in Telesales

from II - Persuasion and (New) Contexts of Use

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2025

By
Bogdana Humă
Edited by
Sofia Rüdiger  and
Daria Dayter
Sofia Rüdiger
Affiliation:
Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Daria Dayter
Affiliation:
Tampere University, Finland
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Summary

Traditionally, the role of language in persuasion has been mostly studied in experimental settings with a focus on how persuasive messages are understood, processed, and ultimately complied with. Recently, a new approach has emerged that focuses on the sequential properties of language-in-use mobilised in real-life persuasion-in-interaction (Humă, 2023). This body of research illuminates how aspects of sequence organisation (Humă et al., 2019, 2020), turn design (Llewellyn, 2015), and lexical choice (Sikveland & Stokoe, 2016, 2020) are implicated in persuasion. The present study contributes to this line of work by zooming in on two configurations for formatting requests in sales interactions: when-formulated and if-formulated sales requests. Using conversation analysis to examine a corpus of 159 real-life telephone calls between salespeople and prospective customers, I show that the former configuration is more effective in eliciting productive responses that advance the commercial activity. These findings can be explained in terms of the differential opportunities afforded by the two configurations to reject the sales requests. Thus, this study strengthens the claim that, in real-life social interaction, persuasion is mainly realised through the architecture of possibilities for responsive action and not through the effects of language-in-use on individual minds.

Keywords

languagepersuasionrequestspreference organisationturn designsales callsconversation analysisdiscursive psychology
Type
Chapter
Information
Manipulation, Influence and Deception
The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language
 , pp. 45 - 62
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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