Turning the Passer-by into a Customer: Multi-party Encounters at a Market Stall

ABSTRACT Interactions at a fruit and vegetable stall in a public market are analyzed—focusing on the moments of configurative change as one sales encounter comes to an end and another begins. Market participants address the lack of structural regulation endemic to an open market stall by interactively achieving an order for sales. Participants’ role transformations from passersby to customers turn out to be finely intertwined with respective changes to the entire configuration at the market stall. The evidence demonstrates that various forms of interactions are at play in a public market that go beyond the boundaries of dyadic and focused sales encounters. Furthermore, the complex nature of multiple actors in informal settings managing divergent action trajectories can result in participants entering encounters “at the wrong moment,” thus lacking situational knowledge to interpret a constellation “correctly.” Overall, the findings connect conversation analytic studies on service encounters with sociological and ethnomethodological research on interaction in public spaces. The data are in Swiss German with an English translation.