Negotiating confrontation: The problematic nature of initiation and response

Role Reversal

“…Social confrontation, “when one actor signals another actor that his or her behavior has violated (or is violating) a rule or expectation for appropriate conduct within the relationship or situation” (Stutman & Newell, 1990, p. 185) has been studied in many contexts, but rarely health related. Generally speaking, what is known about social confrontation suggests that health confrontations—signaling that health-related actions or behaviors are inappropriate, concerning, or need to change—carry unique risks for the confronter, such as relationship damage, conflict, face threats, and other potentially serious repercussions (Newell & Stutman, 1987b). These risks can be threatening enough for people to avoid broaching the topic (Afifi, Olson, & Armstrong, 2005).…”

Efficacy and Outcome Expectations Related to Customer Complaints About Service Experiences

“…With service-based complaints, the dissatisfying elements of the service experience lead to a number of possible initiating acts on the part of the consumer that begin and frame the confrontation episode (Newell & Stutman, 1989-90). Newell and Stutman (1989-90) describe five categories of initiating acts (hinting, seeking confirmation, blaming/accusing, emotional display, and emotional statement), but note that complaint initiation likely occurs through a sequence of negotiated interdependent actions, rather than strictly through one initiating act.…”

Complaint sequences across proficiency levels: the contribution of pragmatics and multimodality

“…The lack of specific structures of complaints makes the study of complaint complex since different acts can be involved in a complaint situation. In this chapter I have presented some of the influential structures of complaint discourse functions (Schaefer, 1982;Piotrowska, 1987;Olshtain and Weinbach, 1987;Newell andStutman, 1989, 1990;Trosborg, 1995;Murphy and Neu, 1996;Laforest, 2002;Chen et al, 2011) as well as those that have served to design the classification for the present study (Schaefer, 1982;Piotrowska, 1987;Trosborg, 1995;Laforest, 2002;Chen et al, 2011). The structures of complaint presented in this chapter should be seen as a starting point to examine learners' complaint discourse functions, and therefore, it might be expanded if required to capture the nature of the complaints.…”

“…Hence, drawing on previous research on complaints (Schaefer, 1982;Piotrowska, 1987;Trosborg, 1995;Laforest, 2002;Chen et al, 2011) and responses to complaints (Newell andStutman, 1989, 1990;Laforest, 2002), the following moves are suggested. Table 3 best illustrates the different discourse functions.…”

“…Laforest (2002Laforest ( , p. 1597 points out that "[f]rom an interactional standpoint, if we take the complaint as the first part of an adjacency pair, there is no typical corresponding second part: the complaint can be followed by a denial, rejection, justification, making excuses, etc". Laforest (2002), pointing to the work of Newell andStutman (1989, 1990) on verbal confrontation, indicates that few studies have focused on the response to complaints. Laforest (2002) argues that there are many ways of responding to a complaint, which can be included into two main categories: (1) acceptance of the fact that a supposedly shared rule has been broken; and (2) rejection of the fact.…”