Responses to indirect complaints as restricted activities in Therapeutic Community meetings

Abstract

In this chapter I investigate how the staff members of a mental health Therapeutic Community in Italy avoid displays of affiliation in response to residents' indirect (or third party) complaints. I show how this restriction can be embodied in different practices: ignoring a resident's turn carrying a possible complaint, avoiding attending the complaint-components of a resident's turn, and disaffiliating with a resident's complaint.

‘I am put on quite a bit’: Recurrent complaining and the ambivalences of multigenerational near‐co‐residence

“…164–165). This, though, presents challenges for analysts; and the issue of identifying complaints as complaints when they are implicitly designed, when there is no explicit orientation by participants to the ‘moral work’ (Drew, 1998, p. 302) being done in the detailing of some matter, has been widely discussed in the research literature (Drew, 1998; Edwards, 2005; Pino, 2015; Schegloff, 2005).…”

“…In other studies, it is clear that successive interactions within largely the same participation framework are likely to be at issue (e.g. Heinemann, 2009; Laforest, 2009; Pino, 2015). In none of these studies, though, is successivity the focus of the analysis.…”

“…Studies of complaining, including of complaints in long sequences in single interactions, abound; the point of departure for this study is its focus on a series of third‐party complaints by the same complainant to the same recipient spread across four discrete encounters, the first and last of which are separated by 21 weeks. A methodological challenge in studying potentially ambiguous practices like complaining is that ‘the moral work’ achieved through detailing the circumstances of a possible complainable may be implicit, with none of the participants explicitly displaying their orientation to the matter as a complaint (Drew, 1998, p. 302; Pino, 2015). This paper aims to show how, by studying the possible complainant's detailing work longitudinally, that is, across successive encounters, and by paying careful attention to the minutiae of the design of this detailing work—features like use of reported speech, marked use of reference, category work—we can make a defeasible case (a) that complaining is indeed the interactional practice underway; and (b) that the underlying target of these pieces of detailing work—these signals of complainability—is the same person on each occasion.…”

(Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre

“…difficulties, but such behaviour may simply be a more practical and thus potentially efficient thing to do. In this respect, Pino (2015) demonstrated that staff members of a mental health institution disattend to patients' complaints by letting them pass and continue with the ongoing activity precisely for this reason.…”

“…Complaints about service provision are ubiquitous, whether they are manifested directly to the service provider or to a third party. It is therefore not surprising that research on complaints in institutional settings has attracted much attention and supplied the knowledge on how the participants carry out complaint sequences and the strategies they use in an attempt to achieve their interactional goal (Márquez Reiter, 2005Heinemann, 2009;Monzoni, 2008Monzoni, , 2009Ruusuvuori & Lindfors, 2009;Pino, 2015). Broadly speaking, to complain is to report a particular problem that had already occurred and in doing so express a sense of dissatisfaction or unfairness.…”