Service Encounters and Cross-Cultural Communication Symposium

Service encounters, understood as contextual situations in which the ‘server’ has a professional role and the ‘served’ expects to get something from that specific service, have been widely studied from a pragmatic and interpersonal point of view in the last decades. One of the reasons lies on the fact that the communicative exchange between customer and service provider is essential for the success of the service encounter itself. In this context, the choice of the appropriate utterances, the interpretation and negotiation of the message and the interactants’ expectations are influenced by countless variables.

To further explore verbal interaction in service encounters, this first symposium aims at gathering specialists in communication in service encounters from a variety of perspectives and thus create a forum of ideas and recent developments that may help not only advance in this particular context but also contribute to improve communication in professional settings and unify current studies.