Abstract:
Although the term complaining represents an ostensibly straightforward behaviour, it
has come to obtain a range of meanings within academic and commercial works which
have directed research toward understanding the behaviour and attempting to improve
the way that it is undertaken, particularly in commercial environments where complaint
handling constitutes an important field of commercial practice for many firms. It is
proposed in this thesis that such variation in the way that complaining is approached is
problematic, as it is treated ways that frequently underemphasise the fundamental point
that it is overwhelmingly conducted in interpersonal interactions using language as its
primary vehicle (Edwards, 2005). This thesis offers an approach to complaint handling
and complaining that eschews such approaches in favour of an empirically grounded
account based on the principles of ethnographic analysis, conversation analysis, and
discursive psychology. Through investigating the complaint handling procedures as
practiced by employees in an institution expressly dedicated to the receipt of complaints
and enquiries from customers by employing participant observation and interviews, an
account of complaint handling is developed that identifies how a range of forces works
to impact on the way that it is performed in an institutional environment, furnishing
complaint handling with a level of detail not currently offered in managerial literature
dedicated to developing the practice. Next, two research chapters present the
investigation of two different aspects of complaint interactions themselves. The first of
these focuses on call openings as customers and institutional agents work to align
themselves to the project of the call, demonstrating varying orientations to institutional
complaining as callers demonstrate their own procedures for complaining (and
enquiring) which may not match the institutional prerogatives and procedures of the
agents receiving the calls. The final research chapter offers an analysis of a recurrent
practice in the complaint calls themselves: callers’ use of self-disclosure in the service
of rendering matters as problematic and warranting complaint. This finding adds to
existing discursive understandings of how complaining is done. Taken together the
findings offer an alternative approach to investigating complaint handling by treating it
as an indexical practice bound to local demands. This offers a detailed depiction of
complaint handling and complaining ‘in situ’ that may offer researchers and commercial
entities a new approach to investigating how it is that complaining is done and how, in
commercial or institutional contexts, complaint handling may be improved through the
methods employed in the thesis.
