Walking away: An embodied resource to close informal encounters in offices

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ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 76 (2015) 101--116 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Walking away: An embodied resource to close informal encounters in offices Sylvaine Tuncer * Télécom ParisTech, 46 rue Barrault, 75 634 Paris Cedex 13, France Received 26 August 2014; received in revised form 28 November 2014; accepted 30 November 2014

Abstract This article addresses informal interactions in offices by analyzing video recordings of naturally-occurring, unscheduled visits in offices. We focus on closings, and more particularly on the embodied resource of walking away by drawing heavily on a previous study. We show that fellow institutional members rely on a similar set of methods, types of walking away, to simultaneously close the encounter and achieve office work. During closings, parties are to elaborate the main features of their professional relationship and of the task at hand, and this is achieved through the interactional work to achieve closings. We also show embodied resources and the sequentiality of interaction play an important part in the production of deontic authority in office organizations. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Ethnomethodology; Office work; Informal interactions; Closings; Walking away; Deontic authority

1. Introduction This article addresses the interactional accomplishment of work in office organizations, from an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic angle (henceforth EM/CA; Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Sacks et al., 1974). With analyses of video recordings of naturally-occurring interactions, we explore the moment-by-moment and collaborative practices through which participants achieve the closings (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Button, 1987) of unscheduled visits in offices, with a focus on walking away as an embodied, mobile resource. Considering that members can and do orient to a variety of semiotic fields as forming one integrated stream of action in interaction (Goodwin, 2000), we draw particular attention to the role of bodies in orienting to, and producing, both a socially significant material setting (Streeck et al., 2011) and a sequentially-organized interaction. For fellow workers, cooperating to close a sequence of interaction means to make, and is a means to making, a move in their collaboration and in a work process. We will show that the visitor’s departure from where she stood in space during the interaction, as well as her subsequent mobility, are crucial resources in the simultaneous progression of interaction and organization. This article originally contributes to previous research from several angles. (1) It expands on Broth and Mondada’s framework of different types of walking away in sequence closings (Broth and Mondada, 2013), by exploring achievements specific to office settings. (2) It complements extant literature on closings with a focus on a setting and on embodiment and mobility. (3) It tackles as a related issue the production of deontic authority or entitlement in decision making in institutional settings (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012; Asmuss and Oshima, 2012) with a unique focus on embodied resources and mobility. (4) Lastly, it sheds new lights on remarkably understudied aspects of work: informal * Tel.: ++33 625627666. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.012 0378-2166/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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interactions, the role of bodies at work (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007), and the concrete, everyday phenomena that make the organization. One contribution of this study is therefore to document moments and practices; the other is to include their understanding to scientific knowledge of work and organizations. 2. Office work and informal interactions Scientific interest for the practical accomplishment of work at least dates back to Mintzberg’s study on managers (Mintzberg, 1973), and the success of in-depth ethnographic studies regularly revives it (Orr, 1997). Management and Organization Studies, observing that physical proximity improves and stimulates collaboration, claim a sound interest for informal interactions, but save a few exceptions in the field of CSCW and Workplace Studies (Kraut et al., 1990; Whittaker et al., 1994; Luff and Jirotka, 1998; Luff et al., 2000), they do not come to grips with concrete encounters in any depth (Fayard and Weeks, 2007). In other words, Barley and Kunda’s explicit call for more empirical research has not yielded much response for more than a decade (Barley and Kunda, 2001; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010). On the side of EM/CA, data-driven research, studies on talk at work tend to leave office organizations aside (Drew and Heritage, 1992). Boden’s in-depth and extensive research on talk in organizations remains unique for that matter (Boden, 1994), and in its wake, contemporary research on institutional interactions using video data study essentially meetings (Deppermann et al., 2010; Ford and Stickle, 2012; Mondada, 2004, 2006, 2007; Markaki and Mondada, 2012; Svennevig, 2012). Informal interactions are remarkably absent from this domain too, yet they are an important feature of the contemporary office, and occasion distinct work achievements. The encounter is occasioned by work, and in turn the encounter occasions some work to be achieved. As a consequence and as we intend to demonstrate below, there are recognizable methods for fellow workers to simultaneously accomplish an institutional activity and the sequence of interaction. The issue of deontic authority, recently raised anew, is also central to our setting and object. Focusing on semantics and turn-design, Stevanovic and Peräkylä identify several types of speaker’s suggestion for future events, and several types of responses, and the deontic stance each can display. The authors draw a framework of several recognizable pairs, more or less deontically congruent (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012). In a less taxonomic perspective, Asmuss and Oshima take on the notion of entitlement in decision making (Asmuss and Oshima, 2012), by looking at how collaborators in a meeting, as they propose an action be accomplished now, claim more or less entitlement to decide. They show different ways these proposals are complied with or resisted in response. We will mostly follow on the terms and definitions proposed in the two studies -- proposal, acceptance, announcement, suggestion for future action, deontic authority and entitlement -- and test their extensibility to the articulation of verbal and embodied aspects of interaction. 3. Closing an interaction Closing an interaction is a crucial moment and takes delicate work, because the last words are known to remain effective during the anticipated time of separation and to settle a relationship. One problematic achievement is to open the closing sequence. Conversationalists manage to get to a point where initiating closings is both appropriate and somehow expected: there are normative expectations regarding their being a non-unilateral accomplishment (these normative expectations are rendered visible as they blow up during argumentative walkouts, cf. Dersley and Wootton, 2001; Llewellyn and Butler, 2011). Then the closing sequence as a whole is a continuous interactional work implying close monitoring: each move can delay, accelerate or postpone actual closings because conversationalists are to make sure that all the necessary actions are achieved before actual closings. They must thus continuously assess the interaction so far as more or less complete and proceed in a very step-wise and collaborative fashion. The methods and practices for closing are a traditional topic in EM/CA. In their foundational paper, Schegloff and Sacks described conversationalists’ methods to make closings relevant at some point, to leave opportunities for ‘‘unmentioned mentionables’’ and to reach a point where the turn taking system no longer operates (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). Button systematically investigated a set of conversational objects (pre-closing turns, passing turn, unmentioned mentionables. . .) and closing-implicative environments, more or less likely to elicit a move out of closings (Button, 1987). The value of studying closings in a particular setting and an activity lies in identifying the types of achievement that regularly coincide with the initiation of closings; and what participants orient to as necessary achievements before actual closings. We know from mundane conversation that the closing sequence is where relatives (1) show a special orientation to ‘‘maintaining and reaffirming interpersonal relationships’’ and display involvement in the relationship (Bolden, 2008: 99). They also (2) provide sustained efforts at maintaining and producing the continuity of the relationship, recalling past actions and formulating future plans. Because a professional encounter and professional relationships are sustained by institutional objectives, specialized actions are performed during closings but it may help to think of them in parallel with the ones encountered in mundane

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conversation. Indeed, parties tend to (1) display their common involvement in a work process; (2) assess what they have just achieved as satisfying for this encounter, and orient to the work that need be achieved in the future, and how to achieve it. Because distribution of work, commitments and obligations are at play, issues of deontic authority are pervasive. In other words the closing sequence displays parties’ orientation to (a) organizational processes on a larger temporal scale, and (b) the production of work relations and their associated rights and obligations. It takes some skill to perform the complex natural language of organizations in interaction and be a good professional; to manage and coincide in both (1) the continued assessment of a work process and mutual commitment; whilst (2) displaying the appropriate sensitivity to the interactional situation and its contingencies. In addition to conversational work, the variety of semiotic fields available in face to face interaction demands participants’ detailed attention to numerous cues altogether. LeBaron and Jones have shown in a beauty salon ways of orienting to simultaneous ongoing activities in the larger social setting (LeBaron and Jones, 2002). Other studies have focused on the manipulation of artifacts: the way friends in a café manipulate their glasses and drink are resources to initiate departure together (Laurier, 2008). At the desk of a travel agency, Ticca looked how customers collect their personal belongings, position their bodies with respect to the desk and progressively shift postures (Ticca, 2012). Early research on medical visits have shown that in this setting where one participant leaves the room while the other remains, closings are initiated through the patient’s embodied conduct associated with verbal acceptance of the treatment (Heath, 1986). Our study complements on these approaches by focusing on the visitor’s mobility in order to identify a set of recognizable methods to close an unscheduled office encounter. To be able to associate organizational achievements with types of walking away, we draw heavily on Broth and Mondada’s study (henceforth B&M) where they identify and describe four ways in which two or more participants can walk away together at sequence closing (Broth and Mondada, 2013). There has been a longstanding and renewed interest for walking together as a concerted action (Ryave and Schenkein, 1974; vom Lehn, 2013; Weilenmann et al., 2014; De Stefani and Mondada, 2014), but this innovative article is precious grist to our mill. (1) By associating in a systematic analysis walking away and the organization of interaction, they show how this embodied conduct operates as a closing implicative action. (2) They demonstrate that, and show how, members adjust their verbal production to the movement and pauses in walking away, and the other way round, how walking away is adjusted to the (in)completions of speech. Embodied action and the trajectory of the interaction are thus shown to be mutually constitutive, with no obvious precedence the one over the other. (3) Eventually the synthetic framework of different types of walking away that is proposed, objectivizes the articulation of sequence organization with embodied action, thus forming a solid basis for further inquiry. This study builds on these elements with new material from one institutional setting. Before findings are exposed, each sub-section will open on a summary of what B&M have shown as one type of walking away to be achieving. Thus we will show that a corresponding type of walking away to close an unscheduled encounter regularly contributes to a recognizable organizational achievement. With our last fragment of walking back in the office, we will extend the framework to the well-known phenomenon of moving out of closings. One difference with B&M’s data is that parties to an office encounter rarely ever walk together: one leaves while the other remains in place, but we will endeavor to show throughout the analysis the symmetrical resources the sitting participant can make use of. 4. Data and method The findings presented here are a product of a larger research for which the author conducted an ethnography in three French organizations, and filmed twelve individual or shared offices for three days each with two cameras. The total video corpus of 120 h comprises (a) a variety of activities, such as computer development, human resources, public relations, ergonomics; as well as (b) a variety of functions, among which are a unit manager, a project manager, a head of a small service, or more autonomous functions such as expertise within a research and development unit. During the fieldwork, a better understanding of participants’ environment, tasks and responsibilities, was gained through discussions. But it is upon investigation of the corpus that unscheduled visits from one office to another appeared a frequent and recognizable communicational event for members: their choice as object for research is therefore data-driven. Sixty visits in total were isolated, very few of which were ruled out for appearing previously arranged between the participants. Closings were systematically analyzed with the aims and methods of conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974; Heritage, 1984) and with a particular attention to the ‘multimodal’, i.e. verbal, embodied and material dimensions of interaction (Deppermann, 2013; Hazel et al., 2014). In the empirical section we analyze five video excerpts, transcriptions rely on Jefferson’s conventions, and the methods for transcribing embodied action are available in Appendix. Throughout the analysis, only participants’ ‘‘identities for conversation’’ (Sacks, 1992) are used: the interaction initiator and the interaction target, visitor and occupant of the office, because these categories are demonstrably relevant for participants in the interaction (for principle of relevance and consequential procedurality, see Schegloff, 1991). Any category pertaining to background knowledge, whether from history of relations between participants or organizational statuses or functions, are left aside. This choice

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deserves mentioning since the works related to deontics we draw from, use professional categories, yet we do not insinuate that they thus drift from the members’ perspective. 5. Analysis 5.1. Walking away and smooth achievement of closings: the proposal--acceptance pair B&M describe as ‘‘smooth departure at sequence closing’’ the simplest and most frequent configuration where ‘‘walking away is a concerted action which not merely accompanies closings but also achieves them’’ (Broth and Mondada, 2013: 45). The authors analyze two excerpts where participants walk away together while they unproblematically and jointly close a sequence of verbal interaction. Also recurrent in office encounters, this type of walking away appears related to a particular activity: agreeing on an achievement in the limits of this encounter, and projecting future action. In the following excerpt, the visitor (V) is standing next to the office occupant (O) while the latter is looking for the document that the former has come to request. They are both looking at the computer screen as the transcript begins, and on line 1, O resumes their current task after a brief interruption.

[TD$INLE]

[TD$INLE]

On lines 1--2, O describes the extra work that will be necessary before she can grant V’s query (‘‘So: I have to find again the template she made for me because now as I said I >took another template<’’), preparing the ground to propose they postpone achievement of the requested task: ‘‘right, I’ll find them okay?’’ (line 3). This TCU semantically juxtaposes the

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idea that something has been achieved -- ‘‘right’’1 conveys a notion of enough having been done until this point -- and a commitment for future action, a way for O to invite V to leave by committing to send her later what she needs. But the tag at the end strongly projects acceptance and hence frames this turn as an announcement, rather than a proposal that would be made more contingent on V’s response, for instance by pursuing confirmation (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012). Embodiment-wise, the way O suddenly turns the upper part of her body to V (image 1.1) and, soon after, away from her again, projects disengagement and reinforces the closing-implicative character of this turn (vom Lehn, 2013). V fully aligns to this new trajectory through several means: she verbally agrees while reaching O with her arm as a token of agreement (‘‘yes (.) okay’’, line 4, image 1.2), and in a smooth continuation starts walking away (image 1.3). As a response to the announcement, initiating departure accompanies and embodies acceptance and compliance, it achieves a decisive move in the progression toward actual closings. The loose-coupling between interaction order and the organization (Goffman, 1983; Rawls, 1987, 1989) is particularly reflexive in this excerpt through deontics. Although the directionality of the service goes from O to V (the latter initiated the encounter to request something from V), it is O who initiates closings and thus assesses the adequacy of the encounter so far for that project (Raymond and Zimmermann, 2007). Participants converge on this deontic distribution, O’s entitlement to initiate closings and V’s little entitlement to request something (reinforced by her own account on line 5: ‘‘it’s not- there’sthere’s no emergency you know’’).2 This distribution has to do with the unscheduled, on-the-spot character of the query, it clearly relates to the interaction order: an unscheduled visit demonstrably triggers local rights and obligations, on which the terms of the final agreement highly depend. The indexicality of a deontic relationship is this original articulation between formal, organizational statuses, and rights and obligations associated with the terms of the encounter. Participants’ contingent asymmetry becomes now part of their formal, organizational relationship. Besides, this basic instance gives a clue as to why the production of deontic authority is at stake in virtually any closings: before they can actually take leave of each other, participants are to decide on the distribution of future work. In this excerpt closings are achieved smoothly and swiftly as V and O coincide on many aspects: no contradictory clue or tension between verbal production and embodied conduct on the one hand, and on the other the deontic stance each of them displays in consecutive turns, are congruent and facilitate agreement and closing. Thus from this excerpt we are able to draw a simplest pattern: (A) Announcement + embodied display of disengagement = first closing turn. (B) Compliance + walking away = aligning second closing turn. The next excerpt sequentially follows a similar pattern, but seemingly minor details, not least of all the articulation of talk with walking away, shape completely otherwise the closings and the terms of the final agreement. V has come to suggest they arrange a meeting with O and another colleague within the following days. In the course of the visit, they agree on arranging now the precise date and time. As the transcript begins, they have been looking at their calendars onscreen for several minutes.

[TD$INLE]

1 There seemed to be no ideal translation for ‘‘bon’’ as uttered in this specific situation. ‘‘Right’’ fails to convey the sense of enough, but is at least more closing implicative than ‘‘well’’ which is semantically closer. 2 The cut-offs and repairs are no doubt due to V’s efforts to walk though the office and physical obstacles on the ground.

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[TD$INLE]

O proposes a day for the meeting (‘‘we do it Thursday?’’, line 1), and after a silence (line 2) suggests the time (‘‘Nine o’clock?’’, line 3). Another long silence follows (line 4) that foreshadows V’s rejection, leading O to argue (‘‘It won’t take long’’, line 3), but V still does not respond, neither verbally nor by initiating departure (image 2.1). O insists by reformulating his previous account (‘‘In my opinion it won’t take long’’, line 7). After that does she initiate departure (image 2.2) and verbally accepts the proposal (‘‘Yeah okay Thursday nine o’clock yeah’’, line 8). It is mainly by initiating departure at this position in the ongoing talk, that V fully accepts the initial proposal, and the way she starts walking away reinforces the definite character of the agreement by projecting the end of the encounter. But her mitigated, protracted acceptance also embodies a reluctant, unenthusiastic stance regarding the agreement, consistently with the way she earlier withheld her response. While she walks away from O, she adds an increment (Ford et al., 2002) that reasserts this stance and considerably alters their agreement: ‘‘Nine, ten o’clock’’3 (line 10, image 2.3). She announces she will be late and thus slightly undermines her commitment in the conclusive agreement. Still she does not contest its conclusive status: by producing this increment while walking away and at an advanced stage of closings, she does not challenge the agreement by for instance opening a new sequence to discuss it. Like in Excerpt 1, numerous cues suggest that parties orient to a symmetrical relation of deontic authority. (a) O’s proposals are uttered on an interrogative prosody (lines 1 and 3) and hence pursue V’s acceptance, (b) V shows she has the possibility to accept or refuse by twice withholding a response, (c) the demonstrable need for persuasion (O’s accounts) indexes proposals made particularly contingent on their response (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012: 307), and (d) the my-side telling token (Pomerantz, 1980) prefacing the repeat of the account orients to V’s right to have her own point of view in the decision. But unlike in Excerpt 1, this congruence is the product of the sequential progression of closings, from V’s silence as a first response, to her incremental display of reluctance, via O’s argumentative turns. V’s symmetrical authority on the decision is progressively reinforced in the course of a delayed agreement sequence. Even though these closings are overall smooth and unproblematic, the timely production of each move extend the agreement sequence and casts its terms in a slightly different tone from that of Excerpt 1. First, initiation of departure and acceptance of the proposal are delayed: the way V remains observably static and engrossed in searching onscreen embodies her dissatisfaction with the proposed appointment, and leads O to take full consideration of her stance. In a second moment, the placement after departure, while walking away from O, of an additional comment enables V to

3

In French, this turn means without a doubt ‘‘Between nine o’clock and ten o’clock’’, and certainly not ‘‘Ten past nine’’.

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reaffirm her stance and her agency in the agreement just made, even though she does not put it into question, and eventually leaves on the initial proposal. In this first section, we have seen that walking away can accompany unproblematic closings. By initiating departure, the visitor can (a) treat previous turn as a first closing, (b) accept the announcement or proposal it consists of; and in a second moment, during the longer action of walking to the exit, the visitor can either (c) leave the agreement intact by going to the exit without talking further, or (d) alter the agreement without significantly breaking it. In the next section, we will show that a more step-wise walking away can accompany and enable a negotiation of the final agreement. 5.2. An interval between initiation of departure and actual walking away: attempting to bring further the work process In B&M’s ‘‘step-wise walking away’’, four participants standing in a group start walking away at different structural locations regarding the ongoing talk (Broth and Mondada, 2013: 49). One participant starts walking before another’s turn at talk is syntactically complete, and he himself adds a turn at talk while walking away. Despite this embodied evaluation of ongoing talk as terminating, former speaker goes on talking but his speech delivery is hastened by his interlocutor’s ‘‘embodied time constraint’’. In other words in the case of ‘‘step-wise walking away’’, the progression, acceleration and slowing down of the interaction toward closings is the product of co-participants’ successive tangential alignments and readjustments. In many office encounters, the terms of the agreement made at the initiation of closings can be negotiated during closings while V is walking toward the exit. As we considerably drift from the simplest pattern obtained from Excerpt 1, both the visitor’s walking away, and the agreement sequence, take a progressive and step-wise form, overflowing the proposal-acceptance and departure sequence. In Excerpt 3, V has come with a formal document to obtain O’s signature, and to ask him who should be signing next. O has signed the document and still holds it as the transcript begins.

[TD$INLE]

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[TD$INLE]

O initiates closings by handing the document back to V (Mondada, 2006) while producing a directive (‘‘Ask (name 1) or maybe (name 2). I think it should be sent to (name 3) 8but uh8 (0.5) ask them the question’’, lines 1--4, image 3.1). This embodied ‘‘prospective indexical’’ (Goodwin, 2002) projects closings because it indicates that what could be, or had to be, achieved with the document during this encounter has been achieved, and the verbal directive is a proposal for future action. V steps back but does not turn away from O: without actually complying to the closing-implicativeness of prior turn, he does display consideration of it. This subtle move evolves into a step-wise walking away: V almost stops while agreeing with a rising intonation (‘‘Yeah?’’, line 3), another ambivalent display of partial acceptance. And while slowly taking another step backward, he makes an attempt to obtain more precise information about the unfolding of the procedure: ‘‘I sh- shouldn’t it get up to uh: (name 4) or::’’ (line 6). But he immediately abandons his request, withdraws his attempt and displays an insufficient entitlement to demand a response (‘‘no? no that’s enough (.) okay↓’’, lines 7, image 3.2). In response, O rejects the former attempt, aligns to the withdrawal and reasserts the limits of his own obligations here and now, leaving it to V to find out the procedure by himself (‘‘well no er: yes somebody has to sign. I: I d- I don’t know the process’’, lines 8--9). Moreover his embodied conduct reinforcing closing-implicativeness -- arm dropping on the armrest -- re-assesses that the directive was from the onset not offered to discussion. In response, V transfers weight to his other leg, demonstrably re-initiating departure, while agreeing with, and committing for, O’s initial suggestion: ‘‘Well I’ll ask (name 1) ↓then’’4 (line 10, image 3.3). The encounter closes as they eventually turn away from each other. V initiates departure in a step-wise fashion: (a) By first walking backward -- away from V but without breaking mutual orientation -- he can both align to O’s first closing-implicative move and continue the interaction to try and obtain more precise directives. During this phase, participants proceed to closings with a deontically congruent pair through the pair proposal for future action -- walking away as a response. (b) When he slowly walks backwards without turning away, V inserts a sequence where a slight deontic incongruence arises as he tries to obtain more from his interlocutor. (c) Eventually, closings accelerate again as V accepts the proposal and turns away, and displays of deontic authority are congruent again. Step-wise walking away is thus a closing method through which members can negotiate their relative rights and obligations regarding the task at hand, which in the end is decisive of how far within the limits of this encounter they will bring this task together. Progression of the task is inseparable from parties’ relationship as it is interactionnally produced here and now, as they elaborate the point where O’s obligations toward V stop and where V’s autonomy starts, they also determine when this encounter is to end, and how far the task will progress. They nonetheless reach

4

The translation ‘‘Well’’ rather than ‘‘Oh’’ seems to convey something closer to the French ‘‘Oh’’ in this situation.

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an unproblematic agreement and bring their encounter to an end through tightly coordinated and moment-by-moment adjusted moves. Compared to the smooth walking away in the previous sub-section, step-wise walking away are instance where fellow institutional members make opportunities to jointly and step-by-step elaborate the terms of their agreement and their mutual relation. As the analysis gradually moves on to more problematic closings, we now turn to instances where the visitor marks noticeable departures from straightforward closing. 5.3. Stopping on the way to reaffirm one’s appraisal of the situation

[TD$INLE]

B&M identify ‘‘walking away intermittently: taking a step away, stopping and going’’ as consisting of a movement initiated, suspended, and then resumed (Broth and Mondada, 2013). In their excerpt, one participant among the four -- at times the just preceding speaker -- starts walking as the talk is possibly complete, but talk re-emerges after the embodied departure. In response to this new turn at talk, the walking participant pauses, and her stable position can consolidate anew the Fformation, and elicit a full-fledged sequence of verbal interaction. In office encounters, it is frequent that visitors stop on their way, marking a pause between their initial departure and the exit: the F-formation is then still relevant in a way that enables one of the parties to speak again (Ciolek and Kendon, 1980). In the next Excerpt, after V has come in to greet O, the latter brings about a topic that requires their coordination now, and V leans against the wall next to him as the interaction extends. The transcript begins after O has suggested what ought to be done next and V responds with a suggestion for future action.

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[TD$INLE]

On lines 1 and 3, V commits for future action, a proposal minimally acknowledged by O on lines 2 and 5. V closes the sequence in third position (‘‘8okay8 (.) 8fine8 (.) 8we’ll do like this8’’, line 5) while turning her face away and pushing her body away from the wall (image 4.2): her departure thus frames the agreement as conclusive of the encounter. Partly on overlap with this first closing but once they have turned away from each other, O initiates a comment (‘‘It will enable to rectify th-’’, line 6) that he abruptly interrupts when V takes the floor on a louder volume: ‘‘I push this up as a priority uh (0.5) strong priority’’ (lines 7--8). Initiated as participants are in significantly disaligned bodily orientations (image 4.3), this comment is uttered slowly with a break in the middle, during which V transfers her weight from one leg to the other, to finally face O again. She takes on a more stable position and ends her comment with an out-breathed laughter (line 8, image 4.4). Semantically, this comment reassesses a complaint she made during the encounter about having too much work at the moment. But it is precisely positioned regarding the ongoing closings and O’s incipient comment, and it is buttressed by considerable embodied work to obtain O’s recipiency. Through embodied conduct she shows she is the one entitled to appreciate the situation, all the more that her comment contrasts with O’s previous implications. Indeed, he implied that their final agreement and what V had just committed to do would catch up for past mishaps, thus implying that individual responsibilities are implied in these mishaps. On the contrary, V’s repeated complaint implies that the organization itself has put her in a situation where she cannot cope on time with all the tasks she has been assigned. This comment overtly takes precedence over O’s interrupted comment on line 6. O displays recipiency in the course of her comment by looking at her and then smiling, and he fully affiliates at the end with a hearable laugh. Then he takes V’s stable position in front of him as an opportunity to also take the floor: he pretends juggling (line 9, image 4.5), an embodied idiomatic expression through which he both affiliates with and closes the complaint

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(Drew and Holt, 1988). It is also a full-fledged response, a challenging comment in that the metaphor alludes to the professional know-how of being able to juggle between many competing and simultaneous tasks. All the more that he insistently smiles all the while, he somehow denies the complainable (Schegloff, 2005), rebuts V’s complaint by inviting her to accept her situation as it is, and invites her to make the best out of it by depicting it as an opportunity for a professional performance. As closings are in progress, opportunities to add extra turns become scarce but the noticeable halt in the visitors’ walking away offers a new opportunity -- to V and to O -- to put forth one’s own version and appreciation of the situation. After she has minimally acknowledged this competing version of the situation (‘‘yeah’’, line 13), she turns and resumes walking away (image 4.6), thus temporarily leaving him with the last word. But on her way to the door, she produces another turn: ‘‘and I’m going to check the uh: integration because this is no pleasure cruise either’’ (lines 10--11). With the particle ‘‘and’’ (Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994) she resumes the complaint and disregards the just previous move, and as the turn is uttered while walking away from O and to the exit, she works at preserving it from a further opposing move. V articulates with the ongoing talk a variety of resources pertaining to the ‘‘walking away intermittently’’ method, i.e. walking and stopping in turn, facing her interlocutor and turning away from him. On the other hand, this method also offers O with extra opportunities to respond when V is still within his reach. The production of deontic authority regarding the work process under discussion is apparent in the agreement sequence, as V commits to do something and pursues O’s acknowledgment. But what happens after the final agreement and the initiation of closings, during the ‘‘walking away intermittently’’, touches upon another aspect of deontic authority as far as it is ‘‘about determining how the world ‘‘ought to be’’’’ (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012: 298): the complainability of a situation, the right to complain (to whom) and to blame the organization (or not). V works hard at assessing her right to express a negative emotional content related to her experience of what it is like to work in this organization at that moment, when O twice rejects this activity and invites her to a more compliant, devoted stance. V terminates her comment right as she walks through the door, this time leaving virtually no window of opportunity for O to respond. Walking away intermittently is a method for parties to compete for the last word; and to end the encounter with any party fully affiliating with the other’s stance. The type of walking away we now turn to corresponds to that type of situations where a competition arises for the last word and is neither resolved nor appeased as the visitor is about to exit. 5.4. Coming back in: moving out of closings to reframe the upshot After misplacement markers such as ‘‘by the way’’ were identified as possibly doing the job of marking a move out of closings already on their way (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), Button identified the relationship between some elements typical of closings and some regular methods to initiate a move out of closings (Button, 1987). In office encounters, one way a visitor can do this is by noticeably coming back toward her interlocutor. Although in a few cases she does so to bring about an out-of-topic unmentioned mentionable, we will rather draw attention to a more frequent occurrence where an absence of affiliation emerges during the conclusive turns as the visitor is walking out of the office, or about to. Thus, comparison with the previous excerpt will bring heuristic insight as to both interactional and organizational work at play. In our following, final excerpt, V has come to complain about a third party’s attitude during the telephone meeting she has just taken part in. As the transcript begins, O is standing next to her, has poured hot water in her cup and put the kettle back in place.

[TD$INLE]

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[TD$INLE]

On lines 1--2, V projects closings by legitimizing and summarizing her complaint with a figurative expression (Drew and Holt, 1988) (‘‘sometimes I tell myself but this can’t be, the guy came up haphazardly he hasn’t read anything he pretends’’, image 5.1), then she quickly turns her face away and starts walking away (image 5.2). After O’s minimal receipt (‘‘8yeah8’’,

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line 3), V turns her profile to her while continuing to walk away (image 5.3). While walking she utters in a low voice a truncated comment (‘‘annoys m-’’, line 5), then brakes with two quick steps, freezes in the doorway in this walking posture, and initiates a new turn framed as a continuation of the complaint (‘‘and behind that you-’’, line 5): she pursues a more affiliative response. But O interrupts on overlap and on a louder volume, taking this suspended mobility as an opportunity: ‘‘and so eventually uh: what does uh: it’s okay: but with revisions?’’ (lines 6--7). With turn-initial resumption markers, this request for information breaks with the just preceding turns. Assuming that the document that V and her colleagues were presenting to a third party was eventually accepted, O invites V to talk about the work achieved during that meeting, rather than the third party’s misbehavior at the origin of her complaint. By placing this move late in the closings, she tries to have V leave the office on a more positive conclusion, by substituting her complaint with an alternative point of view. The placement of the request for information within the ongoing closings and V’s motion to the exit may achieve far more than obtain an information. Resembling O’s attempt in Excerpt 5 as he pretends to be juggling, O makes this move right before her mobile interlocutor is out of the office: one way for her, as a sitting participant, to try and protect it from rejection. In other words the moment the visitor is near the doorway, because closings are more imminent then ever, and co-presence about to stop, is a placement where turns at talk can be afforded a special status. In Excerpt 5, it is from this position in space that V reassesses her version of the facts after O rejected it, but we see here that the sitting party can also benefit from this situation to produce a reframing/disjunctive move. However here, V does not leave on these last words. In the course of the request, she progressively turns to O (images 5.4 and 5.5), and initiates a response with a cut-off hesitation that projects rejection of the terms of the request. On a high pitch she confirms that some work was achieved but immediately opposes this positive reframing by expressing disagreement with what was achieved: ‘‘uh- (.) ↑yes: but the revisions I’m sorry I: I don’t accept the revisions he is talking about’’ (lines 8--9). She starts walking back into the office, thus re-opening the interaction with a new complaint sequence, she walks through the office and comes close to O to initiate this durable expansion (image 5.6). By walking back in as closings are almost complete, V makes a highly disruptive move regarding the sequential organization. But she does so in response to a disaligning move, i.e. a move disruptive not only with regards to the sequential progression, but also to the activity. Moving out of closings is neither sudden nor unilateral: incipient disalignment is already apparent in the agreement sequence, as soon as O minimally affiliates with V’s closing-implicative move on lines 1--2 (figurative expression and turning away). She keeps arguing as she walks away and in a body torque (Schegloff, 1998) directed to the door and to O, keeps pursuing affiliation to her complaint. O’s request as she is about to get out of the office is demonstrably in opposition with her prospect, and this attempt to reframe the upshot of the encounter is eventually rejected by the move out of closings. In other words what leads the visitor to walk back in the office is a take-off between sequential progression -- initiation of departure and walking away accomplish smooth and rapid closings -- and the movement back and forth of parties’ alignment in activity -- complaining or informing about a work task. Walking back in is a method for the visitor to display her disagreement and re-assess her stance. It is through a setting, here the semi-private space that is an office and the doorway as a symbolic boundary, that embodied conduct and mobility become resources to frame recognizable actions within a sequence of interaction. 6. Conclusion This article is in part an attempt to take over EM/CA’s longstanding focus on verbal interaction -- a collective endeavor -and unpack the complexity of closings. In order to discriminate among the many semiotic resources, and to identify socially shared methods, we relied on a previous study focusing on walking away in sequence closing. We showed how members rely on this resource, manifold in and as itself, to simultaneously accomplish closings and achieve their work tasks. We hope that the angle, empirical data and findings of this article may contribute to research on work, on organizations, on closings and on deontics, by bringing new pieces to complex puzzles. Each sub-section of the analysis builds on one type of walking away, as described in B&M’s framework. Out of the first Excerpt we proposed a simplest pattern for ‘‘smooth departure at sequence closing’’, a method for fellow institutional members both to achieve an unproblematic agreement, and to frame it as conclusive of the encounter. With a second excerpt, we saw that slight variations within this pattern, such as delays and turns at talk after departure, can be a resource for the visitor to display a stance toward, and alter, the conclusive agreement. The step-wise fashion of walking away was shown to enable the negotiation of a proposal before the conclusive agreement is ratified. As a third category, walking away intermittently can be a way for the visitor to place her own words in the last position before actual departure, and reject her interlocutor’s, uttered while she initiated departure. Lastly, beyond B&M’s framework, we saw that, as a response to a challenging move right before the exit, the visitor can walk back in the office, thus re-open the interaction and initiate a new argumentative sequence.

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Independently of these types, we pointed to three practically inseparable types of embodied resources involved in the accomplishment of closings and work achievements: position in space, mobility and body orientation. We showed that participants orient to the position of bodies in a setting made of relevant landmarks and boundaries. Whatever the advancement of closings, as long as participants stand within the office boundaries they remain within each other’s reach and mutually accountable: the interaction remains relevant. The speaker’s position in space is essential in making a turn at talk intelligible as an interactional move: if the F-formation splits at the initiation of closings, turns at talk uttered in other spatial dispositions are framed as increments or expansions, and thus provided a different status regarding the conclusive agreement. As a case in point, in Excerpt 5, rather than simply staying in the doorway as closings are almost complete, V comes back near O to undo closings and re-set the encounter’s conclusion. We have also shown that mobility is a meaningful resource regarding what closings accomplish: whether a turn at talk is uttered while one is walking, or during a halt, it is framed either as in passing, or as a substantial modification of the final agreement. For instance, a party talking to a visitor walking out the doorway will be understood as ‘‘catching’’ her before she is out of reach, a marked action compared to talking to a visitor standing in the doorway. Participants’ body -- especially the upper part -- and gaze orientation, whether they are mutually oriented or not, also make significant differences. A visitor on her way to the exit turning back to her interlocutor temporarily renews the F-formation and thus enables a consequential expansion. In Excerpt 4, the visitor is able to insert a request by remaining bodily oriented to his interlocutor even after he has aligned to a first closing turn by walking away. Because they are pervasive in closing sequences, we also paid great attention to the production of deontics. We showed, first, that embodied conduct is fully involved in displays of deontic stance. In Excerpts 1 and 4, a proposal uttered while suddenly breaking mutual orientation, because it strongly projects closings, is treated as also displaying strong entitlement. A second point is that face-to-face interaction is where participants can challenge a display of deontic authority though subtle resources, shades of differences: in Excerpt 3, V does not comply to O’s directive, but through an ambivalent embodied conduct, is able to withdraw as soon as O re-asserts that his directive was not meant to be discussed. Third, we showed that deontics can hardly be dealt with by looking at one pair, one display responding to another. Relative rights and obligations are the product of an interactional, progressive work spreading over a larger sequence of interaction. An approach that qualifies a response as simply contesting or aligning to an initial display of authority, does not consider these aspects, and somehow privileges intention over joint elaboration. For instance in Excerpt 2, V’s agency in the conclusive agreement is the product of O’s argumentative work, itself a product of her withholding a response, remaining static and silent. The progressive production of deontic authority becomes intelligible, for members as well as for the analyst, as one looks at the whole closing sequence. We will conclude by reviewing the variety of office work achievements that we saw can take place during informal interactions, in ordinary situations. As participants are to agree on the continuation of a task, closing an encounter elicits the distribution of work, and possibly opens its explicit discussion. Embodied resources provide for a variety of shades as opposed to one-block formal descriptions and concepts. For instance in Excerpt 2, the visitor slightly alters her commitment to be on time for an appointment with an increment after she has started walking away: the appointment is made, but as the time will come, these two participants will be able to anticipate a delay. Informal encounters are also a moment when responsibility and blame may be attributed. In Excerpt 4, V blames the organization for assigning her more work that she can cope with: she preemptively refuses to take responsibility for future possible mishaps. Besides, closings foster minimal alignment, even after incompatible experiences or versions of work have arisen: encounters foster elaboration of shared meaning of work and involvement in a common goal. Excerpt 4 is a case in point: neither party fully rejects to the other’s version, and indeed whether having a lot of work is a complainable or an opportunity to prove one’s professional skills is one constitutive ambivalence of work. In a similar way in Excerpt 5, closings foster the recipient’s attempt to re-cast past events, reported in a complaint, into a normal work experience. Informal interactions can be occasions to defuse and tie back to normal negative emotions and experiences. The organization is a fundamentally asymmetric order because distribution of work and power relations are its primary features. But encounters provide members with commensurable interactional resources, and are thus unique opportunities not only to reproduce the organization, but to produce it anew, each-another-next-firsttime. Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Futur et Ruptures program from the Fondation Télécom and Télécom ParisTech in France [no grant number]. I thank the persons responsible for this program, the participants who accepted to be filmed, the scientists who accompanied my research project over the years, and the anonymous reviewers who provided me with very insightful suggestions and comments.

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Appendix. Transcript conventions Talk has been transcribed according to conventions developed by Gail Jefferson An indicative translation of the French in italics is provided line per line Multimodal details have been transcribed according to the following conventions : * delimits description of the visitor’s action ^ delimits description of the office occupant’s action ------ action described continues across subsequent lines of talk # indicates the exact moment at which the frame grab was recorded References Asmuss, Birte, Oshima, Sae, 2012. Negotiation of entitlement in proposal sequences. Discourse Stud. 14 (1), 67--86. Barley, Steven R., Kunda, Gideon, 2001. Bringing work back in. Organ. Sci. 12 (1), 76--95. Boden, Deirdre, 1994. The Business of Talk. Polity Press, Cambridge. Bolden, Galina, 2008. Reopening Russian conversations: the discourse particle --to and the negotiation of interpersonal accountability in closings. Hum. Commun. Res. 34, 99--136. 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