Maastricht International Workshop on Economic Exchanges: The social and conversational activity of economic encounters

Our everyday economic interactions are inevitably more than economic. While economic exchanges can include many different types of situation — such as marketplace bargaining, garage sale haggling, share trading, coffee ordering, supermarket checkouts, street-performer soliciting, and so on — they universally bring participants into interactions in which they must manage the relationship created by their need to trade with one another. Inasmuch as these encounters are produced through relatively standardized conversational sequences between people who are normally strangers (to a greater or lesser extent), they can be weighty sites, not just for establishing value but also for doing identity work in a public domain. In other words, economic exchanges are sites in which participants orient toward expectations, norms, rules, rights, and morals involved in the business of making exchanges, but also in their own individual social positions as communicators within a larger and diverse community.

This workshop seeks to define economic exchanges as a coherent and unique site for Conversation Analysis (CA) research by exploring the roles and structures involved in accomplishing economic outcomes, through talk and other embodied practices.
Our objective during this workshop is to collect the existing, disparate research already underway by several CA scholars into a coherent theoretical agenda and programme of studies for examining economic exchanges.

For more information about the workshop, please contact Lauren Wagner via l.wagner@maastrichtuniversity.nl