[Full paper] Persuasive conduct 28.5.18.pdf (416.96 kB)
Persuasive conduct: Alignment and resistance in prospecting 'cold' calls
journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-12, 13:31 authored by Bogdana Huma, Elizabeth Stokoe, Rein SikvelandSocial psychology has theorized the cognitive processes underlying persuasion, without considering its interactional infrastructure—the discursive actions through which persuasion is accomplished interactionally. Our article aims to fill this gap, by using discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine 153 “cold” calls, in which salespeople seek to secure meetings with prospective clients. We identify two sets of communicative practices that comprise persuasive conduct: (1) pre-expanding the meeting request with accounts that secure the prospect’s alignment to this course of action without disclosing its end result and (2) minimizing the imposition of the meeting to reduce the prospect’s opportunities for refusal. We conclude that persuasive conduct consists in managing the recipiency of the meeting requests by promoting alignment and hampering resistance. Overall, this article contributes to the wider discursive psychological project of “respecifying” psychological phenomena such as attitudes, memory, and emotion from the realm of social cognition to the realm of social interaction.
History
Published in
Journal of Language and Social PsychologyVolume
38Issue
1Pages
33 - 60Citation
HUMA, B., STOKOE, E. and SIKVELAND, R.O., 2018. Persuasive conduct: Alignment and resistance in prospecting 'cold' calls. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 38 (1), pp.33-60.Publisher
SAGE Publications © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-05-28Publication date
2018-07-24Notes
This paper was published in the journal Journal of Language and Social Psychology and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X18783474.ISSN
0261-927XeISSN
1552-6526Publisher version
Language
- en