TALKING FOR A CHANGE: COMMODITY NEGOTIATING BY TELEPHONE

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the discourse-based work undertaken by commodity traders in their attempts to negotiate mutually acceptable changes to terms and conditions of sale. It focuses on the way the negotiations are undertaken by telephone. The materials examined in the chapter are five audio-recorded international telephone negotiations, undertaken within the export section of Melko Dairies, a large Danish-based conglomerate. Each of the five telephone negotiations is conducted in lingua franca English, that is, English used between normative speakers, and involves a Danish Export Manager and Middle East-based wholesalers. It was argued that, though locally and contingently managed; the calls are structured in stable, iterative ways. Calls were seen to be opened in methodic ways, as the parties moved into or circumvented casual talk before initiating talk that directly addressed the work-related problem that constituted the reason for the call. By so doing, the parties were seen to orient to an orderly and locally-accomplished point of entry into the negotiation calls. This point of entry was reached most visibly in the way the current call was tied to a preceding communication, and, therefore, shown to be an embedded part of a series of interrelated work tasks. The so-called retrospective tying reference, and its accompanying formulation of the contents of the preceding message, served to establish a rudimentary working agenda for subsequent talk.