ABSTRACT

This chapter brings together two areas of research that have seldom intersected: service encounters and commercial Facebook interaction. It examines the unfolding of conflict in a corpus of Facebook wall interactions hosted by two Spanish stores of different socioeconomic status. Crucially, this study also draws from variational pragmatics (Barron & Schneider, 2009), which, within the field of Spanish service encounters, has paid scant attention to socioeconomic factors like status or prestige. Hence, the objective of this chapter is twofold: (i) to examine the possible differences in the microlevel management of conflict that could be related to the socioeconomic status associated with two department stores (+/- prestige) and, in doing so, (ii) to expand the framework for variational pragmatics to include studies of impoliteness and conflict on commercial Facebook. Results show that, despite similar use of types of impoliteness strategies by both +/- prestige stores, there is pragmatic variation in the frequency of use of individual strategies as well as regarding the target of impoliteness. Furthermore, findings show that both stores attempted to diffuse conflict by redirecting customers to different webpages albeit with different degrees of success.