Izadi's book provides a refreshing perspective on service encounters at a Persian grocery in Sydney, Australia. Izadi adopts a mediated discourse analysis (MDA) approach and illustrates throughout his book that a strong focus on action, social practices, and the modal richness of social interaction during service encounters enables a new perspective of service encounters.
In chapter 1, Izadi provides an overview of theoretical approaches to service encounters (SE). Various examples illustrate the social and cultural complexity of SEs in ethnic shops, and Izadi argues that SEs are best studied as multimodal social phenomena in which actions, social practices, and identities are best seen as dynamic constructs contingent on the spatial and temporal relationships emerging in interactions. Chapter 2 introduces Erving Goffman's frame analysis and how it is applied to understand a hybrid set of social, cultural, linguistic, and literacy practices that are taking place at ethnic shops and the basic principles of MDA.
Chapter 3 is the first analysis chapter and addresses the multilayered nature of social interactions that emerge during SE. He illustrates that Goffman's participation frames, how participants understand a situation, and the roles people assume are structured as part of the SE through a complex set of intercultural communicative practices.
Chapter 4 examines how authenticity, an important notion in ethnic shops, is actively produced through how actors use tools and objects, such as a box with Persian dates at the counter, as part of SE. The book continues with a discussion on the various social identities that are claimed and produced as part of the SEs including membership categorization devices. Besides more common tools like language, ethnicity, and culture, Izadi also includes an interesting discussion of material resources present at SEs: a Persian flag, a sign, or a note placed by the researcher.
Chapter 6 discusses the ethnic shop as a social space produced by the actors and the mediated actions during SEs, and chapter 7 adds to this discussion the role of narratives. Izadi argues that the complexity and multilayered nature of social interaction observed as part of these SEs produces an intersection of practices that turns this ethnic shop into a portal to a Persian-Australian space. This portal enables actors from various ethnic backgrounds to engage in a complex set of practices involving identity, education, social networks, and employment allowing them to construct a narrative about a place, Iran.
Izadi concludes the book in chapter 8 by presenting and discussing an MDA driven model that facilitates understanding the complexities of service encounters. Izadi reiterates how MDA enables a more comprehensive understanding of the social practices, meaning making, social identities, and notions of authenticity that intersect at service encounters that take place when people from various backgrounds meet in ethnic shops like the one studied in this book. His book adds to the growing body of research adopting action-centered, multimodal perspectives on social interaction, illustrating how these approaches provide a different, more comprehensive understanding of Goffman's question ‘what is it that is going on here’ in social interaction.
