La notion d’aide-à-autrui est la pierre angulaire du travail social. Cette aide s’incarne sous la forme d’une multitude de déclinaisons à travers les activités menées par les professionnels de l’action sociale, les travailleurs sociaux. Lorsque l’un d’entre eux se trouve ponctuellement en difficulté dans l’exercice de son métier, la « réunion de synthèse » est un espace dédié à l’aide entre professionnels.Dans ce cadre de travail, le langage est l’outil essentiel qui permet aux participants de se rendre mutuellement disponible leur point de vue sur un « cas social » et de traiter eux-mêmes la descriptibilité de leurs actions.La perspective théorique et méthodologique de la linguistique interactionnelle, issue de l’analyseconversationnelle d’inspiration ethnométhodologique, constitue un cadre privilégié pour examiner les pratiques langagières qui caractérisent ces réunions institutionnelles. La question des ressources mobilisées et de leurs cours d’action dans l’interaction est devenue mon objet de recherche. Un objet qui ratifie non seulement le principe du langage comme ressource centrale de l’organisation des activités sociales, mais aussi dans ce contexte institutionnel, comme principale ressource de production et de structuration d’une activité d’aide-à-autrui.Cette thèse a pour visée d’approfondir la connaissance des processus permettant l’émergence d’unetelle activité, en étudiant les procédés par lesquels les ressources linguistiques sont méthodiquement déployées pour façonner et délivrer les points de vue des membres sur leurs actions, contribuant en retour à la constitution d’un espace intersubjectif qui rend possible l’élaboration collective d’un travail interprétatif. / The concept of aid to others is the cornerstone of social work. This assistance is embodied in the formof a multitude of variations through the activities of the professionals of social action, the socialworkers. When one of them is punctually in trouble during the exercise of his job, the " meeting of synthesis" is dedicated to mutual aid between professionals.In this framework, the language is an essential tool which allows participants to make mutually available their point of view on a "social event" and handle themselves the describtibility of theiractions.The theoretical and methodological perspective of interactional linguistics, from the conversation alanalysis in the ethnomethodological tradition, is an ideal framework to examine the language practicesthat characterize these institutional meetings. The issue of mobilized resources and their course of action in the interaction became my object of research. An object that ratifies not only the principle of language as a central resource of the organization of the social activities, but also in the institutional context, as a main resource of production and structuring an activity to help others.This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the processes for the emergence of such activity, by studying the processes by which language resources are methodically deployed to shape and deliverthe views of members about their actions, contributing in return to the creation of an intersubjective space which makes possible the collective elaboration of a interpretative work.

The subject of this study is language use in a special type of social activity: the exchange of goods, services and information in a commercial setting. The main aim is to gain an understanding of the work that shop assistants perform using language. In the analysis, the focus is on verbal routine work. One part of the analysis thus entails mapping the typical utterances and conversational sequences related to such activities. Another part involves investigating how much non-task-oriented interaction the various activities require or “tolerate”, for instance, in the form of “small talk”. A central theme in the study is the interactants’ conversational rights and obligations, from the perspective of politeness theory, especially Fraser’s theory of the conversational contract. The service encounters are categorised as activity types, according to Levinson’s activity theory. In the comparative parts of the study, the concept of pragmeme is used as a tool to examine different realisations of prototypical situated communicative acts. The empirical material consists of authentic conversations, analysed by methods borrowed from conversation analysis. The conversations were recorded at a supermarket checkout till, a deli counter with manual service and an information desk in a bookshop. It turned out that only a few of the customer conversations were without complications. At the supermarket till, for instance, only one out of four conversations was completely routine and unproblematic. Also presented is a diachronic investigation of the norms relating to service encounters that have been taking place in shops since the 1940s. The main sources here are manuals and study materials for shop employees, together with interviews and material gathered from role playing. In this part of the study, a number of features in the historical change process are described, for instance in the manner of addressing people and the use of politeness expressions.

Interactions are formed and shaped differently from culture to culture. This thesis focuses on this phenomenon and in the first part deals with (from a theoretical view) the question, how the interplay between language-use and culture can be described. A cross-disciplinary approach within the scope of cross-cultural communication research is developed as is a semiotic concept, based on mainly linguistic, interactional and anthropological theories and methods. In order to describe different culture-specific interactional styles the semiotic field called embedding culture is outlined as an important resource for participants organizing talk-in-interactions. In the second part of this book the relevance of this approach is applied and tested. With the aid of various video recordings of ‘lunch-talks’ among colleagues at a restaurant in Sweden and Germany, this specific type of action and their cultural patterns are analyzed in order to describe cultural-specific styles in face-to-face-interaction. The methodological problem of recorded interaction is pointed out and the role of the camera highlighted. As the analyzed data is mainly based on interactions between men also gender-aspects are discussed. Furthermore, the scenario, time aspects and the customs and rituals of interactions at table are taken into account as relevant features of the embedding culture, all going into a culture-specific style of interaction. The results of the empirical study are, finally, correlated with other, not interaction-based analyses in the field of cross-cultural communication, and the specific national-cultural dimensions are critically discussed. / Interaktioner utformas och gestaltas olika från kultur till kultur. Avhandlingen fokuserar på denna aspekt och behandlar först ur ett teoretiskt perspektiv hur detta fenomen kan beskrivas. Med en tvärvetenskaplig ansats inom ramen av den s.k. interkulturella kommunikationsforskningen (cross-cultural communication) kombineras kulturanalytiska med lingvistiska och samtalsanalytiska teorier och metoder. Ett semiotiskt koncept utarbetas med hjälp av vilka olika kulturspecifika interaktionsstilar kan beskrivas. Det semiotiska fältet som koncipierats kallas för Einbettungskultur (’inbäddningskulturen’). I den andra delen används och prövas detta koncept. Med hjälp av ett flertal videoinspelade lunchsamtal i Sverige och Tyskland analyseras konkreta exempel på kommunikativ praxis och deras kulturella mönster i jämförbara interaktionssituationer. Det beskrivs hur den kulturspecifika interaktionsstilen vid lunchen bland svenska arbetskollegor kan skilja sig från det tyskspråkiga sättet att gestalta samma interaktionstyp. Inspelningssituationen problematiseras och kamerans roll i interaktionen diskuteras. Eftersom analyserna huvudsakligen baseras på samtal mellan män tas genusperspektivet upp. Vid sidan av själva samtalen analyseras även scenariot, tidsaspekten och ritualiseringen av interaktionen vid bordet som tre aspekter av inbäddningskulturen som tillsammans bidrar till en kulturspecifik interaktionsstil. Resultaten av den kulturella analysen som tar sin utgångspunkt i en konkret och jämförbar interaktionssituation i olika kulturer relateras avslutningsvis till andra, icke-interaktionsbaserade analyser inom den interkulturella kommunikationsforskningen och nationalkulturella beskrivningar problematiseras.