Weatherall2022

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Weatherall2022
BibType ARTICLE
Key Weatherall2022
Author(s) Ann Weatherall, Emma Tennent, Fiona Grattan
Title ‘Sorry everything’s in bags’: The accountability of selling bread at a market during the COVID-19 pandemic
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Buying, Coronavirus, Discursive Psychology, Account, Morality, Pandemic, Sales Encounters, Selling, Social Interaction, Touch, Vision
Publisher
Year 2022
Language
City
Month
Journal Discourse & Society
Volume 33
Number 1
Pages 89-106
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/09579265211048732
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Societies are undergoing enormous upheavals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of psychological distress are widespread, yet little is known about the exact impacts at the micro-level of everyday life. The present study examines the ordinary activity of buying bread to understand changes occurring early in the crisis. A dataset of over 50 social interactions at a community market stall were video-recorded, transcribed and examined in detail using multi-modal conversation analysis. With COVID-19 came an orientation to a heightened risk of disease transmission when selling food. The bread was placed in bags, a difference which was justified as a preventative measure and morally normalised by invoking a common-sense prohibition of touching produce. Having the bread out of immediate sight was a practical challenge that occasioned the expansion of turns and sequences to look for and/or confirm what was for sale, highlighting a normative organisation between seeing and buying. The analysis shows how a preventative measure related to the pandemic was adjusted to interactionally. More broadly, this research reveals the small changes to daily life that likely contribute to the overall negative impacts on health and well-being that have been reported.

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