'That's my husband's sees the smoke on this card bill he doesn't like me smoking' : service interactions in Persian shops in Sydney

The current study focuses on the intersection of social action, practices and discourses produced and reproduced by the shop owners (a husband–wife team) and the customers within a site of engagement in a typical Persian shop in Sydney and the way they are interactionally realized. The present study is situated within the framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollon, 2001) and Nexus Analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) in that it focuses on how the social practices imbricated in service encounters are always mediated by a range of mediational means, of which wording and text is only one. In such settings, joint actions are not undertaken exclusively through language use, but frequently incorporate nonverbal conduct and references toward material objects available in the physical environment. The study foregrounds that a nexus analysis and the application of mediational tools (e.g., objects) embedded in service encounters provides a finer understanding of specific social practices and actions and local material contexts, which serve to ascribe social identities for shop owners and customers. Such intricacies encourage us to re-evaluate our understanding of the critical complexity of the language practices of late-modern urban groups who employ and exploit features from a wide range of cultural and semiotic resources.