‘He probably thought we were students’: Age norms and the exercise of visual judgement in service work
通过分析服务互动中的视频记录，揭示人们如何无意识地依据视觉判断来运用年龄规范，对组织行为和社会互动研究者有参考价值。
This paper analyses how organisational actors draw upon, perhaps without conscious acknowledgement, assumptions about age as they engage in organisational activities. Drawing on video-recordings of naturalistic interaction, the paper analyses how customers are positioned with respect to age-based norms, often following visual assessments of their physical appearance. Through detailed rhetorical and sequential analysis, the paper describes artful practices, through which participants make age-based norms relevant for the composition of ordinary organisational actions. The paper is amongst the first micro-sociological studies to analyse how people engage age-based norms in this way. It shows the positioning of age identities to be substantially an interactional phenomenon, as well as a discursive and reflexive one.