Introduction

The chapters in this collection, authored by renowned scholars, address a gap in the literature by focusing on the consequences that outsourcing, among other globalized economic practices, and remediation by new technologies have had on the service encounters genre (SE).

From both a multilingual and a multidisciplinary perspective, this collection explores the development of technological applications and professional best practices as well as call centre interaction, e-commerce, and e-word of mouth.

More specifically, the papers in this volume report on technology developed to support SEs and how this technology influences service providers and their allowable linguistic contributions.

Further, this collection provides valuable insights on the language and strategic behaviour deployed in less researched kinds of SEs, gives special attention to how technology impacts the interface between the transactional and interactional goals of SEs, and thus has real world applications.