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“A Give Grief Kind of Guy”: Help‐Seeking, Status, and the Experience of Helpers at a University IT Help Desk
Author(s) -
Seeley J. Lotus
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1002/symb.365
Subject(s) - deference , ethnography , face (sociological concept) , social psychology , psychology , meaning (existential) , desk , rank (graph theory) , sociology , computer science , social science , psychotherapist , operating system , mathematics , combinatorics , anthropology
Returning the helper to studies of help‐seeking highlights how organizational status is interactionally (re)produced. Using interview and ethnographic data of IT support workers in a medical school, I illuminate how organizational status hierarchies develop independently of organizational rank or authority. Status both structures and is (re)produced through requestors' enactment of deference and/or face‐threatening acts; backstage interpretive processes among helpers naturalize and legitimate status‐based interaction styles. High‐status requestors' failure to protect helpers' face does not flow naturally from organizational status but is the result of active meaning‐making processes with meso‐level implications.