Interaction: Managing Customers

Abstract

I have looked at what conditions, under the circumstances of socialisation at Wellbread’s, made fiddling a reasonable practice for recruits to adopt. What is there in their ordinary daily life as salesmen that might make continuing to fiddle reasonable? Although the organisational profit/mistake dilemma is still a reality even when the recruit passes from the highly homogenized training setting to the highly differentiated network of fully fledged salesmen, what interactional, emotional and psychological support for the fiddle can be gleaned from customer interactions? I have already suggested that one ‘secondary adjustment’, to use Goffman’s (1957b, p. 172) term, which the rounds-men make to the increasing discrepancy between the need to fiddle for the company, and the ability to do so, is the ‘conversion’ to fiddlingfor-themselves. Although partly based on the trial stage of the moral career, conversion occurs when the roundsman’s main contact is with his customer. What is it about customer interactions that makes this fiddling reasonable?