A Study of Customer Service Agent’s Pragmatic Identity Construction in Complaint Responses

Positioned within rapport management theory proposed by Spencer-Oatey, this article investigates the customer service agent’s pragmatic identity construction in complaint response calls. Drawing on data of 42 complaint handling recordings from the customer care center of a Chinese airline company, this study tries to address these three research questions: 1) What types of pragmatic identities do the customer service agents construct in complaint response calls? 2) How are these pragmatic identities constructed through rapport management strategies? 3) What interpersonal functions do these pragmatic identities perform? By adopting a qualitative research method, this study has found that the agents mainly construct three default identities and one deviational identity in complaint response calls by employing nine rapport management strategies from four rapport management domains. These different pragmatic identities mainly perform three kinds of interpersonal functions: support face needs, support sociality rights and obligations, and support interactional goals. The findings further validates the feasibility of rapport management theory in the study of identity construction, and provides new ideas for future study on pragmatic identity construction in institutional communications

Optical LC-like resonances in high-index particles

Electric LC resonances, occurring in metallic circuits, govern the motion of free electrons or electric signals. In this paper, we study the optical LC-like resonances, which take place in high-index particles (HIPs) and involve optical or electromagnetic fields instead. The resonance effect is dominated by optical analogues of inductance and capacitance, which can be determined according to the electromagnetic energy bounded near the particle. The viewpoint of dielectric optical circuit with equivalent parameters facilitates the understanding of dielectric resonance effect. The result also provides a method for studying the optical properties of the HIPs.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Transmission resonance in a composite plasmonic structure

The design, fabrication, and optical properties of a composite plasmonic structure, a two-dimentional array of split-ring resonators inserted into periodic square holes of a metal film, have been reported. A new type of transmission resonance, which makes a significant difference from the conventional peaks, has been suggested both theoretically and experimentally. To understand this effect, a mechanism of ring- resonance induced dipole emission is proposed.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Optimization and resilience of complex supply-demand networks

Acknowledgments This work was supported by NSF under Grant No. 1441352. SPZ and ZGH were supported by NSF of China under Grants No. 11135001 and No. 11275003. ZGH thanks Prof Liang Huang and Xin-Jian Xu for helpful discussions.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Why Employee Turnover? The influence of Chinese Management and Organizational Justice

Employee turnover is an important topic in organizational behavior research. Understanding how to address turnover in Chinese organizations is also a practice problem. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of paternalistic leadership (authoritarianism, benevolence, and morality) on employee turnover and examine the moderating effect of organizational justice (distributive justice, interactional justice, and procedural justice). Data were collected from 207 supervisor and subordinate dyads of 51 stores in a Chinese food and beverage company. Paternalistic leadership and organizational justice were initially collected from subordinates. After six months, employee turnover was collected from supervisors. The results indicate that benevolent and moral leadership were both negatively related to employee turnover. Authoritarianism failed to predict employee turnover. Furthermore, the relationship between authoritarianism and employee turnover is moderated by distributive justice and procedural justice. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed