This article investigates how members of the public are guided or ‘signposted’ out of organisations that they have contacted to third-party agencies. Using conversation analysis, we examine the interactional practices professionals use to signpost callers to external organisations when their concerns do not fit within the remit of the present service. Drawing on a corpus of over 500 calls and meetings at five different institutions in the UK (including mediation services, local council organisations, a housing charity and a politician’s constituency office), we show how the practice of signposting is intertwined with the activities of rejecting the caller’s case for receiving service, while simultaneously offering a service – namely, a redirection to an ostensibly more appropriate service provider. We show how community problems can be treated as warranting assistance along a range of offer-ability (e.g. ‘I will do X for you’, ‘That’s the kind of thing we could do’, ‘Do you want their number?’), and how troubles-tellings without a specific request can be retroactively formulated into an actionable item for an institution. Our findings demonstrate practices for negotiating institutionality itself, through delimiting service remit, and through participants’ orientations to the relevance of service provision as an institutional goal.

本文研究了如何引导或“张贴”公众成员与第三方机构联系的组织。通过对话分析，我们研究了专业人员在呼叫者的担忧超出当前服务范围时将其与外部组织联系的交互做法。我们利用英国五个不同机构（包括调解服务，地方理事会组织，住房慈善机构和政客的选民办公室）举行的500多个电话会议和会议的语料库，展示了路标操作与拒绝活动是如何交织在一起的呼叫者在接受服务的同时提供服务的情况服务–即重定向到表面上更合适的服务提供商。我们展示了如何将社区问题视为可以在一系列要约范围内提供帮助的方式（例如“我将为您做X ”，“这是我们可以做的事情”，“您想要他们的电话号码吗？”），以及在没有特定要求的情况下如何将麻烦陈述追溯到机构的可诉诸事项中。我们的研究结果表明了通过划定服务职权范围以及通过参与者将服务提供的相关性作为制度目标的相关性来协商制度本身的实践。