Denial in managerial responses: Forms, targets and discourse environment

Highlights

• Denial is a rapport-challenging speech act.

• Denial is instantiated as the Deny Problem move in seven different forms in the review response genre.

• Targets of denial include the problem complained about, reviewers, and hotel's responsibility.

• Denial can occur alone or in series, causing various degree of damage to rapport.

Abstract

This paper investigates denial, a rapport-challenging speech act. It discusses the performance of denial in the review response genre – managerial responses addressing negative online comments made by dissatisfied customers. In this study, the speech act of denial is taken to be instantiated as Deny Problem, one of the moves constituting the review response genre. The moves were identified by qualitatively analysing a total of 2,577 managerial responses produced by hotels of different star-ratings (2-star to 5-star) with the aid of the software Nvivo 12. The Deny Problem move and its proximal discourse environment were analysed further to address three main broad areas of interest: the forms of denial, the functions performed by denial, the targets of denial, and the work, if any, done by the hotel management to mitigate the potential damage to rapport resulting from the performance of the rapport-challenging act. Our analysis suggests that denial, be they used alone or in series, can target the asserted information, the customer's rationality, the hotel's responsibility, and the seriousness of the problem. While discursive effort is usually made to repair the damaged rapport with the customers, rather unexpectedly, instances of further rapport challenge are found in the proximity of the denial.

Introduction

Denial as a speech act has drawn considerable research attention from within the field of linguistics and outside like psychology and business studies (e.g. Kim et al., 2004; Spenader and Maier, 2009; Tedlow, 2010). It has been defined, from a discursive perspective, as “a statement in which an allegation is explicitly declared to be untrue” (Ferrin et al., 2007: 894); and from a cognitive perspective, as “the unwillingness to see or admit a truth that ought to be apparent and is in fact apparent to many others” (Tedlow, 2010: 36) (emphasis added). The present study follows Ho (2019) and defines denial from a discursive perspective as a statement whereby an allegation is explicitly or implicitly declared to be untrue. This definition is adopted for two reasons. First, any claims made about the hotel managers' cognition (i.e. their (un)willingness to see or admit a truth) at the time of writing the responses can hardly be substantiated as only the discourse produced by the managers was analysed. Second, contrary to Ferrin et al.'s (2007) definition, denial can be performed explicitly or implicitly (Ho, 2019; Stapleton and Hargie, 2011).

The way denial is defined does not seem to change its rapport-challenging nature. The performance of the speech act indicates the speaker's/writer's disagreement with the hearer/reader, constituting a face threat to the latter (Brown and Levinson, 1987). As face, sociality rights and obligations, and interactional goals are the three interconnected bases of rapport, any threat made to it will unavoidably challenge the rapport between the interactants concerned (Spencer-Oatey, 2008).

It is rather strange then for people to perform the speech act of deny as it has negative effect on interpersonal rapport. In fact, denial can perform various functions including repairing trust (Ferrin et al., 2007; Kim et al., 2004), repairing image (Benoit, 2015; Holtzhausen and Roberts, 2009) and acting as a defence strategy (Schütz, 1998; van Dijk, 1992). Apart from the three functions reported above, there are at least two other reasons to continue to pursue the line of research into hotels' managerial responses, termed the review response genre (Ho, 2017a, b, 2019). First, probably because one main function of managerial responses is supposedly to achieve service recovery (Sparks and Fredline, 2007; Zhang and Vásquez, 2014), the use of denial in such responses has just been scarcely reported in previous studies of the genre (Sparks and Bradley, 2017). Our understanding of the performance of denial in the genre is therefore still limited. Second, the importance of the review response genre to hotels has been increasing with the popularity of e-tourism (Buhalis, 2003). Hotels can manage their online reputation and image, and improve their services and facilities through responding to customers' negative comments (O'Connor, 2010; Stringam and Gerdes, 2010).

The present study aims to deepen our understanding of denial in the review response genre by examining the linguistic realization of the speech act. This will subsequently allow us to better appreciate the reasons for the hotel management to risk damaging its rapport with customers (both existing and potential) by denying the latter's accusations. The study is guided by the following research questions:

• In what forms is the speech act of denial realized in the review response genre?

• What are the targets of denial in the genre?

• What is the proximal discourse environment of denial, that is, what immediately precedes and follows the speech act in the genre?

• How does the hotel management mitigate the potential damage to rapport resulting from the performance of denial?