Abstract
Before I attended Christian Heath and Paul Luff’s plenary lecture at the International Conference of Conversation Analysis in 2010 in Mannheim (Heath and Luff, 2010a), I was not familiar with Heath’s work, mostly in collaboration with Luff, on auctions. I was familiar, though, with much of his other work, often with collaborators, on doctor–patient interaction (e.g. Heath, 1988) and interaction in the workplace involving the use of technology (e.g. Heath and Luff, 2000). A common characteristic of all this work is its focus on what would come to be called embodied action, or ‘the ways in which the production and intelligibility of action is accomplished in and through bodied action, the spoken and the visible, and where appropriate, the use of various objects and artifacts, tools and technologies’ (Heath and Luff, 2013: 295). The work on auctions (e.g. Heath and Luff, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b), of course, shares this characteristic.
This well-written volume, authored solely by Heath, brings this work on auctions together in one place and adds, in the first chapter, some historical information about the development of auctions and different types of auction and, at the end, a glossary of common terms related to auctions. The author lucidly analyzes, for example, how an auctioneer uses various resources – talk, gaze, gesture, bodily orientation and material artifacts such as the hammer and documents on the podium – to establish competition between two bidders, a run, so as to quickly escalate the price of the item being auctioned; to seek a new bidder when one of the two has withdrawn; to coordinate the bids of bidders who are physically present, who are bidding by telephone or internet, or who have left bids on commission with the auction house; and to maximize the transparency of the auction itself, which is critical for maintaining the integrity of the auction house and participants’ trust in the process.
Of particular interest is Chapter 6, which focuses on how bids made online are incorporated into the auction, and the difficulties that this presents. Less than a decade ago, Heath and Luff (2007b: 69) wrote that ‘[a]t the present time, despite various experiments with the internet, remote participants typically bid by telephone’. In this volume, though, Heath is able to write of ‘the widespread deployment of systems to support real-time Internet bidding at auctions of art and antiques’ (p. 140). While online participation has not replaced other forms of remote participation – through the telephone or by leaving bids on commission – it would appear to have become much more common over the last decade. An issue with the use of online bidding, though, has been that such bids tend to be slightly delayed, presenting online bidders with difficulty in having their bids accepted and auctioneers with managing a run between two bidders. The auctions that Heath analyzes consist of runs and series of runs between two bidders. When there are two active bidders competing in a run, the auctioneer ignores attempts by others to enter their own bids, but when one bidder withdraws, the auctioneer seeks a new bidder in order to establish a next run. For an interested online bidder, though, when one bidder withdraws and an opportunity to have a bid accepted occurs, the delay may prevent the bidder from being able to enter the next run. In addition, when an online bidder is one of the two participants in a run, a delay in bidding the next increment, together with the auctioneer’s lack of visible access to the online bidder, may be misinterpreted by the auctioneer as withdrawal, so that he or she seeks a new bidder to establish a next run. As Heath concludes, ‘the integration of Internet bidding into the live, co-present auction demands significant changes in the ways in which the [online] participants and their contributions are described, identified and rendered “visible”’ (p. 159).
If there is a weakness of this volume, it is that it does not offer much that is new. While it contains some new examples, it covers much of the same ground and considers the same issues as is found in Heath’s work with Paul Luff on auctions already cited here. It is nevertheless an interesting volume and brings this work on auctions into one place, which may be particularly important for readers who do not have ready access to these earlier publications.