Making Sales: Influence as Interpersonal Accomplishment

Making Sales - an ethnographic enquiry - uses interview, observation and participant-observation materials to portray sales work as it is experienced by the people involved. The author depicts the dilemmas, strategies, practical limitations, frustrations and excitement experienced by vendors in their dealings with their customers. Prus also demonstrates how people draw upon and manipulate human communication, symbolic meanings, relationships and the norms of moral order to accomplish their goals.