Searching for Trouble: Recruiting Assistance through Embodied Action

The recruitment of assistance constitutes a basic organizational problem for participants in social interaction. The methods of recruitment that we have identified include embodied displays of trouble which create opportunities for others to give or offer assistance. In this report, we examine one coherent set of such embodied displays in detail: visible searches of the environment. We first distinguish between looking and searching as different forms of embodied action and then describe the specific embodied practices that participants use to produce visible searches.