Walking away: An embodied resource to close informal encounters in offices

• This article studies face-to-face interactions with video data.
• It offers an ethnomethodological approach of office work.
• Embodied resources are involved in closing unscheduled encounters.
• We focus on different types of walking away.
• And show they enable recognizable organizational achievements.

This article addresses informal interactions in offices by analyzing video recordings of naturally-occurring, unscheduled visits in offices. We focus on closings, and more particularly on the embodied resource of walking away by drawing heavily on a previous study. We show that fellow institutional members rely on a similar set of methods, types of walking away, to simultaneously close the encounter and achieve office work. During closings, parties are to elaborate the main features of their professional relationship and of the task at hand, and this is achieved through the interactional work to achieve closings. We also show embodied resources and the sequentiality of interaction play an important part in the production of deontic authority in office organizations.