Site and participants

The setting of this study, Ellie's Style Shop, is a small independent hair-salon, located in a village in southern England and run by the owner, Ellie, with two members of staff, Bethan and Clare. It comprises one downstairs room with five styling stations, three wash-basins at the back of the shop and four old-fashioned hood-dryers arrayed along one wall. A small room upstairs is used for the drying of towels and gowns, and as a staff rest-room. The community served by Ellie's is older and less racially mixed than is the case for England as a whole, and these characteristics are reflected in the salon's clientele, who are mostly older folk, and overwhelmingly white British.

In contrast to the overtly feminised spaces described in some studies of hair-salons (e.g. Barber Reference Barber2008: 461), Ellie's presents a quite neutral space, with walls painted off-white, brown flooring and overhead lighting that casts a somewhat unflattering light. The magazines on offer, though overtly targeting a female readership (e.g. Women's Own, Good Housekeeping), do not focus exclusively on health and beauty; and although the shelves are stacked with hair products for sale, there are no other stereotypically feminine items. Like Julie's International Salon in Furman's study, the accent at Ellie's is ‘on functionality, not glamour’ (Furman Reference Furman1997: 18). This emphasis on functionality might in part be a function of the salon's clientele, with Ellie claiming that men comprise some 40 per cent of her client list.

My nine client participants were all white British women, ranging in age from 55 to 90. My three oldest participants attended Ellie's weekly for a shampoo-and-set; the remaining six all had a cut and blow dry, and each of these women coloured their hair, either at home or in the hair-salon. I recruited these nine participants in various ways. Some approached me, having seen a small poster I put up in the salon; some, I approached, having built up rapport during my time observing (see below); some were prompted by Ellie.

Data collection

The data collection encompassed audio-recording of naturally occurring interactions supplemented by participant observation and interviews.

To build a rich collection of interactional data I recorded a total of 27 hair-appointments (about 20 hours of audio-recordings) of my nine client participants. For each of these, the digital recorder lay above the wash-basin or on the shelf in front of them at the styling station.

To gain an understanding of the salon's people and practices – and to help in recruiting my participants – I undertook nearly two years of participant observation in Ellie's as both client and quasi salon-worker. Hand-written ‘scratch-notes’ of my observations were typed up fully each evening, and coded using NVivo to support the identification of patterns of practices.

Interviews, which lasted up to three hours and were audio-recorded, were held in either participants’ homes or a local café. Each of these took place after I had observed three or more of the participant's hair-appointments and audio-recorded between two and four of them. The interviews supplemented the analysis of the naturally occurring interactional data and encompassed topics relevant to the wider study. The part of the interview schedule focusing on appearance included prompts to encourage participants to relate their experiences of hairdressers and hair management and their reflections on their appearance and ageing, whilst also allowing exploration of issues emerging from observation and initial analysis of appointment recordings.

Data analysis

The starting-point of the analysis was the building of collections. In terms of the audio-recorded data, these collections encompassed both interactional phenomena (e.g. kinds of sequence, like consultation and approval sequences), and more topic-orientated collections (e.g. talk about hair colour and colouring in hair-salon interactions or interview). From the fieldnotes were derived, for example, collections of descriptions of clients’ attire and notes on their appointment-making practices as well as broader descriptions of the processes and practices of the salon.

At this point I made very detailed transcripts of all the audio-recorded data in each collection, using the Conversation Analytic (CA) notation system devised by Jefferson (Reference Jefferson and Lerner2004) (see Appendix), and subjecting them to micro-linguistic analysis drawing on CA's analytic tools. CA focuses on understanding people's ordinary, everyday sense-making methods in interaction. Its primary analytic goals are to understand and describe ‘the intertwined construction of practices, actions, activities, and the overall structure of interactions’ (Stivers and Sidnell Reference Stivers, Sidnell, Sidnell and Stivers2013: 2), drawing on a sophisticated apparatus that supports detailed scrutiny of a range of aspects of interaction, such as turn-taking, turn-design and the ways sequences unfold (Schegloff Reference Schegloff2007; Sidnell and Stivers Reference Sidnell and Stivers2013).

Interview analysis

Much qualitative research examining appearance and its importance to older women has used unstructured interviews as a research method. Despite the undoubted nuance that can emerge from these, the socially situated nature of the research encounter is too often overlooked. For example, studies often comment that the researcher's positionality will have shaped the way participants respond or that particular kinds of response may be attentive to social norms (e.g. Liechty Reference Liechty2012). However, studies rarely – if ever – show how that shaping evidences itself in participants’ responses. More importantly, the way the interviewer her/himself shapes responses through the presuppositions embedded in her/his questions is not considered; indeed, all too often the interviewer's questions are simply omitted. Studies in the CA tradition, by contrast, have shown how interviews should be treated as social interactions in which the researcher plays a key shaping role (Wooffitt and Widdicombe Reference Wooffitt, Widdicombe, Drew, Raymond and Weinberg2006).

With these points in mind, for the purpose of analysis I both incorporated my own utterances into the transcript and included them in the analysis alongside those of my participants to examine how my questions sequentially shaped participants’ responses. Following Rampton (Reference Rampton2006), among others who adopt an interactional approach, I refer to myself by name to underline my status as co-participant in the interaction.

In the next section I consider the insights offered by observation of participants’ practices in the salon. I start with these as they were chronologically the first data I collected and were thus influential, along with the initial review of the appointment-recordings, in shaping the assumptions I brought to the interviews, as I discuss further below.

Extract 2

Extract 3

Just a few clients – and just one of my participants, Brenda – sometimes turned up to their appointment looking less carefully put together.

Extract 4

As these notes indicate, there was considerable variety in clients’ apparel and self-presentation. However, analysis of these descriptions revealed certain commonalities in the dress choices of Ellie's clients. These commonalities related mainly to style. So it was rare to see older women in Ellie's wearing high-heeled shoes; and loose clothing seemed to be preferred to figure-hugging, short and figure-revealing clothes (in line with the norms identified by Hurd Clarke, Griffin and Maliha Reference Hurd Clarke, Griffin and Maliha2009). Of course, participants doubtless have multiple reasons for these choices. For example, they may partly be seeking comfort in looser apparel and lower heels, much as was claimed by participants in the research by Hurd Clarke, Griffin and Maliha (Reference Hurd Clarke, Griffin and Maliha2009: 716ff). For many of them – and interview data point this way – their current investment in how they look may also partly reflect both habit and a desire to maintain some continuity with their former on-sight identity (Symonds and Holland Reference Symonds, Holland, Ward and Bytheway2008: 33f; Ward and Campbell Reference Ward and Campbell2013: 344).

But occasional comments made by various clients, in general, and my participants, in particular, suggest that among the factors shaping clients’ appearance choices was a desire to dress age-appropriately; and what is appropriate now is cast as different to past practice, as in the following fieldnote of a conversation with a client in her late sixties just before her appointment.

Extract 5

Here the client implicitly associates a kind of figure-revealing and trendy attire with youth. Dressing age-appropriately for older women – here defined as fifties or sixties – involves on the contrary not revealing too much flesh or trying to be trendy. Similar observations about age-appropriate dress and appearance were made by most participants both during their audio-recorded hair-appointments and in interview. So they talked about what the recipient should do or what they had done to age well (as far as looks were concerned); and they problematised aspects of social norms of age-appropriate appearance for older women, in general, and themselves, in particular, criticising women deemed to be dressing too young (e.g. wearing pedal pushers in their sixties or seventies), and worrying whether they themselves looked like ‘mutton dressed as lamb’.

As a minimum, these claims display participants’ awareness of social norms of appearance for older women, including the need to adapt one's attire with age. Also their practices of attire suggest that they were in fact tacitly orientating to these loose and unspecific social norms of age-appropriate appearance for older women, avoiding looking like ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ whilst managing not to ‘let themselves go’. More particularly, in generally looking as if they had invested care in their appearance, these older women also displayed themselves as to that extent interested in how they looked; that is, they looked as if their appearance had some importance for them.

This display of investment in their appearance was mirrored in the regular patterns of appointment-making and attendance practices adopted by most of my participants. So my three oldest participants, who still had a shampoo-and-set, attended Ellie's on the same day each week, only booking their appointment when some event disturbed their routine. Of my other six client participants, all of whom had a cut and blow dry, five likewise had a regular pattern of attendance at Ellie's, ranging from every four to eight weeks. These clients generally booked their next appointment at the close of the current. Just a few clients, of whom Brenda was one, had much looser patterns of attendance and appointment-making, allowing months to elapse between appointments before ringing to book last-minute.

Furthermore, in the course of my fieldwork I observed several clients, including my participants, from time-to-time altering the pattern of their hair appointments, e.g. inserting an extra visit, to look their best for particular events – family lunches, coach trips, visits to London, weddings, and so on. Indeed, the mention by a client of having booked an additional appointment sometimes prompted Ellie to enquire about a possible outing. This points to a conventionalised association between a break in clients’ usual appointment patterns and an upcoming social event, and an orientation by all parties to the importance of looking (particularly) good for special events. That is to say, their appearance assumes a particular importance at such times.

In short, in the relative tightness or looseness of their appointment-making and attending practices, in the care they devoted to their attire and other aspects of their appearance, particularly when going out or for social events, participants displayed themselves as more or less invested in their appearance. Unlike the views expressed by participants in the research by Tunaley, Walsh and Nicolson (Reference Tunaley, Walsh and Nicolson1999) with respect to their weight, my participants tended not to treat their age as an excuse or a reason to ‘let themselves go’, to be lax in matters of appearance when it came to their hair, attire and grooming, or to be more laissez-faire when faced with social events. Indeed, even Brenda – the participant who often turned up rather scruffily attired – was eventually driven by her three inches of grey roots to have her hair coloured. Thus, in line with the research discussed earlier, examination of my participants’ practices shows them continuing to invest time and effort in their appearance, and, I suggest, in attending to broad social norms of appearance for older women.

Of course, the nature of my research site and selection of participants means that the latter have inevitably displayed at least some interest in their appearance simply by virtue of their attending the hair-salon. Clearly many older women may never have attended or no longer attend a hair-salon, for whatever reason; their displays of (un)interest via their hair and other appearance practices are omitted in my study. Nevertheless, given the fact that my participants do on the whole display investment in their appearance through their practices, it is particularly telling to compare this display with their appearance-related talk. In what follows I examine the way participants orientate discursively to their appearance in two interactional settings, the hair-salon itself and the research interview, focusing on two sequential environments in which appearance was made particularly salient, namely what I call the ‘approval sequence’, and sequences in interviews which focused on a possible investment in appearance. As I will show, in both sets of sequences participants tended to display lack of interest in their appearance, even if they had minutes earlier been displaying interest.

Setting 1: Hair-appointment

Participants engaged in relatively little appearance-related talk during their hair-appointments. Occasional lengthy consultations at the start; sometimes explanations of changes – additions or lapses – to their routine; rare longer exchanges about their changing appearance; brief comments or instructions interjected into other talk (‘monitoring talk’); and more or less expansive expressions of approval at the close: these comprised the sum of the discursive displays of interest by participants in their appearance.

The only sequence common to all the recorded hair-appointments was the last of these (indeed, even this was occasionally effected without talk). This, the ‘approval sequence’, occurs at the end of the treatment, and in Ellie's is typically initiated by the stylist taking out a mirror to show the client the back of her head. It is the culmination of the overt purpose of the hair-appointment. Here, if nowhere else, we might expect to see some displays of interest by the client in what the stylist has done: scrutiny at least, and perhaps, too, expressions of pleasure and appreciation of her work (as reported in other studies of hair-salons, e.g. Weitz Reference Weitz2005: 182, 184). Indeed, we do see such displays. However, many approval sequences in Ellie's were very cursory, produced almost ‘in passing’, as in the following extract.

Prior to this, the client, Mrs Middleton, and Ellie have been exchanging stories that illustrate their reasons for preferring bitches to (male) dogs; here, they produce affiliative codas to those stories.

Extract 6

Ellie takes out the mirror during the gap in line 8, but Mrs Middleton does not close off the story-telling and move to hair-business. Instead, she prolongs the story-telling, moving to a different impact of her tale (line 9). She then breaks off what she was saying and produces a single-word assessment (line 10), whose sotto voce design, rendering it literally less hearable, casts it as secondary to her story-telling. She then recycles in line 11 both the lexis and prosody of her utterance of line 9, thereby further marking the assessment of line 10 as side-business. Ellie collaborates in this orientation to story-telling: instead of acknowledging Mrs Middleton's ‘lovely’, she produces in line 14 a near-echo of Mrs Middleton's utterance.

One-third of the 26 recorded approval sequences are delivered ‘in passing’ in this manner. By delivering her approval in this way the client – with the stylist's collaboration – constructs story-telling as the main activity under way; and as more important right now than the hair-business which is the ostensible point of the visit but here done very much in passing (or at least primarily assigned to the non-verbal domain).

This minimisation of an interest in appearance at the point when it most obviously becomes the focus is even clearer on the occasions when an overt display of lack of interest is made, as in the following extract, where Ellie is finishing off Brenda's hair.

Extract 7

Ellie takes out the mirror in line 2 and replaces it in line 9. Between these actions, though, there is no verbal approval, as the comments about back-ache are continued. We can also infer from Ellie's utterance in lines 10 and 11 that Brenda gave her reflection in the mirror little if any scrutiny. Ellie's laughter and use of the third person, casting Brenda as a non-addressed participant, points to something unusual – worthy of comment – in Brenda's action, namely the (almost) complete lack of interest in the back of her head (and by extension, in anything the stylist has done). Although Ellie's observation is ostensibly addressed to Clare, it is Brenda who in line 12 responds; and she not only provides the preferred response, i.e. agreement, but effectively produces an exaggeratedly upgraded agreement (Pomerantz Reference Pomerantz, Atkinson and Heritage1984: 65ff). This – ’so long as there's hair there still’ (line 13) – has the effect of not only agreeing, but also sets the bar for satisfaction so low as to constitute a strong display of lack of interest in her appearance.

We might argue that the reason for the minimal or (in Brenda's case) non-existent approvals relates to the routine nature of the hair-appointment for these women. Yet the displayed lack of interest at this point contrasts with earlier scrutiny by both women of what the stylist was doing. That is, with displays of interest. So for example, some minutes before Mrs Middleton's approval of Extract 6, the following had occurred.

Here Mrs Middleton has been telling Ellie an amusing story of an exchange with a friend, which forms part of a much longer complaint about the smell of silage. Mrs Middleton had just recounted how, when driving her friend and catching a particularly strong whiff of the silage, the friend had protested that ‘it wasn't her’.

Extract 8

From lines 1–18 Mrs Middleton and Ellie, with much hilarity, co-construct the somewhat risqué responses that the former might have made to her friend. In line 20, Mrs Middleton, still smiling, agrees with Ellie's imagined version of the exchange between Mrs Middleton and her friend. Then without a pause she shifts footing (Goffman Reference Goffman and Goffman1981) – from laughing and intimate to serious; from story-telling with a friend to a client in the hair-salon – as she demonstrates in lines 20 and 22 that she has all this while been closely attending to Ellie's work on her hair. In this shift of footing Mrs Middleton constructs her hair as, at that point, more important than the story she was telling and the longer complaint of which it was a part. As soon as Ellie provides reassurance (lines 23, 25), Mrs Middleton reverts to the longer complaint sequence with a ‘so’ that invites Ellie to draw her own conclusions about the story of the smell of silage (Raymond Reference Raymond2004).

In this ‘monitoring talk’ Mrs Middleton and others display a temporary orientation to the importance of their hair. Indeed, she and others display similar orientations at other times during their hair-appointments as briefly sketched at the start of this section. It is important to note, of course, that displays by participants of interest in their hair in a hair-salon can do other interactional work than simply (or even) showing interest in their appearance. For example, topicalising their hair or mentioning an additional appointment can (also) provide an entrée to storytelling (e.g. about the event that necessitates the additional appointment). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss such instances. The intriguing aspect, though, in the approval sequences, is that when explicitly invited via the taking out of the mirror to focus on their hair, Mrs Middleton, Brenda and others more or less overtly sometimes do discursive work that has the effect of minimising interest in their appearance. That is, any interest in their appearance is played down by participants precisely at the point when it is made most salient, and regardless of prior displays of interest. A similar playing-down of interest in their appearance is evident, too, in interview when the possibility of their being invested in their appearance arises.

Setting 2: Research interview

In interview, all participants made a range of claims that we might be tempted to interpret as indicating the relative lack of importance to them of their appearance. For example, they asserted that they had other priorities for their time and money, that they were too busy for hair. Similarly, in talking of their daily appearance practices, participants made these out to be fast routines for minimum effort. Mrs Elder, for example, who had started the interview describing appearance as the awful thing about ageing (Extract 1), stated that she spent barely longer than ten minutes on her hair and make-up in the morning. Some participants also made explicit self-categorisations relating to what they were ‘naturally’ like – ’scruffy’ or people who ‘can't be bothered messing about’. However, close examination revealed a number of disfluencies accompanying many such claims in interview – pauses and hesitations, reformulations and re-starts. Putting a micro-analytic lens on such interview talk is revealing, as I illustrate by discussing an extract from my interview with Rose.

I focus on Rose because her practices of attire (Extract 2) and tight hair-appointment routines for her cut and colouring suggested that her appearance was important to her. She was also one of the clients who produced rather more effusive approval sequences. Armed with this prior knowledge of Rose, I had expected her to assert that her appearance was important to her. In interview, though, she produced the kind of claims to lack of interest in her appearance discussed above. Furthermore, even the rare admissions indicating some interest in her appearance were down-played. However, these were also marked by signs of trouble, as in the following exchange that occurred just over half an hour into the interview.

Extract 9

The production of my question takes me to line 16. My question is marked by a considerable lack of fluency, with reformulations (lines 2, 9–10), repairs (line 7) and clarifications (line 14). Rose herself shapes this in various ways, and this shaping displays the trouble she has in responding. She allows pauses to develop without any attempt at uptake (e.g. lines 4, 5, 8, 11) and she initiates repair (‘sorry’, line 6) in a manner reminiscent of the technique used by some callers to a suicide help-line to avoid supplying a name (Sacks Reference Sacks1995: vol. I, 3ff). All this enables her to defer a response for several seconds as I rework my question.

Rose's response, when it eventually arrives (line 18), is delivered with further signs of trouble. Her ‘nice’ in line 18 is produced with a continuing intonation, as if she is about to enlarge on what she means. Instead, she breaks off. Her subsequent turns are marked by gaps and pauses (lines 19, 21, 23, 27), hesitations (line 22), minimisers (‘just’ lines 24) and the knowledge disclaimer, ‘I don't know’ (line 20), that may serve more to distance herself from a possibly ‘sceptical or negative inference’ about her than to deny knowledge (Wooffitt Reference Wooffitt2005: 1769). The ‘meaning for her’ (line 9) that she eventually produces – knowing ‘you're going to look nice’ (lines 28–31) – relates to her appearance. There is further distancing in Rose's design of this utterance, produced as it is with a distinct pause before ‘nice’ (line 30) and a ‘generic you’ which, along with ‘you know’ (line 25) both appeals to her interlocutor's own experience (O'Connor Reference O'Connor2000: 99ff) and generalises the experience.

In response to Rose's elaboration, I produce an acknowledgement (‘right’, line 32), which appears to treat as self-evident an association between the importance to Rose of going to the hair-salon and wanting to look ‘nice’. But this positions Rose as someone who is in fact interested in ‘looking nice’, that is, in her appearance.

It is at this point that Rose engages in discursive work to position herself rather differently. In line 33 she seems to be starting to confirm her prior response, marking it thus with her recycling in line 35 of ‘the fact that you’ from line 24. This time, though, the ‘someone’ referred to is someone to chat with rather than someone making her look nice. So barely has Rose mentioned ‘looking nice’ as the ‘importance’ or ‘meaning’ for her of going to the salon than she shifts the focus on to a non-appearance-related ‘meaning for her’, namely ‘having a chat’ (line 41), with this element foregrounded as the stylist's job (lines 43–44).

Rose now launches a story. Sequentially occasioned, as it is, by the generalisation about the stylist's job being ‘keeping you chatting’ (lines 45–47), this story is constructed as an example of that aspect of the stylist's job. Rose peoples her story with a stereotypical salon figure, the flattering male stylist (Robinson, Hall and Hockey Reference Robinson, Hall and Hockey2011: 43), and herself, unashamedly ‘loving’ (line 54) the encounter with this ‘gorgeous’ (line 52) man whom she later describes as a ‘hunk’ (not shown). She thereby positions herself as more interested in the flirtatious encounter than in the work being done to her appearance.

This positioning of herself as a character in her tale is supported through her delivery. She uses emphasis and vowel elongation to infuse her evaluations of that stylist and the visits to his salon with an enthusiasm (lines 52, 54–55) that is in stark contrast to the muted ‘just nice’ (line 18) and ‘quite good’ (lines 37–38) of her initial and reworked responses. Moreover, smiles (line 52) and laughter (line 55) infiltrate her evaluations in a display of light-heartedness in which I collaborate (lines 53, 56–57), and which further contrasts with the serious tone achieved in Rose's initial responses. Through these contrasts with her initial and reworked responses of lines 18–37, and through the parallels between her lively character in the story and her liveliness in narrating it, Rose distances herself from her initial response. Instead, she points to her ‘real’ self as being someone who is primarily interested in the light-hearted chit-chat of the salon visit, with appearance-related concerns being secondary.

In summary, my question to Rose implicitly positions her as potentially interested in her appearance (‘what importance does it have going to the hair-salon?’). Her initial response aligns semantically with that implicit positioning (‘you know when you come out you're going to look nice’). However, the signs of trouble in her delivery indicate that my implicit positioning of her, as someone interested to an extent in her appearance, is unwelcome to her. With her reworked response and story, she succeeds in re-positioning herself as a woman for whom the appearance-aspect of the salon visit is relatively unimportant.

Overall, detailed CA-informed analysis of the interviews showed that when I as interviewer embedded a presumption in my questions that participants were in fact interested in their appearance – implying, for example, that they spent ‘a lot’ of time on their hair, or, as with Rose here, that the visit to the hair-salon might be ‘important’ – signs of trouble tended to occur in their responses as they displayed themselves as not interested. Comparing Rose's data with another client's, Brenda's, is instructive. As mentioned above, Brenda was the participant who in her attire and routines (or lack thereof) most displayed herself as uninterested in her appearance (Extract 4). I asked Rose and Brenda eight and nine appearance-related questions, respectively, yet only two of Brenda's responses displayed the ‘trouble’ features discussed above, compared to seven of Rose's responses. However, what was also notable is that whereas all those seven of my questions to Rose embedded a presumption that her appearance might be important to her, only three of my questions to Brenda embedded such a presumption. The sole trouble-free response Rose gave to one of my appearance-related questions was to the one in which I had not embedded in the question a prior assumption about the importance to her of her appearance.

What this suggests is that my own preconceptions shaped the precise way I formulated the appearance-related questions for each participant, positioning them as potentially more or less invested in their appearance. Furthermore, the signs of trouble participants displayed in response to these presumption-embedding questions of mine imply that being positioned as invested in their appearance is somehow problematic. In the concluding section, I discuss what might be going on here and draw the strands together.