International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Apology is an action in which one admits the wrongful nature of an act and one's responsibility for it in dealing with some type of problematic situation; for instance violations of social expectations, offenses, rule-breaking behaviors, social predicaments, and embarrassment. The concept can be traced back to apologia , the speech of self-defense identified in Greek rhetoric. The first scholar to give much attention to this action in face-to-face settings was →  Erving Goffman , who treated it as part of a remedial interchange. The remedial interchange is a sequence of exchanges in which one tries to change the meaning of an action that is potentially offensive to one that is acceptable through the uses of such acts as excuses, justifications, and apologies (→  Accounting Research ). Unlike an excuse , in which one admits the wrongfulness of an act but denies one's full responsibility, or a justification , in which one admits the responsibility but denies that the act itself was wrong, an apology admits both to the wrongfulness and to one's responsibility for the act, often with an expression of remorse. Goffman treated a remedial interchange as a unit basically consisting of four moves, namely remedy (i.e., accounts, apologies, or requests), relief, appreciation, and minimization, whereas other researchers have used slightly larger units, such as an accounting sequence and ... log in or subscribe to read full text