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Globalization - a set of far-reaching, transnational, economic, social and cultural changes -- has implications for patterns of language-use, linguistic variation and change.
= new ways of working that make new demands on the linguistic abilities of workers
•Workers must in principle develop new forms of linguistic and other agency to meet the demands of the new capitalism
•New linguistic demands on workers may, in practice, entail new (or at least, newly intensified) forms of CONTROL over their linguistic behavior, and thus, a diminution of their agency as language users.
‘Audience design’ (Bell 1984, 1997)
• Stylistic choices are primarily motivated by the speaker’s assessment of the effect certain ways of speaking will have on particular addressees.
• Commonly takes the form of convergence towards the addressee’s way of speaking.
Stylization is taking on a voice which is recognizably different from one’s ‘normal’ or ‘expected’ voice
Crossing – appropriating linguistic features that index an identity which is in some salient way ‘other’
combining meanings made available by linguistic variation into a distinctive way of speaking; a stylistic agent appropriates resources from a broad sociolinguistic landscape, recombining them to make a distinctive style
In Service Workplaces
•Service styles are designed by one set of people (managers on site or at head office, or –not uncommonly—outside consultants) to be enacted in speech by a different set of people (front line customer service workers).
•Typically, a third set of people (supervisors or ‘team leaders’, and sometimes, also ‘mystery shoppers’, people employed by the companies to carry out spot-checks on service while posing as genuine customers) are charged with ensuring compliance through monitoring, ‘coaching’ and appraisal of workers’ linguistic performance.
in Service Workplace
Stylistic choices’ are made by corporate style designers with ‘audience design’ in mind, namely the customers with whom service workers interact.
• The corporate style designers’ relationship to the audience is indirect, mediated by the workers who actually talk to the customers.
• These workers have dual audience: the customer and the supervisor or manager who enforces linguistic and other norms through surveillance.
• In practice, the workers prioritize the ‘in-house audience’, whose judgments on their performance had more direct and immediate consequences.
The institutional regime of the call center exemplifies what the sociologist George Ritzer (1996) has dubbed ‘McDonaldization.’
This process has four main dimensions:
McDonaldization results to an EFFICIENT, logical sequence of methods that can be completed the same way every time to produce the desired outcome. Quantity (or CALCULABILITY becomes the measurement of good performance. The outcome is PREDICTABLE. Additionally, all aspects of the process are easily CONTROLLED
Call center scripting and styling
Scripting – standardizes what is said
Styling – attempts to standardize how it is said
"….[women] just seem to fit better, they are better at it….people who can chat to people, interact, build rapport….they’re more natural when they do it. It doesn’t sound as forced, perhaps they’re used to doing it all the time anyway…they have higher tolerance level than men."
CUSTOMER CARE
EMOTIONAL LABOUR
Examples:
“Your telephone manner should sound as if you have been waiting for that particular call all day” (for every 32-sec encounter, directory assistance centre manual)
“Try to make the customer feel you are there for them” (auto insurance centre manual)
AMATEUR THERAPY
However, service work is performed not only by women.
increase in Service Sector + decrease in Manufacturing = Men seeking customer service jobs
WHAT THE MEN SAY
Male call centre operators in Britain did not consider their gender to be an issue.
They were more concerned with artificiality, inauthenticity, and extreme subservience of the persona imposed upon them by scripts.
In the US, a number of men perceived their jobs as “feminizing” and for that reason, problematic.
However it must be noted that these observations are anecdotal and non-conclusive.
WOMEN’S LANGUAGE
by Deborah Cameron
McDonaldization is described by Ritzer as a process by which a society takes on the characteristics of a fast food restaurant. It is a process of hyper-rationalization in which it is believed that almost any task could (and should) be rationalized.
“... the adoption of new managerial approaches in a context of intensified global competition has sharpened awareness of language as a valuable commodity, potentially a source of competitive advantage...”
In call centers:
‘Standard’ speech or ‘standardization’ of speech within organization
•The practice of making and enforcing rules for language-use with the intention of reducing optional variation in performance
•Tend not to target grammatical or phonological variation but is more concerned to prescribe features of interactive discourse such as prosody and voice quality, the way in which particular speech acts should be performed, the choice of address terms/salutations and the consistent use of certain politeness formulae.
•Is not prompted by the need to communicate across regional/national boundaries, but rather by the need to subordinate individuals to a corporate norm.
linguistic consequences of globalization
Women represent majority of rank & file employees in many service workplaces,
including call centres.
linguistic studies of workplace talk
relationship between language and gender