Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center: London Calling

223 Pages·2019·3.419 MB·English

by  Johanna Woydack

COMMUNICATING IN PROFESSIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS
series editor: Jonathan Crichton
Linguistic Ethnography of
a Multilingual Call Center
London Calling
Johanna Woydack
Communicating in Professions and Organizations
Series Editor
Jonathan Crichton
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia
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Johanna Woydack
Linguistic
Ethnography
of a Multilingual
Call Center
London Calling
Johanna Woydack
Foreign Language Business Communication
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Vienna, Austria
Communicating in Professions and Organizations
ISBN 978-3-319-93322-1 ISBN 978-3-319-93323-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93323-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956290
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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Praise for Linguistic Ethnography
of a Multilingual Call Center
“Woydack provides an illuminating insider look into call centers and how call
agents operate interactionally and textually, within the organization itself and
with clients on the end of the phone line. The importance of the standardized
script, which is frustratingly familiar to most people, is investigated in terms of
top-down accountability, training, and monitoring alongside bottom-up resis-
tance and agency on the part of call center agents. A fascinating ethnographic
study of a multilingual globalized workplace.”
—Colleen Cotter, Queen Mary University of London, UK
“This innovative study of a multilingual centre draws on unprecedented eth-
nographic access. Four years of participant observation provide Woydack with
an insider understanding that enables her to challenge established critiques of
standardization. Detailed analysis shows the agency of staff as they negotiate
the demands of the script, their own communicative repertoires, and imme-
diate interactional realities. Her research provides a fascinating glimpse into a
little- understood setting, and a nuanced understanding of the contemporary
workplace.”
—Karin Tusting, Lancaster University, UK
“By placing script trajectories in the centre of this linguistic ethnography,
Woydack constructs an insightful and engaging account of language practices in
a globally operating call center. Her study weaves together recontextualization
analysis and elements of workplace studies in a highly innovative way.”
—Jannis Androutsopoulos, University of Hamburg, Germany
“This book provides a fresh and insightful exploration into how call centre
agents develop and use language at work. The researcher was able to do this
because of her unique position within this workplace: she being one of the
agents herself. This allowed her to provide a deep ethnographic account of how
agents are recruited, trained and managed in this call centre, where many previ-
ous studies have relied on less knowledge and understanding of the actual and
nuanced work situation.”
—Jane Lockwood, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
v
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my gratitude to several people who have contrib-
uted in various ways to this book.
I am greatly indebted to my Ph.D. supervisors Prof. Ben Rampton,
Prof. Celia Roberts and Prof. Jannis Androutsopoulos, who have assisted
me over the years. My warmest and deepest thanks go to my main super-
visor Prof. Ben Rampton. I am sincerely grateful for all his extraordinarily
helpful, meticulous and detailed comments on the various drafts, for
being patient with me, taking time for supervision meetings and inspir-
ing me to think deeper and differently about aspects of my work.
I am grateful to the Funds for Women Graduates (FfWG) for helping
me with the funding of this research.
This book would not have been possible if it had not been for the man-
agement of my field site who kindly granted me full access and supported
me the whole way through, always trying to facilitate my research. I do
not know how to thank them enough for this. The same is true of all my
participants, to whom I owe the greatest obligation for sharing their
invaluable insights and knowledge and allowing me to represent their
experiences in this book. It is their voices which have contributed greatly
to its insights.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, in particular my
parents, for their continuous support, help, and advice, since without this,
vii
viii Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to complete this book. I am also very grateful
to my brother for assisting me with the editing of this work and my sister
and brother-in-law Geoffrey for helping me with the proofreading of some
parts of it.
I gratefully acknowledge permission from Multilingual Matters for
allowing me to reuse content from a chapter I published in the volume
“Engaging in Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language
Practices” and Cambridge University Press to draw on material from
within: Woydack, J., & Rampton, B. (2016). Text trajectories in a multi-
lingual call centre: The linguistic ethnography of a calling script. Language
in Society, 45(5), 709–732 © Cambridge University Press 2016, repro-
duced with permission.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Aims and scope 4
The context 5
Background: call centers, standardization, scripts 6
Theoretical framing and methodological designs intertwined 16
Outline of the book 19
References 23
2 Getting to Know CallCentral: A First Encounter 27
A fictional agent’s first day at work 27
Agent views 55
Conclusion: the significance of the script at CallCentral 64
References 66
3 The First Stage of the Script’s Career: Production of the
Master Script 67
Introduction 67
Features of the institutional system: contractual expectations 70
The production of the script 80
Interim conclusion 89
References 90
ix
x Contents
4 The Second Stage in the Script’s Career: Adaptation
of the Master Script 93
Introduction 93
Living with monitoring from management upstairs 95
The adpation of the master script in its transition downstairs 104
Personalizing the master script in interview role play 122
Conclusion: campaign managers and team leaders negotiating
between upstairs and downstairs 135
References 138
5 The Final Stage of the Script’s Career: Enactment and Use
of the Master Script 141
Introduction 141
Rehearsing and using the master script: a script in progress 142
Data logging 161
Conclusion: agency in calling—beyond the dualism of control
and resistance 170
References 177
6 Standardization and Agency Intertwined 179
Advantages of ethnographic methods for revealing
complexities of corporate hierarchies and subjectivities within
them 180
Benefits of focusing on the script as the main object of analysis 182
Advantages of tracking textual trajectories over time, space,
and personnel 183
Perspectival variation in hierarchies 186
Rules within rules 186
Creative compliance versus resistance 188
The achilles heel of monitoring 192
Upskilling 193
The essential intertwining of standardization and
transformation 195