Rethinking call centers
From stigma to productive experience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.42282Keywords:
stigma, call centers, resistance, ethnography, Goffmann, passingAbstract
Call centers have been critiqued in academia and the media for widespread standardization. This paper argues that although this critique of working conditions is well-intended, it has led to unwanted stigmatization of not just call center work but also of call center agents. Much has been published on call centers, but the stigma this work entails and the effect this has on agents on and off the phone has been overlooked. This paper applies Goffman’s notion of stigma to data collected through long-term ethnography and interviews with over seventy call center agents in a London call center. I show how agents experience, manage, and resist stigma. The analysis reveals that agents attempt to hide where they work by adopting different accents and avoiding specific lexis associated with call center language. I conclude by suggesting potential avenues for reducing the stigma of working in a call center, e.g. shifting the dominant discussion in academia beyond debates surrounding standardization.
References
Alarcón, A., and Heyman, J. M. (2013) Bilingual call centers at the US-Mexico border: Location and linguistic markers of exploitability. Language in Society 42(1):1–21. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404512000875.
Bain, P., and Taylor, P. (2000) Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre. New Technology, Work and Employment 15(1): 2–18. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-005X.00061.
Belt, V. (2002) A female ghetto? Women’s careers in call centres. Human Resource Management Journal 12(4): 51–66. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-8583.2002.tb00077.x.
Belt, V., Richardson, R., and Webster, J. (2002) Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres. New Technology, Work and Employment 17(1): 20–34. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-005X.00091.
Cameron, D. (2000a) Good to talk? London: Sage.
Cameron, D. (2000b) Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(3): 323–347. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00119.
Fernie, S., and Metcalf, D. (1998) (Not) hanging on the telephone: Payment systems in the new sweatshops. London: Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Flowerdew, J. (2008) Scholarly writers who use English as an additional language: What can Goffman’s ‘stigma’ tell us? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(2): 77–86. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2008.03.002.
Goffman, E. (1986) Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity (26th pr). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hitch, P. (1983) Social identity and the half-Asian child. In G. M. Breakwell (ed.) Threatened identities 107–127. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Holman, D., and Fernie, S. (2000) Can I help you? Call centres and job satisfaction. Centrepiece 5(1): 2–5.
Holtgrewe, U., Kerst, C., and Shire, K. (eds) (2002) Re-organising service work: Call centres in Germany and Britain. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.
Kanuha, V. K. (1999) The social process of passing to manage stigma: Acts of internalized oppression of acts of resistance. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 27–46.
Mankekar, P., and Gupta, A. (2014) Intimate encounters: Affective labor in call centers. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/8136952/Intimate_Encounters_Affective_Labor_in_Call_Centers.
Matos, P. (2012) Call center labor and the injured precariat: shame, stigma, and downward social mobility in contemporary Portugal. Dialectical Anthropology 36(3–4): 217–243. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-012-9276-8.
Mirchandani, K. (2004) Practices of global capital: Gaps, cracks and ironies in transnational call centres in India. Global Networks 4(4): 355–373. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2004.00098.x.
Mirchandani, K. (2012) Phone clones: Authenticity work in the transnational service economy. Ithaca: ILR Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801464140.
Poster, W. R. (2007) Who’s on the line? Indian call center agents pose as Americans for U.S. outsourced firms. Industrial Relations 46(2): 271–304. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-232X.2007.00468.x.
Rohy, V. (1996) Displacing desire: Passing, nostalgia and Giovanni’s room. In E. K. Ginsberg (ed.) Passing and the fictions of identity 218–233. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822382027-010.
Roy, S. (2003) Bilingualism and standardization in a Canadian call center: Challenges for a linguistic minority community. In R. Bayley and S. R. Schecter (eds) Language socialization in bilingual and multilingual societies 269–285. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Doi: https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853596377-019.
Spradlin, A. L. (1998) The price of ‘passing’: A lesbian perspective on authenticity in organizations. Management Communication Quarterly 11(4): 598–605. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318998114006.
Taylor, P., and Bain, P. (1999) ‘An assembly line in the head’: Work and employee relations in the call centre. Industrial Relations Journal 30(2): 101–117. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2338.00113.
Tovar, J. (2020) Call center agents’ skills: Invisible, illegible, and misunderstood. Sociolinguistic Studies 14(4): 437–458. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.39555.
Walkerdine, V. (2006) Workers in the new economy: Transformation as border crossing. Ethos 34(1):10–41. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2006.34.1.010.
Walkerdine, V., and Ringrose, J. (2006) Femininities: Reclassifying upward mobility and the neo-liberal subject. In C. Skelton, B. Francis and L. Smulyan (eds) The SAGE handbook of gender and education 3–46. Sage: London.
Woydack, J. (2019) Linguistic ethnography of a multilingual call center: London calling. Cham: Springer. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93323-8.
Woydack, J., and Rampton, B. (2016) Text trajectories in a multilingual call centre: The linguistic ethnography of a calling script. Language in Society 45(5) 709–732. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000610.
