Call center timespace and working from home

Abstract

Ethnographies of Indian call centers highlight the space of the global call center and its separateness from domestic life. This separateness is manifested in a chronotope (depiction of place, time and personhood) which allows for the coordination of sociolinguistic practices between call center workers and their colleagues, both domestic and international. Learning to speak like a ‘professional’ is one reason that many people seek work in call centers. For many call center workers this register is learned on the job from colleagues, trainers and managers. Covid-19, a global pandemic which has forced many industries to take adaptive measures in the face of national lockdowns, has led to many workers suddenly working from home. On May 24th 2020, the Government of India ordered a 21-day nation-wide lockdown, limiting the movement of over a billion people and forcing call center employees to work from home. Drawing from interviews with call center employees impeded by the lockdown, along with an analysis of metalinguistic commentaries from call center trainers before the lockdown, I propose that call center timespace serves the purpose of coordination of sociolinguistic practices and the enregisterment of professional forms of personhood emblematically linked to an array of speech norms including but not limited to pronunciation, grammatical norms and the phrasing structure of customer service interactions. The newly mediatized formulations of workers in a work-from-home environment result in a clash between the chronotopes of home and office.

The case of task-oriented, <em>polite</em> discourse in intercultural aviation and customer service interactions

“…More recently, a special issue of the journal Sociolinguistic Studies edited by Tovar (2022) explores current developments in call center research and specifically the impact call center work has on agents. Relevant issues in call center interactions are addressed, including web chat (Lockwood, 2022), agent stigmatization and resistance (Orthaber, 2022), and agent training relative to Covid-19 concerns (Nielsen, 2022).…”

“…The use of addressee-focused markers, extended turn features, and politeness and respect markers characterizes the overall nature of transactions handled by outsourced agents. Service encounters commonly allocate for courteous language and the recognition of roles (e.g., server/servee), and call center agents are expected to show respect and courtesy when assisting customers (Nielsen, 2022). Of interest here is the variation between these three groups of call center agents who are, in fact, dealing with similar contexts and callers, especially the contrast between PHIL and U.S.-based agents.…”

The role of language in place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns

“…Research has addressed the effects of Covid-19 in many areas, such as workplaces and working from home (e.g., Nielsen, 2022;Tovar, 2022), communication, and de-globalizing forces (Sułkowski, 2020). Nevertheless, there have been few studies, including linguistic ones, on how Covid-19 has impacted place branding or how images of place have been reconstructed and the ways places have come to be reimagined as post-lockdown.…”