As employees, most of us have probably received written instructions and guidelines from our colleagues or superiors that we were supposed to follow, carry out, or reference in workplace tasks (Smith 2001; Anderson 2004). Sometimes we adhere to these directives to the letter, or even find them helpful. At other times we might interpret them situationally or try to evade or even resist them. Creating a work culture encouraging employeesâ compliance with electronic or paper texts, also called âaudit culture,â âaudit society,â or âstandardization,â is on the rise (Strathern 2000; Power 2010; Shore and Wright 2015).
This book is about call center workplaces that have reputations in the public and the media for providing scripted âinstructionsâ and guidelines to employees. The general public believes management uses electronic monitoring to insure that call center workers (âagentsâ) follow these scripts (cf. Bain and Taylor 2000, 3; Hudson 2011). In many industries and institutions, providing employees with instructional texts is considered unproblematic, a positive aspect of the work environment oriented toward achieving and maintaining standards. However, scholars researching the dynamics of call center labor in which scripted directives govern work argue that the process is controversial and mostly negative. Sociologists and sociolinguists blame the scripted work environments of call centers for deskilling , dehumanization, and the compromise of employee agency (cf. e.g., Mirchandani 2004, 359â62; Sonntag 2009, 12). In fact, these scholars often believe scripted work environments are so controlling and oppressive that workers find themselves driven to resist all forms of control; scholarship celebrates them for this (Mumby 2005; Bain and Taylor 2000; Leidner 1993) Many researchers believe that the agency inherent in humanity resists standardization attempts that turn workers into machines. If agents do support standardization, scholars argue in a Marxian fashion, they do not realize that they have been duped and exploited by the system (see also Mumby 2005). Yet the same researchers assume that agents are limited in their ability to resist because they work in an electronic prison where every keystroke is being recorded and work contracts are temporary, which means agents can lose their employment if they resist.
While I was working and doing fieldwork in call centers that relied heavily on scripts and monitoring, I was surprised to learn how supportive call agents themselves were of scripts. I did not expect agents to tell me that scripts, for example, helped them master languages or strengthen their fluency. This support stood in stark contrast to most of the academic literature and what one reads in the media (see for an exception Sallaz 2015). I asked myself if these workers were indeed being duped as the literature claimed, and if the only way for agents to show agency was to resist openly. Is it possible that other forms of agency, with some degree of compliance, could have been overlooked by researchers, such as the creative transformation of scripts in the practice of call center work itself?
I was also surprised by the different purposes for scripts at call centers and the diversity in perceptions of their utility. Corporate management thought of scripts and their uses in ways markedly different from the call center agents and the managers below them. Call center managers were varied amongst themselves in the positions they took toward scripts. Individuals adopted stances depending on when they were talking and to whom. Occasionally contradictions among workers surfaced in the form of open conflict. Yet scripts were also the thread that connected call center workers across the organizational hierarchy . A closer look at the functions of scripts and their efficacy in the workplace will help develop a more nuanced understanding of the controversies surrounding call center labor, and it will address the productivity of agents operating in these settings. The following vignette from my field notes illustrates some of the tensions and productive agentive strategies that will be the focus of this book.
Field Note Entry 1.1 Problems with a campaign and Jennyâs secret solution
[I had received a Yahoo Instant Message from Jenny asking me to come to the panic room for an emergency meeting. I had already received a visit from the operations manager from upstairs asking me to fix a particular campaign where the numbers were very bad. As I walked into the panic room, I saw Jenny sitting there with her feet up on a chair with a paper script in her hand. She looked rather stressed]. She asked me âwhat the hellâ was going on in the specific campaign where the numbers were a disaster. She told me that there was a lot of pressure from upstairs and as the quarter would end in two days, the campaign would have to be finished no matter what. [Campaigns always need to be finished within the quarter for financial and legal reasons and because new campaigns start at the beginning of the new quarter]. She asked me what the problem was on the campaign. My reply was that the data were not very good and the topic of the script was not very interesting either. However, I added that I knew that we could not do anything about this because the script comes from the client and agents need to read from it. [Knowing that she was sometimes funny about saying out loud that agents change the script from the client, I didnât tell her that I had already tried to âspice up the scriptâ a bit under the radar to improve the statistics. Although she often said one needs to improve the script, I played innocent to see how sheâd react to the situation. Because of her constant flip-flopping, some team leaders called her two-faced.]
In this situation, she got angry with me and said that in a case like this I need to change the scriptâI should have known that. Then, she went on complaining about sales and said that the script should have never been sold like this. This script was an example of sales trying to land a client. The entire campaign had always been unrealistic and sales upstairs should have never agreed to it as then we would not be in this mess in the first place. She should always be present when a campaign is sold to ensure that a good campaign is sold. However, now that we were at the end of the quarter, hitting the numbers by any means was more important than following the âclientâs script.â According to her, if the numbers werenât hit, everyone in the call center would be in more trouble than I could possibly imagine.
Jenny knew it was not possible to read straight from the script, although she would never admit to that openly. As she told me, âDo you really think I donât know that agents donât follow the script word for word? Iâm not blind or deaf and I have been on the phone too once.â However, she believed it was dangerous to tell agents that they could ignore the script although she knew that most did. Officially, her line was that agents need to read from the script. She added that the client would also not be very happy if they found out that people who know very little about IT (and only after a few hours training), possibly not native speakers, called up a clientâs target and conducted customer service, marketing, and sales on their behalf without a script or not reading from it. But right now, between them at that moment, for this campaign, she did not care about following the script but just about hitting the targets. Her suggestion was for me to give agents a few tips on how they could make the script more interesting and they could take a few notes. She warned me, though, that I needed to be discreet about this. Neither the operations manager nor anyone from upstairs should hear or see me doing this as they would not be happy about it and would not understand.
Aims and scope
The call center is perhaps the archetype of a contemporary workplace in (i) conditions of employment, (ii) recruitment, (iii) standardization practices, (iv) global reach and communication, and (v) surveillance. I focus on effects of call center employment on the lives of employees in the workplace, on their productivity, and on individual reactions to scripts within the workplace. This includes not only call center agents working the lines, but also call center managers directly responsible for implementing campaigns, and their corporate managers who negotiate agreements and targets with clients. Taking a linguistic ethnographic approach, this book is the first to explore the complexities of such work for employees, the expertise required, and the management of production across diverse levels of the organization.
The central argument of the book is ...