Language as raw material, scripts as tools and conversations as product: effects of linguistic production on job categories in outsourced call centres

• Author: Josiah Mc. Heyman,Josep Ubalde,Amado Alarcón
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12156
• Date: 01 March 2020

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Linguistic production and employment conditions 97

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Language as raw material, scripts as tools

and conversations as product: effects of

linguistic production on job categories in

outsourced call centres

Amado Alarcón , Josep Ubalde and Josiah Mc. Heyman

The article shows how linguistic criteria have become central

when dening job categories in the outsourced call centre sec-

tor in Spain. Language occupies a central role in the production

processes of informational capitalism: in call centres, language

functions as the raw material, scripts as tools and conversa-

tions as a product. Yet the ways in which linguistic produc-

tion affects key elements of job categories have received little

attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews in the call centre

sector, the analysis of scripts and collective agreements, this

article shows how trade unions and workers are pushing to

adapt Fordist arguments based on job autonomy to informa-

tional production, arguing that job categories may depend on

linguistic autonomy from the scripts during the labour process.

Keywords: call centres, job categories, linguistic standardisa-

tion, language skills, employment conditions, monitoring.

Funding

This paper was discussed and main contents written among first and third author during a Fulbright/Ministry of

Education and Science Research Stay at Center for International and Border Studies, University of Texas at El

Paso (CIBS-UTEP) (PRX15/00479). All authors has meet several times to develop this article at URV and UTEP

thanks to the framework of funding schemes cited below.

Analisys and further comparitions across occupations has been possible thanks to the funding Ministry of

Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CSO2015-24247-P) and ACUP-Recercaixa (2016ACUP-00020).

Introduction

We ask what specic sorts of labour management struggles occur concerning the role

of language work in the call centre labour process in an economy (Spain) with coordi-

nated bargaining between management and labour. To do this requires two steps.

First, we characterise the skills demand inherent to the linguistic content of work in

representative outsourced call centres. Second, we examine how debates over the pre-

cise nature of labour design and process control enter into skill-based job classication

negotiations. Struggle revolves around how to classify (and therefore how to recognise

Amado Alarcón (amado.alarcon@urv.cat), Sociology Unit, Business and Management Department,

Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain.

Josep Ubalde, Sociology Unit, Business and Management Department, Universitat Rovira i Virgili,

Spain.

Josiah Mc. Heyman, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, USA

98 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

and how to pay) workers concerning the locus of control of linguistic performance.

This case is important in several ways regarding the current socio-technical organisa-

tion of call centres. First, it delineates main issues in the design of a work content cen-

tred on language skills, an important but understudied domain. Second, it extends a

classic question in the social science of work—deskilling versus skill retention and

development—into an important new sector with specic technological developments,

call centres, that are part of the wider development of informational capitalism.

The importance of language skills in informational capitalism has been emphasised

in recent decades (Castells, 1996; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner, 2010; Duchêne and

Heller, 2011; Koller, 2017; Holborow, 2018). In this context, language as an embodied

asset is a form of labour power subject to monitoring and assessment and, therefore,

potentially objectivised through standardisation, frequently by means of scripts and

protocols (Urciuoli and LaDousa, 2013). At the same time, workers (commonly immi-

grants) can individually use language capitalisation to achieve better positions for

themselves (Rojo, 2013).

At companies, standardisation (ideally) involves identical communication formulas

based on scripts and protocols for all conversations, while linguistic autonomy refers

to the ability of workers to create their own approaches, choosing and adapting con-

tent according to the customer, increasing interactivity within specic parameters of

professional knowledge (Cameron, 2000; Boutet, 2012) Paradoxically, there are analy-

ses that shows to what extent standardised scripts become a tool that can help teleop-

erators to prevent labour abuse and develop by their own ways to manage in a exible

way these tools (Woydack and Lockwood, 2017). Despite the importance of language

standardisation in these new forms of production, its relations with occupational sys-

tems are relatively unexplored.

The task of classication and design of call centres have attracted the most attention

to control mechanisms over the workforce. Most research has considered call centre as

a sui generis phenomenon, with a ‘new socio-technical system for the production and

delivery of information’. Contrary, we situate call centres not as a rara avis, but subject

to industrial relations forces that makes job categories (and more generally employ-

ment conditions) for teleoperators as language workers an object of bargaining and not

merely a business prerogative (see Russell, 2008: 196).

Our main research question is: How is the linguistic character of work a central con-

cern of the struggle to dene job categories by employers and trade unions in collective

agreements? To address this, we ask what language skills are part of production at call

centres? And how are these skills considered in collective bargaining and, eventually,

recognised in job classication schemes? Following our eldwork in Spanish out-

sourced call centres, our argument is that linguistic criteria, conceptualised as the de-

gree of linguistic autonomy an employee is granted, have become a stratifying

mechanism of job classication. This is important because this type of classication

based on language skills goes beyond formal education, the type of product sold by

companies or the type of service subcontracted by public bodies.

Fieldwork was carried out in the outsourced or third-party call centre industry for

several reasons. First, language plays a key role in its production processes and prod-

ucts: language as raw material; scripts as tools; and conversations as a product. Second,

the sector is important to the extent that it can absorb other activities and transform

on-site jobs into call centre activities under standardisation schemes, which we can

refer to as callcenterisation processes (these include technologies applied to work or-

ganisation, the transferability of workers, vertical disintegration and privatisation)

(Huws, 2001; Van den Broek, 2008). Third, callcenterisation includes specic negotia-

tions and the struggle between agents for the control and recognition of linguistic per-

formance within the ‘inescapable problematic’ of the indeterminacy of labour in service

encounters (Holtgrewe, 2001; Taylor and Moore, 2014: 3). This indeterminacy is related

to occupational recognition and is observable through the institutionalisation of occu-

pational categories for call centre workers in Spain—as in other coordinated industrial

systems such as the Netherlands (Gallie, 2011). This system includes linguistic auton-

omy as a criterion for dening occupational categories which exemplies the