ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some sociolinguistic characteristics of the speech style prescribed to workers for interacting with customers in service contexts, focusing in particular on the linguistic and vocal ‘styling’ prescribed for operators in telephone call centres in the UK. Typically, the speech of call centre operators is subject to intensive regulation and constant surveillance. The institutional regime of the call centre exemplifies the hyper-rationalizing tendency that the sociologist George Ritzer has dubbed ‘McDonaldization’. For Ritzer this tendency is defined by its drive to maximize four things: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Call centres are a good example of service work as language work, and as such they are also a particularly rich source of insight into the commodification and regulation of language on the job. The chapter shows how various elements of the symbolic construct ‘women’s language’ are appropriated and recombined in the call centre context to produce a particular service style.
