Good morning customer, how may I help you?

If you’ve ever gone to get a takeaway drink from Starbucks, you’re probably aware that they like to take your name and write it on the cup. If you’re someone whose name is even vaguely unusual or uncommon, you’re probably also aware of how infuriating it is when the poor barista mangles your name when trying to write it on the side. “Why do they even bother?”, you may have thought in such situations.

Whilst not entirely related to coffee shops, Anna Kristina Hultgren of the Open University looked into the politeness strategies of people working in call centres. Her aim was to compare the best practices with the actual interactions that call centre agents do. In particular, she noted an increasing trend of using vocatives – that exact trait where people constantly call you by your name – and considered how this could be accounted for.

Customer service was originally defined as being a “face-to-face” interaction, which orientated around what the customer desired from it, and the server’s obligation to fulfil the customer’s wishes. As Hultgren notes, the rise of call centres has changed this somewhat, along with what she calls the rationalisation of customer service interactions. This involves them being efficient, predictable, controlled, and calculable. (So yes, when you’re ringing up to query your phone bill and the person on the other end sounds like a robot, it is because they have to follow these four principles.) However, this still needs to be balanced with the fairly basic task of treating the caller like a human being. So how does this work?

                Madam, much as I would LOVE to spend another hour hearing about how your geraniums are doing, can you please just tell me what is wrong with your bill?

Hultgren looked at one particular call centre in Scotland, which specialised in pensions. She looked at the manuals that were provided to agents on training, and then researched the working practices of the call centre. This included on-site observations of the agents at work, a corpus of 79 call centre transactions, and interviews with call agents as well as their managers. Hultgren looked at 21 different rules that applied to the customer service interactions, dividing them into transactional  rules (ones which focused on the call being efficient and saving money) and interactional rules (ones which focused on the customer care element).

Naturally, given the rationalisation of the interactions, Hultgren found that, where the opportunity arose, transactional rules took priority. Of the interactional rules, the ones that were most frequently used were the aforementioned vocatives – giving the customer a “verbal handshake” by asking for their name, and then using it regularly throughout the interaction.

Why is this? Some of the other interactional rules included small talk and personalised greetings. The problem with small talk is the possibility that the agent will lose control of the conversation, and risk being too inefficient. Meanwhile, personalising greetings requires a lot of effort on the part of the agent, which they may not be able to expend when they have targets to meet. However, there is still the requirement to personalise the call, and the easiest way to do this is to use the customer’s name. Therefore, the use of vocatives sticks. 

Hultgren theorises that this shows a new politeness strategy, called rationalised politeness, which has emerged from the economic, social and technological conditions of such interactions. When the overall goal is to make money, and the lack of face-to-face communication constricts the personal aspect of the conversation, there are limited ways for agents to engage with the customers.

It remains to be seen how much further this new form of politeness will spread. But if you're annoyed with Starbucks getting your name wrong every time, consider that you may well have to get used to it – this trend seems to be here to stay.

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Hultgren, Anna Kristina  (2017). Vocatives as rationalized politeness: Theoretical insights from emerging norms in call centre service encounters. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(1), 90-111.

doi. 10.1111/josl.12224

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

Naughty boys and sexy girls

21st Century = equality, right?  Cathrine Norberg decided to investigate, using the New Model Corpus, a 100 million word corpus of current English drawn from the web, to see if there were any differences in the usage of the words GIRL and BOY.

Norberg started by examining verbs and found that boys are frequently associated with physical activities.  Jump, run and kick for example, were mainly found with BOY. GIRL was principally used with ‘non-movement’ verbs, like sit and wait. Play was strongly linked to BOY, although the thinking verbs, discover and understand were also exclusive to BOY, suggesting they are more curious and mentally active.  

Girls were the objects of verbs far more often than boys. The violent verbs rape, traffick, abduct, assault, attack and steal were all exclusively found with GIRL, whereas the only similar verbs with BOY as the object were beat and drown, suggesting that girls are more frequently represented as victims.  GIRL was much more frequently the object of marry, indicating that the idea of girls being ‘given’ in marriage still persists. GIRL was often used as the object of date, love, and fuck, showing that females are seen as passive objects of male sexuality.

Norberg also analysed adjectives, dividing them into three groups:

●      In physical appearance, female identity was closely connected to appearance, often with sexual undertones.  Attractive and sexy are more frequent with GIRL and the use of naked suggests that there is a stronger connection between nakedness and sexuality when it is a girl who is without clothes (‘I spot a naked young boy chasing a cow’ vs. ‘...viewing naked girls was a matter of sexual delight’).  Boys were discussed in terms of their physical size, with big also used in the sense of importance.  Girls were more often described as little but in the sense of sweetness and innocence (‘...that little girl is so cute’). Young was also used more with GIRL, although freshness, in terms of girls’ sexuality, was a more common meaning than age (‘I could...enjoy this young girl’s body for pleasure…’).  Old was used more with BOY, although rarely with reference to age; more commonly it had the sense of belonging to a ‘club’.  Similar to big, old indicates male importance (‘Study finds corporate old boys have positive impact on governance reform.’)

●      In personal characteristics, naughty was used for both BOY and GIRL but with a difference, often including sexual aspects for girls (‘Can you make your skirt slit any higher, you naughty girl?’) and only conduct for boys (‘We’ve got a naughty boy in school.’)  Norberg found a set of adjectives used more with GIRL that diverged from the traditional image of girls as agreeable and passive:  words like tough, crazy and popular. However, once again, many of them alluded to sexuality (‘Edith, a very pretty blonde, was the popular girl, who received lots of valentines.’)

●      In roles and social identity, Norberg found that boys were associated with activity (delivery boy) whereas girls were associated with sexuality (call girl).  Only GIRL occurred with single and unmarried, indicating that females are more likely to be referred to in terms of their marital status. This also happened with nationality words like Swiss and religious terms like Christian, suggesting that females are seen as ‘others’, becoming Muslim girls, whereas males were just Muslims.

So, our language reveals that we still think in gender specific terms, sometimes to an alarming extent. Definitely not 21st century equality….

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Norberg, Cathrine (2016). Naughty boys and sexy girls: The representation of young individuals in a web-based corpus of English. Journal of English Linguistics 44: 291-317.

doi: 10.1177/0075424216665672  

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This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle