Caring and loving teachers online: personality in the feminized labour of Filipina English Language teachers

1 Introduction

What kind of people are language teachers? In this article, we raise the questions of which kind of teachers have which kinds of personalities, and what these personalities are for. While, as this special issue illustrates, there are a number of varied conceptualisations of personality across a number of scholarly fields, we focus here upon the role of personality in the workplace – more specifically in questions of the regulation – and division of labour at work. As a point of entry, we briefly turn here to work at the intersection of management, business, and psychology, where the personalities of service workers are seen as something to be regulated and cultivated within the specific context of the workplace:

Rather than selecting employees with personality measures that have low validities and are possibly susceptible to faking, organizations may adopt the alternative of designing training programs to instruct service employees to be more polite, energetic, sympathetic, and organized when the situation requires. From a job design perspective, organizations may modify elements of the job to facilitate or restrict situational characteristics that influence personality states at work.

(Huang and Ryan 2011: 479)

Our focus on personality in this article however, does not attempt to ascertain what the enduring personality traits of any given individual are, nor to problematize particular conceptualisations of personality and their deployment within research (see Highet 2023; Nyssen 2023 [in this issue]). What we wish to draw attention to, is the partiality of personality – the way in which only some of us have our personalities made explicit, displayed, or talked about, at certain times, and under certain conditions. Huang and Ryan’s discussion above for example, addresses exclusively the personality of workers in terms of who should or should not be hired, and which kinds of workers should be assigned which tasks, while leaving the personality of those doing the hiring and assigning of workers, untouched. In certain times and places then, matters of personality become salient for some (and not others), and is for something – a means to an end, in the case above, rationalizing the hiring and organization of service workers.

Moreover, we do not see discursive constructions of personality as ephemeral singularities which float in isolation of each other in space and time. Rather, we take personality as a social practice – as a way “of controlling the selection of certain structural possibilities and the exclusion of others, and the retention of these selections over time, in particular and shifting ways” (Fairclough 2003: 23–24). We are concerned not only with the questions of who personality is “done” to, and what personality “does”, but also the situatedness of particular operationalisations of personality within particular networks of social relations, which come to be reproduced or evolve in particular ways over time. To restate, we are not interested in the way in which any given language teacher’s personality is constructed in and of itself, and whether this truly reflects what their personality is really like. Nor do we aim to critique, discredit, or correct any particular notion of personality employed in scholarly research elsewhere. Rather, we are concerned with how and why personality becomes a salient topic within language teaching, taking on personality as a regime of truth (Foucault 1980). In short, in the context of language teaching, we attend to the issue of why personality as a topic arises at all, for whom personality is at stake, and why.

We situate our work on personality within language teaching in relation to contemporary work which examines language teaching as a form of affective labour where matters of teachers’ personalities come to the fore. We then move on to discuss how the work of language teaching relates to broader political economic changes in which affective labour in service work, and the feminization of labour, have involved new gendered relations between the global North and South. We then situate the service work of English language teaching within this global shift, before focussing on the emergence of particular forms of commercial online English teaching that bring Filipina teachers into relation with Japanese learners. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the partiality of personality within these online teaching platforms, as well as on customer review websites, we describe how personality becomes salient in rationalising the suitability of Filipina teachers of English for Japanese learners. We also attend to the partiality of discourses of personality, where personality becomes salient for some teachers, but not others on online platforms. We then move on to illustrate how personality, at times, plays a substitutionary role, where the personality of Filipina teachers is seen as compensating for their assumed deficits in relation to the nativeness and linguistic and cultural knowledge of other teachers in the global North whose personalities often remain hidden. We then conclude by raising issues we feel are pertinent to future research which examines personality within the framework of teaching as a form of affective labour, especially in consideration of the objects of teachers’ care or love.

2 Personality in the affective labour of language teaching

There is already a substantial body of work concerning the affective and emotional labour involved in language teaching specifically (for an overview, see Benesch 2012), often involving an ethics of ‘care’ (Gkonou and Miller 2019, 2021; King 2016; Kostogriz 2012) or a ‘labour of love’ (Pavlenko 2013). While such work does not always clearly distinguish between teaching as a form of care-based labour on the one hand, and love-based labour on the other, we refer to them both here as they consistently concern the extent to which teachers reflect upon the kind of people they are, in managing their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Here, the language teacher is potentially seen as one who loves, cares about, and cares for their learners. Outside of the voluntary sector however, even the most sincerely loving or caring of teachers would likely baulk at the prospect of teaching without the receipt of a wage, even within non-profit institutions. Such labours of love then, are very often tied up with teachers’ need to make a living and earn a wage rather than absolute acts of loving altruism. We also see a need to address how the patriarchal notion of care- or love-based work as something traditionally ascribed to women in the domestic sphere resonates in language teaching contexts where teachers are often overworked and underpaid, and in which women often form the majority. We examine how emerging forms of commercial online teaching platforms (Blanden 2020; Komska et al. 2020; Morales 2020; Panaligan and Curran 2022) in which the caring and loving personalities of predominantly female teachers play a key role, relate to broader global economic trends in the emergence of global North–South relations in feminized service industries.

3 Feminization of labour in the service industry

Though neither the service industry, nor women in the workplace, are in and of themselves new, certain changes in the who and how of many workplaces over the last few decades mark our contemporary form of capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004 describe a transition in capitalism from the industrial or Fordist mass production of tangible products, towards an informational economy in which communication, knowledge, and affect play an increasingly important role in the production of immaterial goods. These immaterial goods, often experiential and affective in nature, involve the labour of those within the service industry where matters of personality intertwine with forms of affective labour, defined as:

labour that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. […F]or example, in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile).

(Hardt and Negri 2004: 108)

In addition to, and often overlapping with affective labour, is the concept of emotional labour in which workers manipulate their own emotions in order to produce a desired emotional experience in the customer (Grossman 2012; Hochschild 2012; Veldstra 2020). As Wu and Del Percio (2019) have shown in their work on the Foucauldian stylization of bodies in café service work, affective labour is necessarily embodied labour involving the use and stylization of workers’ bodies, avoiding a problematic split between ideal and material, or mind and body (see also Kostogriz 2012). To avoid confusion, in this article we see affective labour as referring to work which may involve the expenditure of emotional labour, but which is necessarily embodied and therefore also involves bodily or physical as well as emotional or mental work.

Alongside the emergence of immaterial labour, is the feminization of labour (Oksala 2016; Weeks 2007), and the overlapping concept of what some term the Housewifization of labour (Fuchs 2014; Mies 1986; Mies et al. 1988). So far as the feminization of labour is concerned, in addition to acknowledging the quantitative increase of women in the workforce, it:

also denotes a qualitative change in the nature of labour: the characteristics historically present in female work – precariousness, flexibility, mobility, fragmentary nature, low status, and low pay – […which has] increasingly come to characterize most of the work in global capitalism [including work performed by men]. (Oksala 2016: 281)

To reiterate a point made earlier, all this is not to say that service work, immaterial labour, precarity, or the proletarianization of women are in and of themselves “new” in the global North or South, or have in some sense replaced the “old” expanding processes of proletarianization and capital accumulation (Munck 2013). As Mies et al. have suggested through their notion of Housewifization, the precarity an increasing number of people find themselves working in, has traditionally been characteristic of women within patriarchal relations. Contemporary precarious work in their view “bears the characteristics of housework, namely labour not protected by trade unions or labour laws, [and] that is available at any time, for any price” (Mies et al. 1988: 10). According to Mies, Housewifized labour entails the “externalization or ex-territorialization of costs which would otherwise have to be covered by the capitalists” (Mies 1986: 110). This externalization or ex-territorialization could involve, for example, workers themselves bearing various costs of production – paying for their own equipment or working from home and paying utility bills for example. In the case of the online English teachers on whom we will later focus, it is highly likely that costs for equipment and services necessary to work (computers, internet connection, headsets, etc.), as well as many of the overheads also necessary (electricity and internet bills for example) are covered by workers themselves rather than paid for by an employer.

The way that the feminization or housewifization of labour often plays out in service work which involves affective labour, is in the justification of low pay through a view of much gendered and racialised affective labour as low- or unskilled work – work which women “naturally” are able to perform without the need for specialised training or education. These “natural” abilities then are seen as inherent characteristics or properties of the (often female) worker – akin to notions of personality as a fundamental property or essence of individuals, and not as any particular skill to be honed or recognized through increased training or progressive remunerative frameworks. What is at stake then, is capital ex-territorializing what Hochschild terms the unpaid, and unregulated “shadow labour” performed by women in the private realm of the household (Hochschild 2012: 165), as the low- or unskilled affective labour of the service industry:

[W]ork that calls upon women’s so-called ‘natural abilities’ is seen as low-skilled because women are presumed to be innately able to perform the work without training. […] Women, and, more often than not, women of colour, are seen as naturally caring or nurturing, thus the service they provide is seen as an extension of their intrinsic skills rather than the cultivation of professional competency.

(Grossman 2012: 70–71)

Moreover, the invisibility of much affective and emotional work (appearing as natural, as a non-skill, or as something not worthy of professional status or remuneration), reflects the same invisibility of affective and other work traditionally performed by women in the domestic sphere of the household. Here, women are ideologically framed as performing domestic labour (in contrast to paid labour in the workplace) as an act of love – labour freely and altruistically given, rather than as an expenditure of effort and time which could be recognised and remunerated, as the wages for housework movement expressed it might (Veldstra 2020).

4 English language teaching as feminized service work

Something of an exception to the larger body of work which looks at language teaching largely in and of itself as a form of affective labour, Anabalon Schaaf’s work (2022) relates the work performed by teachers to the broader trends in the feminization of labour discussed above. She proposes the emergence of a register she terms the pedagogy of love which “comprises a series of affective-discursive practices including the deployment of socially perceived positive and feminine traits such as generosity, nurturance, sweetness, kindness and empathy” (2022:20). While teachers such as those in Anabalon Schaaf’s work may well perform such labour as acts of love in largely sincere ways, in so far as genuinely caring about their students’ wellbeing and futures, such labour is often unrecognised and under- or unpaid (similar to the “shadow” labour of the domestic sphere). The flipside of teachers “going the extra mile”, or doing extra work as people who care for or love their students then, is the under- or unpaid labour that teachers often perform (Simpson 2023). There is potential here for personality to become salient in serving to legitimise low pay, or even unpaid labour, in positioning teachers as caring and loving people who perform such work as an expression of their own inherent caring or loving personalities, and whose more material needs (to earn a wage, to pay rent, to eat, etc.) are secondary, if mentioned at all.

As Grossman (2012) and McRobbie (2010) have both emphasised, there is a need for work which examines how gender and race play out in service work to link the micro – the everyday experiences of individual service workers, with the macro – matters of political economy more broadly. Our context in this article focusses on a particular North-South relation – that is predominantly female Filipina teachers working in the Philippines (part of the global South), who teach English to Japanese (often male) language learners located in Japan (the global North). The rise of the online English teaching industry in Japan roughly coincided with the growth of offshore call centres within the Philippines and the increase of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) working within neoliberal capitalist economies including in Japan (Tajima 2018, 2023). Indeed, the diminishing birth rate and the aging population of nations such as Japan has also played a key role in the importing of labour from the global South to nations in the North (Onuki 2009; Otomo 2020; Świtek 2014). Since 2008, based on the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) signed with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, Japan has recruited large numbers of migrant workers such as nurses and caregivers (Otomo 2016, 2020). What is intriguing about these workers is that when their qualities are described, emphasis is often laid on their personality and capability to perform affective labour as well as their professional skills (Onuki 2009; Świtek 2014). This is not to say however, that feminized labour is a concern only in care-based service work. Here for example, is Terry’s conclusion from work on Filipino cruise ship labour:

discourses of Filipino seafarers – as docile, friendly, caring, loyal, and so on play some role in cementing the idea that they belong in certain (mostly subordinate) positions in this labour market; one that requires workers who display such characteristics while remaining inexpensive.

(Terry 2014: 89)

The feminization of labour then, is neither a monolithic linear trend, nor simply synonymous with increased numbers of women in the labour force. Traits of feminized labour as friendly, caring, or being “family oriented” (Terry 2014) clearly are not circumscribed by particular industries, and in keeping with our earlier point, indicate not the presence or increase of women in the workforce, but the intersection of discourses of personality with low pay and precarious employment.

5 Methodology

As Flubacher (2022) has emphasised, innovations in communication technology have changed the provision of services in significant ways. Most pertinent here is the way in which contemporary forms of language teaching bring together learners and teachers around the globe through digitally mediated means. The particular online English teaching platforms we discuss bring Japanese learners of English, most of whom are located in Japan, together with Filipina teachers, who work from the Philippines by teaching online. Five English teaching service platforms were chosen in line with their prominence on Kuchiran, a well-known Japanese website for customer service reviews (https://kuchiran.jp/business/eng_online.html). The English language learning platforms we focussed on: hanaso; RareJob; Cloudt; DMM Eikaiwa; and ECC Online Lesson; all featured on Kuchiran as leaders in their industry with large volumes of customers, all of whom employ teachers in the Philippines as English teachers. For each of these we examined how the personality of Filipina teachers was constructed: by the institutions – typically an introduction or description of the teachers for prospective students; by the teachers themselves in teacher ‘profiles’ or ‘messages from the teacher’; and by the customers (learners) in customer reviews.

These websites were accessed through the Spring and Summer of 2022 and all data in Japanese was translated into English by one of the authors. As the online platforms often employ a large number of teachers, one platform as many as 10,000 ( DMM Eikaiwa 2021), our data comprised of texts that related to teachers who were top rated or recommended teachers, either explicitly categorised as “top rated” or “most popular” and displayed at the top of teacher profile pages. Our reason for doing so was that these teachers had been afforded greater visibility on the website as a result of their favourable ratings from students, often expressed in star-rating systems (Komska et al. 2020). This makes teachers more visible to prospective students, and presumably improves their chances of being booked by a student as they are the first faces seen (as well as the highest rated). We analysed these foregrounded or top-billed teachers in particular, as we see them as functioning as archetypes of who “good” teachers within such platforms are, at least in terms of satisfying students and maximising booking rates and incomes. While most of our analysis concerned Filipina teachers of English, we also examined teachers outside of the Philippines from ECC Online Lesson. We did so as this platform categorises their teachers in three distinct ways: “native speakers of English”, “bilinguals” (referring exclusively to teachers proficient in both Japanese and English) as well as teachers working from the Philippines. The reason for examining ECC Online Lesson in particular, was to better understand the partiality of discourses of personality – the question of why personality is more at stake for some than for others. This meant gaining an understanding of how those working in the Philippines as “non-native” speakers of English, relate to those working in other locations, including in the global North termed “native speakers” of English.

Drawing on Fairclough’s notion of orders of discourse which “select certain possibilities defined by language and exclude others […and thus] control linguistic variability for particular areas of social life” (2003: 24), we conducted a critical discourse analysis as a means to answer our guiding research question – namely to examine for whom, and why personality becomes a salient topic. Our analysis here focussed on key themes, words and phrases, which recurred throughout the data, in particular descriptions of teachers as “loving”, “kind”, “cheerful”, “smiling”, and their ability to care for, or produce positive affective states in their learners such as feelings of “relaxation” or “ease”.

6 Filipina teachers of English: cheerful, kind, and always smiling

We begin by focussing on those online providers of English teachers that predominantly employ teachers working from the Philippines: hanaso and RareJob. Here, we analyse constructions of personality at a level of generality – that is to say the way that Filipino (male and female) teachers in general are ascribed particular traits relating to personality. These platforms often reproduced elements from broader discourses on the suitability of Filipino workers for care-giving service work in Japan described above. The hanaso website for example, introduces their teachers as follows:

7 Personality and differentiation in the market

Here, we address the differentiation between platforms, in terms of the kind of services they offer, and the different kinds of clientele (learners) they target, and explore how this may affect the way in which personality becomes salient. The Cloudt platform seemed primarily aimed at young learners (though they do offer lessons for adults), with its family package form of selling bundles of lessons which, though any member of a household could partake in, seemed primarily aimed at young learners. This was illustrated numerous times throughout the website in videos and images of young children participating in online lessons with a parent or grandparent to the side as a largely passive observer, as well as in the general aesthetic of the website featuring bright colours and cartoon illustrations. Platforms such as Rarejob, hanaso, DMM Eikaiwa, and ECC Online Lesson, on the other hand, some of whom also offer lessons for young learners, seemed to focus more on adult learners – at least in terms of the majority of the services they offer (i.e. kinds of lessons) being aimed at adult rather than young learners. What this meant in terms of personality in the more adult-learner oriented platforms (in distinction to Cloudt) was a focus on the teacher’s personality enabling tension or fears on the part of the adult learner to be relieved. These fears or tensions were of two overlapping types. Firstly, there were presumed fears involved in learning the English language, or of engaging in an online learning situation. Secondly, there were presumed tensions or difficulties that might occur between two differentiated peoples, cultures, and places – Japan and the Japanese, and a tacitly implied Filipino Other. Platforms described how teachers were trained to “have a deep understanding of the Japanese character and culture” (Rarejob n.d.), or to “Like Japan” (ECC Online Lesson n.d.), with teachers in their profiles and profile videos often alluding to their interest, knowledge, or love of Japan or Japanese culture and people. This was very often coupled with Filipina teachers’ ascribed traits of being warm and welcoming, and able to alleviate tension or worry in others:

8 Differentiation and personality in a substitutionary role

While in our above discussion we have explored the differentiation between platforms occupying differing spaces in the market through their target clientele, we now move on to differentiation between teachers within a single platform – ECC Online Lesson, which features a greater diversity of teachers (at least in terms of nationality and native/non-native speaker of English status). To recap, ECC Online Lesson categorises the teachers they employ in three ways: “native speakers of English”, “bilinguals” (referring exclusively to teachers proficient in both Japanese and English) as well as “Filipinos” – teachers working from the Philippines. As there were only two ‘bilingual’ teachers registered on the platform at the time of writing, we were wary of drawing many conclusions about the way a category such as “bilinguals” does or does not have implications for how the personality of teachers is constructed. Our analysis here focusses on how Filipina teachers relate to their “native” counterparts, to gain an understanding of for whom personality is, and is not, of importance as qualifying them as good or suitable teachers. Each kind of teacher from the ECC Online Lesson website is described in three short key points shown below:

9 Teachers as caring and loving of who or what?

Reflecting upon our discussion, and in considering future directions at the intersection of language, personality, and affective labour, we conclude with the observation that often the objects of teachers care or love in the websites we have analysed are omitted – the teachers “just are” caring, kind, or cheerful people. We feel more consideration might be given in future research towards exactly what or who the objects of this “care” or “love” might be: care or love of who or what? This would certainly involve research going where we have not, due to issues of access,^[3] and observing and analysing work processes as they happen (for example, observing the production of lessons), as well as investigating how workers themselves reflect upon what they do at work (Tajima 2018) Addressing such questions can help us move beyond the notions of teachers, or others carrying out affective labour, as inherently caring or loving in and of themselves, at the intersections of racialised, feminized, and colonialised imaginaries. In considering the objects of such care, we might ask for example whether “caring” and “loving” teachers are those who simply attend to the immediate needs and wellbeing of individual learners (or clients), or whether there might be a broader, more social sense of care or love at stake. What might the relationship be between these two senses of care or love – one concerning individual learners, the other social care or love for others beyond the classroom, many of whom teachers or learners might never meet. In addressing such questions, we maintain that a greater understanding of affective work which teachers do must be related to affective labour carried out elsewhere in society more broadly. Doing so will orient us towards thinking about what kinds of people those who perform various forms of affective labour are, and more importantly, collectively what kinds of people they could be in demanding more just recognition and redistribution in the workplace, the home, and throughout society.