Volume 14, Issue 2 - Special Issue: (Im)Politeness in professional contexts, Issue Editors: Piotr Jagodziński, Dawn Archer, and Derek Bousfield

Many customer service institutions draw on the (argued over) notion of “customer experience”. Gentile et al. (2007) suggest that, at an optimum, the notion assumes a thinking and feeling customer who co-creates their customer experience together with the service providing institution. This co-creation is believed to comprise interactional involvement, personalization and the holistic treatment of the customer’s needs. Given the latter, we might expect service providers, such as call centres, to view language as a vital means of creating an experience with the customer. The extant linguistic call centre research, including our own, points to the fact that call centre institutions view language as fundamental to their functioning. However, heavy language regulation tends to be the most important - if not the only - means of achieving outstanding customer experience (Cameron 2000; Jagodziński 2013; Archer and Jagodziński 2015). There is a clear mismatch, then, between the tenets of customer experience and the way language is conceptualized, interactionally managed and regulated. Throughout this paper, we argue that the co-creation of customer experience must be accompanied by its linguistic co-construction , which can only be achieved by giving frontline employees more interactional freedom than they tend to have in practice.

This paper investigates the rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2005) that collections agents at a UK-based utilities company call centre are expected to perform during debt collection telephone interactions. It examines the rapport-relevant information communicated in the textual materials, including training manuals, through which a prescribed debt collection style is implemented. The analysis reveals that there are tensions in the rapport-concerns that collectors must attend to when using the style. Collectors are instructed to perform potentially face-threatening behaviours in order to collect debt, whilst simultaneously engaging in linguistic behaviour that may be interpreted as face-enhancing and which functions to develop rapport with the debtor. It is suggested that the local deployment of this contradictory “helping you to pay us” philosophy is problematic on multiple levels and may give rise to relational tensions between collectors and debtors who have conflicting expectations about rapport management entitlements. In turn, this may contribute to a culture of sanctioned face-attacks in call centres (Archer and Jagodziński 2015). Therefore, I suggest that call centres may need to loosen the synecdochical hold they have over their employees, thereby affording them the flexibility and volition to cope with the complex face demands, unpredictability and potential volatility of debt collection encounters.

This paper examines the discursive processes involved in the construction and negotiation of face in Chinese business interactions. Drawing on 20 hours of authentic video- and audio-recorded business meetings in two companies in Hong Kong, we analyse how interlocutors do facework while orienting to and actively constructing their interpersonal relationships. Our particular focus is disagreements upwards, i. e., those, potentially very face-threatening, disagreements that are uttered by subordinates targeted at their superiors. Findings illustrate that some disagreements are relatively strong but face and relationship maintaining, while others are relatively weak but face and relationship challenging. We not only argue that the processes of doing facework and managing relationships are closely interwoven, but we also illustrate the important role of identity in these processes, and argue that the notion of identity should be incorporated into theories of face and relationship management as it constitutes an integral aspect of how interlocutors construct and negotiate face.

A variety of face types can be in operation in workplaces, dependent on, for example, the kind of workplace, the various activities engaged in in that workplace, the status/role/gender of participants working in and/or connected with the workplace, etc. This paper offers an adapted version of Archer’s (2015) Facework Scale as a means of accounting for the different types of face in evidence in one activity - Performance Appraisals - in one workplace, relating to a UK retail organization. We will show that interlocutors used facework strategies that emphasized different or multiple facets of face on both a professional and personal level (Jagodziński 2013). This includes attempting to safeguard/support their working relationships (Haugh 2013) by managing impressions of self and/or the company (Jones and Pitman 1982) at the same time as maintaining credibility for self and/or other(s) (Bolino et al. 2016). We use our findings to argue that employers and their employees would benefit from having an understanding of face(work), and briefly discuss the training implications for Performance Appraisals if face(work) notions were introduced.

Combining (meta-)theoretical extension and practical application of models of politeness, the collected works of this special edition promise to make a significant and lasting contribution to the field as well as signalling an important milestone in interactional and pragmatics research more generally. Focussed to a greater or lesser extent on the ‘impact’ of the research on the social, occupational, or legal world around us, the collected papers here are all in effect ‘interventionist’ (cf. Antaki 2011: 8). That is, the collected works of this special edition, whether dealing with remote interactions via a call centre (Jagodzinski and Archer, [this volume]; Harrington, [this volume]), or face-to-face interaction via an appraisal or a business meeting (Archer and Willcox, [this volume]; Chan et al., [this volume]), and quite irrespective of the varying approaches to (im)politeness they take, all contribute precisely to the need for further refinement, development and empirical study which Haugh (2018) wisely advocates in his recent appeal for metatheorization in politeness work. To this end, this paper argues for the evident directions and potential applicability of future metatheorizing for (im)politeness research exploring and suggesting collocated consideration of notions of face, identity and politeness in a wider notion - in interactional studies - of ‘self’.