26.4045, Calls: Sociolinguistics/Spain

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4045. Mon Sep 14 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4045, Calls: Sociolinguistics/Spain

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Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2015 15:34:04
From: Anna Kristina Hultgren [kristina.hultgren at open.ac.uk]
Subject: The Sociolinguistics of Call Centres

 
Full Title: The Sociolinguistics of Call Centres 

Date: 15-Jun-2016 - 18-Jun-2016
Location: Murcia, Spain 
Contact Person: Anna Kristina Hultgren Johanna Woydack
Meeting Email: kristina.hultgren at open.ac.uk

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 25-Sep-2015 

Meeting Description:

The Sociolinguistics of Call Centres: How can twenty years of call centre research shed light on current issues in sociolinguistics?

Over the past decades, call centres have shot up exponentially across the world. Their particularities have attracted considerable interest from the public, the media as well as researchers across a wide range of disciplines, including sociologists, anthropologists, business scholars, organizational psychologists and linguists.

Socio- and applied linguists have taken a particular interest in aspects such as scripting, textualisation, commodification and metadiscursive regimes (Heller 2003; Cameron 2000, 2008; Hultgren and Cameron 2010a, 2010b; Woydack & Rampton 2015), multilingualism (Duchêne 2009; Alarcón and Heyman 2013), gender (Cameron 2000b; Forey 2013;, Heller 2007; Hultgren 2008), accent neutralization (Cowie 2008), cultural identity (Mirchandani 2004, 2012; Poster 2007; Sonntag 2009; Duchêne & Heller 2012), conversation analysis (Baker et al. 2005) and politeness (Archer and Jagodziński 2014; Hultgren 2011). Some have adopted an applied perspective, trying to provide suggestions as to how to improve call centre interactions (Lockwood 2012; Lockwood and Forey 2007; Friginal 2009).

Call centre agents are under pressure to process calls quickly as well as providing a personalized customer service, a tension which needs to be managed linguistically and which, in the case of off-shore call centres, may be exacerbated by the interaction transcending national, linguistic and cultural borders. While sociologists have studies call centres as a way to shed light on key sociological themes such as rationalisation, post-Fordism, standardisation, social class and gender, the potential for call centres to illuminate key themes in sociolinguistics is vast. 

Bringing together researchers working on call centres of different types (inhouse, offshore, outbound and inbound) and on different continents (Asia, South America, and Europe), the aim of the proposed colloquium is to discuss and make visible the types of theoretical and practical insights linguistic research on call centres can bring to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. As workplaces with low status and a poor societal reputation, they provide a potentially illuminating window into the conference theme of attitudes and prestige.

Call for Papers:

Some of the questions this panel seeks to address are:

- How can call centres shed light on key issues in sociolinguistics: attitudes, prestige, globalization, multilingualism, linguistic homogenization, migration, commodification, scripting, linguistic diversity and the role of technology?
- How similar/different are the linguistic and non-linguistic practices in contexts in different national and ethnolinguistic contexts and what does this suggest about key sociolinguistic issues?
- How do the linguistic and communicative practices differ according to the activities in the call centre, customer service, sales, etc. and to what extent has this been taken into account in research?
- How do economic and political changes affect language and communicative practices in these contexts, and what insights might be gained to develop sociolinguistic theory?

Presenters are invited for a colloquium on the sociolinguistics of call centres proposed for the Sociolinguistics Symposium 21, Murcia, Spain, 15-18 June 2016. If your work addresses the issues above, or any related ones, we would be happy to hear from you. The colloquium is subject to acceptance by the conference organizers and places on the colloquium are limited.

Please send a title and a brief outline (up to 100 words) by email to Kristina.hultgren at open.ac.uk by 25 September. Please note the short deadline!




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