Linguistic Expressions of National Selves: Projecting Identity on the Phone in Outsourced Call Centers in the Philippines

Date Presented:

February 7

Abstract:

More than a century ago, the United States implemented an English-only educational system in its new colonial acquisition of the Philippines. Today, the burgeoning Philippine call center industry relies on widespread English proficiency and ties with foreign investors from the United States. In attracting such investors to the country, Philippine officials attribute a set of uniform qualities to the workforce that repeat colonial ways of speaking about the country. Individual workers’ speech must then accord with these attributions; in order to enter the industry, workers must prove their ability to speak the “correct” kind of English. Cultural and communication training, both outside and within the call center, teaches agents to modify their voices to accord with a spectrum of linguistic value that mirrors economic value. The linguistic spectrum relies on evaluations of speech’s relative “neutrality”—a vague identification that indicates a framework of ideas about social types in the world. Likewise, these social types inform representations of the macro-level workforce abroad. The remarkably consistent ideas about the desirability of a supposedly American standard find ultimate expression in workers’ bodies. Working the night shift to synchronize with American daytime, agents often suffer bodily fatigue and social detachment from others. In examining these cross-context ideas about social types and their real physical effects, I find that the call center require these specific modes of speaking in order to express national identity on the phone.