Hashed-up, incomplete, fraught-with-errors lit. review

Literature Review

Introduction

“For as long as men [and women] have used tools and have needed to communicate with each other about them, technical discourse has existed. Scholarship has traced technical writing of quite a familiar sort back to the Sumerians, and we need come no farther forward in history than the Roman Empire to find technical writing as lucid and sophisticated as any that is done today” (Connors 1982 [reprinted 2004,] p. 4). However, according to Connors, technical writing didn’t become a profession in and of itself until the technological explosion of WWII and didn’t gain full-fledged professional status until the fifties (Connors 1982 [reprinted 2004,] p. 12-13).

Since that time, technical communicators have attempted to define their profession. And many writers have illustrated the human, non-technical nature of technical communication. Butter asserted that “technical communication belongs to a tradition that asserts the primacy of knowing and being over willing and knowing. It insists that the person thinking is more important than the tools used or the system acted upon” (Butter 1991 [reprinted 2004], p. 22). Winsor’s article on the Challenger Tragedy illustrated that simply providing information wasn’t enough. Successful technical documents must also have a successful perlocutionary effect (Winsor 1988). Herndl, Fennell, and Miller (1991) illustrated that this effect was frequently tied to social relationships not necessarily the communication itself in their analysis of the Challenger Disaster as well as Three Mile Island. And Gross and Walzer (1997) broke with traditional communication thought that puts the responsibility of communication on the rhetor not the audience. They insisted that the fault of the failed communication in the Challenger Disaster rested on the audience who decided not to heed the warnings of the engineers who insisted that the O-rings would fail. Successful technical communication is not a matter of presenting information lucidly, the conception of technical communication as a clear window explained by Miller (1979) in “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing” but rather a complicated articulation of social power and meaning as described by Slack, Doak, and Miller (1993 [reprinted 2004]).

Changing Media; Changing Communication

From advances in printing to advances in media, technical communicators continued to expand the media they used to communicate. In the latter part of the twentieth century, technical communication expanded with technology into electronic formats and onto the Internet. Initially electronic documentation was merely print documentation uploaded to the Internet as new media scholars like Bolter and Grusin (2000) would predict—new media recycles old content. However, as the Internet because more user friendly and ubiquitous, some industries began to create documentation exclusively for the Internet and shipping products with only a few pieces of documentation particularly in the computer industry presumably because manufacturers could assume that most computer users also had Internet access. Online documentation afforded distinct advantages of print documentation. It is cheaper to distribute; it can be modified after the consumer receives the product; it’s searchable and doesn’t require indexing; and for the time being, it allows manufacturers to escape costly EU laws demanding that documentation be translated into all EU languages including Maltese.


The technical communication field became professionalized to create the printed text. Technical communication was strongly associated with genres associated with printed texts. However, Rude (2004) declared the success of a document depends on its performative effect. In her examination of the delivery of public policy reports over time she called for a new, expanded view of delivery. “The message cannot remain bound by the document. If one document is limited in persuading audiences to act, another document, another genre, another medium, another emphasis, other settings, other collaborators may be enlisted to help reach the goal” (286.) In other words, successful communicators pursue genre and media that have the desired perlocutionary effect.

And in the late twentieth century, the available genre and media were expanding pushing documentation into new media that society in the latter half of the twentieth century embraced. Walter Ong (1982) labeled this new society that relied upon written texts, but also used forms of oral media secondary orality. He recognized that technology in the form of telephones, television, and radio had created a new culture that certainly wasn’t oral, but was no longer chirographic either. This new culture relied on texts to back-up its oral media, but it used and enjoyed oral media. Furthermore, Ong differentiated media from communication. In the age of secondary orality similar communication could occur in a variety of media. Journalists could print the news in the newspaper, but also broadcast it over the radio or the television. Bolter and Grusin (2000) emphasized this point exactly—new media always recycles old content. The media doesn’t change the message only its effectiveness. Theorists Yates and Orlikowski (1992) demonstrated how new media created an opportunity for more effective technical communication without changing the genre and purpose of the communication. They pointed out that while some genres may dictate a particular media, such as letters need pen and paper, many genres didn’t necessarily require a particular media and genres could exist across different media. They asserted that media selection should depend on the richness necessary to achieve the goals of the genre. They cite a theory from Daft and Lengel that stated “media may be ranked on a continuum according to their capacity to provide immediate feedback, to convey multiple cues, to support personalization, and to accommodate linguistic variety” (309).

Technical communication should not be bound by media. Although Rude (2004) is discussing public policy reports in her 2004 article not documentation, her analysis could apply to any technical communication intended to benefit and not manipulate the public. Certainly, product documentation, although not as altruistic, meets this criterion and the implications for technical documentation is that if a manual doesn’t do the trick perhaps websites or call centers can. So, as technology has expanded media choices, technical communicators have responded by offering technical communication via an expanding array of media; certainly these new options for delivering technical documentation should include call centers.

Globalization
Finally, twenty-first century improvements in technology have allowed labor arbitrage that makes call centers an affordable and viable method for providing technical documentation to a wide variety of consumers (Friedman 2005).


Call Centers

Call centers are increasingly popular methods of providing customer service to customers. Call centers by their nature are difficult communication transactions characterized as emotional labor; Leidner (1991) asserted that such workers are highly monitored and their work scripted by their employers. However, others argued that such labor presents a management dilemma to managers. They can manage volume through task routinization and scripting designed to create a low discretion work environment (Houlihan 2002; Frenkel , Tam, Korczynski, and Shire 1998.) Or they can treat call center workers as highly trained, well-compensated, semi-professionals who use IT to act as an ambassador for the company and customize the client’s service experience. (Frenkel, Tam, Korczynski, and Shire 1998.) Most call centers operate somewhere between these two management extremes, but most if not all call center managers rely on technology to monitor workers either directly via listening devices and keystroke monitors or secondarily through the collection of statistics and customer surveys (Winiecki 2007.) Regardless of the management style, call center work is stressful (Houlihan 2002; Frenkel , Tam, Korczynski, and Shire 1998. Winiecki 2007 Taylor and Bain 1999.)

Call center transactions can be broken down into inbound (customers calling in) and outbound calls (call center workers calling customers) and by industry. The industries that rely most heavily on call centers are financial services, insurance (increasingly indistinguishable from financial services), and information technology. Generally outbound calls are more difficult than inbound calls. Furthermore, most insurance industry calls are the most complicated, because of the varied nature of the instruments they service and sell (Dean 1993). My research will focus on relatively easy inbound, information technology calls.

Telephone conversations, but especially call center conversations, in which the call center worker is usually trying to read, type, think, and talk at the same time are problematic. Although several researchers have identified difficulties with call center conversations. Schneider (2006) demonstrated that while call center workers may be talking to customers, their engagement with the computer causes them to inadvertently respond verbally to the computer to the great confusion and disconcertment of the customer.

Call centers are also less than ideal places to work as well. Not only do they require emotional labor as workers attempt to placate customers (Leidner 1993), but as Lyon (1993) pointed out that computer surveillance techniques created a virtual panopticon for workers. In a 1997 study in Scotland, Taylor and Bain examined how this virtual panopticon applied directly to call centers. Workers described both the nature of call center work in which workers relied heavily on scripts and decision trees as well as the heavily monitored nature of the work as an “assembly line in the head.”

Call centres remove the need for face-to-face contact
with customers, with the telephony and computing technology used in call
centres resulting in the service activities of the organization able to be provided
from any location (Burgess and Connell, 2003; Ellis and Taylor, 2006; Miozzo
and Ramirez, 2003; Richardson and Marshall, 1999). The combination of
technology and cost-saving driven by globalization has resulted
in an industry that is geographically flexible and mobile (Burgess and Connell,
2003; Ellis and Taylor, 2006). Thus as organizations search for cost savings
through the creation of call centers, further profits and economies of scale are
sought through their (re)location to places with lower (mainly labor) costs
and adequate supplies of available labor (Bristow et al., 2000; Ellis and Taylor,
2006). This is demonstrated not only by the large number of call centres that
are located outside of metropolitan areas in provincial regions, but also the well
publicized move of many call centers offshore to countries such as India, South
Africa and the Philippines.

Furthermore, offshoring does nothing to alleviate these issues with call centers. In fact, the intercultural nature of the positions may exacerbate the problems. In 2005 Taylor and Bain followed call center workers to India. In this article they maintained that in an attempt to reduce risk, the most routinized, segmented parts of the call center industry were the mostly parts to be outsourced to India resulting in an exacerbation of this phenomenon. They lamented the fact that such a flawed work process was ever exported to another country. Budhwar, Varma, Singh and Rohin (2006) published their two part empirical study that identified the high attrition rate at call centers. They attributed this to on-the-job stress as well as difficulties maintaining appropriate work life balance working typical call center hours—overnight—as well as a lack of career development. In a series of interviews with Indian call center workers, Mirchandani (2003) suggested that offshoring created layers of cultural colonialism. For example, worked described scripted Taylorism that made them feel like a “keyed toy (p. 7) much like the criticisms of Taylor and Bain (1999, 2005).” They also described linguistic imperialism (p. 8) much like the phenomenon defined by Pennycook (2001) as American English linguistic hegemony. Additionally, workers described locational masking (p. 10) as well as colonialization with time (p. 11) similar to the issue described by Budhwar, Varma, Singh, and Rohin (2006).

Despite an awareness of the economic imperialist issues of offshored call centers, Indian call centers workers expressed satisfaction with their jobs both in the interviews conducted by Mirchandani (2003) and the focus groups conducted by Pal and Buzzanell (2008). In the Mirchandani interviews participants felt that call centers allowed them to position themselves in the geographically stratified global market. And while they did have to construct their identities to satisfy culturally different customers, it was easy to distance themselves from those identities while not on the telephone. Furthermore they had opportunity to construct the identities of their American customers as well. However, in focus groups conducted by Pal and Buzzanell (2008) Indian call center workers expressed overall satisfaction with their jobs. And while they acknowledged that constructing more Americanized identities made their worker easier, in fact was almost necessary, they did not feel that such assumed identities affected their off-the-job personalities or culture.

Also labor arbitrage has created an environment that encourages intercultural calls in which the call center worker may be from cultures half way around the globe. Popular places to outsource calls to English speaking customers are India and the Philippines. However, this phenomenon is not confined to English speakers. Many Japanese countries outsource call centers to areas of China that have large Japanese speaking populations. European countries like France and Germany have also started to outsource some their call centers. One could argue that outsourcing particularly call centers is the 21st century’s legacy of colonialism and occupation. Generally it’s cost effective to outsource to countries that have been owned or occupied by the outsourcing country or a counterpart. Outsourcing U.S. call centers to India is cost effective because the operations of Britain’s East India Trading Company created an educational system and population in India that taught and spoke English. Furthermore, India’s IT outsourcing industry started in the southern part of the country, in Bangalore, far from its capitol New Delhi and apart from its business center primarily because the British government had set-up its operations there a century before and had created an infrastructure that lent itself to the industry. Bangalore, by Indian standards, was a relatively small and bucolic city before then. In fact, it’s nickname was and still is the garden city—a nickname that is difficult to attach to the heavily industrialized city of Bangalore today. China is a prime candidate for Japanese outsourcing because WWII occupation of China created a large Japanese-speaking Chinese population in ******. Generally the history that has created a climate for outsourcing is aggressive at best and violent at worst. And some have argued outsourcing is the 21st century’s version of colonialism. Pennycook has argued that outsourcing contributes to American English linguistic hegemony. ***** Taylor and Bain (2005) characterized the work that Indian call center workers perform to remake their identity as “neocolonialism.” And Mirchandi’s (2003) unpublished paper on training and work in call centers is titled “making Americans.” call centre work resonate of imperialist subcontracting practices characteristic of
"globalization from above" whereby Indian workers are trained to serve the needs of
American clients, the transnationalization of voice-to-voice service work simultaneously
provides the opportunity for Indian workers to construct "Americans" and situate their
own jobs within global labour markets. p.4

One-to-One Intercultural Communication
Finally, it’s not just that call centers are the new manuals, but also that call centers offer a look into the kind of intercultural communications that are likely to be more typical in the future, and much of intercultural communication has not studied this kind of synchronous, one-to-one intercultural communication. First, much intercultural research is really cross-cultural not intercultural. Intercultural is when two people from different cultures interact. The entire field of contrastive rhetoric, by definition, is cross-cultural. Hannah Sun’s (2004) really good case studies are really cross-cultural as is Honold’s (1999) well received study. And as Carbaugh (2007) points out, just because people from a particular culture communicate a particular way with people from the same culture doesn’t mean they’ll communicate that way with people outside their culture. Localization has been the focus of other intercultural research. St. Amant’s (2003, 2005) work has largely been in the areas of localization and privacy (2008.) Some good studies have focused on one-to-one communication like Thatcher (2000, 2006) and Sunaoshi (2005). And of course, research on call centers from Lockwood and Forey (2007) and Dean (2007) has started to reveal some interesting things that could be transferred outside the realm of the call center such as avoiding the use of sarcasm with your Philipino counterpart on the telephone. The type of communication that occurs in intercultural call centers will only continue to grow and that’s what makes call centers an increasingly valuable site of intercultural communication research.


Identity, Culture, and Call Center

National identity also becomes an issue when examining offshored call centers because the call center workers are almost always a different nationality than the customers they serve.

Cultural Identity
However, recent technical communication researchers have pointed to problems with these models. Hunsinger (2006) claims that heuristic approaches like Hall’s, Hofstede’s, and Trompenaar’s presuppose that culture is a universal thing that grounds cultural identity. Consequently, the “construction and mobilization of cultural identity during discursive exchange tends to be neglected” (37). Hunsinger (2006) offers political, economic, and historical factors as possible influences on communication. Although he alludes to ways in which these extracultural factors might influence communication, he doesn’t provide concrete examples. Rather he explains how the experiences of one expatriate, Chinese acquaintance of his is influenced by different cultural characteristics that he refers to as scapes as in technoscapes, mediascapes etc. However, I can imagine a more applicable situation in which this view of intercultural communication might inform an internationally outsourced call center function. For example, the United States might bring pressure to bear on India to give up their claim to Kashmir in exchange for Pakistan’s cooperation in the “global war on terror. Such an occurrence might not predispose Indians kindly towards Americans in telephone exchanges especially if the Indians had already received training that taught them that Americans don’t know as much about computers as they think as Sandberg has claimed. In his article Hunsinger is not denying Hofstede’s and Hall’s analysis of culture, but rather pointing out how other factors may and probably will supersede communication, because cultural identity is an ongoing and dynamic discursive act.

In her call for comparative as opposed to contrastive rhetoric, Wang (2008) takes on both Hofstede and Kaplan. After a quick overview of theories of culture, she points out that culture and cultural identity is a moving target that changes over the course of one’s lifetime as one has different experiences. As a person has more contact with people of different cultures, these static cultural norms are less likely to apply to you. In fact, static definitions of culture don’t account for the rapidly changing environment we live in. So not only does Hofstede not apply, but neither does Kaplan, because as ESL learners read and write for more people outside their culture, their cultural rhetorical patterns would change. Furthermore as the culture as a whole interacts with other cultures, Kaplan’s static views of rhetorical preferences no longer hold.

In fact, Wang’s explanation that globalization is changing the ways in which culture influences communication are echoed in the work of many researchers. Shome (2006) and Y.Y. Kim (2007) warn against the effect that the polarizing and colonizing forces of globalization have on cultural identity. Others like Carbaugh (2007) see globalization as more reflexive. In fact, Carbaugh (2007) eloquently identifies the issue that Hunsinger, Wang, and others have identified. He explains,

as people communicate with each other, they are saying things literally about the specific subject being discussed, but they are also saying things culturally, about who they are, how they are related, what they are doing together, how they feel about what is going in, and about the nature of things. These cultural meanings—about personhood, relationships, action, emotion, and dwelling, respectively—are formulated in cultural discourse analyses as ‘‘radiants of cultural meaning’’ or ‘‘hubs of cultural meaning’’ which are active in communication practice (174.)

So rather than using culture to understand communication, Carbaugh is saying we should be using communication to understand culture. Researchers like Hofstede, Hall, and Trompenaars get it completely backwards.

And while much has been made of these theories as treating culture like a product not a process, other reasons invalidate their use for the kind of one-on-one intercultural communication understanding we need in our new “global” environment. To begin, these dimensions and rhetorical tendencies have always just described norms (Trompenaars, 1994; Levine, Park and Kim, 2007.) Finally, outliers can always make the system not work and subcultures can act completely differently from their dominant culture (Sun 2004; Carbaugh 2007; Levine, Park, and Kim 2007; Lui 2008.)


Genre
Bhatia (2004) helpfully defined and divided genre into three approaches. He stated “Genre analysis is the study of situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalized academic or professional settings” (p. 22). One approach is the rhetorical or technical communication approach to genre as explored by Carolyn Miller (1984) as typified social action inn her essay “Genre as Social Action” (1984). Miller reviews genre study from rhetoricians, linguists, whether defined in terms of typification of rhetorical action. Bhatia also pointed out that this view was further explored by Bazerman (1994) and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995). He also identified another approach to genre developed by system functional linguistics and characterized most clearly by Martin (1993). This approach defined genre as regularities of staged, goal-oriented social processes. Finally, he mentioned the Bristish school of genre study popularized by Bhatia and Swales (1990). This approach focuses on consistency of communicative purposes within discourse communities, as in Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). These genre theories are not mutually exclusive, but rather are overlapping and interdependent.

Swales relied on and praised both Martin and Miller in his work. To develop his concept of discourse communities and how they operate, Swales relied on Martin. He wrote ‘genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them (Martin 1985), these discoursal expectations create the genres that articulate the operations of the discourse community” (1987, p. 6). (Martin’s explanation of the function of genre sounds very much like Austin and Searle’s definition of a speech act. I’ll address this issue later.) He similarly relied on Miller. Swales (1990) wrote “Miller’s exceptional work reinforces the concept of genre as a means of social action, on situated in a wider sociorhetorical context and operating not only as a mechanism for reaching communicative goals but also of clarifying what those goals might be” (p.44). Miller’s analysis relies on many scholars including rhetoricians like….., sociologists like…, and linguists like Halliday. She writes ……….. Halliday founded the Systemic Functional Linguistics approach that Martin applies to genre.

Not only do these three views of genre overlap, but they also demonstrate how genre use is one of the ways that culture heavily influences communication. Miller wrote “As a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality” (1984, p. 165). More to the point Martin (1985) wrote “the term genre is used here to embrace each of the linguistically realized activity types which comprise so much of our culture” (p. 250). He continued on to explain how culture influences the use of genre, “one of the principal descriptive responsibilities of genre is to constrain the possible combinations of field, mode and tenor variables used by a given culture” (p. 250). He provided an example of a hole in a culture’s register paradigm. (Register is made up of field (subject or content), mode (medium), and tone (social distance or power.) A spontaneous dialogue (mode) about sex (field) to someone working under one’s supervision (tenor) isn’t appropriate. However, a similar conversation with a peer perhaps in a locker room would be. A register shift in social distance makes such a conversation acceptable. Genre serves to create a framework of acceptable register combinations. This framework, genre, is determined by culture.

Linguistics

Ultimately, the linguistic view of genre as a staged, goal-oriented social process works best for my purposes because embedded within this definition is a method of examining the way that culture influences communication. Swales and Miller both acknowledge this influence, but don’t create methods of examining its influence. The systemic functional linguistics view of genre and register do provide a mechanism for examining the influence of culture in part because they were founded on the idea that culture influence communication. In the book that Miller refers to, Language as Social Semiotic, Halliday (1978) spends a lot of time describing how culture teaches us to act and mean. Although he never says this, he really creates this Foucauldian view of childhood in which parents, usually mothers, schools, and society constantly watch and when necessary correct children and through this watching children learn language and eventually genres like the scolding mother genre. He explains the mechanism by which culture produces and reproduces genre.


For example, in Language as Social Semiotic (1978) Halliday develops the concept of register. Register breaks into field, mode, and tone. Field encompasses the situation of the communication as well as the exigence and content; mode is the means of communication—the media--but also can include textual elements that speak to cohesion like reference, ellipsis, substitution, theme and rheme, etc. and finally tone deals with interpersonal relationships and the things that build that like formality, word choice etc. In Cohesion in English (1976) Halliday and Hasan also develop this idea of text and a text might identify itself as a genre with particular obligatory stages. So I can apply the methods of linguistics to a call center telephone call something like this. Based on the successful telephone calls, I already know that a successful call center call starts with a greeting and then having the customer state the problem. (Hypothetically speaking, I haven’t actually performed such analysis, but Forey and Lockwood (2007) had such findings.) And ala Halliday, I’ll have a neat diagram of the stages of a successful call. However, in one call, either because the representative views the call as more of an elaborate apology or just wants to get through quickly to improve his metrics, he tries to get straight to the troubleshooting decision tree. (The customer stating the problem doesn’t usually allow call center representatives to skip the decision tree, so it just takes time, but doesn’t yield results.) When he asks the first troubleshooting question immediately, the customer doesn’t understand the question because she’s expecting to hear something to the effect of what’s the problem. Or possibly the call lost cohesion. Perhaps the customer used an anaphoric reference in a manner not typical in Indian culture, and the call center representative couldn’t figure out what the caller was talking about. The coding system developed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) would reveal that. Linguistics provides a rigorous way to get at these linguistic issues--the nuts and bolts of creating meaning. Likewise, linguistics allows me to assess levels of formality, the building of information from theme (given information) to rheme (new information)—a textual issue—as well as lexical-grammatical issues.

Methodology

Rhetoricians and technical communicators rely heavily on qualitative methods such as ethnography and interview and quantitative methods such as surveys. In their recent article on researching genre, Swales and Tardy (2008) specifically point to techniques that mix ethnography and oral interview data with genre and discourse analysis for intercultural communication. However, in his 2001 article Thatcher questions the validity of such techniques. Although he doesn’t actually say it, he implies that techniques that create a relationship between the researcher and the participant of the type advocated by researchers like Sullivan and Porter (1997) are essentially a type of methodological imperialism. That less individualist and egalitarian cultures simply won’t respond in a manner that will foster valid results. He does say that research that follows culturally sensitive organizational and rhetorical strategies is more likely to be valid, but most countries aren’t egalitarian and individualist and thus participants are like to not respond well to American style methods. We can identify culturally sensitive and therefore valid research methods by grounding research in broad cultural categories like those laid out by Hofstede. Such an approach is problematic too for reasons that I elaborate in the next response; the short answer is that such dimensional analysis doesn’t allow for the changing nature of cultural identity, subgroups within a culture, or outliers. Such dimensions were always just an average or a norm and typically can’t be applied with any accuracy to individual members of a culture.

Methodological Patronizing
And doing as Thatcher recommends could be interpreted as kind of cultural patronizing. For example, the technologically savvy and globally influenced young women in Hannah Sun’s (2004) case studies might not take a survey seriously if it’s written in the old fashioned rhetorical style of their parents (although one could argue they might consider taking it when their parents wouldn’t.) Or they might take it on the Internet. And now that Hannah Sun has revealed that population through her text analysis and interviews that she could conduct with some validity being a relatively young Chinese woman herself which raises the point that Sullivan and Porter (1997) make very well—researchers need to be aware of where they stand—their contextual situatedness. As a young Chinese woman, Hannah Sun (2004) could avoid Thatcher’s (2001) imperial methodology critique and pursue her intercultural communication research (really cross cultural, but I address that later) using both quantitative and qualitative methods advocated by Porter and Sullivan (1997), Swales and Tardy (2008) and others.

The Inside Job
And such research on call centers has yielded some really interesting results. For example, Pal and Buzzanell (2008) used focus groups inside an India Call Center to uncover attitudes that Indian call center workers had about their jobs and Americans. They used connections they had through a friend to gain official access to the call center and they used their friend to recruit participants. Both the focus group format and the manner they were recruited lends a lot of validity to their results when viewed through a Hofstedean prism of collectivist, high power distance kind of country. The problem with the study was that it’s only one company, didn’t involved many people, and didn’t have a very rigorous sampling method although they did sample for age and gender. Consequently while their results are indicative of the attitudes of a particular group of call center workers at a particular company, they aren’t necessarily broadly applicable across the call center industry. (If such methods held, from where I stand, John Kerry would be seeking his second term in office.) And in case you’re wondering, the Indian Call Center workers in Pal and Buzzanell’s (2008) study like their jobs, but don’t necessarily see it a career—except for older workers. They think they get paid well, but not enough to raise a family. And they think Americans are stupid; I’m pretty sure most American call center workers think Americans are stupid too, but I’d have to conduct broader surveys to be certain. Pal and Buzzanell’s (2008) research is in stark contrast to the research by British researchers Taylor and Bain (1999) who use ethnographic methods to make the case that the call center is Foucault’s panopticon made real. Are Taylor and Bain simply imposing their British sensibilities on call center work or is Pal and Buzzanell’s (2008) study too limited? Taylor and Bain made assumptions based on thick description, while Pal and Buzzanell used rigorous qualitative methods to answer complex questions about what call center workers think—more research like their research would be helpful. So, outside researchers looking in are very limited in the research they can conduct alone, but they can team up with insiders to conduct interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic research to uncover attitudes, beliefs, and environmental influences. Similarly insiders can create and conduct surveys to collect quantitative data to measure the extent of attitudes and beliefs with some expectation of validity. In fact, it might be kind of nice if Pal and Buzzanell took the information they garnered from the focus group and created a survey. And then use their circle of friends and then their friends to find call center workers to answer a survey of closed questions to discover if the attitudes at that one company are typical. Of course, they would need to sample participants appropriately, but a method of spreading the survey through friends is far more likely to yield representative results.

What’s the American Researcher to Do?
And that’s well and good for researchers living in India, but what is the intrepid, single, U.S. intercultural researcher to do? Even Thatcher (2001) indicates intercultural researchers can study “local genres and utterances” (p. 464.) Miller (1994) points to linguistic analysis for getting at genre issues. And Swales and Tardy (2008) also point to textual analysis. As long as the methods applied are sufficiently rigorous to minimize cultural bias, all the researchers I’ve read agree that such methodologies avoid the pitfalls that affect other intercultural research techniques. And the rigorous methods of identifying and coding prescribed by the school of systemic functional linguistics supplies the deliberate and systemic approach to provide such rigor. Lockwood and Forey’s (2007) study is a perfect example of this kind of intercultural research that manages to avoid many of the validity pitfalls that assail it and still examine the moment of intercultural interaction. Unfortunately their methods like such methods generally do lose some of the complexity inherent in human behavior. For example, they describe the stages of a successful genre, but can’t explain why some call center workers seem to know how to employ them and others do not. (Halliday (1978) would say native speakers have been enculturated to use the genres, but Non-native English Speakers would need to be explicitly taught.) They demonstrated how Philipinos met all instances of sarcasm either with silence or a literal interpretation, but they cannot figure out why. Do Philipinos really do not use any form of sarcasm or if their sarcasm is inflected or executed differently? These methods can describe what particular cultural groups are likely to do under varying circumstances, but they cannot uncover why. And the why might go a long way to teaching people to change their communication practices. Generally such questions are answered by purely qualitative researcher that’s difficult for outsiders to conduct in a non-biased manner. So while such research can see the effects of culture inherent in the communication, the cultural phenomenon that caused such communicative habits is unavailable to them.

So What is Qualitative and Quantitative?
Which brings me to the next part of my discussion, are methodologies like linguistic and content analysis quantitative or qualitative? Creswell (2007) puts such methodologies and their methods of looking at text, conversation, etc. firmly in a gray area. For him, quantitative research must collect quantitative data and analyze such data in a quantitative fashion. Artifacts like texts and conversations are qualitative data and applying the methods of counting and coding like in content and linguistic analysis are applying quantitative methods to qualitative data—hence his belief that they occupy a gray area between qualitative and quantitative analysis. Personally, I see such methods as sort of the ultimate in mixed methods research. And, as Creswell (2003) contends such methods are best used for pragmatic, problem centered research like my research. My research focuses on the workplace and specifically why people who speak English fluently can’t understand one another in the limited context of the IT call center telephone conversation. My research takes the messy, qualitative data of the call center conversation and applies rigid, quantitative methods analysis methods to it in an attempt to remove the filters of culture as much as possible to see where the various linguistic cultural tendencies of the participants influence both what they say and what they understand. Mixed methods research is necessary to understand the inherently open-ended, qualitative nature of communication in as closed and objective a manner as possible. The methods of linguistic analysis developed by Halliday (1978) and Halliday and Hasan (1976) allow me to collect data in manner not biased by cultural dynamics between the participants and me and analyze that data in a relatively culturally neutral way. I could shore up the validity of my analysis by getting one or more other people to code the data as well to verify its non-subjective nature. Such methods are the best way to get at that moment of intercultural interaction and still make allowances for variable and changing nature of national culture. One could argue that the gaze, in this case the listening, of the recorder might cause people to speak or act differently, but since recording is an omnipresent part of the call center transactions, it won’t invalidate this research. In fact, to not have it might invalidate the research, but it is an argument that my findings might not be generalizable to conversations that aren’t typically recorded—like a private intercultural telephone call between a client and customer. Such calls don’t exist at the company I’m researching, but surely they exist somewhere. Furthermore, the analysis methods also are fairly culture free, although critical linguist Pennycook (2001) might argue that they further American English linguistic hegemony. Such research definitely does, but Lockwood and Forey (2007) respond to this assertion that their research and by extension mine allows for economic development and real quality of life improvement in the countries the call centers open in. Wheelan (2003), the economist, attacks such assertions as patronizing. People in developing countries can choose development for themselves—to not offer it to them is the truly unethical thing. And this discussion highlights the real difficult issue with intercultural communication research not just using appropriate methods, but to choose methods that respect the cultural integrity of the participants when the researcher may not completely understand the cultural integrity of the participants. So intercultural researchers could use the same qualitative quantitative methods to uncover complex issues that other technical communicators use, but cultural issues make that problematic at best.





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