call handler’s voice is minutely analysed for pace, volume and timbre to ensure the right ‘mood’. Timbre is a function of breathing, and if there is any anxiety the ensuing adrenaline surge can constrict the diaphragm, which raises the timbre. So Harding & Yorke train people to breathe properly. The final aim is to achieve ‘emotional resolution’ as well as practical resolution of the customer’s call, and that, explains Bob, is about ‘making the customer feel great’. He quotes management guru Tom Peters: ‘It doesn’t matter how good you are, the only tiling which matters is how good does your customer think you are.’ Bob believes it’s instinctive to be empathetic, so his consultancy’s job is to ‘liberate people’s natural behaviour’. To top it all, Bob claims empathy is efficient: it’s a win-win formula, because empathy means the employee works out more quickly what the customer really wants.
Empathy, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the power of identifying oneself mentally with (and so fully comprehending) a person’, has become an important skill in the labour market, and it is changing the employability status of individuals. This intrigues social theorist Andre Gorz, who argues that while the assembly line represented ‘the total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality’, what is now required is the ‘total mobilisation of that personality’. He writes that ‘technical knowledge and professional skills are only of value when combined with a particular state of mind, an unlimited openness to adjustment, change, the unforeseen’.2
At the Orange call centre in North Shields, the manager told me they never recruited someone for their technical skills. What they were looking for was a particular personality: cheerful, outgoing, flexible, good-natured, adaptable – because these were the characteristics which they couldn’t train. It is an approach shared by B&Q, the DIY retail chain which uses an automated telephone personality test to recruit employees with the right kind of emotional characteristics; applicants have to press their telephone keypad to answer questions such as, ‘I prefer to have my closest relationships outside work rather than with a colleague.’ In December 2002 B&Q’s Human Resources Director explained to the Financial Times that ‘We wanted a psychological underpinning to the entire culture – the same description of cultural fit across the entire population [of the company] – including management.’3 Identifying the right personalities has become a big industry, with a turnover of £20 million a year; over 70 per cent of companies in the FTSE 100 now use psychometric testing. In this labour market women and young people are favoured, while the shy, the reserved and those who find it hard to adapt to change are disadvantaged.
Gorz goes on to claim: ‘What this represents is an end to the impersonal relationship in which the employee sold labour to the employer regardless of personality, a return to the pre-capitalist relations of personal submission as described by Marx.’ That submission does not depend on rules and coercion – you can’t force someone to be ‘warm’ and ‘natural’ on the telephone. The required attributes derive from the worker’s ‘entire ability to think and act’. The ‘power battle’ is no longer played out in the workplace, says Gorz, but shifts ‘upstream’: ‘The battle lines of that conflict will be everywhere where information, language, modes of life, tastes and fashions are produced…in other words, everywhere the subjectivity and “identity” of individuals, their values, their images of themselves and the world are being continually structured, manufactured and shaped.’4 In other words, the conflicts over power and autonomy which always characterise working lives now no longer take place in the factory, call centre or office, but in the wider cultural life of the country, which promotes the required norms for the twenty-first-century workplace. For example, when a human resources director gives out instructions that staff are to ‘be themselves and be natural’ with customers, the staff’s understanding of self or naturalness can be drawn from a disparate range of pop psychology, television, magazines and friends.
These required emotional characteristics are in continual conflict with the pressure to be efficient; a conflict which is symptomatic of many forms of service work with low profit margins. There’s an inherent contradiction in this, because contrary to Bob Hughes’ claim, empathy is not always efficient: the confused old lady who can’t use her mobile might take up twenty minutes if a call handler is too empathetic. The old lady may even get canny and try to reach the same call handler every evening, in a bid to alleviate her loneliness – it happens – and just how empathetic should the response be? The empathetic employee is caught in a tension between the organisation’s drive to be efficient and competitive, and meeting the consumer’s desire for satisfaction. Balancing the two is no mean feat, given the often unrealisable promise of consumer culture that ‘we can have whatever we want whenever we want it’: the ‘enchanting myth of customer sovereignty’.5 Often the failure to cope with this tension is placed on the shoulders of the individual employee, rather than acknowledged as a contradiction of the position they’ve been placed in.
Furthermore, the emotional labour may require some degree of deference on the part of the employee. Bowing is taught to workers at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo because ‘Guests wish to experience an appropriate feeling of prestige or superiority, purely by virtue of their using what is commonly evaluated as a deluxe enterprise.’6 The culture of the hotel industry is about an illusion of old-fashioned servility and ingratiating hierarchy. The flipside of the catchphrase ‘the customer is always right’ is the put-upon employee who is required not only to repress his or her own emotions (irritation, frustration), but also to accept responsibility, which results in the endless and meaningless apologies of service culture. The egalitarian aspirations of Western democratic countries do not seep into the interface between employee and consumer in the service economy. The result is a mismatch between the values of the workplace and the values of consumer culture: in the former, employees are expected to repress their own emotional responses; in the latter, they are encouraged to give them full rein.
Inevitably, the mismatch is most acute amongst the lowest-paid: they are required to provide emotional experiences which they could never afford to receive themselves. In a culture which privileges the expression of emotion and rejects traditional forms of emotional self-management – such as the British stiff upper lip – the mismatch becomes even more acute: on the one hand, the consumer can become more demanding, while on the other, the employee has to control his or her own culturally legitimised emotions.
One study quoted the instructions given to clerical staff at Harvard University, who were advised to ‘Think of yourself as a trash can. Take everyone’s little bits of anger all day, put it inside you, and at the end of the day, just pour it into the dumpster on your way out of the door.’7 In Hochschild’s seminal study, flight attendants were told to think of passengers as guests, children, or people who have just received traumatic news – similar analogies are used in training British call-centre staff. This kind of cognitive restructuring of employees’ responses is required to pamper the customer’s every whim. Such self-control can be very hard work, as management theorist Irena Grugulis points out: ‘Expressing warmth towards and establishing rapport with customers may provide a genuine source of pleasure for workers. Yet in practice, emotions are incorporated into organisations within strict limits. Emotion work does not necessarily legitimise the expression of human feelings in a way that supports the development of healthy individuals, instead it offers these feelings for sale. Work is not redesigned to accommodate the employees’ emotions, rather employees are redesigned to fit what is deemed necessary at work.’8
There is a world of difference between the waitress who chooses to smile, quip with her customers and be good-natured, and the one whose behaviour has been minutely prescribed by a training manual. The former has some autonomy over
