Language, ideology and neoliberalism

Language, ideology and neoliberalism

Marnie HolborowDublin City University

When the ideas of capitalist globalisation appear to speak as one across the world, it is timely to re-examine the interconnections between language and ideology. The global market and its dominant neoliberal ideology, increasingly expressed in English, have led some to hold that the language itself constructs the hegemonic order of global capitalism. Others have focussed on language not only as the bearer of ideology but as part of the immaterial production of capital-ism. This paper discusses the way in which language and ideology interconnect but argues that the ideology of neoliberalism cannot be adequately described as a discourse. Instead, it is an ideology with specific historical roots and which, as a dominant ideology, makes itself felt in language, although not without contra-dictions. Two aspects of language and neoliberal ideology are examined here: firstly the way in which the customer metaphor has been adopted in different and unexpected settings and, secondly, how models of listening and speaking in call centres are framed around neoliberal assumptions. Both processes aim to impose a kind of ‘corporate speak’ to reinforce neoliberal ideas as common sense, but both also contain tensions because language is neither a straitjacket nor a settled ideological product. This paper argues that language and ideology are not the same and that it is in the dynamic of their interconnection that world views are both made and contested.

Keywords: call centres; corporate speak; customer; discourse; English; ideology; market fundamentalism; metaphor; neoliberalism

The ideology of the global market insinuates itself everywhere. At a macro level, international reports, often emanating from the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, chime thick and fast with assumed notions about the need to deregulate, to open up state companies and services to market competition, to pursue further trade liberalisation. At a micro level, almost every company website, mission state-ment and strategic plan pronounces that ‘demand’ and ‘competition’ are synony-mous with efficiency, cost-effectiveness and ‘best practice’. This is the neoliberal world in which “free markets in both commodities and capital contain all that

Journal of Language and Politics 6:1 (2007), 5–73.issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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is necessary to deliver freedom and well-being to all and sundry” (Harvey 2003: 201). The strains of the market resonate not just through official documents, but at every meeting, in emails and the language of individuals. Ironically, for an ideol-ogy so given to the promotion of ‘choice’, it is expressed in a drab uniformity which would have made a Soviet bloc bureaucrat blush.

Such strident sameness, so detectable in language, raises sharply issues around the relationship between ideology and language, and specifically between a domi-nant ideology and language. In what ways is English the bearer of this ideology and part of US global dominance? Is language playing a more salient, constitutive role in capitalism today? With ever greater use of communication technologies to promote, sell and keep selling, has language itself become a product in capitalist production? Is discourse the same as ideology and, if not, how does ideology inter-act with language? These are the concerns of this article. Through an examination of some specific interconnections between neoliberal ideology and English, I hope to describe something of how ideology works through language and, conversely, how language can contest ideology.

I shall investigate two aspects of the language–ideology interconnection. The first concerns the use of the ‘customer’ metaphor and the second models of listen-ing promoted in call centres, both of which are activated by neoliberal ideology. Before this, however, I will make some general remarks about ideology and lan-guage and the debate around and, briefly, chart the contours of the ideology of neoliberalism.

Ideology and power in society

In recent times, discourse has come to be used in place of ideology. For Foucault, whose influence in this area still remains considerable, the blurring between ideol-ogy and discourse involved a shift away from the classical Marxist understanding of ideology and, correspondingly, the downplaying of the social and economic foundations of power in favour of ‘discursive regimes’ (Foucault 1979: 36). Be-cause this paper does not take this interpretation, and because the concept of ide-ology is contentious, I propose to define the way in which I am using the term. It revolves around three strands:

1. Ideology can appropriately be described as meaning in the service of power (Thompson 1990: 7). It is a set of ideas that emerges from specific social rela-tions and supports the interests of a particular social class. Thus, rather than being the expression of what is objectively true, ideologies are true according to particular standpoints; therefore, ideology is a concept that cannot easily

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be stripped of its negative sense. I use the term here in conformity with a broadly Marxist position that ideology is representation as in a camera obscura whereby things appear in a slanted fashion, ‘upside down’ (Marx and Engels 1974: 47), distortions that suit the interests of its promoters.1

2. The bias of an ideology also gives rise to contradictions within the ideology which become manifest at different levels. First, the vision of the world that an ideology presents can clash with what is actually happening and this can lead to its seemingly accepted status being questioned. Secondly, there are com-peting and different ideologies that exist in society, which means that even dominant ideologies do not always hold sway and, depending on the weight of other forms of social contest, are open to being opposed in unpredictable ways (Gramsci 1971: 333). Far from ideologies constituting a kind of social cement or a social given, they can fall victim to their own inconsistencies, and like the globalization anti-globalization case, implode into their opposites.

3. Language, particularly, because it is everywhere in society and a highly sensi-tive indicator of social change, is an immediate (although not the only2) way of grasping ideology. An examination of the workings of ideology in language highlights just how unpredictable this process is, and that far from language being ideologically predetermined, its speakers, as social actors in their own right and faced with different social developments, may at the same time ac-cept some aspects of the ideology and challenge others.

Language and ideology

Language and ideology overlap in so many ways that it is difficult to say where one begins and the other ends. Both represent reality, both are symbolic, both interpret the world. Although some language is patently more ideological, all language has the potential to be ideological (Volosinov 1973: 10). Because ideology crystallizes in language, ideology can appear as if frozen in language. Repeated from the lofty heights of the media and positions of power, these ideological representations can acquire the status of natural truths and common sense. This was the significant insight that Gramsci made when he identified that this uncritical acceptance was part of how ruling ideas won consent, or hegemony. In particular, language could give specific expression to a whole ideology, bestow a new twist to established ways of thinking which then becomes taken for granted, almost self-evident (Gramsci 1971: 323–325; 418–425).

Others have expressed this sedimentation of ideology in language in a different way. Lakoff and Johnson have described how widely used metaphors often mask the social impetus of their original adoption and thus become invisible envelopes

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of ideology. They give the example of the now widely used metaphor ‘Labour is a resource’. The metaphor equates human work with a natural resource which places the speaker inadvertently in a position which ignores the quality of labour and sees labour like oil — the cheaper the better (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 236–237). These metaphors are social standpoints and can be true or false according to where you are standing. The wider the usage, the less salient is the metaphor and the more its meaning appears ‘natural’. As we shall see, within neoliberal ideology, certain metaphors obtain with varying degrees of acceptance.

However, these interconnections do not mean that language and ideology are the same. Every sign is subject to ideological evaluation and critique, and language and use of words can become hotly contested. Raymond Williams described some-thing of this process when he identified how in the development of a language, “in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, qualified, changed”(Williams 1976: 12). Writing at a time of social upheaval, he could see how language did not simply reflect the processes of society but that within language itself, some important social historical processes occurred. He selected certain ‘keywords’ in post-Second World War Britain which he saw as particularly ideologically sensitive and which encapsulated this dynamic. Both continuity and discontinuity and also deep conflicts of value and belief could be found in words such as consumer, conventional, intellectual, interest, peasant, pro-gressive and that these processes involved not only the study of meaning but also the study of social values and conceptions. Analysis in this frame could give that ‘extra edge of consciousness’ against the shaping of meaning by a dominant class. Williams explains:

“This is not a neutral review of meanings. It is an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once con-scious and critical — subject to change as well as to continuity — if the millions of people in whom it is active are to see it as active: not a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus which [….] has a natural authority; but as a shaping and reshaping in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view; a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in to change as we find it necessary to change, as we go on making our own language and history.” (Williams 1976: 24) [emphasis in the original]

This questioning of the ideological meaning of words can take place over long peri-ods of time or can be concentrated into shorter periods, especially when social up-heavals and crises break down normal assumptions. Williams’s observations sprang from the social turmoil post-Second World War and his insights about consensus and contention around language have, as we shall see, particular resonance again.


A number of things follow from the fact that language and ideology are dis-tinct from one another. Firstly, it is not possible to impute ideological meanings to language per se. Because ideology can be distilled in language does not mean that it is indefinitely, or that language is irrevocably locked within a certain ideological encasing. Many valuable contributions to foregrounding the ideological in lan-guage have fallen, sometimes unwittingly, into this determinist mould. One of the first to lay bare the ideological role that English played for first the British Empire and then for US imperialism was Robert Phillipson (1992). He locates ‘Englishiza-tion’ and linguistic imperialism as part of the project of globalisation order that has increased the global gap between the haves and the have-nots and he sees English as an instrument in global dominance (Phillipson 2004). He accepts that this he-gemonic ordering could be challenged but focuses on a challenge outside English rather than within it. His suggestion that Esperanto could provide a neutral me-dium confirms negatively how much he sees English as particularly value-laden. He even ascribes to English a certain character. English has specific pull factors for young speakers, who, he claimed, saw English as representing consumerism and what he calls hedonism (Phillipson 2003: 65).

This viewpoint underestimates the dynamic of language and the roles of speak-ers in its making. ‘Linguistic imperialism’ may highlight the reality of US global domination, but it also glosses over tensions and challenges that make themselves felt within a language. Opposition to language dominance, Phillipson proposes, should take the form of promotion of other and minority languages, as if languag-es themselves are ideological standpoints. No one could fail to recognise the fact that real language choice hardly exists anywhere in the unequal world of today; nor could anyone deny the ongoing need to defend the right for everyone to speak their own language. But that battle does not necessarily challenge the global elites who ride the tiger of world English today. As transnational corporations know all too well, ‘localisation’ can easily live with globalisation. Seeing shifts into other languages as an act of resistance can overlook — as nationalist ideology often has — that not every speaker of a dominant language is in a position of power and minority languages can also be exclusionary and enforced by elites. Opposition to the system and contesting dominant ideology takes different forms worldwide and is not dependent on using a particular language. Many have chosen, or felt obliged, to express their resistance in English.

Secondly, language by its nature cannot be said to be another product in the system. It has been argued, for example, that language in global markets today has become a central part of economic production. The renowned critics of globalisa-tion, Michael Hardt and Tony Negri (2005) maintain that language itself maintains social hierarchies — within and across communities “as a relationship between power and knowledge” (205, 132). They argue that language has become part of

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what they call immaterial production which has become “internal to labour” by creating “new means of collaboration” and “external to capital” because it is cre-ated outside direct production processes (2005, 147). Norman Fairclough makes a similar case, if less strongly, that “language is becoming more central and more sa-lient in New Capitalism” because “the system is information-based, depends more on communication technologies and because brands and branding determines economic success” (Fairclough 2002: 163–66).

It is easy to see why these ideas about the weight of language in the global economy have some appeal: not only has communication between people changed beyond all recognition over the last two decades, but also those at the head of governments and corporations constantly promote the idea that we are living in a post-industrial ‘information’ age where spin, branding, and communication over-ride everything else. But the notion that language in global capitalism has been transformed into a product like any other overlooks the dependence of the system on real products for its profits underestimates the fundamental social role that language has always had. Language has been a vital component in human labour from earliest times and, as one memorable account shows, language interacts di-alectically with social organisation; it is made by the social environment and it also helps to transform it (Beaken 1996). Language-mediated production systems, from this point of view, are not all that new. Capitalism production has at different times required an expansion of specialised skills amongst its workers. In the nine-teenth century, this consideration gave an impetus to the provision of universal primary education in Britain and in some parts of its Empire. Literacy on a mass scale became another part of labour power in the new methods of production and produced new ways of life and new forms of class division. The ‘knowledge’ economy we are seeing today is a difference of degree not of kind. I will return to the discussion of the role of language in global capitalism today when I examine the language used in call centres.

It would seem that Hardt and Negri’s claims for ‘the immaterial paradigm of production’ are more indicative of a persistent philosophical idealism than an understanding of capitalist production. They locate the origin of their model in Foucault’s writings (Hardt and Negri 2005: 142). Discourse thus assumes a pivotal role as a ‘disciplining’ mechanism, as various ‘regimes’ that order society and as the only way of apprehending reality. Foucault refused a place for ideology in his schema because he wanted to avoid the Marxist frame which would link the ideo-logical properties of discourse to the economic base (Foucault 1979: 36). However, philosophically, there are very good reasons to maintain the connection and dis-tinguish between the different sorts of power that emanates from each. What is imagined and what is lived are not the same, in the sense that the idea of gravity never drowned anyone, as Marx once wryly remarked (Marx and Engels 1974:


37–41). Such distinctions are not just fanciful philosophising; without them, in-ventions such as the ‘smooth space’ of a ‘deterritorialised’ Empire can assume such gargantuan dimensions that the more mundane reality of bread and guns, can be left out entirely — as Hardt and Negri tend to do in their analysis (Hardt and Negri 2000).3

While ideology may help to tie people to the power structures of society, the manufacture of consent is only one aspect of how capitalism governs, and not even the determining one. Those in power rule by both force and consent, a fact which is often left out in accounts of discourse and society, as Blommaert reminds us (Blommaert 2005: 167–169). The power of discourse is not of the same order as the power of capital both in terms of experience and effect and forgetting this fails to identify the driving force of the system as a whole, the drive for profits (Jones, 2004).

Making discourse primary in society — what might be termed discourse over-stretch — can too often give the impression that power relations are expressed as surely in texts as in the real world. The presence of larger social forces and the reality of conflicting social relations can become lost in an ever diminishing field of enquiry which focuses on the textual and formal features of language. I argue here that the notion of ideology, as distinct but also interacting with language, al-lows us to better understand the dynamic of social relations of which the makers of language are part. Ideology, in the Marxist sense, with its constant reference to wider social forces, helps maintain this vital proportionality and therefore remains an indispensable tool in any critique of power in society.

The Ideology of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, a term only relatively recently used in anglophone circles, is also described as the ‘Washington consensus’ which shows the weight of the US in its making. It is an ideology that can be summarised thus:

“an array of market orientated principles designed by the government of the Unit-ed States and the international financial institutions that it largely dominates and implemented by them in […] stringent structural adjustment programmes. The basic rules, in brief, are: liberalize trade and finance, let markets set price (‘get prices right’), end inflation (‘macroeconomic stability’) privatize. The Govern-ment should ‘get out of the way’…..” (Chomsky 1999: 19–20)

As the US sociologist Michael Mann points out, what the “rest of the world calls neoliberalism” the US calls “encouraging the world toward more open trade”, pref-erably that which favours the US, in the belief that growth flows from freeing up

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markets” (Mann, 2003: 57). Harvey, in his invaluable history of neoliberalism, de-scribes it as

“a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2).

Neoliberal ideas, it should be remembered, did not so overwhelming convince when they first appeared. Their origins can be traced to a small group of passionate advocates who in the 1940s coalesced around the Austrian political philosopher, Friedrich von Hayek. The group shared a nostalgia for classical nineteenth cen-tury ideals of laissez-faire entrepreneurialism which, Hayek believed, had been ef-faced under the state control of both Nazi and communist totalitarianism (Hayek 1979). Individualism and its making of a ‘spontaneous’, rather than planned, social order was the fount of social and economic progress. (1979: 12–13). The worst affliction for Hayek, articulated in his famous Road to Serfdom written in 1947, was twentieth century ‘statism’ in which individual ingenuity was crushed and the ‘worst’ people came out on top (1979: 100–14). His ideas remained obscure until economic crisis struck in the 1970s when they found new powerful patrons in the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, the Heritage Foundation in Washington and particularly the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman was drawing up pure neoliberal models for the economies of South America (Harvey 2005: 74). Neoliberalism moved centre stage this side of the Atlantic with Thatcher’s govern-ment and her dictum that there was no such thing as society, only individual men and women. Soon after, under Reagan, Washington channelled the new thinking through the global conduit of the IMF and required Mexico to implement neolib-eral reforms in return for debt rescheduling. Thereafter, neoliberal orthodoxy be-came the norm for the various shock therapy programmes imposed by the IMF in many of its 184 members scattered across the global south. Meanwhile, in western countries, as part of an attempt to restore previous profit levels, neoliberal policies were driving through privatisation programmes which converted state services into private assets, to be invested and speculated in for profits. Thus the neoliberal world order took shape.

One of the first to describe modern-day neoliberalism as a coherent ideol-ogy and to see its workings through language was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He saw the new thinking was “destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic” and the free market was acquiring the sta-tus of unassailable scientific theory. Its advocates — which he saw in the case of France as an unholy alliance of political, administrative and business elite — pre-sented free market economics as a kind of incontestable logic whose dictates of


flexibility, competitiveness and rampant individualism brooked no opposition. It was a ‘strong discourse’ an ‘infernal machine’ whose necessity imposes itself across society, even on those who stand to lose from its imperatives (Bourdieu 1998). Earlier than other critics of capitalist globalisation, he saw how French capitalism was restructuring and its new elites embracing economic liberalism. They claimed it was the necessary condition of political liberty despite the fact that neoliberal policies were restricting people’s choices not expanding them (Bourdieu 1999). He argued that a section of the dominant class were tied closely to corporate interests and together they imposed a unique form of French neoliberalism through state dirigisme (Lane 2000: 166–192).

Bourdieu stressed the weight of the neoliberal consensus within what he called symbolic capital. Interestingly, for one so critical of market fundamental-ism, he sees expressions gaining legitimacy through a kind of linguistic market (Bourdieu 1992: 106–159). But he stressed how neoliberal logic could be contested and, returning to an older tradition amongst French intellectuals, reengaged with the struggles against privatisation and labour deregulation in France. He reaf-firmed the important political role of academics in taking a stand against the facile identification between economic liberalism and political liberty, and the fake uni-versalism of the ‘new neoliberal doxa’ which, in reality, serves the interests of the dominant class (Bourdieu, 2003: 23).

The Workings of Neoliberalism in Language

The way in which ‘corporate-speak’ has seeped down into various communicative events has been well documented (Cameron 2001; Fairclough 2003; Blommaert 2003; Heller 2003). Hall, referring to the ‘new managerialism’, has showed how it becomes the conduit for neoliberal ideas in institutions and the ideology that turns citizens into consumers (Hall 2003). His view is that people have been in-culcated to a new culture-change, a new kind of common sense “so that slowly but surely everybody … becomes his/her own kind of ‘manager’” (Hall 2003). Others remain sceptical that the ‘new managerialism’ has gained consensus. An interesting study of ‘new managerialism’ in higher education concludes that it is not accepted en bloc or uniformly, even if its language is adopted. The authors show that amongst academics, who increasingly find themselves becoming ac-countants and fundraisers, they nevertheless remain unconvinced that market fundamentalism is appropriate in the university (Deem and Brehony 2005). Fair-clough also makes the point that much of the manager discourse remains at the official rather the informal level and few actually adopt the language as their own (Fairclough 2002: 195).

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However, these studies focus only tangentially, if at all, on the bigger global and economic context of neoliberalism. Because their focus is an ideological un-derstanding of the phenomenon of ‘new manageralism’, they also concentrate little on how language comes to absorb this ideology. It would seem that the intercon-nections between language and ideology can only be fully grasped both through reference to the wider context of neoliberalism and closer examination exactly how the ideology takes shape in language. Hasan (2003) takes just this approach, with some interesting insights. She shows how the semantic shift from global, with its straightforward meaning of “concerning or including the whole world” to glo-balisation which now included “lower costs of production”, “expansion of compa-nies “ and “appropriate take-overs” coincided with the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of the new markets to global capitalism (Hasan 2003: 434–5). In the same article she identifies processes of meaning shift that reveal ways in which ideology becomes consensual in language. Re-semanticisa-tion, which was used in the context of world Englishes and the ways in which they adapted to different cultures, she sees as a key process whose boundaries here are set by power and the control of wealth. It involves a play on evaluative and conno-tative aspects of language which make new meaning associations. Liberalization of trade, for example, not only confers all the positive evaluations of liberal (freedom, tolerance and moderation) to trade but also, she shows, enacts semantic reversal in so far as global trade is stripped of its self-interest and becomes, as if magically, in the interest of others (Hasan 2003: 441).

The Customer Frame

The concept of re-semanticisation captures well how ideological shifts gain cur-rency. The prevailing tenet of neoliberalism is the notion that the market is the just arbiter of social production and how the invisible hand of supply and de-mand is what orders our world. For those of us in higher education, we experi-ence the language of the market being applied ubiquitously across all education and research activity. ‘The market place’ and ‘quality assessment’, courses being ‘competitive’, teaching being ‘quality proofed’, lecturers’ work being ‘benchmarked’, universities ‘service providers’ and needing to achieve high ‘market visibility’ and research being about patents, income generation and property rights are all now part and parcel of university life and language, officially at least. Re-semanticisation here involves extending the field of particular word clusters whose superordinate is normally business or industry to the academic world.

The way ‘customer’ is used in new settings contains both re-semanticisation in that the term is stretched beyond its usual commercial transaction context and


also metaphor in that new subjects are likened to a customer. ‘Customer’, in these usages, is endowed with a semi-reverential status, whose supposed needs and end-less desires become the guiding light of progress and efficiency. Almost everybody in every sphere of activity becomes a ‘customer’.

For example, it is not uncommon in educational settings for students to be referred to as ‘customers’, and not always in quotes. The identification between what was a traditional customer in receipt of a good in exchange for money and a student in a learning institution is a metaphor redolent with ideology. It evokes superficially positive factors, in this case of putting the student first and respond-ing to what she or he might want. But the terms of reference that the metaphor evokes are patently false. It is worth examining how this particular meaning trans-fer comes about and what ideological slippages and distortions it involves.

Students cannot be customers because degrees are not quite, in fact, bought and sold, and the student does not always have the last word — not because uni-versities are authoritarian (which they may well be), but because education is not that sort of transaction. The rounded experience of teaching and learning is not just about product transference from lecturer to student but (as anyone engaged in it will know) about reciprocity, reference to a larger world and many other things besides. Behind this ideological metaphor lies something else which does not make the apparent centering on the student innocent. It reflects new funding mechanisms which have increasingly been displaced from the institution to the in-dividual student. In Britain and Australia this has taken the form of the introduc-tion of fees; where I teach, Ireland, it has taken the form of funding being allocated on the basis of each student enrolled. The use of the student-customer may be seen as a part, not of a genuine desire to prioritise students’ interests or rights, but of the reality of decreasing state funds which result in institutions chasing every student and going to all lengths to persuade them to register and stay registered. The metaphor appears innocently apt, but it suggests how deeply the neoliberal agenda has penetrated education. By the same stroke, paradoxically, the student/customer metaphor dumbs down the educational experience. The conversion of education into a service, learning into a product and a degree into a cash transac-tion is not without its ironies in our much heralded ‘knowledge’ economy. From an ideological point of view, it shows how the intended positive re-semanticisation of customer can have the opposite effect and actually connote a much diminished picture of the learning process.

When one looks further across the social arena, one finds ‘customer’ meta-phor cropping up in even more unexpected places. The asylum seeker process in Ireland, under the Office of the Refugee Application Commissioner insists strenu-ously that it is customer-orientated. In 2002, the Office launched its Customer Service Action Plan in which it listed its customers as:

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• Individual asylum seekers• Dependents of asylum seekers• Refugees who are seeking reunification with family members• Legal representatives of asylum seekers• The Government• The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform• Other Government Departments and Statutory Agencies• The general public and their elected representatives• Non-Governmental Organisations• The United National Higher Commissioner for Refugees• The Staff of the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner

(Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner 2002: 4)

The Office admitted that its customer base was somewhat broad and that its ‘stake-holders’ rather diverse (ibid: 4). None of the parties in the asylum seeking process is excluded from the designation of customer, and no distinction is made between those agents who grant asylum and those who are subjected to it. Yet it is the Government, in the form of the Minister of Justice, that has the final say about whether one of the many failed asylum seekers will be deported. This involves the forcible removal of the person by the Irish police, often early in the morning, often restrained and sometimes physically carried on to specially hired planes.4 Such practices, if proof is needed, leave no doubt as to the fact that some ‘customers’ of the immigration office have very much more power than others.

The following year the Office addressed its asylum seeker ‘customers’ under its Customer Charter. It is worth producing some sections of this unique document in full.

Customer CharterAt the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, we are committed to delivering a high-quality service to our customers. This charter sets out the standards of service you can expect from us.

Our CommitmentsQuality service for all

We are committed to making sure that our services take into account the needs of all our customers whatever their background, and in particular, the needs of those groups identified in equality legislation.

• Our office will be open from 8.45 am to 4.00 pm Monday to Friday (apart from public holidays).

• We will try to keep waiting times in our reception areas to a minimum.

• If you have an appointment we will see you promptly when you arrive.

• We will deal with you politely and as quickly as possible.


• We will keep our reception and waiting areas clean and tidy, and will improve our facilities where necessary.

• If you need an interpreter, we will provide one.

• We will continue to review and improve our access for our customers with disabilities.

Documents

• We will produce all documents (such as forms and information leaflets) in as user-friendly a format as possible and in an appropriate range of languages.

[………]

Complaints

You have a right to complain if the service you receive from us does not meet the standards set out in this charter, or if you believe that any action or decision that we have taken is not in line with our rules, practice or policy. If you want to make a complaint, please write to our Customer Liaison Officer (see Section 12 for details).

For all complaints we receive, we will do the following:

• Acknowledge them by letter within five working days of receiving them.

• Investigate them thoroughly.

• Send you a full reply within 20 working days or, if this is not possible, send you an explana-tion of our current position and what we will do next.

You will find a copy of our complaints procedure on our website (www.orac.ie) or you can contact our Customer Service Centre by phone or e-mail(see Section 12 for details).

Please note that this complaints procedure does not cover our decisions about asylum ap-plications or how we arrive at these decisions. If, after your interview, your application is unsuccessful, you can appeal to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal.

Listening to you

As well as consulting NGOs, we will hold customer surveys at least twice a year to get your comments and views. These surveys will form part of our process to improve and, where necessary, change our service delivery so that we continue to meet our customers’ needs.

If you want to take part in our surveys, please write to our Customer Liaison Officer (see Section 12 for details).

Confidentiality

We will keep confidential any personal information you give us.

We may pass your information to other government agencies in line with the Immigration Act 2003 so that they can perform their legal duties. We may also pass your information to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in line with the terms of the Refugee Act, 1996 (as amended), and to other countries using the Dublin II Regulation or Dublin Convention. The Dublin II Regulation and Dublin Convention provide the legal basis for deciding which EU Member State is responsible for examining an asylum application made in another Member State (including Iceland and Norway).

Office of the Refugee Application Commissioner 2005

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The reality of the asylum seeker process in Ireland needs to be described for the full ideological value of the customer metaphor in this context to become appar-ent. Just 5% of all applications for refugee status are granted, on the Office’s own admission (ORAC 2004: Appendix 2). These low levels of success in the overall function of the Office make something of a nonsense of the Office’s concern for its ‘customers’. All the ‘customer services’ on offer — “listening to you”, right to com-plain and consultation — overlook the overriding one that isn’t — securing refu-gee status. When one also considers that the Irish refugee appeals procedure has been singled out for lacking in transparency and accountability (Coulter 2005), the supposed concern for a Customer Charter — down to its tone, every detail and blind naivety –appear all the more absurd.

In fact, the customer metaphor is not naïve. ‘Customer’ equalises everyone; applying it beyond those involved in a purely commercial transaction to other groups of people distorts social relations and effaces social power. The oppressive state of affairs which sees individuals having to move from one end of the globe to another (often as a result of global neoliberal strategies of market restructuring) and, once having arrived in a strange land, to be subjected to rigorously strict im-migration laws is blithely smoothed away in the customer designation. The fact that a state agency should employ such an approach falsifies things further. The Refugees Office’s presentation of itself as just another service-provider, in line with neoliberal dictates of the corporate model, serves to mask the harsher reality of the coercive arm of the state. The language of the glossy brochures soon fades into insignificance when the ‘customer’ in question is dragged out across the tarmac in handcuffs, and deported. This constant threat in the background is another reason why ‘customer’ jars so, confirming that here, at least, the metaphor fails to gain ‘common sense’ status. Indeed, it appears as a strong case of neoliberal overkill. This example is also instructive regarding the distinction between dominant ide-ology and language use. The customer metaphor may be part of the neoliberal consensus at official levels but few, not those working in the office nor those who it is supposedly describing, would take it as seriously as do the writers of these mis-sion statements. It is very unlikely that an asylum seeker would describe herself or himself as a ‘customer’ — proof enough of the failure of this ideology to connect and of the gap between dominant ideology and those subject to its dictates.

Marx’s description of ideology entailed two crucial aspects: dominant ide-ologies reflected the interests of the ruling class and that in this respect they consisted of a distorted view of the world. Applying the workings of the mar-ket to asylum- seeking, through the apparently anodyne use of ‘customer’, shows both processes at work. It is in the interests of those who seek to tightly control the granting of asylum to cover over its exclusionary policy by a focus on ‘cus-tomer’ relations. How asylum seekers are treated and the number and nature of


deportations have become a live political issues.4 As part of a strategy to assuage public opposition, the treatment of asylum seekers is presented as supposedly irreproachable while side-stepping the real issues of deep institutional discrimi-nation (Loyal 2003). This is not a case of discrimination in discursive negative stereotyping; nor will it be erased through applying ‘rules of ethical discourse’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001:60–71). This is a kind of discrimination in reverse, an ideological representation whose effacing of social conflict is so exaggerated that it fails to be perceived as true. Even through their own customer awareness prism, the Refugee Office recognises something of this dilemma as the quaint “Please Note” addendum after the Complaints section makes clear: complaints about the decision to refuse asylum — something that we know over 90% of these ‘custom-ers’ will experience — are ruled out.

Thus we see here how the simple overplaying of customer is deeply ideologi-cal. It may meet the template of neoliberalism, in its mimicry of private corpora-tions and the transposing of market conditions where they do not apply. The irony is that in the state’s enthusiasm to refashion its way of doing business, it exposes inadvertently its own absurd falsification.

Customised talk

Neoliberal ideology interconnects with language not only through choice of meta-phors but also through promoting styles of language interaction. Speaking styles have become a perceived key component of selling techniques with their own par-ticular contribution to the dictates of the market. Branding, new ways of reaching customers, aggressive after-sales follow-up, presentation, visibility absorb ever-growing expenditure from multinational corporations (Klein 2000). Emphasis on this sphere of activity has become an important tool in the promotion of the neoliberal view of things.

Its premise is that the market works according to its own rules and operates a ‘free’ market whose only limits are those of supply and demand. The exclusive con-cern with communication techniques with potential customers ignores the pletho-ra of conditioning factors in this supposedly free-wheeling purchasing world. Tar-iffs, influence, subsidies, protections, economic leverage, the protective arm of the state, all the conditioning factors that actually decide the success of the selling of goods, and whose goods are sold, are absent from the neoliberal scheme of things.5 The ideology is presented in simple terms and part of the appeal is to present a straight line from the individual consumer to the overall workings of the economy, both stretching towards an endless horizon of ever-greater consumerism. In this scheme of things individualism and individual interaction is at a premium.

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Call Centres — or Business Process Outsourcing Providers as they prefer to be known — take the inculcation of speaking styles in their employees very seriously. Cameron, investigating this phenomenon, has shown how transnational corpora-tions have attempted to standardise styles of speech (Cameron 2002). Styles pre-viously reserved for personal communication — on first name terms, affirming and encouraging, closing social distance — have shifted into public discourse, as Fairclough (1995) has pointed out. Service providers, selling face to face or on-line adopt what is conventionally considered to be the discourse of interpersonal rela-tionships in an effort to establish stronger affective links with their customers.

The way that language is placed at the service of selling is ideologically instruc-tive. One such international provider based in Dublin, with its motto We Think like a Customer, requires its multicultural workforce to do the same.6 Their customer care training sessions ask them to think of their own good and bad experiences as a customer and then to describe business-friendly techniques in dealings with customers. Everything is in the language, the tone and the ‘way you listen’, as the extracts from one such learning module makes clear:

Listening for customer clues• Understanding and being understood• Be Business friendly• Don’t get desensitized• Don’t argue; solve the problem• Smile• Show empathy

Three goals of listening:• Hear the customer• Understand the customer• Relate to the customer

The ‘ASAP’ technique• Apologise sincerely and follow up with action• Show empathy with the customer• Accept ownership• Prepare to help

Projecting warmth on the telephone — stipulating personality styles to keep the customer satisfied — has reached proportions in this service industry that has led some to define these aspects of work as ‘emotional labour’ (Bunting 2004: 62). This is serious corporate speaking styles, developed on the basis of keeping the customer ‘loyal’. The acceptance that the customer category applies equally to us all, that customers in a market demand absolute subordination to their needs and


that call centre assistants must be moulded into that attitude, indeed should ‘take ownership’ for a process that is not theirs to own — all these reveal other ideologi-cal aspects of the customer phenomenon.

Trainees are asked to identify with their customers in a way that converts the employee/customer relationship into a horizontal, harmonious one, indeed into a fundamental social relationship. No detail is spared in the objective of successful selling, down to actual words to be used. Interestingly, these language directions take the form of issuing formulae which the employee has to adopt and they are given to native and non-native speakers of English alike.

Avoid ‘Trigger’ phrases Instead, say…….‘I’m sorry but …’ ‘ What I/we can do is…’‘I don’t know…’ ‘That’s a good question. I’ll find out for you. May

I put you on hold while I get that Information?’‘It’s company policy, sir/ma’am’ ‘That’s a tough one. Let’s see what we can do.’

(Avoid using ‘ sir’ or ‘ ma’am’)‘You should have…’ ‘I have updated information for you’‘I suppose I can but that would require too much paperwork’

‘I’ll need a couple of minutes to help you with that.’

‘That’s incorrect. Someone gave you the wrong information. Who told you that?’

‘The person who helped you before must not have had the complete information available.’

‘I can’t do that.’ ‘The best way for me to help you is to put you in touch with/direct you to…’

‘I’m not responsible for what other people promise.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate you feedback on what we’ve been doing right … and wrong.’

The smiling face symbol simplistically underlines the message to be driven home, and distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in its own inimitable branding style. This is speaking as if you are smiling. If anything would appear to be linguistic indoctri-nation, this would.

However, the template runs into contradictions. Politeness to the customer has to be weighed against productivity and how many calls an employee can make in a working day. In the call centre from which this manual was taken, if the em-ployee took longer than seven minutes to satisfy the customer, the client compa-nies would interject on the line and tell the employee that her time was up. This cannot do much for the supposedly sacrosanct courtesy to the client. It also high-lights that courtesy does not extend to supervisor–employee interactions (if such interjections can be called thus).

The models of speaking presented are meant to appear spontaneous and warm yet they are rigidly standardised, down to what words to use, and in practice re-quire a suppression of sincerity and naturalness on the employee’s part, in order

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to clock up the required number of calls. Tight monitoring is as much part of the work routine as speaking nicely to customers. Ticker boards above the customer service representative heads show the number of calls to be answered. Supervi-sors can see exactly what every employee is doing. Bunting in her account of call centres in Britain describes just how intense this monitoring can be, with a second lateness from break being recorded on her screen by a red flashing light (Bunting 2004: 66). This is intense discipline which for all its advanced technology has much in common with the intense levels of exploitation to be found in sweatshops in China or East Asia. Such rigid monitoring and grinding supervision do not lead to deference. Not surprisingly the employees themselves remain quite disengaged, even cynical, about the rules laid down (Bunting 2004: 65).

Growth of the communication industry and call-centres that have led some to believe that the production of images and styles take us into a ‘post-industrial’ world in which ‘postmodern’ communication takes on a life of its own. Hardt and Negri, reformulating in academic terms a popular idea, assert that linguistic and economic performativity are similar and language part of ‘immaterial labour’ in today’s world. They stress that this immaterial production is somehow outside the traditional capi-talist production and has its own dynamic (Hardt and Negri 2005: 201).

Although language is used and inculcated in people for the purposes of sell-ing, this does not in itself make language a product nor its speakers collaborating independently or in a way ‘external to capital’. Advertising, branding, call centres, styles of selling, and customer care service are conducted in the service of actu-ally selling something — a product or good. Rather than these uses of language escaping the system, having their own autonomy, as Hardt and Negri claim, these new forms of regimented communication — both electronic and verbal — are organised very tightly under the control of capitalist global production to serve its competitive needs. One non-native speaker who worked in the Dublin call cen-tre in question made available the training manual only with trepidation because employees are asked to keep training modules strictly confidential, on pain of dis-missal. Complaints about productivity targets being imposed are met with similar rejection. ‘Accepting ownership’ of the customer calls is encouraged, but the same degree of inclusion is not afforded to their employees as evidenced by the outright rejection on the part of management of any union representation.

Here is an extract of an account given to me by one of the non-native English speakers who worked in the Dublin call centre which shows how employees are not taken in by the corporate identity nor the language of the market that they are obliged to speak. It also captures something of the anger that the employees feel.

– you have to be “online” (ready to take incoming calls) at a precise time, accord-ing to your designated shift:


– from 7am to 11pm depending on the market you work for, but of course, some markets / call centres would make you work 24h/day!!!

– a 7 days/week obligatory shift is provided with a week’s notice, which means it’s hard to plan ahead any weekend away from town!

– It takes at least 15 minutes to log on to the different types of databases — most of them require plenty of different passwords you are asked to remember by heart. Thus you have to be in at least 30 minutes before the actual starting of your shift… voluntarily […]

– You are “given” two 15-minute-breaks/day (you cannot take them when you want to for it comes with your shifts), and you have another 30-minute-break for lunch.

– There’s a dress code but it’s not implemented! This is great!!!– Most of the employees take this job hoping they won’t stay more than 3 or 4

months because the alienating aspect of it is acknowledged and feared — but one quickly ends up staying for a whole semester or more!

– To prevent stress-damage I’d say 50% of us smoke and the other 50% eat junk snacks. Some do both!

– There’s a very good atmosphere among workers (esp. among expatriates) who want to enjoy the few “free” moments they have during the day […]

High levels of staff turnover bore witness to just how frustrated employees became. This particular employee was quite cynical about any loyalty to the company, par-ticularly when the company had threatened several times to close down and open up under another name. From this account, and others, the dull monotony of the phone assembly line is the overriding sentiment and not compliance or acceptance of the customer philosophy.

For all the strenuous attempts at ideological inculcation through linguistic uniformity, the ideology is seen as simply “as part of the job”. Seabrook finds the same phenomenon in call centres in India and describes that company philosophy is not passively accepted, despite considerable training and preparation. In the hundreds of call centres in Kerala, Karnataka or the periphery of Delhi, according to Seabrook, the indoctrination mechanisms reach new extremes. The new ‘cyber-coolie labour’ force is told to keep up with the latest episode of Coronation St. or East Enders to make their customers believe they are speaking from around the corner rather than another continent. But this alienating pretence breeds hate and resentment. Seabrook relates how one call centre worker, Tushar, a 27 engineering graduate, lets loose some of the anger bubbling under the surface:

“You feel high. The salary is good and you feel part of the modern world, but you don’t realise how much working in a foreign language takes it out of you. You try not to miss a single word of what people are saying. They expect you to be familiar with their culture but they don’t care a damn about yours. It is racist. In the end you get to resent it, and you hate them” (Quoted in Seabrook 2003: 25)

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Not surprisingly, the language used here, like the reaction above of the Dublin call centre, is particularly forthright and very different here too, one would assume, to the ‘smiling language’ of call centre training manual.

Conclusion

Much of the opposition to neoliberalism that has come to the fore in recent times has sprung from the recognition that the neoliberal order does not do what it promises and does not represent the world as it is. On a smaller scale, neoliberal ideology and its workings in language contains the same contradictions.

The nature of the interaction between ideology and language is complex. The socially interactive nature of language means that language cannot be said to sim-ply absorb ideology. Our two examples shed light on two aspects of the dynamic between language and ideology.

1. Ideological metaphors, however widely they are reproduced, are not given, ideologically speaking. The ‘customer’ metaphor, which encapsulates the mar-ket philosophy of neoliberal ideology, is used much more in official documents than it is spontaneously in people’s speech. Our examination of its use in the asylum seeker context uncovered its incongruity in this setting and the barri-ers to this metaphor acquiring ‘common sense’ status. There is a certain dual-ity here: of a top-down process in which ‘customer’ is promoted in brochures and official documents and an ‘on the ground’ reality where it simply does not appear appropriate to refer to asylum seekers as customers. ‘Customer’ in the university setting shares some of this top-down characterisation. Identification with it, I argue, remains weak in so far as it fails to reflect accurately the student experience and because of this, ‘customer’ is understood to be part of a kind of ‘official speak’ rather than what people would use naturally themselves.

2. Even where language is moulded and modeled to suit the market ethos, ideo-logical commitment to it remains low. In our second example, we found that there was a considerable gap between the ‘speak as if you are smiling’ of the training manual and the actual attitudes of the customer service operators. The desire for both customer satisfaction and higher levels of productivity leads to contradictions that threaten to undermine both the stated goals of satisfaction to the customer and loyalty to the company.

More generally, this investigation would support the contention that ideology is distinct from language. The notion that ideology can be collapsed into discourse implies that language is the determining prism through which ideological aware-ness passes. It also elevates discourse/ideology to the status of a social agent in its


own right, with no explanation of where that power originates. On the other hand, the workings of ideology in language that we have identified here — re-semanti-cisation and the use of metaphor — allow for the more creative and unpredictable elements of language to be foregrounded. They reveal how some neoliberal as-sumptions are not accepted as ‘common sense’, and can be contested. The site of this resistance is not within discourse itself, as Foucault would claim, but arises from the contradictory nature of the ideology within society at large and speakers themselves can perceive this to be case.

Notes

. For a fuller account of Marx’s view of ideology see Holborow 1999.

2. Roland Barthes’ depiction of ideology in visual representation is a powerful case in point (Barthes 1973).

3. See Boron 2005 for a critique of Hardt and Negri on these grounds.

4. See the account in Metro Eireann, an Irish publication dealing with asylum issues, Jan 2004 Vol 5, Issue 1.

5. A description of the way in which the US state intervenes very aggressively in the running of markets is given in Arrighi 2005: 27–30.

6. I have not identified the name of the Dublin call centre whose materials I reproduce here as those employees I spoke to specifically asked me not to. It would seem that procedures and work patterns described here resemble other call centres world-wide; the accounts of Bunting (2004) and Seabrook (2003), which I refer to, describe similar conditions and employee reactions.

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Author’s address

Marnie HolborowSchool of Applied Language and Intercultural StudiesDublin City UniversityDublin 9Ireland

Email: [email protected]

About the author

Marnie Holborow is a lecturer at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. She teaches on undergraduate Exchange Programmes with European and Asian universities and on a taught Masters Degree in Intercultural Studies. She chairs of a new degree programme in English and Intercultural Studies for non-native speakers of English. Her research interests are the social foundations of language, language and ideology and world Englishes.

http://www.orac.ie

mailto:[email protected]

Language, ideology and neoliberalism

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