Call centre interaction: A case of sanctioned face attack?

•This paper explores verbal aggression/impoliteness as exhibited in the call centre.•FTAs seem to be implicitly sanctioned – or tacitly accepted – suggesting they’re a norm.•Some agents found repetitive FTAs testing. Others were able to detach themselves.•Such detachment points to de-individuation/acceptance of a “representative” status.•We also noted overlap between prescribed institutional- and 2nd-order strategies.

In this paper, we investigate a sub-corpus of call centre interactions building on and extending the work of Jagodziński (2013) and Archer (2008, 2011a,b). Our aim is to show (i) how the institution's tacit acceptance of impoliteness and verbal aggression, on the part of callers, can lead to a form of institutional sanctioning, (ii) how the sting of impoliteness/verbal aggression is neutralised for some agents, in the course of conflictive customer service interactions – but not all, and (iii) possible reasons for this (non)-neutralisation. Our goal is to provide real-life evidence of: how impoliteness and/or verbal aggression are performed in the call centre, the extent to which they are mutually related, and how they link with the notion of instrumentality. In this way we present our own understanding of concepts which, although they have been used in im/politeness research for some time, are still relatively under-researched in real-world contexts such as the call centre.