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*. This manuscript has benefited significantly from comments from Deborah Cameron, Jenny Cheshire, Theresa Lillis, Karen Littleton, Joan Swann, and anonymous reviewers. I also wish to acknowledge the participating call centres and funding from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. Any errors are my own.
INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK
When the organizational sociologist Joan Acker (1990) formulated her thesis on 'gendered organizations' in 1990, she was operating under the assumption that normative masculinity pervaded most workplaces. This assumption has also permeated the field of language and gender in the workplace, a now well-established sociolinguistic field of inquiry, where it is reflected in a predominant focus on high-status, male-dominant workplaces (Holmes & Stubbe 2003; Baxter 2006; Holmes 2006; Mullany 2010; Angouri 2011; Holmes & Marra 2011). Holmes has pointed to the expectation in such workplaces of a speech style that signals 'autonomous', 'task/outcome', and 'referentially oriented' stances, and that in turn has been said to index normative masculinity (2006:6; see also Tannen 2001). One oft-explored question in this body of work has been how female managers discursively navigate the double bind of being in a position of authority without coming across as abrasive, aggressive, or unfeminine (Mullany 2010; Angouri 2011; Holmes & Marra 2011; Ladegaard 2011).
The shift to a globalized service economy, however, has transformed the world of work. The globalized service economy is here understood as comprising workplaces that have existed for less than thirty years, whose institutional culture incorporates globalized capitalism, and whose primary objective is to sell services rather than goods (Cameron 2000). In workplaces in the globalized service economy, the assumptions underlying Acker's theory of gendered organizations no longer apply, in that it is typically not normative masculinity, but normative femininity that prevails (Belt 2002; Russell 2008; Scholarios & Taylor 2011). Call centres, the focus of this study, are emblematic of the globalized service economy. The link between call centre work and women is well-documented (Cameron 2000; Belt 2002; Russell 2008; Scholarios & Taylor 2011). Dubbed 'female ghetto[s]' (Belt 2002) or, more positively, 'female-friendly workplaces' (Russell 2008), 71% of workers in the global call centre industry are female (Holman et al. 2007). From...