Culture in Communication
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124 JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ
However Leidner also points to a downside to the pleasantness of ex-
changes:
The problem from the workers’ point of view was that the more the workers
were themselves on the job and the greater their efforts to make the interac-
tions pleasant, the more painful or infuriating it was when customers were
unresponsive or mean: “I am pleased when people are responsive to my
cheery greeting and feel annoyed if they don’t smile or say thank you” Tracy
tells me, “if a customer’s nice, O.K. I smile. I don’t smile unless something
makes me laugh or somebody’s just nice.” (1993:138)
While the script creates an interpersonal communicative exchange between
customer and worker within the institutionalized environment of the work-
place, the exchange remains short and repetitive. Yet the politeness tokens in
the script produce positive feelings which can become generalized to other
work activities. For example they also seep into talk among the workers
themselves who find this makes the workplace less tension-charged and more
enjoyable, as shown by this comment:
In part the courtesy and cooperation that were the norm among the crew people
in this MacDonald’s were built into the routines they were taught. In the
windows training class, new workers were told that the proper phrasing for
giving an order to a grill person was, for example, “Two Big Breakfasts,
please.” to which the grill person would respond: “Thank you” to indicate that
he had heard the message. This courteous protocol was used consistently.
Also, window workers were taught that they should use any spare time to
backup other workers by, for instance, assembling an order for a second
worker while she set up and handled a money transaction. (Leidner 1993: 137)
The politeness of the work atmosphere is thus partly attributed by participants
to the semi-scripted exchanges. Sociologists tend to take a critical approach to
the routinization of service work seeing the managed environment as an
example of the exercise of manipulative control which robs individuals of the
chance to use initiative or express any genuine feelings (Hochschild 1983).
The evidence of Leidner’s study suggests that although the McDonalds opera-
tion is clearly somewhat exploitative of young workers and subject to all the
constraints of a highly routinized and mechanical managed task structure,
many participants see the communicative environment, established as part of
the routinization, as creating a positive work context. The script does its work
by solving some of the structural problems common to all service work, such
as the vulnerability of repeated encounters with unknown others and the
strains of the need for speed in a repetitive task within a work crew.
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Leidner’s fieldwork endorses the impression that work in a MacDonald’s
franchise appears to have a truly Goffmanian character, where in spite of
routines there still exists a backstage/front stage division between the “corpo-
rate worker” in a McDonald’s uniform and the private person who dons this
uniform (Goffman 1957). Sometimes the two flow together as when workers
comment that as off duty staff they like to “hangout with friends at work” as
part of their social life. Sometimes others keep their routinized job separate
from their own personal outside-work self, in which case the scripted ex-
changes provide a buffer zone of routinization so that the worker can practice
a little “role distance” from the job and keep from getting too personally
involved. In these instances politeness serves to move the activity efficiently
but without the worker needing to give any especially “personal” input
beyond the script. By harnessing politeness to efficiency the designed work-
place makes work into a collaborative endeavor involving both customer and
worker. This places the worker and customer within a common communica-
tive space without need for any particular personal effort on the part of the
workers themselves.
Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this paper, the McDonalds
examples highlights the importance of communicative environments as a
factor in multicultural societies. Leidner’s study shows how such a scripted
environment provides an ideal site to bring together a culturally diverse
workforce of counter workers, crew trainers and shift manager as well as, of
course, franchise owners. The scripted communicative work environment
makes a good learning context for interactional exchange. As Leidner points
out in commenting on the social characteristics of the shift in the franchise she
studied, it could be seen as typical of urban MacDonalds and their multi-
cultural workforce:
The store had “five salaried managers, all male, three white and two black.
The owner’s son, another white, also worked as a shift manager as well as
crew trainers (all female; three black, one white, one Native American).
During my fieldwork, two crew people, a black woman and an Asian man
were promoted to the level of management” (Leidner 1993: 61).
To summarize the argument so far: the consequences of the McDonalds’ study
for exploration of the communicative characteristics of multicultural society
are several. The focus on service exchange and its implicit communicative
collaboration between customer and service worker is quite different from the
older conflict of interest paradigm of labor relations. While tightly routinized
126 JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ
interpersonal design and scripted exchanges leave little room for difference,
they make intercultural workforces easier to bring together. Although the
workplace and work activity design controls action, it seems to provide a
productive environment for a very limited personalizing of the script that can
encourage the young workers to be involved while providing a structured and
therefore safe learning environment in which the limited routines can give rise
to a wider communicative culture. In fact the scripting draws attention away
from cultural differences. The managed communicative environment creates
an interactive space where differences become a matter of personal style not a
structural feature of performance. MacDonalds provides a communicative and
interactional environment where the script is laid down and the designed
environment takes most of the degrees of interpersonal freedom from the
communicative exchange. Yet while the actual talk becomes a routinized
element in an overall interactional design, the performance of the talk ex-
change remains potentially variable and the communicative environment
becomes interpenetrated by the politeness rituals that provide a social space
for easing the tensions of highly routinized work and cultural difference.
Leidner comments that the surprise of the actual fieldwork encounters
was discovering the enthusiasm that so many young workers felt for their job:
Despite the specificity of their script and the brevity of most encounters with
customers, the service interactions were not all alike and were not necessarily
devoid of personal involvement. For example, Steve answered the question,
‘What do you enjoy about working with the public?’ with great enthusiasm
“It’s just fun!…They make my day. They really do. I mean, sometimes I can
come to work like yesterday, I wasn’t really happy. I was somewhat in the
middle. This guy came in, he was talking real low, and his friend said, ‘Why
don’t you talk up… I told him to turn up his volume (I laugh), and he said
something…and I started smiling. Ever since then, I’ve been happy…The
guests out here… they’re friendly and fun. I just loved to meet them, you
know? I mean, its nice working for them, its nice serving them. Some, you
know well, I’d say one out of ten guests will probably try to give you a bad
time. But the rest of them just make my day.”
Steve’s comments on the “fun” aspects of working with the public are echoed
in these remarks by another crew worker:
“Well I enjoy working with the public ‘cause they’re fun to be with. Some of
them are a trip. So I enjoy it, find it very amusing” (1993: 136)
In all the comments above from the McDonald’s fieldwork, the Goffmanian
themes of avoidance of threats to self demeanor and management of risk
through politeness stand out most clearly, but the theme of pleasure at work as
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a realization of the new workplace and its talk also begins to emerge.
3. Service and pleasure exchanged: enthusiasm and emotional
involvement within the new service environments
Pleasurable experience in work may be one of the most salient features of a
new and different type of service situation in late modern societies. It is one in
which the relationship between customer and service worker is not scripted
nor is it constrained by many of the conventional formalities of traditional
middle class service encounters. The recent shift to informality and friendli-
ness in service encounters which take place within the designed spaces of the
new boutique stores and restaurants such as those in the smart shopping malls
of the United States, constitutes a site for these new pleasurable encounters
(Morris 1993; Shields 1994). The new workplace encounter takes place within
a designed spatial environment, albeit one less instrumentally arranged than
MacDonald’s, rather one which is heavily symbolic of the particular service
being offered. Within this space as workplace, worker and customer come
together for what appears to be a mutually pleasurable meeting, often laden
with positive affect, carefully planned music and even with positive odors
added to the scene.
A significant characteristic of these stores and other public spaces is that
while for some they act as workplaces, at the same time they also present
visible, publicly available, inviting, emotionally positive and cheerful envi-
ronments which are demonstrably open to all for pleasurable recreation. In
short, an ultimate democratic, late capitalistic experience.
Moreover, like McDonald’s, the stores are part of an increasingly global
network and can be found in the same forms in many urban places nationally
and internationally; as such they present an instantly recognizable style and
form, e.g. Laura Ashley, The Gap, Benetton.
These social spaces symbolize a potential availability of pleasurable
experience both as a physically designed and as an interactional environment.
While the service exchange between customer and retail worker can be limited
or brief, it is often made to appear as part of a longer period of acquaintance by
its informality and mutual concern for shared goals. Although worker and
client/customer are not engaged in the same task, they construct a communica-
tive exchange as if they were in similar positions in the encounter. Donzelot, in
128 JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ
his 1991 paper suggests, that the personalizing of work has become a new and
much more insidious means of control in which the worker must internalize the
norms of control as personal responsibility for their own performance and
expertise. The external appearance of these new controls appear under the
guise of personal expressions of pleasure in work, enthusiasm and commitment
to the activities of the corporate workplace. Hochschild (1983) has developed
somewhat similar arguments about the new “commercialized” expression of
feeling within service encounters through personalized comments or public
expressions of care and concern. She refers to these phenomena as expressions
of the emotional labor that service encounters require. These are indicative of
a new relationship between the server and the served, where the structured
environment provides a symbolic context but not a direct extensive communi-
cative framing for the service encounter. The weight of interaction rests on the
contextually-created communicative exchange. Although the talk in these new
situations is unscripted, it constitutes the critical part of the exchange of
service. In advancing the notion of emotional labor Hochschild leans on
Goffman’s concept of ceremonial labor that has to be accomplished in many
public encounters where the personal self has to be brought into the encounter
yet protected from any possible harm or affront. Goffman here suggests that
this is achieved through a balance of deference given to and demanded from the
other. At the same time both participants in an exchange are responsible for
managing their own demeanor image. (Goffman 1956/67)
When the service encounter is not a scripted exchange the communica-
tive task presents some very different possibilities.
In the following examples communicative strategies observed during
fieldwork in shopping exchanges between customer and service personnel are
described:
1. Making the corporate style part of the exchange
Retail personnel in the “new mall boutique” (Shields 1994) are encouraged to
make up their own, idiosyncratic script as an essential part of the task of
personalizing the sales exchange. By using the plural first person pronoun —
the editorial “we” — personnel take on a corporate role identity and so build
the corporate endeavor into their talk. For example, a salesperson at a new
store selling cosmetic products when asked about other similar stores in the
area says in answer to the customer query: “Yes we’ve just opened in Languna
Hills, its wonderful.’ Or on another occasion “I’ve been to our store in
Newport Beach, its not nearly as lovely as this one”. In these examples the
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corporate ideology becomes part of the salesperson’s personal linguistic iden-
tity in that they pronominalize their relationship to the organization.
2. Expressing pleasure as a display of competence at work.
The principle of pleasure also makes the requirement to express pleasure and
enthusiasm for your tasks into a necessary condition of doing the job properly
(Donzelot 1991). Both customer and service worker may enter into these
exchanges as in Donzelot’s example of an enthusiastic discussion of new
raincoats which begins between two customers and is joined in on by several
store personnel who talk about the wonders of “our raincoats” compared with
ones of other manufacture. The retail personnel’s competence is shown by the
degree of enthusiasm they display along with their explicit knowledge about
raincoats.
3. Displaying positive emotionality in service exchanges.
For both parties to the exchange, the need to expose a personal self can be part
of the risk that the server and, to some extent, the person being served, has to
take in order to make the exchange effective. For the recipient of a service the
usual contribution required is a smile or some brief exchange of pleasantries or
gossip. Hochschild (1983) has suggested that the tasks of service personnel in
contemporary service industries needs to be accompanied by additional ex-
pressions of positive emotion. Such expressions of positive affect within a
limited communicative exchange makes the event into one of apparent per-
sonalized labor, yet one which being so ritualized, ultimately protects service
personnel from further risk.
Examples of “emotional labor” can be performed in several ways;
a. by using a formulaic expression of concern: Airline cabin staff at the end
of a flight saying: “Thank you for flying with… X …airlines.. It’s been
our pleasure to serve you…
b. Appearing to expose the personal self to customer through talk that relies
on the worker’s own interactional style in unscripted exchanges. “Waiter
in a smart S.F restaurant: “Thank you for being such nice customers, it’s
been a pleasure meeting you”.
In this example there is an unexpected reversal of the expected customer-
waiter interaction where it would be normal for the customer to thank the
waiter in some manner; here, the opposite occurs. This event acts rather like a
Garfinkelian breach experiment (Garfinkel 1967).
c. By moving from routine enquiry or politeness in a service exchange into
130 JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ
informal, personal talk. Such a strategy places the customer in a socially
exposed position in the exchange. The service worker while offering
some tokens of personalized concern, also sets up the expectation of a
similar personalized exchange. For example, consider the following ex-
change: a middle age customer with her husband is considering buying a
sweater jacket in one of the new mall boutiques, the sales person is
searching through a small stock of jackets looking for the correct size and
she makes conversation while doing so: “How long have you two been
married….” Such unscripted talk can cause customers some surprise, yet
within the overall designed symbolic environment of the new retail
boutiques the unexpected and, to some, inappropriate informality be-
comes interpreted as part of an exchange made “in good faith”’. How-
ever, within this environment, cultural difference in talk and appearance
becomes transformed into a matter of stylistic variety.
Significant for the issues of intercultural exchange that this paper addresses is
the fact that in the settings I have described, ethnic and cultural differences in
the multicultural workforce are no longer treated as innate differences but
become matters of personal style. In these settings each individual worker
becomes responsible for his/her own personal script and for his/her own
strategies for preserving self demeanor and engaging others in the “ceremo-
nial labor” of the service exchange. Therefore, cultural difference becomes a
personal aspect of each worker’s communicative resource. The unscripted
communicative exchange must fit into the designed environment, which pro-
vides a situation to contextualize the talk and provide a situated frame to guide
talk, inference and interpretation. The designed environment encourages the
assumption of good faith on the part of both interactants to the exchange and
generates an overall positive emotional and interpretive tone. In the new smart
dress boutiques such as the American “Ann Taylor” stores, the informality of
the customer and worker exchange constitutes part of the atmosphere of
camaraderie and metaphorically suggests that both, customer and retail assis-
tant, are “Ann Taylor women”. Thus the communicative exchange confers a
sense of community in conjunction with the interpretive signals given by the
environmental design. Together the designed environment and the talk be-
come one semiotic resource.
All of these features of the situated talk suggest that we have a new
communicative genre developing within the service encounter. The managed
yet unscripted exchanges of the new service encounters are conducted in an air
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of informality, which gives the impression of “pseudo” equality or parity of
concerns. The service worker appears to care personally about the customer
and treats the customer as a friend, while the customer is a mostly willing and
cooperative partner in these exchanges, whose enthusiasm and concern helps
to create a shared common activity.
However the service exchange is only a transient collaboration with very
limited goals. The rules of retail exchanges differ from those of other service
encounters in that the customer need not buy, while the worker needs to sell.
Neither shares the other’s perspective within the scene. There remains a power
differential which makes for asymmetry. It is at this juncture that the structural
problem in service encounters can be recognized and the unscripted talk can
be seen as an attempt at solving this asymmetry via the new communicative
genre that serves to solve these inherent problems (Günthner and Knoblauch
1995).
4. Cooperation and asymmetry at work: The structural problem of
service encounters identified
If a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent and character
of the cooperation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret.
(E. Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959: 104)
The suggestion made in Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, above is
reiterated in Goffman’s 1983 paper, in which he again reminds us that service
relations are a matter of tacit cooperation between asymmetries that must
remain unmarked. In spite of the collaboration of the new workplace activi-
ties, there remains an essential tension or asymmetry between worker and
customer/client or between workers in different positions and contexts of
work. The social work that the participants must do requires them to cooperate
in concealing the existence of this asymmetry for the purpose of preserved
order. When differentials are recognized, repair work has to be part of the
encounter. Goffman suggests that to preserve the interaction order persons
need to act as if the principle of symmetry was in place. The person receiving
the service must assume that:
“the notion of equality or fair treatment must not be understood simplistically.
One can hardly say that some sort of objectively based equal treatment ever
occurs, except where the server is eliminated and a dispensing machine is
132 JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ
employed instead. One can only say that participant’s settled sense of equal
treatment is not disturbed by what occurs…. [all] of this is evident from what
has been said about the acceptable ways in which a personal relationship can
be given recognition in service encounters. (Goffman 1983: 15)
Most studies of collaborative practical activity assume that proximity in
collaborative endeavors between workers in similar task environments must
indicate that participants share a point of view or have common goals. The
challenge of contemporary detailed studies of practical activity and of mutual
collaboration in workplaces has been to describe the details of human interac-
tions in the high risk environments where it can be acknowledged that asym-
metry exists (Heath 1993) and where the usual social science assumption of
cognitive consensus as the basis for any analysis of social ordering can be
challenged. (Heath and Luff l996; Goodwin and Goodwin l996).
Given this asymmetry. how does work get done? How does the worker
provide for or become co-opted into the concealment of the difference in goals
and aims of the apparent mutually beneficial collaboration that most contem-
porary service encounters are communicatively constructed to appear to be?
The need to cooperate in the concealment of asymmetry between workers’
tasks and customers’ positions suggests that we must reconsider the notion of
emotional labor, politeness routines and unscripted personalized informal talk
of service encounters as all having a purpose more serious than has previously
been realized. While these were previously regarded as formulaic exchanges,
separate from the business of the main activity, we can now see that they are
an essential part of the cooperation between interactants and the concealment
of the basic asymmetry and risk that exists as part of any service exchange
(Cook-Gumperz 1991).
5. Cooperation, concealment and exchange: Getting service work
done
I have suggested that the need for workers and customers/clients, the servers
and the served, to collaborate in performance that gets certain tasks accom-
plished requires that both come together and cooperate in concealing the
continued existence of their essentially different points of view within the
task. Thus, the talk that is part of the exchange in its continued repeated
existence within similar environments can provide the conditions for a com-
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municative genre to develop as outlined by Günthner and Luckmann (this
volume).
In the following briefly sketched accounts of work activities based on my
own fieldwork, I am going to give some examples of worker training in a
bank. The studies are made on-site during training in work settings, because at
the level of actual practice, practitioners reveal to each other what it is that has
to be done to make a particular activity effective.
6. Recognizing the risk of perspectival asymmetry
In a training course for potential bank clerks in a community college, students
from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds are being prepared to qualify for
initial entry into a bank training program. The tutor is an African-American
ex-bank personnel executive, and drawing on his own personal experience, he
gives the students a commentary on the official training procedures. He
instructs the students that they must be careful and correct in all entries into the
daily tally sheet that each bank clerk must keep in an American bank. Any
errors result in the whole counter ‘work team’ being kept late to search for the
cause of the error. However, as the students practice their “counter routine” he
stops them and explains that the routine talk and pleasantries that pass be-
tween customer and clerk must not overshadow the real work of being correct
in all entries. He says “Once the customer walks away…you (the clerk) are
responsible”. He goes on to point out that the emphasis of bank training will be
to encourage the clerk to achieve customer rapport in order to sell additional
bank services. Recognition of the responsibility of the worker to be accurate,
which each worker shares with the team, will not be a direct focus of training.
The asymmetry between customer and service worker will be a tacit but
unmentioned part of the training.
7. Creating the goodwill to work within a visible space: Exchanges
within the person-machine collaboration
While the first example was from an initial training session where trainees are
using calculators to complete transactions, at the real bank site workers must
learn to manage both the bank’s computer system and their relations with the