In search of good value for money: fabricated ignorance to the rescue

Rosina Marquez Reiter, University of Surrey

When?

Wednesday 21 November 2012, 12:00 to 13:00

Where?

02AC02

Open to:

Students, Staff

Speaker:

Rosina Marquez Reiter

In this talk I examine a negotiating strategy observed in more than half of the telephone calls (80+ hours) made by clients to the Latin American call centre operation of a multinational company specialised in holiday time-shares by focusing on two calls in which the practice was prevalent. Through this practice, which drawing on Goffman (1974) I have termed ‘fabricated ignorance’, the clients show an unawareness of how the system works in order to gain access to information, services, or benefits that they are not, in theory, entitled to. They do so, among other things, by formulating pre-sequences (Schegloff 2007) designed to address a gap in epistemic knowledge (Heritage 2012) as a way of dealing with the possibility of their requests being rejected. Essentially, the clients approach the interaction displaying only partial knowledge of the system and manage the conversation in such a way that the agents will be induced to have a false notion of what is going on.

I contend that service operationalization, which positions the clients as information-disadvantaged relative to the agents and thus potentially leads them to pursue ways of counterbalancing such an imbalance, is one condition for the emergence of this practice. Fabricated ignorance is a client’s way of sizing up opportunities. Sizing up entails a participant’s assessment of where the interaction is leading, an estimation of the extent to which is conducive to meeting the participant’s goals and the steps that might be needed to achieve them. One avenue for achieving this aim is judging the moment in the encounter when it might be potentially more convenient to make their move and to act out an uninformed stance.