Frame conflict and social inequality in the workplace: professional and local discourse struggles in employee/customer interactions

This article focuses on frame conflicts in workplace interactions and their role in the sociodiscursive reproduction of social inequality. Specifically, I analyse the frame conflicts that arise when customers mobilize local discursive patterns, code-switching and conversational topics. I observe how these local communicative means, which are considered to be of lesser value on the linguistic market, struggle when matched against the institutional and depersonalized discursive style of the professionals. The research is based on employee/customer interviews recorded at a partly state-owned enterprise that supplies water, sewage treatment and waste collection in a borough in Galicia (Spain). The data have been subjected to sociodiscursive, sequential and critical analyses. This multimethod aproach has enabled us to observe the way in which social order is built up from interactional order, revealing the role played by frames, linguistic resources and interactional asymmetry in reproducing the power differences that separate institutions and citizens.