“They Want What They Want When They Want It”:
Help-Seeking, Face-Saving, and Status at a University IT Help Desk
J. Lotus Seeley
In today’s higher education classrooms, a malfunctioning computer or projector can
disrupt a lesson and derail a whole class. Before the 1990s, faculty required little more than a
podium, supplemented perhaps by a chalkboard or an overhead projector with acetate
transparencies. Today, an unadorned lecture is not enough to meet expectations for engaged
learning, multimedia teaching tools, and PowerPoint to accompany presentations. The professor
who simply lectures is unlikely to keep students’ attention or receive good evaluations, no matter
how fascinating the material. Some faculty remain steadfast in their traditional methods, but
most have begun to incorporate an array of teaching tools, from simple lecture slides to online
videos to interactive “clickers” that let instructors and students “interact dynamically” 1 through
polls and games. As a result, faculty today rely on IT Support (ITS) workers to keep technology
functioning and their classes running smoothly; seeking help from ITS workers is unavoidable.
Whenever computers (and the technologies that rely upon them) are central to the
operation of an organization, whether in classrooms, back offices, or the hands of sales forces,
the ability of individuals to work depends on technology’s uninterrupted functioning. Any
number of technical failures can cause work to grind to a halt: a forgotten password, a server
down for maintenance, a computer virus, or a suddenly dead power supply. As Barley and Orr
(1997, 14) say, technicians “separate us from the technology on which our society is based,”
since most individuals encounter technology as a black box, ignorant of the fundamental
processes (e.g., the intricacies of computer code) that make possible the devices upon which they
See https://www1.iclicker.com/ for an explanation of “clickers” and how they can be used for interactive learning
in the classroom, including in-class polls.
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depend. Only a minority of users are knowledgeable enough about technology to repair their
own computers and devices. Some problems are small enough (and some users savvy enough) to
troubleshoot their own machines, but most users require the expertise of ITS workers to return to
work.
Needing IT Support requires requesting IT Support, meaning users must engage in the
interaction ritual (Goffman 1967) of help-seeking, or requesting help from another person. Helpseeking is a status-laden interaction, as the imbalance of power between requestor and person
receiving the request, the requestor’s behavior during requesting, and the response of the person
from whom help is being sought combine to (re)produce the status systems in which both parties
are embedded. In workplaces, the relative importance help-seekers attach to “saving face”
(Goffman 1967, 5) for themselves and/or the person to whom they are seeking help versus
accomplishing their goals both reveals and (re)produces organizational status. Using
ethnographic and interview data of ITS workers in a university setting, I document the
interactional processes through which an individual’s organizational status, or location in the
organizational hierarchy (King 2005), shapes modes of help-seeking and in turn (re)produces the
local status system. Specifically, I focus on how a medical school faculty and staff’s different
aims as regards face are revealed in different modes of help-seeking, which, regardless of the
users’ intent, are understood by the ITS workers as enactments of faculty’s high status relative to
low status staff. The responses of ITS to faculty and staff’s different modes of help-seeking,
particularly ITS workers’ acceptance of faculty’s lack of deference, (re)produces a status divide
between high status faculty and low status staff.
By examining the help-seeking processes of both high status and low status individuals
within the same context, an IT Support desk in a medical school, I provide a clearer picture of
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the interactional ritual of help-seeking than is currently available. Social psychologists have
examined the factors that lead individuals to ask for help or not as well as the enactment of
deference in seeking help from peers at work, focusing primarily on individuals’ desire to save
face in a face-threatening situation (Lee 1999, 2002). Others have written on how social class
influences students’ help-seeking in the classroom and how working-class children are
disadvantaged by their more vocal and insistent middle-class peers (Calarco 2011). I draw from
as well as supplement these two approaches, creating a more multi-dimensional portrait of helpseeking as a site for the (re)production of status. I show how staff’s consistent engagement in
deference as a means for positive face for both themselves and ITS workers contrasted with
faculty’s general lack of deference toward ITS workers in the pursuit of negative face,
solidifying a status hierarchy that placed faculty over staff. As I show, the meaning ITS workers
gave to these different approaches to help-seeking and deference reinforced the organizational
status hierarchy, even when ITS workers disapproved of faculty’s style of help-seeking.
This essay is proceeds as follows: First, I review the existing literature on deference,
positive and negative face, help-seeking, and the importance of status to these processes.
Second, I examine empirical examples of help-seeking to uncover how status structures the
pursuit of positive face for requestor, positive face for the person from whom a request is being
made, and negative face for the requestor. Third, I discuss how ITS workers interpreted and
sanctioned the different patterns of help-seeking engaged in by faculty and staff in ways that
(re)produced the organizational hierarchy of the medical school. Finally, I conclude with a
discussion of how future research can continue to develop Goffman’s concept of face in fruitful
directions.
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Theories of Help-Seeking and Positive and Negative Face
Erving Goffman defines deference as “a symbolic means by which appreciation is
regularly conveyed to a recipient of this recipient, or of something of which this recipient is
taken as a symbol, extension, or agent” (1967, 56). Deference differs from obeisance and
submission. Though definitions of deference usually emphasize asymmetries of status, like
subordinates’ deferring to the preferences of superiors, the crux of deference rituals is
interactants enacting their esteem for each other. Deference acts may be engaged in by equals.
For example, deference may be express “capacity-esteem” when an “individual defers to
another’s technical advice” (Goffman 1967, 59). Scholars refer to deference among peers as
lateral deference and show that individuals engage in deference with peers when concerned with
showing they are not “overstepping their bounds” in interactions with peers or threatening each
other’s statuses (Fragale et al. 2012, Spataro et al. 2014). Problematically, most research on
deference has either been conducted using experiments (Morand 2000, Spataro et al. 2014) or
textual analysis of emails between individuals in an organization (Fragale et al. 2012, Lee 1999).
Less attention has been given to naturalistic face-to-face interactions (Spiers 1998), an oversight
this essay seeks to correct.
Deference is linked to face, or the “image of self delineated in terms of approved social
attributes” (Goffman 1967, 5). Face is produced either through avoidance of face threatening
situations or through “respect and politeness” that “extend[s] to others any ceremonial treatment
that might be their due” (Goffman 1967, 16). Goffman asserts that people balance between two
concerns: “a defensive orientation toward saving his own face and a protective orientation
toward saving the others’ face” (1967, 14). As a whole, Goffman’s theory of face-work
emphasizes the tendency for individuals to save face for both themselves and others, depicting a
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failure to protect face as a relatively uncommon breach of social standards of “considerateness”
(1967, 11). He distinguishes among three possiible reasons for an individual to threaten the face
of the other: innocent faux pas, maliciousness, and “an unplanned but sometimes anticipated byproduct of action … the offender performs in spite of its offensive consequences, although not
out of spite” (1967, 14). His focus, however, is on the practice of saving face for the self and
other, not interactions in which saving positive face for self and other is of concern. Research on
face has leaned toward social psychological experiments (Lim and Bowers 1991, Lee 1999, Lee
1997) and cross-cultural analyses of differences in the importance placed on and methods for
saving face (Oetzel et al. 2001, Ting-Toomey and Kurogi 1998). Others have examined
facework as self-presentation strategy and interactional achievement (Pollock 2008, Bell and
Hastings 2011, Lee 2009). These articles retain Goffman’s emphasis on individuals’ desire to
save face for themselves and others and give little attention to failures to be protective of their
interactant’s face.
Politeness scholars in linguistics have elaborated Goffman’s ideas by distinguishing
between two forms of face (Tracy and Tracy 1998, Brown and Levinson 1987, 13): Positive face
is the desire to be approved of by others and is produced by acts of respect that seek to minimize
face threat for interactants, express reciprocity, and not threaten the other’s in-group rights and
duties (Brown and Levinson 1987, 70). Negative face is the desire to be unimpeded in one’s
actions and may be produced either through politeness strategies or “baldly” without engaging in
face-saving interaction rituals (Brown and Levinson 1987, 68). These two aspects of face may
come into conflict, as when the desire to achieve one’s ends (i.e., negative face) results in
disregard for others’ approval or expressions of deference (i.e., positive face for self and/or
other). Alternately, positive face may depend on negative face such that being approved of by
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one group of others (e.g., peers, superiors) requires particular accomplishments and thus negative
face. Positive and negative face are particularly salient in the act of requesting help from others,
as the degree of imposition engendered by a request may be threatening to the positive face of
the self (e.g., the desire to be seen as someone who does not impose unduly upon others) and the
other (e.g., the desire for others to be seen as cooperative and helpful) as well as the negative
face needs of the requestor to achieve their goals (Craig, Tracy, and Spisak 1986).
“Help-seeking,” as used by social psychologists, describes how organizational members
decide to locate information or ask for assistance with a problem (Hofman, Lei, and Grant 2009).
Research has focused on the psychological processes by which people decide to ask for help or
not, constructing help-seeking as an active process where individuals make decisions about
whom to interact with and how to approach them. Their key finding is that an individual’s desire
to gain or maintain power and status is inversely related to their willingness to seek help (Lee
1997, 340). Employees may be inhibited from help-seeking because of the social cost (e.g., loss
of status) of being perceived as incompetent and/or dependent on others (Lee 1997, 339). These
social costs are characterized as “status threats,” because requesting help may place the
individual in a (momentarily) subordinate position relative to the person from whom help is
being sought (Lee 2002). The threat to status that help-seeking induces is not a concrete threat in
terms of actual loss of status but the brief moment during help-seeking in which the seeker is
vulnerable to negative interpretation of incompetence or dependence. Using the example of
hospital employees’ help-seeking in relation to a new electronic records system, David Hofman
and colleagues (2009) show how help-seekers perceptions of potential helpers’ accessibility (i.e.,
whether the request would be seen as an imposition) and trustworthiness (i.e., whether the
request will cause the requestor to lose face) matters more than objective skill when choosing
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whom to ask for help. Subjects showed a marked preference for seeking assistance from
individuals who would not make them feel bad for needing help (i.e., threaten their positive
face), highlighting the role of status threat in structuring help-seeking interactions.
Fiona Lee has examined the workplace strategies individuals use to seek help, showing
how people try to frame their requests in such a way as to save face for both themselves and the
person from whom they are requesting assistance (2002). She documents three major “verbal
strategies” that people utilize to soften requests for help and maintain others’ favorable
impressions of them: “other-enhancing strategies” that “elevated the helper or abased the help
seeker,” “minimizing strategies” that downplayed the imposition of the request, and “taskoriented strategies” that “oriented the helper’s attention toward the task at hand” (1999, 1479).
She concludes that gender, power, and local norms all play a part in how individuals ask for
help; for example, low status men and women are most likely to engage in the types of verbal
strategies she identifies. Unfortunately, Lee focuses on peer interactions, meaning she is unable
to speak to the strategies by which high-status individuals seek help from low-status individuals,
thus overlooking modes of help-seeking in which high-status individuals shape their interactions
to mitigate possible status threats. Nor does she examine negative face at length, so no details
are provided about help seekers who are unconcerned about protecting the face of the person
from whom they are requesting help, leaving unexamined the role of such behaviors in
(re)producing the unequal statuses of the requestor and the person helping them.
In contrast, sociological attention to help-seeking has examined the process of requesting
help across power differentials and what this means for the (re)production of larger social
inequalities (Calarco 2011). Research on teacher-student interaction in classrooms has
demonstrated that students’ strategies for seeking teachers’ attention and assistance (re)produce
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inequalities like social class. Middle-class students engage in proactive efforts, like calling out,
approaching the teacher unbidden, and overshadowing less proactive students, all of which
ensure these students receive the help they need and complete their work successfully (Calarco
2011, 865). In general, middle-class students evince little trepidation in their help-seeking from
their higher status teachers. In contrast, working-class students exhibit a lack of entitlement to
immediate attention, either foregoing help-seeking or engaging in low-key strategies that are
more likely to be overlooked (Calarco 2011, 871). Like research on help-seeking by adults,
working class children are described mostly as foregoing help-seeking interactions (Ryan, Hicks,
and Midgley 1997). Working-class students are not described by Calarco as engaging in much
deference or positive face besides sheepishness in asking for help, though other scholars have
emphasized the process of learning to be polite in making requests (Newman 2000). Drawing
from politeness theory, the middle-class students’ behavior can be interpreted as a form of
negative face in which the desire to achieve one’s goals becomes the primary aim of the
interaction and positive face for self and other is sidelined. While Calarco documents some
frustration on the part of teachers when students aggressively seek help without making
independent efforts, teachers generally respond positively to middle-class students’ proactive
help-seeking and provide the requested assistance. In contrast, teachers overlook working-class
students ignorance about how seek help in socially acceptable ways. This proves disadvantaging
because it limits the assistance working-class students receive in the classroom, which can
diminishes the benefits from education for that accrue later in life (Calarco 2011). Through these
examples, Calarco goes beyond Lee to show how inequalities may be (re)produced through
contrasting help-seeking styles.
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Negative face as a concept has been largely ignored within sociology. However, Bolton
and Houlihan’s (2005) study of individuals interacting with call centers describes a version of
negative face. Using data drawn from participant observation of call center workers and the
spontaneous and informal comments of callers, the authors define three major approaches
customers have to customer service and may shift among during a single call: Moral Agents who
try to treat call center workers respectfully as fellow human beings, Mythical Sovereigns who
expect and sometimes demand deferential treatment from call center workers, and Functional
Transactants who “want to carry out a transaction in the simplest manner possible” (Bolton and
Houlihan 2005, 686). Applying the language of saving face, which the authors do not use, Moral
Agents engage in interaction rituals based on lateral deference and Mythical Sovereigns demand
deference from workers but do not perform lateral deference themselves, both examples of the
pursuit of positive face for self and/or other. In contrast, Functional Transactants emphasize
efficient interactions in which their goals are pursued efficiently and without “involvement in
social interaction” (Bolton and Houlihan 696). When combined with a lack of lateral deference,
Functional Transactants’ orientation toward efficiency meets the definition of negative face in
which instrumental concerns take precedence over the interaction rituals of deference or
politeness. Though Bolton and Houlihan provide valuable insight into how customers differently
approach interacting with call takers in call centers and situate these interactions within
organizational and economic structures, call center communications are spot transactions in
which customers and call takes engage in one-off interactions with minimal influence on their
relative social statuses. In contrast, the research I present below examines individuals with in the
same organizations and highlight how individuals’ approaches to help-seeking are shaped by and
(re)produce interactants’ organizational status.
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This essay uses the example of ITS workers to integrate these two perspectives on helpseeking while also calling attention to how different modes of help-seeking are interpreted by the
people from whom help is being sought. Moreover, it locates those processes within a single
help-seeking context, highlighting the role of help-seeking as a mundane processes through
which organizational status is produced. While high status faculty deploy strategies similar to
the strategies Calarco documents among middle-class elementary school students, low status
staff rely primarily on lateral deference as outlined by Lee. As I show, these different modes in
which help is sought, not just the failure to ask for help by low status individuals, served to
(re)produce the organizational status system of the medical school in which faculty had greater
status than staff.
Setting and Methods
The analysis presented in this paper is based on more than 200 hours of observation at
The Help Desk, a computer subunit of an elite medical school’s Computer Support Services
Department. This data is supplemented by 45 hours of observation at a professional school at the
same university for comparative purposes and interviews with 30 ITS workers from both the
observed Help Desk and a variety of departments, including engineering schools, administrative
units, and humanities departments. The medical school consisted of faculty and graduate students
engaged in research, training, and providing paid services to a substantial patient population.
The medical school had more than 1500 computers and 800 users, which were divided into three
groups: high level administrators, clinical and research faculty, and general staff. Six individuals
were employed by the Help Desk during my observation period, two people quitting and one
person being hired while I was present. Three individuals were present for the entirety of my
observational period. The subunit was heterogeneous, including gay and straight white males in
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their twenties, middle-aged men and women immigrants from South America and Africa, and a
woman in her forties who had previously been a social worker. ITS workers besides the medical
school Help Desk will have their department noted. All names and identifying information have
been changed to protect confidentiality.
The Help Desk was the unit tasked with making sure users could fully utilize the
computing resources provided to them, including purchasing and maintaining of all computers
and peripherals owned by the medical school; servicing of classroom computers and projectors;
maintaining the school’s computer network; and insuring users’ ability to access the school’s
programs, servers, and email. Employees of The Help Desk were interactive service workers
(Leidner 1993), as their technical labors like unjamming printers, resetting passwords, or saving
crashing programs, were always within a relational, interactional context. Some interpersonal
interaction, whether face-to-face or over-the-phone, was necessary for the ITS workers to fix a
user’s problem; emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) was necessary to be good at ITS.
For some ethnographers, deep and sustained observation of workers in their workplaces
may be accompanied by actual engagement in the tasks at hand (Adler and Adler 1987), whether
selling sweaters to China’s nouveau riche (Hanser 2008) or planning a countercultural arts
festival (Chen 2009). Although comfortable with computers and technology, I am not skilled
enough to be anything but an impediment to Help Desk employees trying to get harried users
back to work. As a result, I engaged in shadowing, or non-participant observation (McDonald
2005, Quinlan 2008, Fletcher 1999, Orr 1996), watching carefully and taking detailed notes,
occasionally asking for explanations or clarifications of things I observed, like the identity of a
user or the established protocol for a task (Monahan and Fisher 2010). My observation excluded
concern with the actual technical details of their work (e.g., how to reset an expired password or
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update a program) and focused on the service work interaction along with the individual and
collective meanings ITS workers gave to their work. In contrast, I participated fully in the
informal culture and socializing of the department, attending unit meetings and farewell
luncheons, hanging out in the offices as ITS workers puzzled over computers, and joking around
with staff from other units and departments. I never attempted to achieve insider status
(Holyfield and Jonas 2003), but I did immerse myself in the daily life of the unit as best I could.
My time in the field was split between going on service calls with ITS workers and sitting
at the Help Desk with the individual in charge of walk-ins and phone calls that day. I observed
more than 350 discrete interactions between users and ITS workers plus myriad interactions
among the staff in formal and informal settings. I spent an average of three days a week, four
hours at a time, over the course of fifty-three observation days spread across five months. While
at the Help Desk, I used my netbook to take detailed notes on the interactions among ITS
workers, users, and other visitors, capturing nearly verbatim large chunks of conversation,
including opening and departing salutations, and brief descriptions of people’s appearance,
movement, and demeanor. I listened to phone calls and recorded as much as I could, filling in
details with the ITS worker afterwards. When I followed ITS workers on service calls, I left my
netbook and carried pen and paper to scribble down conversation and what we did. For all
interactions, ITS workers provided me with details and clarification about things I did not
understand or could not hear, like computer jargon or the identity of a caller.
At night I fleshed out the skeletal field notes I took during the day, expanding strings of
dialogue and abbreviated descriptions into detailed narratives of interactions (Emerson, Fretz,
and Shaw 1995). The next day I clarified any uncertainties with the staff members involved,
updating my field notes either during lulls or that evening. My analytic approach was influenced
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by grounded theory’s emphasis on avoiding imposing pre-existing categories or theories on data
(Charmaz 2006). While in the field, I wrote brief memos on emerging themes. At first I focused
on gender and emotional labor, my motivating concerns, but as I became more immersed in the
field, I began to see how faculty or staff was as important a categorical identity as male or female
and how emotional labor was entwined with technical and pedagogical labor. From these
memos I developed my coding scheme. Using Hyperresearch qualitative coding software, I
coded my field notes and interview transcripts with a focus on differences among administrators,
faculty, and staff in how they interacted with the Help Desk employees.
Help-Seeking and Face Saving
My results are divided into three sections corresponding to different aspects of face
saving: positive face of the person making the request, positive face of person having a request
made of them, and negative face of the requestor. First, I discuss the different orientations of
faculty and staff to positive face, showing how staff engage in extensive lateral deference while
faculty frequently omit these interactional rituals. Second, I examine the tendency for faculty to
prioritize their own positive face in ways that were interpreted by ITS workers as threats to their
own positive face, defined as IT professionals deserving of deference for their unique skill (i.e.,
capacity-esteem). Finally, I turn to negative face and how faculty’s focus on accomplishing their
professional obligations overshadows a concern for ITS workers’ positive face and diminishes
their engagement in acts of deference and politeness.
Positive Face for Requestor
Staff at the medical school most closely approximated politeness scholars’ and social
psychologists’ emphasis on preserving their own positive face while help-seeking (Brown and
Levinson 1987, Lee 2000), defined during the act of help-seeking as presenting the self as non-
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imposing, polite, and considerate. In contrast, faculty were notable for the infrequency with
which they engaged in lateral deference oriented toward preserving their own positive face.
While observing The Help Desk, I was amazed by how friendly staff members were when ITS
workers and I wandered the halls on service calls. Receptionists, lab managers, and clinic
administrators all greeted the ITS workers by name, smiling, waving, asking “How are you?”,
chatting pleasantly about work and weather, all exemplars of the “little salutations, compliments,
and apologies” that are hallmarks of lateral deference (Goffman 1967, 57). The ITS workers and
staff joked together, commiserating about technology and its frustrations. Positioning
themselves as peers through these deference behaviors, ITS workers and low status staff
members interacted in a consistently affable manner. Inadvertently this collegiality served as a
foil to the demanding and sometimes uncivil temperament of faculty.
The tone of staff’s help-seeking interactions were characterized by some admixture of
politeness, appreciation, and jocularity on the part of both the ITS worker and the user. Requests
by staff were often “other-enhancing strategies” that “elevated the helper or abased the help
seeker” (Lee 1999, 1479). For example, during a visit to a staff user, the woman freely admits
her confusion, saying “I’m lost.” Sue replies sympathetically, crouching beside the woman’s
chair and consolingly telling the woman she will get her “unlost.” Similarly, when a staff
member said apologetically “I’m creating problems,” Harry was quick to dismiss her concern,
saying “It’s okay – we’re here to fix problems,” reassuring her and reinforcing her right to
service. Staff users (men and women alike) more consistently engaged in basic conversational
pleasantries than faculty, like saying hello, asking the Help Desk employee how they were doing,
and checking to see if the ITS worker had time to listen to their concerns before launching into
an explanation of their problem, all of which protected the requestor’s face by demonstrating
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their respect for the person from whom they are seeking help (Lee 1999,1490). Low status users
were also more likely to apologize for “bothering” an ITS worker by needing assistance and to
give an emphatic thank you to the ITS worker for their help. Indeed, users’ self-abasement could
become distracting, as it was for one admin whose apologies for having to request a service call
drowned out Sue’s attempts to diagnose her problem. At no point during my observation did I
see a low status worker attempt to circumvent the queue, seek an exemption to ITS rules, or
challenge the Help Desk’s protocol, all of which were engaged in by faculty. In all these ways,
staff’s focus on positive face for themselves as considerate and respectful of the time and skill of
ITS workers follows Goffman’s (1967) assumptions about face. The effect is to (re)produce
staff and ITS workers as peers.
The (re)production of staff and ITS workers’ shared low-status through lateral deference
was complemented by help-seeking staff’s reliance on positive face-saving strategies that
emphasized their mutual subordination to faculty, what Lim and Bowers (1991, 421) call
“solidarity,” or reliance on in-group status in the presentation of positive face. On one service
call, we went to a lab classroom where a professor was having trouble getting the VCR to play.
Once there we were met by a woman lab manager, an unexpected event since she was not the
professor’s lab manager nor assigned to the room itself. The professor never stopped teaching
and Harry and the woman spoke in low tones, trying to get the video playing. When done, she
politely asked the professor if he would stop class to let them try the video. It was successful, so
they quietly rewound the tape, pressed pause, and left the room. In the hall and out of earshot,
she thanked Harry profusely and then apologized for having to ask for his assistance, saying
“Thank goodness that worked. The doctor just walked in and said he had a VHS tape and it’s
been so long since I did anything in that room, I forgot.” Harry brushes off the apology as well
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as the gratitude, instead commiserating with the lab manager that he had not been given any
forewarning either, despite having just seen the professor prior to his needing help. The lab
manager is brightened by this and seems relieved that Harry is not irritated with her. By
allowing the lab manager to save face in regards to her urgent help-seeking by citing the faculty
member as the reason for her last minute request, the result was a (re)production of the
faculty/staff status hierarchy in which faculty are constructed as powerful yet inconsiderate in
contrast to a beleaguered staff.
Something similar happened when doctors’ blasé remarks of appreciation for a repaired
printer were overshadowed by the emphatic thank yous of staff. ITS workers often interacted
with staff who were invested in having faculty’s technical problems solved because they were
making more work for the staff, like a malfunctioning printer that was in one administrative
assistant’s words, “a pain in the ass” because the faculty kept asking her to print for them,
unapologetically interrupting her official responsibilities. On a different printer-related service
call, an administrative assistant jokingly made sure that we knew the faculty or graduate students
had caused the problem resulting in our service call as opposed to anything she had done, a claim
Isaac accepted readily. In such instances the staff and ITS workers commiserated politely about
professors’ demanding temperaments and thoughtlessness, cementing their shared identity as
staff and reinforcing the university’s status hierarchy of dominant faculty and subordinate staff.
In contrast, faculty engaged with ITS workers in instrumental ways that were civil yet
skipped over basic interactional elements linked to deference. By avoiding these ceremonial acts
of politeness and making requests “baldly” (Brown and Levinson 1987, 94), faculty put little
effort into maintaining their own positive face. The number one example of incivility was a
perfunctory, hurried interactional style in which faculty members who came into the physical
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Help Desk often skipped over common opening pleasantries like “Hello” and “How are you?”
that typically are used to initiate conversation. Unlike staff, faculty rarely asked if The Help
Desk employee on duty was free to take their request, which, while ritualistic, was regarded as
an expression of the requestor’s respect for the time and energies of ITS workers. Instead,
catching the eye of The Help Desk worker was enough to launch faculty immediately into an
explanation of their problem. A common example from my field notes is “Walk in (10:15am) –
Woman (younger, white) comes in and starts immediately: ‘I’m faculty and I’ve been trying to
approve procedures and just today it says my card is expired’.” Note the absence of any of
interactional niceties as well as the immediate identification of faculty status. Though not rude,
such perfunctory interactions are enactments of status though the faculty member’s failure to
engage in the small rituals through which individuals express their respect for each other (Lee
1999). To launch immediately into a request without checking whether the ITS worker is
prepared to listen to, let alone work on, their problem was an expression of disregard. Skipping
over these introductory remarks ignored the possibility that the ITS worker was currently
engaged in a repair using the remote connection, software that allowed them to take control of
users’ computers and fix some things without physically interacting. The routine character of
these omissions was made most obvious in the question of an undergraduate research assistant
who had been helping me with coding my field notes. She asked whether or not I routinely
omitted such basic pleasantries from my field notes for efficiency’s sake or if the faculty had
really not engaged in such common interaction rituals, so glaring was their absence
Similarly, status governed when thanks, also an expression of deference that maintained
the positive face of the requestor by showing their appropriate appreciation for the person
assisting them, were given for repairs. Staff were generally consistent about enacting their
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appreciation for the help they received, ending their interactions with the ITS workers with
expressions of appreciation intermixed with farewells. Though some faculty expressed their
gratitude in hyperbolic ways, like calling the ITS worker a “genius” or telling them “you saved
my life,” it was not unusual for a faculty member to depart without expressing any appreciation
for the ITS workers’ assistance. Not saying thank you is an incivility that (re)produces status
through an expression of a feeling of entitlement to the labor of another (Sherman 2007). The
net result, regardless of any lack of malice on the part of faculty, was to reproduce faculty’s
higher status through their ability to avoid the economy of gratitude (Hochschild 1989).
Worse than a lack of deference was a rudeness that ITS workers saw as the sole province
of faculty. While at the Medical school, I witnessed only one querulous interaction between ITS
workers and a staff member. A couple interviewees mentioned staff members who had computer
privileges, like administrator rights, withdrawn as a result of multiple viruses. Otherwise,
contentious interactions between ITS workers and staff were rare; friction with faculty was far
more common. Isaac described being cursed at by a professor for a mistake with a presentation.
This experience was widespread; for example, Sue and Jake both shrugged off a post doc’s
incivility with the rationalization that she had not screamed or cursed at her, so it was acceptable
behavior. An Assistant Dean’s visit for repair of the wireless internet of a staff member’s laptop
was punctuated by increasingly vitriolic remarks to Isaac about how someone needed to provide
him with a “500 foot” cable so that the staffer could work away from the building like the
Assistant Dean wanted. The Assistant Dean’s tone became so caustic that Alice, the department
head who rarely intervened in Help Desk interactions, slipped out of her office and into the fray
in an attempt to calm him down enough that Isaac could proceed with his repair and explanation.
18
Stories of faculty rudeness, of a lack of concern for the requestor’s positive face, were
told by nearly every ITS worker I encountered. Jake told about his previous job when he went to
Human Resources to report some faculty that habitually yelled at the ITS workers. Impressively,
he succeeded at forcing the faculty to change this behavior. Others were not so lucky. Joan
(professional school) talked about the dissent that ensued when changes were made to printing in
her department: “[The ITS workers are] getting the people that are just screaming about,
‘Where’s my print job, where’s this, where’s that, why is not working this way and it’s always
worked this way!’” More egregious was an interaction related by Norma (biology):
I had one professor … Something was just not going her way. I don’t remember what it
was, but I was trying to help her out in her classroom, in front of class, and she just
bitched me out right in front of class and I just said something to her like, ‘Uh, we can
talk about this later.’ You know? I’m not going to roll over and play dead. And I’ll just
say something if they’re treating me bad in front of class ... You know, let’s talk about
this later.
Unfortunately, being yelled at was not a rare experience. As predicted by Hochschild (1983),
this had negative ramifications in the form of alienation from organic emotional response. Not
being yelled at became the very low threshold a user had to meet to be considered a good
interaction, (re)producing faculty’s high status by legitimating unguarded emotional displays, or
a lack of concern for presenting positive face (Sloan 2012).
Ultimately, incivility and rudeness were not harmless instances of personality differences,
though some ITS workers attempted to rationalize them as such, but modes of interaction with
real consequences for the reproduction of the organizational status array of the university
(Cortina et al. 2001). Like members of dominant groups everywhere, faculty were less likely to
19
suppress negative affect while interacting with subordinates and more likely to engage in
incivilities (Sloan 2012). When this lack of concern for their own positive face went
unchallenged, they became performances of status that reproduced the dominance of faculty over
staff.
Positive Face for Person Receiving Request
As discussed above, the interactions between medical school staff and The Help Desk
employees tended to be treated as exchanges among peers with polite deference given for
superior skill with technology. Staff’s own positive face saving also functioned as a way to
preserve the positive face of ITS workers. In contrast, faculty’s interactions with The Help Desk
employees often demonstrated a lack of concern with ensuring ITS workers’ positive face,
particularly as regards “capacity-esteem” (Goffman 1967). ITS workers felt that faculty were
dismissive of their skill and unwilling to grant ITS workers positive face by claiming at least
partial culpability for problems the ITS believed were largely the result of user error or
inattention to announcements. Like positive face for the requestor, faculty’s failure to do lateral
deference and engage in token expressions of apology served to (re)produce their higher status
relative to staff (Craig, Tracy, and Spisak 1986).
Sometimes ITS workers experienced simple condescension from faculty who intimated
that they did not entirely believe the ITS workers were competent at their jobs until they had
proven themselves in some obvious way, a withholding of deference during help-seeking
interpreted as face threatening. Geordie (professional school) drew an analogy with the bridge
keeper in Monty Python who refused to let travelers pass until they answered basic questions
correctly. Numerous ITS workers mentioned faculty whose tone and body language suggested
that they did not trust the ITS worker to complete a repair properly, despite having been hired
20
precisely for those skills. More subtly, faculty were much less likely to engage in the rhetoric of
technological incompetence that low status staff sometimes engaged in to apologize for having to
ask ITS workers for their help. Faculty were more likely to locate the origins of their technical
problems outside themselves. For example, one professor seemed to slide into defensiveness
when trying to explain the unintentional installation of the piece of malware, but turned the
blame on the originating company, describing it as an instance of how internet firms “get you.”
Rather than the apologizing for needing to have a virus or malware removed, which was
common among staff, he assumed that the Help Desk would provide the required assistance. ITS
workers did not expect users to perform technological incompetence as a means of engaging in
lateral deference, nor did they regard users as uncivil if they did not. Nonetheless, the general
absence of such interactional strategies served to (re)produce faculty’s high status.
A lack of deference was also present when faculty bent the truth in their interactions with
ITS workers. In an attempt to save positive face for themselves, faculty sometimes tried to avoid
censure by not admitting to having caused problems or broken protocol. Craig (professional
school) told of a professor who had spilled a large latte on his laptop but would not admit having
done so despite the clear presence of coffee in the circuitry. Craig spoke harshly of the
professor’s attempt to save face through remarks that Craig interpreted as dismissing his skill as
an IT expert. Jane (engineering) similarly recalled a professor who had reported a keyboard
mysteriously malfunctioning and then remained steadfast in his denial of responsibility even as
she drained about cola out of a keyboard in front of him. Users sometimes misrepresented
whether computers had been purchased by the university or themselves in an attempt to
circumvent limits on personal computers’ network access and software installation, which not
only was disrespectful but also opened up ITS workers to liability for violating protocol. In
21
general, the flimsy quality of the stories told by faculty made them more threatening to face
because they were premised on the belief that ITS workers were not smart enough to recognize
their statements as false, or a lack of “capacity-esteem” (Goffman 1967).
Faculty’s attempts at positive face saving were evident in their unique habit of telling ITS
workers what they believed was wrong with their computer and what should be done to repair it.
Though these users might have not intended to be disrespectful, the ITS workers interpreted
these interactions as expressions of faculty’s distrust of their expertise and a threat to their
positive face. This negative reaction was multiplied when the advice given was actually wrong
and the user refused to acknowledge their error. For example, Isaac fiercely critiqued a
particular faculty member for his unsolicited advice about how his computer should be repaired.
Isaac said the doctor would never take advice on how to set a broken bone, so for the doctor to
be giving him incorrect advice about how to repair was interpreted as an unambiguous
expression of disregard for Isaac’s skill.
ITS workers interpreted faculty’s overestimations of their technical skill as an affront to
their own positive face as knowledgeable IT professionals. Instead of deferring to ITS workers’
superior knowledge or admitting their own blind spots, some faculty were observed to only
grudgingly admit that ITS workers were correct where they were not. I watched Jim get in a spat
with a professor about the installation of a TV in a waiting room. The professor had walked into
the Help Desk and began talking immediately and loudly: “I came in two months ago about a
Smart TV. I came here a month ago and wasn’t done. I came in last night and it wasn’t done.”
Jim recognizes the man by sight and after clicking through a few screens of the ticket queue, he
asks whether or not the professor had gotten the emails the system indicated had been sent. The
professor says no, and when Jim begins to describe the emails, which have “computer” rather
22
than “TV” in their subject line, the professor spits back, “It’s not a computer it’s a television.”
Jim takes a deep breath and then tries to explain that being a Smart TV, it’s actually a computer,
which somewhat placates the professor, though not fully. Rather than acknowledging that the
new generation of TVs, like the one the professor himself had selected from the catalog, were
more accurately categorized as computers than televisions, the professor held firm to his
traditional definitions and thus his justification for having ignored the Help Desk’s emails.
Rather than protect Jim’s positive face, specifically what Lim and Bowers (1991, 420) term
“competence face,” or the desire for one’s abilities to be respected, by assuming some culpability
for the miscommunication, the professor maintained his antagonistic stance through almost all
the help-seeking interaction.
Such failures of high status individuals to enact deference for ITS workers’ expertise
were not uncommon. For example, Harry and the Alumni Magazine editor spent twenty minutes
going around in circles about the editor’s away message for his email. The editor was emphatic
that it was not working because he was not receiving the notifications in his own email and
ignored Harry trying to explain that the email system was setup to prevent receipt of one’s own
away message and that having your email automatically reply to your own emails with an away
message would create a logic loop that would crash the email system. The editor dismissed and
talked over Harry’s explanation, leaving Harry unable to do anything but silently use his smart
phone to test the away message with his own email account. Even then, the editor seemed to
give little credence, barely glancing at Harry’s evidence and giving an unelaborated “you’re
done” to signal he was ready for the service call to end. Similarly, during a visit to Dr. Otto, an
Emeritus, even I knew Isaac was right about the slow death of the professor’s computer from a
corrupt hard drive, knowing from experience the distinctive thwack of metal against metal that
23
heralds lost data. The Emeritus, however, would not believe Isaac and insisted it was an issue
with an application, even when Isaac demonstrated that the application was not at fault. The
service call only ended after an hour because Isaac and Dr. Otto ran out of time. Faculty’s
failure to enact deference toward ITS workers as part of help-seeking prevented the Help Desk
employee from achieving their aims in both cases, as faculty would not accept their own ability
to be wrong. In both instances, though, the ITS workers expressed a sense of defeat as we left
these service calls, not simply because they had not been able to fix the technical problem but
because faculty’s refusal to acknowledge their expertise in IT threatened their positive face.
Negative Face
An individual’s desire to maintain a sense of autonomy and achieve their ends without
interference from others is termed negative face (Brown and Levinson 1987). The pursuit of
negative face without regard for the positive face of the person from whom a request is being
made derives in part from a sense of entitlement. An individual performs entitlement when they
act “as though they ha[ve] a right to pursue their individual preferences and to actively manage
interactions in institutional settings,” which means shifting “interactions to suit their
preferences” (italics in original, Lareau 2003, 6). This manifests itself in multiple ways, though
the final product is always their interactant’s validation or rejection of the requestor’s assertions
of high status implied in an emphasis on negative face over positive face. Like organizational
status, a sense of entitlement is always abstract and potential until an interactant agrees to cede
the definition of the situation to the individual attempting to control the interaction. Sherman
(2009) shows how upper-class hotel guests purchase the right to have rules bent when they paid
for luxury accommodations. Having to abide by the stated rules of an organization is considered
an affront to their sense of uniqueness and individual worth.
24
Entitlement is a manifestation of negative face in which the individual’s pursuit of their
instrumental goals overshadows the enactment of lateral deference. Among the faculty at the
medical school, negative face often took the form of believing that The Help Desk’s established
policies and protocols could be bent to suit their needs. The problem with users seeking
exemptions was that they did not always recognize the possible impact of those requests on the
ITS worker. Like a survey of bus riders in which respondents largely defined “good service” as
the bus driver breaking protocol by allowing them to ride for free or make unscheduled stops
(Shamir 1980), faculty users were happiest when ITS workers allowed exemptions from
established IT policy. This was dramatized in an interaction between Harry and a university
delivery driver, who had watched a faculty member become annoyed at the Help Desk’s refusal
to install Word on her personal laptop with the university’s global license, which was only for
use on machines purchased with university monies. As the doctor stomped off, saying “You
should provide me with what I need to work,” the delivery driver shook his head and empathized
with Harry. He said, “They just don’t get how much trouble you guys could get into with
Microsoft.” In this situation, the doctor did not engage in lateral deference vis-à-vis the ITS
worker to understand why her request was being declined. Instead, she refused to grant positive
face to Harry by acknowledging that he was simply following university-wide regulations, not
acting out of disregard or spite. She transferred her irritation at being denied a service, meaning
a threat to her negative face, to Harry, who had to enforce the rules or risk his job. Though she
was not able to actually achieve her negative face aims, she was still expressed her sense of
entitlement through a lack of lateral deference.
Faculty’s pursuit of negative face was also regarded as a problem in other departments.
When I asked Sam (life sciences) about having to refuse requests, he said “Oh, people don’t
25
handle no very well, especially in this day and age. They just don’t.” He laughs and mimics a
user not taking no for an answer: “Why not? Explain to me why I can’t do this!” Implicit in such
demands for explanation is the user’s disbelief that the ITS worker is making claims grounded in
their expertise, highlighting in help-seeking interactions the association between negative face
for the self and a refusal of positive face for the person from whom the request is being made.
Nathalie (linguistics) spoke perceptively about the disregard for ITS workers’ expertise implicit
in some faculty’s acts of entitlement in regard to equipment purchasing:
On occasion, people are ridiculous. Like, someone gives you an impossible task, wants it
done immediately and wants it done with no money being spent. Why would ...
<stammering> That boggles my mind, to watch a person spend ridiculous amounts of
money doing silly things and then the thing that’s important, they’re not going to give
you any money for it, but make it work right away. Or faculty members who come and
say “Um, I want this done to my computer.” Well, okay it’s going to cost this much. “No,
I don’t want spend that.” Okay ... there’s not a lot of choices. “Well, you know all these
other things are available now, I went looking, I found it cheaper.” … So it comes down
to setting expectations and with the faculty, when they ask you to do something that’s a
little ridiculous and then they say “No, I don’t want to do that.” That’s like going to your
doctor and the doctor saying “You have, um, cardiac disease and we need to do that.”
“No, I don’t want to do that. What else can I do?” “Okay, well there’s some alternatives
and none of them are all that great, but you obviously know more because you looked it
up on Wikipedia or did a search on Newegg and found new prices.”
The deleterious effects of negative face resulted not from faculty’s honest attempts to find useful
and cost-effective technologies, but from their unwillingness to engage in a dialogue with the
26
ITS workers or acknowledge the ITS workers’ expertise. By not being open to advice from ITS
workers, faculty’s pursuit of negative face (regardless of intent) involved a failure to preserve
ITS workers’ competence face (Lim and Bowers 1991), which through their refusal to defer to
ITS workers’ organizationally-defined spheres of competence ultimately (re)produced faculty’s
greater status than staff.
A ubiquitous form of negative face that deleteriously impacted on ITS workers’ ability to
properly do their job was faculty members’ habitual disregard for official communications about
major service changes from the IT department. This failure to read emails may be considered an
example of negative face because, unintentionally or not, the very real need for overworked and
stressed out faculty (Bailyn 2006) to be efficient in their work resulted in ignoring critical
information. In turn, this resulted in help-seeking interactions in which faculty needed
immediate or emergency assistance to rectify a problem caused by not reading and/or replying to
emails from ITS workers. What ITS workers disliked most was faculty’s reluctance to take
responsibility for problems that could be ultimately traced back to ignoring email. While they
understood that faculty received a lot of email and were not malicious in their failure to read
important missives, the denial of positive face for ITS workers was hurtful. Faculty focused
almost exclusively on negative face and resolving a situation so as to be able to go back to work,
failing to do the kind of lateral deference that characterized most ITS-staff interactions even in
emergencies. For example, even staff voicemails left during a major server outage contained
basic expressions of lateral deference like please and thank you.
In the pursuit of negative face, faculty very rarely apologized for their part in such a
problem or softened their requests to admit some culpability through inattention. More common
was for faculty to express irritation at being inconvenienced by changes they claimed ignorance
27
of and then to expect The Help Desk employee to provide an immediate resolution to their
problem. This caused resentment among ITS workers who felt they were being unfairly blamed
for problems that could have been prevented. The tendency of faculty to ignore vital emails
from ITS workers was highlighted by some professors’ behavior following a major overhaul of
the university’s email system. In the summer before my observation, the university as a whole
adopted Google for email and other applications. This had been a somewhat contentious
decision and was widely publicized by ITS workers in an attempt to ameliorate concern and
prepare people for the transition. Though the medical school staff had accepted the transition
with some grumbling, more than a few faculty members ignored the flurry of announcements.
As a result, a month after the transition was over faculty members were still coming to the Help
Desk in a panic over missing email. The lag between the change and faculty noticing the change
is apparent when Jim remarks exasperatedly two months after his first remark: “Half do it [read
the email, follow the directions]; the other half show up [at The Help Desk] because they never
read their email.” ITS workers interpreted it as a sign of disrespect, an indication faculty
considered themselves and their time as more important than that of the ITS workers.
Faculty members’ failure to promptly read or respond to emails was a theme that
frequently recurred in discussions with ITS workers. The medical school Help Desk employees
communicated this to Lola during her training. While preparing a new laptop for use by its
recipient, Sue tells her, just as Isaac had a few minutes prior, that when the professor comes for
the laptop Lola needs to explain about having to buy her own network adaptor (referred to in
vivo as a dongle). Lola nods, causing Sue to mutter under her breath, “I hope she knows. Well,
we’ll deal with that when she gets here.” Lola counters by asking, “Have they not replied? I
wrote an email yesterday.” Sue dismisses the expectation of a prompt response from a professor
28
out of hand, saying “She’s probably not even in the building” and then dropping the entire
discussion. These failures of communication were also common among faculty in the
professional school and in the interviewees’ departments. Greg (professional school) talked
about the aftermath of some changes they made to their printer system:
People will walk in and be like, “Did you guys do something different to the printers
because I can’t print now.” “Yeah, we sent you out four emails within the last month
saying, ‘We’re gonna do it in three weeks, we’re gonna do it next week, we’re gonna do
it tomorrow.’ We did it. In every case, here’s what you need to do to fix the new
printing.” That ...yeah, that’s ... it’s all documented on our website. Everything you need
to know is right there on the site and they’re still like, “What do I do?” Yeah...
Though usually just irritating and time consuming, faculty members’ failure to read and/or reply
to ITS missives could leave the Help Desk employees unable to complete requested service calls.
If a Help Desk employee needed to know what files the user wanted backed up, have the user log
into a password protected machine, or have the user explain a problem more fully, the
completion of the original request depended up the user replying to the ITS worker. In all these
ways, faculty’s pursuit of negative face resulted in lack of communication that was interpreted as
a threat to the positive face of the ITS workers who were trying to help them.
Discussion: Status (Re)production and ITS Response to Faculty’s Negative Face
Though ITS workers were sometimes hurt by faculty’s failure to extend positive face to
them by enacting “capacity-esteem” for their superior technical knowledge, they tended to
rationalize it in a way that reproduced faculty’s high status by condoning their right to eschew
engaging in lateral deference. Kate (psychology) was explicit about this, saying “Faculty
actually has a tendency to be more disrespectful than staff. I don't know, they’re in a different
29
world. I think a lot of times, they do different things, have different deadlines. You know, so
it’s a little different.” Something similar was at work in Jamal’s (engineering) response to my
question about “problematic faculty or staff”:
I think everyone has bad days. We’ve had faculty throw equipment <laughs>, but it’s not
like there’s one or two that are always doing it. It’s usually when grants and things are
due, when there are high stress levels and people need to get something done and usually
they need to submit something that day and something’s not working. So they’re
frustrated and some days people can send a ticket in and we can respond to them and -and again, it’s the sensitivity of what the issue is and priority. Some things can take
longer and if it’s during one of those periods where a grant is due, they may send another
ticket in 5 minutes later -- what’s going on, I haven’t heard back from you.
This rationalization of disrespectful behavior (i.e., a failure to extend positive face to the ITS
worker) as a laughable expression of negative face resulting from the pressure faculty are under
to secure outside funding ultimately (re)produces the existing organizational status structure and
faculty’s dominant organizational status.
Although ITS workers occasionally reacted negatively to faculty incivilities, this was
atypical and a bit dangerous. Maggie (history) related a story about getting yelled at while
repairing a woman professor’s computer. Trying to maintain her calm and complete the task at
hand, she had asked the professor to leave. What was to the ITS worker a polite attempt to get
the user to stop being rude long enough to fix her computer was perceived by the professor and
her manager as an act of insubordination. She was told that she should have either endured the
abuse without responding or should have been the one to leave. The right of the ITS worker to
be treated respectfully was never brought up for discussion, legitimating the subordination of
30
support workers to professionals by naturalizing faculty’s pursuit of negative face and disregard
of ITS workers’ positive face.
In contrast, staff were allowed no such latitude in their pursuit of negative face. That
staff members and Help Desk employees considered each other peers for whom lateral deference
was due was also obvious in the way ITS workers reacted negatively to staff whom they felt
treated them as subordinates. I quote Jim at length:
After Faculty, the most annoying users are the high level administrative assistants. There
was a secretary from the dean’s office that was a big problem. She acted more like
faculty. She would come in speaking. Like today, making a point of pointing out that no
one answered, but knowing we’re very busy. The one who was the worst is better now.
She made so many demands because she was the Dean’s personal secretary. Oh, she was
awful. Others were bothered by it and told her she was overstepping her bounds and
couldn’t treat people under her like that.” His overall impression was that she was
disrespectful to the IT staff and did not treat them as equals or professionals. She was too
demanding and unwilling to acknowledge that her problems might not be the most
pressing ones the ITS workers were dealing with. It was an issue of an inability to lose
any source of face. She would always name drop, ‘The dean is here, you must come.’
Which is true, but you don’t have to say it, we know who to come on demand for. It was
the demanding that got a lot of people down here frazzled. Especially in the university,
IT isn’t trod on in the same way as in corporate.” He concluded the narrative by saying
that the other admins intervened and explicitly stated to the woman that she couldn’t
behave like that with the IT group. Apparently she got the message because she’s still in
the H-school and has reined in her behavior. (FN0418)
31
Jim’s criticism lays bare how the binary of high status faculty and low status staff serves as the
primary frame for how ITS workers understand and evaluate users’ behaviors. The
administrative assistant was not simply being rude by pursuing negative face to the detriment of
the ITS workers’ positive face, but she was acting like faculty – usurping a prerogative that was
not hers, a much more grievous act. Though his comments are not intended to legitimate faculty
members’ misbehavior, they do normalize a failure of faculty to display “capacity-esteem.” The
importance of status for structuring interactions between users and ITS workers was underscored
by the perspective of other Help Desk employees on the Dean’s secretary. Exacerbating the
situation was the admin’s habit behaving quite differently with Alice, the manager of the Help
Desk, than with the ITS workers. The secretary was willing to enact deference when interacting
with Alice, leading Alice to have a very different opinion of the secretary than the rest of the
unit. As Jim suggests, only intervention by the administrative assistant’s peers was able to alter
her behavior. Ultimately, the ITS workers acknowledged the stress that the secretary was under
as primary support for the Dean, what Kanter (1977) would describe as the unenviable position
of having responsibilities but not the necessary power and authority to insure work is done
correctly. Nonetheless, they felt she was remiss in taking out her frustrations on the Help Desk
employees who were trying to help. Once she ceased these behaviors and began enacting lateral
deference, the secretary was again treated as a peer whom ITS workers were happy to help. In
this way, the staff identity and thus low status of the Dean’s secretary was actively produced in
her dealings with ITS workers, exemplifying the interactional production of organizational
status.
In general, ITS workers engaged in deference when interacting with faculty, saving their
criticism for their understanding colleagues. This ultimately (re)produced the high
32
organizational status of faculty by constructing them as a group of problematic users from whom
civil behavior could not be expected. Sometimes this was explicit, as above when Lola was
instructed during training to not expect prompt responses from faculty. Similarly, Isaac’s
reaction to a call from Dean’s Secretary to figure out for the Dean why he had lost network
access over the weekend demonstrates how status is (re)produced. Though a user ignoring their
email usually brought about grumbling by the staff, Isaac’s reaction highlighted status process:
When he’s done, he turns to me and explains that that was the dean’s assistant and that
the dean had been trying to do things from home over the weekend but couldn’t. Isaac is
pretty amused, saying “There was an email went out last week that system would be
down.” Though he is a tad irritated that people seem not to have read the email, he grants
that the dean “probably got hundreds of emails so he doesn’t remember.” Thomas
suggests that he likely didn’t consider an email from the IT department important and
ignored it, though it actually was quite important. Isaac continues mumbling a bit about
their emails being not read but not in a particularly vitriolic or angry way.
At other times, such remarks were more offhand, like when professors treated as a collective
noun: “The number of doctors that can’t push a power button is astounding” (FN0408). Once
Isaac asked Harry about a service call to Dr. Ting; Harry’s sole response was “Standard fashion
– don’t read emails and freak out.” Rather than deal in the particulars, Harry just flagged the
service call as one of many such instances they have come to expect. Harry’s critique, however,
was not actually conveyed to the professor, instead being said as an aside to Jim with no effect
on faculty behavior.
Ultimately, faculty’s pursuit of negative face sometimes (re)produced their dominant
status by treating ITS workers as low-status service workers and not peer professionals. As
33
many have noted about service workers and secretaries, evaluation by customers and bosses is as
much about responsiveness and demeanor as objective skills (Moss and Tilly 2001, Kanter
1977). ITS workers are subject to a similar metric in terms of how their work was evaluated.
Resolving a user’s problem was only the baseline for a good service interaction; the user’s affect
had to be positive upon the ITS worker’s departure for the service call to have been a success.
On the issue of servility, Barley (1996) says: “Most computer users implied that computer
technicians should be handy helpers who appeared on a moment’s notice, resolved problems
without delay, and disappeared as quickly as they came” (430). The users Barley encountered
described the ideal technicians as “well-behaved, responsive and complacent” (1996, 430).
Isaac made a similar comment about faculty’s display of irritation related to problems with the
implementation of electronic patient records:
They don’t want to talk to you because they’re like, “Okay, you made us have [electronic
patient records] in the first place, so now you fix it.” Because the way they view
technology and us ... Some of them expect for us to be super, just show up and fix it in a
certain amount of time. And if that doesn’t happen, they’re like, “Why are you here?”
And that’s because they don’t really understand how [problem solving] works. … They
expect you to fix it. They don’t want to talk to you; they just want you to fix it.
Isaac’s description coheres with archetypal understandings of good servants as unobtrusive,
quiet, and quick to appear and disappear in accord with the preferences of the employer (Romero
1992, Rollins 1985). For users seeking help in ways that do not disrupt their pursuit of negative
face, treating ITS workers as “servants,” or low status service workers, instead of peer
professionals, is both effective and ultimately (re)producing of the organizational status system.
34
Conclusion
Ultimately, help-seeking involves more than an individual deciding whether or not to ask
someone for help. Help-seeking is an interactional process in which users perform
organizational status through how they ask for assistance, which may or may not be validated by
the person from whom they are making the request. If faculty engage in negative face saving
and disregard positive face for ITS workers and are not challenged by ITS workers, the
dominance of faculty is (re)produced by their demonstrated ability to forego doing deference in
the interactional ritual of help-seeking. The same goes for when staff apologize for “bothering”
the Help Desk workers when requesting help to which they are entitled. In nearly every instance
I observed and story I heard, the technical efforts of ITS workers were accompanied by patterned
modes of interaction that reproduced the faculty/staff binary as a status hierarchy.
The multi-dimensional examination of help-seeking presented in this essay suggests that
sociologists need to continue examining the way positive face for the self and other may be
abrogated by the negative face desires of help-seekers. In particular, the importance of helpseeking for (re)producing organizational status suggests the importance of support workers not
only for making professional work possible but also as a resource for the substantiation of
organizational status. By examining both situations in which low status individuals seek help
from other low status individuals as well as situations in which high status individuals seek help
from low status individuals, this essay suggests that a lack of concern for face in the pursuit of
requestors’ aims is more frequent than assumed by Goffman and that negative face, especially
when sanctioned by lower status individuals’ lack of challenge to requestors’ lack of concern for
their positive face, helps solidify unequal organizational statuses. As regards workplaces,
scholars have examined extreme forms of unconcern for others’ positive face, like customer
35
bullying of service workers, but given less attention to a failure to engage in politeness rituals or
the way in which instrumental behavior by help-seekers may be interpreted by the person from
whom help is being sought as a threat to positive face. Attention to the alternative interpretation
given by those from whom help is sought about help-seekers behavior conceived by the helpseeker as benign points the importance of attending to the meaning interactants give to acts of
deference (or the lack thereof) outside the momentary flow of interaction.
While it might be tempting to psychologize faculty’s status (re)producing unconcern for
ITS workers’ positive face as merely the result of proximate stressors (e.g., deadlines,
administrative pressures) or quirks in temperament (e.g., being driven, forthrightness), these
individual-level explanations are insufficient to explain the clear patterning by status of users’
acts of face-saving and deference. As Hochschild’s (1979) work on feeling rules shows,
emotional expression is not unmediated by social expectations; it is structured by cultural
expectations of who is allowed to feel what and when. Research has documented how
expressions of anger in the workplace are stratified by status and gender. For example, women
express more happiness and less anger than men (Sloan 2012) and low status men express their
anger more than low status women (Domagalski and Steelman 2007). Similarly, the tenor of
help-seeking interactions between ITS workers and users cannot be chalked up to differences in
personality or temperament between those who become academics and those who work as staff.
Instead, such interactions must been seen as part of the mundane processes through which status
is (re)produced in hierarchical organizations.
36
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