Prior sections have addressed how practical forces in day-to-day managerial work can steer the course of professionalisation for interpreters and redefine the realities of professionalism in the neoliberal climate. While Insight managers have enacted different types of institutional work to resist the institutional change, the findings herein suggest that certain organisational level strategies have yet to translate into or even complicate the everyday practice of interpreting. Some work processes between agencies (including Insight) and interpreters remain rather problematic, preventing the latter from pursuing the ideal of “free agenteers” (Barley and Kunda 2004, p.46) and resulting in a reproduction of contingent labour. The rest of this chapter will therefore shift the focus from Insight as the central site of PSI professionalisation to the working lives of freelance interpreters and theorise their unique occupational identity.
8.5.1 Marginalised Labour and the Managed Profession
Insight has adopted different strategies to enhance the sense of organisational belonging from interpreters (see 4.3.3), including providing psychological, emotional and intellectual support for their work, as well as making Insight the home and team base for freelancers. It can be argued that their “non-agency” approach to interpreters greatly
‘humanises’ the way their work is organised. Interpreters do not normally earn the attention of agencies (either because they are not motivated or lack of expertise). Their social and collegial needs are largely unmet owing to the fragmented nature of the work.
It thus widens the communicative gaps between individual interpreters and agencies,
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which is bound to deepen the incompatible complexity in job allocation. However, the overall situation is less optimistic, as most of the contracted agencies do not have a human resources management mechanism in place. Driven by profits and convenience, a common practice is to simply recruit people who can speak two languages to varying degrees of competency without actually checking their qualifications. The disorganised entry arrangements produce knock-on effects on the booking management. Without an in-depth understanding of either the person being ‘matched’ or the work itself, agencies on the whole are still responding to the job demands in a rather shallow fashion.
In their day-to-day work, interpreters face similar working conditions to workers who are typically involved in precarious employment elsewhere (e.g. homecare workers). These factors include limited access to work, diminished freedom to refuse inappropriate tasks and ineffective communications (Quinlan and Bohle 2004). This leads to at least two major consequences. Firstly, the procedural knowledge produced in the process of doing interpreting jobs cannot be properly circulated and codified. The “network of practice”
(Barley and Kunda 2004, p.271) that serves as the primary channel of information exchange for itinerant workers is interrupted because major agencies are not supportive of this matter. Secondly, interpreters hold a sense of distrust toward agencies, which are thought to control a pool of jobs but do not necessarily know how to allocate them effectively and efficiently. Interpreters’ suspicion and fear of ‘losing the job’ is thus likely to strain their occupational limits and concurrently intensify their anxiety and estrangement at work. The situation is worsened by dominant agencies operating under non-expert management with an inadequate understanding of the work tasks—a common source of disorder for contingent employment relationships (Kunda et al. 2002).
Subsequently, Insight’s institutional work, which is characterised by vetting and support, greatly eases the ergonomic tensions that confuse interpreters in addition to the challenges presented by the technical delivery of actual services (Dong and Turner, forthcoming).
Furthermore, this thesis suggests that the lack of industry consensus on what and how much information should be shared prior to work poses various ergonomic challenges to interpreters. While this appears to be beyond the direct control of agencies, the quality of the information they co-produce with the client organisations shapes the professional efficacy of interpreters’ work. The absence of pre-assignment details prevents interpreters from conducting a full assessment of risks; additionally, it is unfeasible to predict the physical, cognitive and emotional difficulties arising from the varieties of work settings, be they hospitals, prisons or private homes. The sparse infrastructure for reporting
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protection failures and managing interpreters’ safety is reflective of the research on broader categories of agency workers and the precarious nature of their work (discussed in 2.2.4). It is apparent that interpreters have limited experience of formal and informal rules governing occupational safety issues on site. The presence of incompetent agencies separates channels of information and results in a more fragmented work process. This thesis thus contributes to the debate by documenting another vulnerable occupational group—public service interpreters, who work so closely with the service providers on the ground but are so isolated from the decision making behind the scenes. Surrounded by agencies’ hyper market-oriented rhetoric, constructive suggestions based on the actual work experiences of interpreters that directly impact the work process design at the policy level are relatively non-existent. In the observations from this study, it is apparent that Insight’s consultancy capacity benefits wider groups of interpreters. Certain problematic procedures (e.g. disregarding “patient’s age or Date of Birth”, Figure 5.2) that have been employed for years are brought to light owing to their collaborative working strategy with the stakeholders.
Previous research also reported that agency workers suffer from a number of health and safety hazards at work such as mental stress, volatile work pace, irregular working hours, low pay, problematic job locations and workplace disorganisation (Underhill and Quinlan 2011; Quinlan 2015). The findings confirm the presence of these factors in PSI service provision and identify issues that have not been discussed explicitly, including interpreters’ conflicting identities and agencies’ rule-based interpretation of ethics. The former creates a dilemma: to what extent should interpreters follow the behavioural rules set by agencies? Quite ostensibly, the trend of replacing individual judgement with the normalisation of good practice through devising behavioural protocols shows that the foundation of historical professional relationship—trust and respect—is fading away.
One thing is for sure: their self-employed status is overshadowed by the power of agencies, so much so that they no longer treat agencies as their clients (Ozolins 2007; Dong and Napier 2016). In the example of “badge wearing” (4.4.3), interpreters abide by the rules of “wearing badges” as if they were employed by Insight and required to represent their employers. Unwittingly or not, this can arguably be a symbol of their declining independent status as solo practitioners and an endorsement of their amplifying organisational identities. Worse still, this is done at the expenses of exposing their names to the potentially threatening clients.
The problem of staying in an unsafe environment during a home visit assignment is also
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serious (4.4.2). In order to keep their role neutral, interpreters have to think of the inhibitory rules of staying within the host’s property despite the potential risk in the surrounding community. Such practices show that workplace disorganisation and poor procedural oversight (including inadequate training) increase the safety risks for interpreters working in unfamiliar premises not purpose-built as workplaces (Quinlan et al. 2015). This also results in a restrictive practice that circumscribes professional autonomy through standardisation. Imposing black-and-white behavioural rules does not help to relieve interpreters’ decisional-making pressures at work. On the contrary, a de-contextualising approach limits interpreter’s cognitive ability to think analytically and cope with the multifaceted challenges— the core constituent of any knowledge-based profession. Prior studies have critically evaluated the passive, oversimplified understanding of interpreting ethics in practice (Tate and Turner 1997; Dean 2015). This thesis adds to the debate by arguing that this is in part driven by the managerial zeal to standardise work procedures and tighten control over professionals’ discretions.
Organisational professionalism, as argued by Evetts, included “rational-legal forms of authority” and resorts to “externalized forms of regulation and … performance review”
(2013, p.787). Bearing in mind that the reason why Insight has drafted this rule is that it received a complaint from health visitors. It can be therefore argued that the professional work of interpreters is increasingly subjected to the instruments of audit and monitoring.
This inevitably causes a dimunition of interpreters’ margin of manoeuvre and gives them less room to adjust their work activities according to personal conditions such as fatigue, anxiety or fear of the consequences of breaching the code of employment.
8.5.2 The Practice of Blue-Collar Professionalism
Throughout this thesis, the argument about why the functions and structures of Insight can advance the professional project of PSI cannot be made more explicit. The premise, however, has been that the organisation is managed by interpreters themselves (managers with interpreting expertise). Any front that Insight could make progress on indicates a possibility that other substandard agencies could make it worse, with the conflicts between the professional and organisational identity being one of the most challenging issues. In Steve’s case (see 4.3.3), it is apparent that interpreters’ occupational discretion has been phenomenally appropriated by some agencies. Interpreters are prohibited from taking any action that might make the agency ‘look bad’, even if dismissing a certain issue will undermine one’s professionalism and the course of justice. Associating the consequence that Steve is “no longer used by this major agency”[B-Int] with the many occasions where interpreters feel hesitant about declining jobs or not getting paid on time,