Enabling ‘managed activism’: the adoption of call centres in Australian,British and US trade unions

This article examines how trade unions in different country settings have utilised call centre technologies. Rather than viewing union call centres as simply a means of service delivery, our research suggests they can also enable a more strategic approach to workplace organising. We explore the implications of union call centres for debates on servicing and organising models of trade unionism.     

Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management

The paper locates the rise of the call centre within the context of the development of Taylorist methods and technological change in office work in general. Managerial utilisation of targets to impose and measure employees' quantitative and qualitative performance is analysed in four case–study organisations. The paper concludes that call centre work reflects a pardigmic re–configuration of customer servicing operations, and that the continuing application of Taylorist methods appears likely.     

Voices from higher up the ladder: exploring the team leader role in call centres

This paper focuses on an under‐researched employee category in the call centre literature—the team leader. The paper, drawing on data from nine Australian call centres, finds that the team leader role is integral to the effectiveness of call centres, yet it is a role that consists of considerable complexity and contradictions. The research demonstrates the critical role performed by team leaders: coach, mentor, trainer, performance evaluator, communicator and supervisor. It also shows team leaders as being far more positive about many of the features of the call centre work environment compared with those on the front line. However, there does appear to be a need for greater acknowledgement of their challenging role, the contradictions that are inherent in the job and the need, in many cases, for increased support being made available to assist.     

Online boundary work tactics: an affordance perspective

Studies of work/life balance have focussed on offline settings, and even though technology is considered as a boundary‐influencing feature, social media have not been the focus. Social technologies challenge the relationship between work and private life in new ways, due to their identified affordances: visibility, persistence, association and editability (Treem and Leonardi, 2012). In this paper, we present the results of a study of social media use (Facebook and Twitter) by employees of non‐governmental organisations (NGOs), and show how, through their affordances, these technologies influence the relationship and boundaries between work and non‐work, increasing visibility and reducing individual privacy. Consequently, we observe boundary work tactics that aim to protect private life from both public and professional scrutiny, in prohibitive, reactive or active ways. Our results call for organisations to develop explicit policies or guidelines for social media use, in both their own interests and those of their employees.     

'You gotta lie to it': software applications and the management of technological change in a call centre

This paper advances an extended material analysis to the study of technological change in a call centre. It shows how such an analysis is particularly apropos for understanding the distance that often separates managerial intentions in introducing a new technology from the outcomes associated with how workers utilise it.     

Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women's employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women's 'feminine' social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised.     

Should telecoms liberalisation stop at call termination?

In recent years concerns about the degree of competition in the provision of telecommunications call termination services have emerged. While the general consensus is that call origination is becoming more and more competitive, regulatory attention to call termination has widened in scope beyond the incumbent public telephone operators, leading to direct regulation of mobile termination charges in some countries and a debate on whether regulation should also be extended to “non-dominant” networks. This paper assesses whether these concerns are justified, extending the analysis to review the economic literature on reciprocal setting of termination charges between network operators. We conclude that while ex ante regulation of call termination simplifies the work of regulators it does not appear justifiable in all circumstances.     

Making and maintaining the subject in call centre work

This article reports an ethnographic study of call centre work. Analytics are applied enabling study of relations between power and subjectivity. Findings indicate that organisational 'truth' claims about workers are produced in a constellation of architectural, technological and managerial apparatuses. Workers orient to and reify the power of these claims, even when resisting.     

Services innovation and the transformation of work: the case of UK telecommunications

Current transformations in technologies and industrial structure of UK telecommunications have important implications for skills and work organisation. This is examined in different divisions of a large UK telecommunications firm: call centres, customer service centres, engineering sectors and the R&D department. The effect of these transformations on the development of firm competences is discussed.     

'We have the values': customers, control and corporate ideology in call centre operations

This article analyses the use of normative control through recruitment, work organisation, social events, and bargaining processes within two Australian telecommunication call centres. Rather than arguing that such control reduced employees to 'self-disciplining subjects', it suggests that these control mechanisms embodied significant levels of managerial coercion and therefore attracted varying levels of resistance.     

Individual customers' use and integration of resources: Empirical findings and organizational implications in the context of value co-creation

This article addresses the call for empirical work to contribute to the ongoing critique of service-dominant (S-D) logic, and for an assessment of its potential reach to practitioners. It examines the appropriateness of a model of the resource-based view of consumers in an organizational context — the British Library (BL) — and concludes that the model can be adapted to include individual customers with varying motivations (personal/business) for using the BL's services. A detailed analysis of individual customer's operant resources (enabled through access to 565 messages posted to a BL user support forum) provided a different lens through which the organization could consider strategies to support value co-creation. The outcomes, from a collaborative research process, with executives and senior managers of BL, suggest that a sub-division of customer operant resources into physical, cultural and social has empirical support and managerial relevance, and that a focus on individual customer resources can provide insights into how to manage co-creation of value.     

Gender matters in the global outsourcing of service work

This paper provides a gendered analysis of the outsourcing of service work to developing economies taking, as illustration, call centres, shared service centres and the general ICT sector. The paper challenges the suggestion that changes in global capitalism, facilitated by ICT-enabled employment, offer new opportunities that benefit women, and suggests a degree of caution is needed before assuming a reduction of gender inequalities.     

Collaboration,Co‐operation or Collusion? Contrasting Employee Responses to Managerial Control in Three Call Centres

This article draws on ethnographic studies of three call centres in a single, medium‐sized insurance company to explore how employees responded differently to similar techniques of managerial control. Considering recent discussions of compromise in the workplace, we identify a response to control that sits between implacable resistance and supine acquiescence. We style this collusion and distinguish it from other states of compromise, such as collaboration and co‐operation. Drawing on the work of Edwards et al., we argue that a dynamic and politically sophisticated collusive compromise can exist between parties whose control and developmental concerns are in conflict. From this position, we extend existing theories of compromise: (a) to accommodate different permutations of control and developmental concerns; and (b) to predict when collaboration, co‐operation and collusion are likely to occur under ostensibly similar conditions of managerial control.     

Making it Personal in a call centre: electronic peer surveillance

This paper analyses a form of electronic surveillance in a call centre that was not automatically performed through or by information and communication technology but required the active involvement of peers to provide feedback on each other's work by using an online reporting tool. Increased surveillance led to a tightening of control over certain aspects of work as advisors modified their call‐handling practices. But surveillance was simultaneously undermined by technical and bureaucratic control linked to existing information systems, which affected the ability and availability of peers to perform monitoring. Electronic peer surveillance was also unable to provide objective information or unobtrusive control as performing and evaluating surveillance became a highly political and contested process. Various forms of resistance arose, which were not always directed at management, but were instead manifest through increased animosity between teams.     

基于SWT的RMI双向推送技术的研究及实现

针对信息推送技术是分布式系统的一个研究方向,分析了基于RMI的分布式多层体系结构,并探讨了利用RMI的调用机制来实现信息的推送。为了实现更美观、实用的桌面应用程序,研究了如何将SWT同RMI结合实现双向推送技术,并使用JavaWebStart技术利用Web服务器对其进行部署、发布和维护,提供了一个从设计、实现、部署与维护的分布式应用程序的解决方案。     

Work–Life Imbalance in Call Centres and Software Development

The paper evaluates the centrality of work to employees in two growing employment sectors, call‐centres and software development. It then examines evidence for extensions of work into household and family life in these two sectors. Extensions are identified as tangible, such as unpaid overtime, or intangible, represented by incursions imported from work, such as exhaustion and stress. The study finds that organizational pressures, combined with lack of work centrality, result in work intruding into non‐work areas of employee lives, though intrusions manifest themselves in different ways according to type of work, levels of worker autonomy and organizational support.     

Why do off‐shored Indian call centre workers want to leave their jobs?

Employee turnover is a major problem in off‐shored Indian call centres. Agents who service Western customers often face hostility and racial abuse because of who they are and where they are located. A substantial part of job‐related training focuses on teaching employees to manage their identity and modify their accent. Based on a sample (n = 211) of Indian call centre workers servicing international customers, we explore these issues and investigate how they affect employee turnover intentions. The study utilises Taylor and Bain's (2005) distinction between factors particular to the Indian context and those more generic to the call centre labour process to better understand the drivers of turnover. We found that a number of distinctive factors including accent modification difficulty, stigma consciousness, racial abuse and perceived favouritism were associated with turnover intentions. The study also revealed that certain job‐related factors related to intentions to leave, including routinisation and poor promotional opportunities.     

The next available agent: work organisation in Indian call centres

We examine the employee perception of work organisation in four large Indian call centres to investigate causes of employee dissatisfaction and turnover. We find that profound mismatch between the offshored labour market and the labour process pose fundamental challenges that may not be susceptible to easy HR fixes.