Call centres represent a blend of old and new employment features that are only partially grasped by existing theoretical alternatives. Labour process theory suggests that call centres are best depicted as new electronic assembly lines of fragmented, low skill service labour. Second-wave post-industrial theory represents call centres as a significant foray into the information/knowledge economy. On the basis of a case study that combines both survey results and on-site observation, the author argues that the sophisticated information technologies that have captured the awe of other investigators have delivered less than total managerial control. Less frequently studied are the novel cultures of employment management that have accompanied the development of call centres and have incorporated information technology into their functioning. These cultures and employee responses to them represent an important, if under-analysed, aspect of call centre operation.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
ACTUa (n.d.) On the Line: The Future of Australia’s Call Centre Industry.
2.
ACTUb (n.d.) Call Centre Unions Group. Minimum Standards Code For Call Centres.
3.
Appelbaum E (1987) Technology and the Redesign of Work in the Insurance Industry. In: Wright B , Ferree M , Mellow G , Lewis L , Samper M , Asher Ret al. , eds, Women, Work and Technology: Transformations. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press .
4.
Appelbaum E , Batt R (1994) The New American Workplace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press .
5.
Baldamus W (1961) Efficiency and Effort. London: Tavistock Publications .
6.
Baldry C , Bain P , Taylor P (1998) ‘Bright Satanic Offices’: Intensification, Control and Team Taylorism. In: Thompson P , Warhurst C , eds, Workplaces of the Future. London: Macmillan .
7.
Baran B , Teegarden S (1987) Women’s labour in the office of the future: A case study of the insurance industry. In: Beneria L , Stimpson C , eds, Women, Households and the Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press .
8.
Beirne M , Ramsay H , Panteli A (1998) Developments in computing work: Control and contradiction in the software labour process. In: Thompson P , Warhurst C , eds, Workplaces of the Future. London: Macmillan .
9.
Bell D (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books .
10.
Belt V (2000) ‘Call Girls’: Women, Work and the Telephone . Presented at the 18th International Labour Process Conference, University of Strathclyde.
11.
Blauner R (1964) Alienation and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
12.
Braverman H (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press .
13.
Burawoy M (1979) Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
14.
Burawoy M (1985) The Politics of Production. London: Verso .
15.
Callaghan G , Thompson P (2001) Edwards Revisited: Technical Control and Call Centres . Economic and Industrial Democracy22, 13-37 .
16.
Cappelli P , Bassi L , Katz H , Knoke D , Osterman P , Useem M (1997) Change at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
17.
Castells M (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers .
18.
Cohen S , Zysman J (1987) Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy. New York: Basic Books .
19.
Edwards P (1986) Conflict at Work. Oxford: Basil Blackwell .
20.
Edwards P , Hall M , Hyman R , Marginson P , Sisson K , Waddington Jet al (1998) Great Britain: From partial collectivism to neo-liberalism to where? In: Ferner A , Hyman R , eds, Changing Industrial Relations in Europe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers .
21.
Edwards P , Collinson M , Rees Cet al. (1998) The determinants of employee responses to Total Quality Management . Organization Studies19, 449-475 .
22.
Edwards R (1979) Contested Terrain. New York: Basic Books .
23.
Frenkel S , Tam M , Korczynski M , Shire K (1998) Beyond bureaucracy? Work organization in call centres . The International Journal of Human Resource Management9, 957-979 .
24.
Frenkel S , Korczynski M , Shire K and Tam M (1999) On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press .
25.
Friedman A (1977) Industry and Labour. London: Macmillan .
26.
Friedman A (1990) Managerial strategies, activities, techniques and technology. In: Knights D , Willmott H , eds, Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan .
27.
Greenbaum J (1998) The times they are a’changing: Dividing and recombining labour through computer systems. In: Thompson P , Warhurst C , eds, Workplaces of the Future. London: Macmillan .
28.
Hays Personal Services (1998) Salary Survey.
29.
Herzenberg S , Alic J , Wial H (1998) New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press .
30.
Hirschhorn L (1984) Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Post-Industrial Age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press .
31.
Hochschild A (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press .
32.
Jacoby S (1985) Employing Bureaucracy. New York: Columbia University Press .
33.
Jenson J (1989) The talents of women, the skills of men. In: Wood S , ed, The Transformation of Work?London: Unwin Hyman .
34.
Kenney M , Florida R (1993) Beyond Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press .
35.
Kinnie N , Hutchinson S , Purcell J (2000) ‘Fun and surveillance’: the paradox of high commitment management in call centres . International Journal of Human Resource Management11, 967-985 .
36.
Knights D , McCabe D (1998) ‘What happens when the phone goes wild?’: Staff, stress and spaces for escape in a BPR telephone banking work regime . Journal of Management Studies35, 163-194 .
37.
Knights D , Willmott H , eds (1990) Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan .
38.
Korczynski M (2001) The contradictions of service work: Call centre as customer-oriented bureaucracy. In: Sturdy A , Grugulis I , Willmott H , eds, Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment. Basingstroke: Palgrave .
39.
Kraft P (1977) Programmers and Managers: The Routinisation of Computer Programming. New York: Springer Verlag .
40.
Kraft P (1979) The industrialization of computer programming: From programming to ‘software production’. In: Zimbalist A , ed, Case Studies on the Labor Process. New York: Monthly Review Press .
41.
Lazonick W (1990) Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press .
42.
Leidner R (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press .
43.
Littler C (1982) The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies. London: Heinemann .
44.
Littler C (1990) The labour process debate. In: Knights D , Willmott H , eds, Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan .
45.
Livingstone D (1999) The Education-Jobs Gap. Toronto: Garamond Press .
46.
Martin M (1991) ‘Hello Central’: Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press .
47.
Mayo E (1933) The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York: Macmillan .
48.
Menzies H (1996) Whose Brave New World?Toronto: Between the Lines Press .
49.
Meredith H (1999) Sector growing at the speed of sound . Australian Financial Review, 26 October, p 41 .
50.
Meyer S (1981) The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press .
51.
Noble D (1986) Forces of Production. New York: Oxford University Press .
52.
Rinehart J (1978) Contradictions of work-related attitudes and behaviour: An interpretation . Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology15, 1-15 .
53.
Roy D (1952) Quota restriction and goldbricking in a machine shop . The American Journal of Sociology57, 427-442 .
54.
Roy D (1954) Efficiency and the fix: Informal intergroup relations in a piecework shop . The American Journal of Sociology60, 255-266 .
55.
Russell B (1999) More with Less: Work Reorganization in the Canadian Mining Industry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press .
56.
Scott A (1994) Willing Slaves? British Workers under Human Resource Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
57.
Sennett R (1999) The Corrosion of Character. New York: WW Norton .
58.
Sewell G , Wilkinson B (1992) ‘Someone to watch over me’: surveillance, discipline and the just-in-time labour process . Sociology26, 271-290 .
59.
Shaiken H (1984) Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age. New York: Rinehart and Winston .
60.
Shalla V (1997) Technology and the deskilling of work: The case of passenger agents at Air Canada. In: Duffy A , Glenday D , Pupo N , eds, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs: The Transformation of Work in the 21st Century. Toronto: Harcourt Brace and Company .
61.
Taylor P , Bain P (1999) ‘An assembly line in the head’: Work and employee relations in the call centre . Industrial Relations Journal, 30, 101-117 .
62.
Taylor S (1998) Emotional labour and the new workplace. In: Thompson P , Warhurst C , eds, Workplaces of the Future. London: Macmillan .
63.
Trist E , Higgin G , Murray H , Pollock A (1963) Organizational Choice. London: Tavistock Institute .
64.
URCOT (2000) ‘Call Centres: What Kind of Future Workplaces?’ mimeo, RMIT School of Social Sciences and Planning, Melbourne .
65.
White J (1990) Hospital Strike: Women, Unions and Public Sector Conflict. Toronto: Thompson .
66.
Woodward J (1965) Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice. London: Oxford University Press .
67.
Zuboff S (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books .
