Work Organization, Control and the Experience of Work in Call Centres
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2374715 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Phil Taylor (0000-0001-8842-5350, University of Stirling), Gareth Mulvey (0000-0002-9132-1672, University of Strathclyde), Jeff Hyman (Glasgow Caledonian University), Peter Bain (University of Strathclyde) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 133-150 |
| Publication date | 2002-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Work Employment and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-0170 • E-ISSN: 1469-8722 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/09500170222119281 |
| OpenAlex | W2139235674 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 101 |
| References cited | 13 |
Despite the integration of telephone and VDU technologies, call centres are not uniform in terms of work organization. It is suggested that diversity can best be understood by reference to a range of quantitative and qualitative characteristics. Consequently, perspectives that treat all call centres as if they were the same hybrids of customization and routinization are rejected, along with over-optimistic interpretations of labour control over work organization. Empirical evidence from nine 'workflows' in two call centres - an established financial sector organization and a rapidly growing outsourced operation - provide excellent grounds for an examination of similarity and difference. A picture emerges of workflows which are volume-driven and routinized, involving low levels of employee discretion, and, by contrast, those less dominated by quantitative criteria offering higher levels of operator discretion and an emphasis on the quality of customer service. Despite these distinctions, larger numbers of operators report an experience of work which is driven by quantitative imperatives, most manifest in the pervasive implementation of targets. Targets are also used increasingly to assess and mould the quality of the call centre operator's interaction with the customer. Overall, the evidence casts doubt on the optimistic perspective that call centre work, in time, will come to resemble 'knowledge work
Business · Call centre · Control (management · Discretion · Diversity (politics · Epistemology · Knowledge management · Political science · Public relations · Quality (philosophy · Service (business · Sociology · Telecommunications · Work (physics · Workflow · Computer Science · Emotional Labor in Professions · Employment and Welfare Studies · Engineering · Law · Work-Family Balance Challenges · Artificial Intelligence · Marketing
Digital Work, Human Labour, and Development
Fieldwork Overview
Digital Taylorism
Africa’s New Digital Connectivity and Economic Change
Futures of work
Hopes and Realities of the Digital
Resilience, Reworking, and Resistance
Economic Geographies of Digital Work in Africa
Constitutional Amendments
‘The petri dish and Russian roulette’
What Do Unions Do to Work Design? Computer Use, Union Presence, and Tayloristic Jobs in Britain
Cybertariats in the export-oriented service sector
Attracting customers through practising gender in call-centre work
Call centre workers unite! changing forms of organisation and representation in the Portuguese and British Digital Economy
In pursuit of happiness
The Call Centre and its Many Players
As novas realidades do trabalho
Trade Unionism and Social Protest Movements in Portuguese Call Centres
Understanding the Post‐Industrial Assembly Line
Co-creating customer experience through call centre interaction
Human capital at work
Boundary Work
Controlling Service Work
Labour geographies of India’s new service economy
The Multitude and the Kangaroo
The Normativity of Work
Once More With Feeling
Emotional Labour and Skill
Reflections on the call centre — a reply to Glucksmann
Living Labor and Social Labor
Call Centres As Sites of Professional Practice
The construction of control
Making it P ersonal in a call centre
Enabling ‘managed activism’
Gender matters in the global outsourcing of service work
Making and maintaining the subject in call centre work
Gender, choice and constraint in call centre employment
Controlling business? Agency and constraint in call centre working
We are nurses, we are supposed to care for people’
Language as raw material, scripts as tools and conversations as product
Visible moves and invisible bodies
Temporality, space and technology
Monitoring what and how
We can only request what's in our protocol’
Get paid, get out’
Factors influencing absenteeism and intention to leave in a call centre
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
Too emotional to be capable? The changing nature of emotion work in definitions of ‘capable teaching’
That type of thing does give you a boost”
South Africa On-call’
Being yourself ’ in the electronic sweatshop
The subversive craft worker
It’s all in the mix
Variability as a source of stability
Service employees and self-verification
Beneath the glass ceiling
Nursing on the line
Neither presencing nor absencing
Unionising’ the new spaces of the new economy? Alternative labour organising in India’s IT Enabled Services–Business Process Outsourcing industry
Barrieren, Brücken und Balancen
An explanation of cross-national variation in call centre job quality using institutional theory
Subterranean Worksick Blues
The Digital Continent
Shop-floor workers’ responses to quality management initiatives
Call centres and job satisfaction in Italy
Covid-19
Ludic geographies
Gender, technology and jobs
Re-embedding agency at the workplace scale
Vocatives as rationalized politeness
Contradictory Control
When it Pays to Be Friendly
You're Not Going Anywhere
O Telemarketing E O Perfil Sócio-Ocupacional Dos Empregados Em Call Centers
New perspectives on language and gender
Living for the weekend
The Work of Community Gardens
The nature of front-line service work
Work, employment and society through the lens of moral economy
A service union's innovation dilemma
The back office goes global
Identity on the line
Indian call centre workers
Managerial control and workplace regimes
Emotional management in a mass customised call centre
Class and employment
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Public sector trade unionism in the UK
Knowledge and the discourse of labour process transformation
Getting on or getting by
The (mis)representation of customer service
Call configurations
The Crisis of Civil Service Trade Unionism
A Unique Working Environment
The Service Industry, Private-sector Employment and Social Class in Chile
Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Center Work
Bermuda Revisited
Formations, Connections and Divisions of Labour
English and Cantonese in a bilingual call centre in Hong Kong
Gender Equality Through Computerisation
Edwards Revisited
On the Front Line
Beyond bureaucracy? Work organization in call centres
The Managed Heart
‘An assembly line in the head’
Scales for the measurement of some work attitudes and aspects of psychological well‐being
The measurement of well‐being and other aspects of mental health
Employment, technology and industrial relations in the UK clearing banks
Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre
| Unique citing works | 101 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,39 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2025 (23) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 101 |