Phil Taylor
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3609199 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Phil Taylor |
| NOMBRES | Phil |
| APELLIDO | Taylor |
| FIRMA | TAYLOR P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8842-5350 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 683 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1946 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Automation and the future of work
Recent years have seen enormous attention paid to automation and its potential implications for the future of work. This study rejects unhelpful speculation and, instead, poses the question ‘what is shaping automation and its predicted effects?’ In contrast to the technological determinism framing much of the current debate, this study utilises the social shaping of technology (SST) approach, a theoretically informed body of research largely over…
Union Equality Structures and the Challenge of Democratic Legitimacy
This article examines two commonly adopted trade union strategies to increase the representation of under-represented groups - first, reserved seats on union decision-making bodies and second, self-organisation, involving separate structures. It does so through the case of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), whose equality reforms were considered remarkable within the union movement and fire service due to the union's small size and highly male-domina…
‘The petri dish and Russian roulette’
This article analyses the dynamic interaction of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, and its epidemiological characteristics, with an expansive conception of the contact centre labour process, integrating the contact centres’ socially-constructed built environment with distinctive qualities of the social organisation of work. Based on an online survey conducted in April–May 2020 of 2,226 call handlers in, largely, the telecoms…
Class Reimagined? Intersectionality and Industrial Action - the British Airways Dispute of 2009-2011
This article explores the inter-relationship of gender, sexuality, race and class among cabin crew, members of trade union BASSA, in the British Airways dispute of 2009-2011. It evaluates the utility of intersectional analysis in the context of industrial action, investigating the ways crew mobilised intersectional identities and class interests. In their narratives, crew evoked the 1984-1985 miners' strike, but rejected a version of class and mi…
As a Sort of Blanket Term”
A band aid on a gaping wound
The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, reviewed by
The Only Way is Essex
This contribution to On the Front Line records a dialogue between two female Fire Brigades Union (FBU) representatives in the Essex Emergency Control Room, who led industrial action over the imposition of a shift system that stretched their work-life balance to breaking point and constrained their ability to work full-time. Their testimony reveals how male members were mobilised in the interests of predominantly female control staff. Kate and Lyn…
Putting Labour in its Place
Cabin crew collectivism
The protracted dispute (2009-11) between British Airways and BASSA (British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association) was notable for the strength of collective action by cabin crew. In-depth interviews reveal collectivism rooted in the labour process and highlight the key agency of BASSA in effectively articulating worker interests. This data emphasizes crews' relative autonomy, sustained by unionate on-board Cabin Service Directors who hav…
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose?'—researching and theorising the ‘new’ new technologies
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose?'-researching and theorising the 'new' new technologies
From boom to where?’
This article locates Indian business process outsourcing ( BPO ) within the global supply chains of business services delivery and an international division of service labour. It acknowledges the BPO market's essential dependence on demand from lead firms in the U nited S tates and U nited K ingdom. Drawing on a conceptual synthesis of the Global Commodity Chain, Global Value Chain and Global Production Network frameworks, the article examines th…
They can't be the buffer any longer
This article reasserts the value of the examination of class relations. It does so via a case study of tax-processing sites within HM Revenue and Customs, focusing on the changes wrought by the alterations to labour and supervisory processes implemented under the banner of 'lean production'. It concentrates on the transformation of front-line managers, as their tasks moved from those that required tax knowledge and team support to those that narr…
Taxing Times
The prevailing economic and budgetary climate is intensifying the search for methods and practices aimed at generating efficiencies in public sector provision. This paper investigates the increasingly popular bundle of techniques operating under the generic descriptor of lean , which promises to improve operational quality processes while simultaneously reducing cost. It offers a critical appraisal of lean as a fashionable component of public sec…
Stressed out of my box
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions - notably stress - and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be 'safe'. This study's locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty…
All they lack is a chain’
The adaptation of lean techniques in public services is viewed as an innovative managerialist response to government demands for more efficient services amidst large reductions in public spending. This paper explores workers' experiences of the impact of lean on work organisation and control and provides new insights into developments within contemporary back office clerical work
Beneath the glass ceiling
Although the call centre is much researched, the literature on gender remains surprisingly undeveloped given the importance of this setting for women’s employment. This study of role segmentation in four call centres demonstrates women’s disproportionate representation in more routinized mass production roles, as opposed to higher status or managerial grades. It also analyses three explanations – human capital, domestic status and supervisor care…
Gender, choice and constraint in call centre employment
This paper examines the genderised experience of employment in call centres. While existing studies have acknowledged structural and agential constraints on women in the workplace, this paper goes further by illustrating the gendered nature of career choice and progression in a context which, in certain respects, appears to have benefitted women's desires for advancement. Drawing on quantitative and in-depth qualitative data from four Scottish ca…
E-specials editorial and call for tenders
Indian call centres and business process outsourcing
In this exploratory study of union formation in the Indian call centre/business process outsourcing sector, the authors draw upon evidence from the first detailed survey of members of the recently formed UNITES, and from extensive interviews. This paper engages with mobilisation theory and analyses of trade union formation
Before the disaster
On 11 May 2004, nine workers were killed and forty injured in an explosion which devastated the Grovepark Mills plant in Glasgow of ICL Plastics Ltd.This was the worst health and safety incident in Scotland since Piper Alpha in 1988 and the most serious on the Scottish mainland since the 1960s.The narrative presented is that of Laurence Connelly, a production worker with 14 years' service, who left the company only weeks before the disaster. Gene…
On the front line
Work, Employment and Society is inviting contributions to a new section of the journal entitled 'On the Front Line'. Submissions should ordinarily consist of first person narratives to a maximum of 4000 words and include a short explanation that situates the narrative in its most appropriate contexts, whether organizational, sectoral or geographical, and briefly indicates how it engages with relevant sociological debates or developments. Submissi…
United by a Common Language? Trade Union Responses in the UK and India to Call Centre Offshoring
The offshoring of business processes from the global North to low‐cost countries of the global South has grown spectacularly in the current decade. Self‐evidently, transnational relocation presents considerable challenges for organised labour since it suggests both a ‘race to the bottom’ in respect of pay, conditions and workers' rights and wholesale redundancies in the developed economies. This paper examines the specific case of the migration o…
It was absolute hell
As part of a broader current of critique of the economic and political dynamics of prison privatisation - a critique that initially emanated from the USA - this paper focuses on Scotland and on research carried out at its then only private penal institution, HMP Kilmarnock. The authors dismantle the government's case for extending prison privatisation by drilling deep into the experience of Kilmarnock and demonstrating the deleterious effects of …
The Meaning of Work in the New Economy
This book analyzes the multiple levels of meaning which people attach to work today, and the role of work in people's lives. By looking at call centres and software development, the book evaluates som
Reflections on the call centre — a reply to Glucksmann
The point of departure is the welcome contribution to Work, Employment and Society by Miriam Glucksmann (2004) to the call centre debate. The principal contention of Call Configurations is that the existing literature has provided only limited conceptualization. For, she argues, despite the 'wealth of empirical data detailing the inner workings of call centres, managerial strategies and labour process ... and their conditions of employment', prov…
India calling to the far away towns
In recent years prominent companies have migrated call centre services to India provoking much-publicized fears for the future of UK employment. This article challenges the widely-held assumption that offshoring voice services is a seamless undertaking, principally through an investigation of the Indian call centre labour process. This enquiry is informed initially by an analysis of the political-economic factors driving offshoring and shaping th…
Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre
This article presents a thoroughgoing critique of Fernie and Metcalf’s perspective, that the call centre is characterised by the operation of an ‘electronic panopticon’ in which supervisory power has been ‘rendered perfect’. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre the authors analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance
Work Organization, Control and the Experience of Work in Call Centres
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 w…
Subterranean Worksick Blues
This article engages in debates stimulated by previous work published in Organization Studies, and more widely, on the purpose and effects of workers' humour and joking practices. The authors emphasize the subversive character of humour in the workplace, rejecting perspectives which see humour as inevitably contributing to organizational harmony. Drawing on methodologies, including ethnography, which permitted the authors to penetrate the organiz…
All they lack is a chain’
The adaptation of lean techniques in public services is viewed as an innovative managerialist response to government demands for more efficient services amidst large reductions in public spending. This paper explores workers' experiences of the impact of lean on work organisation and control and provides new insights into developments within contemporary back office clerical work
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose?'—researching and theorising the ‘new’ new technologies
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose?'-researching and theorising the 'new' new technologies
On the front line
Work, Employment and Society is inviting contributions to a new section of the journal entitled 'On the Front Line'. Submissions should ordinarily consist of first person narratives to a maximum of 4000 words and include a short explanation that situates the narrative in its most appropriate contexts, whether organizational, sectoral or geographical, and briefly indicates how it engages with relevant sociological debates or developments. Submissi…
Stressed out of my box
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions - notably stress - and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be 'safe'. This study's locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty…
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
This paper locates the emergence of call centres within the broader political economy. We demonstrate how British Gas responded to privatisation, restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by radically changing work organisation. Using documentary evidence and oral testimonies, we show how the call centre was pivotal to tightening control over the labour process, to intensifying work and transforming the experience of work
A Unique Working Environment
This article fills an important gap in our knowledge of call centres by focusing specifically on occupational ill-health. We document the recent emergence of health and safety concerns, assess the responses of employers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), critique the existing regulatory framework and present a holistic diagnostic model of occupationally induced ill-health. This model is utilized to investigate quantitative and qualitative…
Automation and the future of work
Recent years have seen enormous attention paid to automation and its potential implications for the future of work. This study rejects unhelpful speculation and, instead, poses the question ‘what is shaping automation and its predicted effects?’ In contrast to the technological determinism framing much of the current debate, this study utilises the social shaping of technology (SST) approach, a theoretically informed body of research largely over…
Cabin crew collectivism
The protracted dispute (2009-11) between British Airways and BASSA (British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association) was notable for the strength of collective action by cabin crew. In-depth interviews reveal collectivism rooted in the labour process and highlight the key agency of BASSA in effectively articulating worker interests. This data emphasizes crews' relative autonomy, sustained by unionate on-board Cabin Service Directors who hav…
Beneath the glass ceiling
Although the call centre is much researched, the literature on gender remains surprisingly undeveloped given the importance of this setting for women’s employment. This study of role segmentation in four call centres demonstrates women’s disproportionate representation in more routinized mass production roles, as opposed to higher status or managerial grades. It also analyses three explanations – human capital, domestic status and supervisor care…
As a Sort of Blanket Term”
Independently verified reductionism
The Scottish Parliament recently considered proposals, which, if implemented, would lead to a considerable expansion of prison privatization. Both the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Executive used what they claimed to be an independently verified cost saving of £700 million as the major justification for these proposals. The way this figure was constructed and used provides an example of the increasing tendency on the part of government…
United by a Common Language? Trade Union Responses in the UK and India to Call Centre Offshoring
The offshoring of business processes from the global North to low‐cost countries of the global South has grown spectacularly in the current decade. Self‐evidently, transnational relocation presents considerable challenges for organised labour since it suggests both a ‘race to the bottom’ in respect of pay, conditions and workers' rights and wholesale redundancies in the developed economies. This paper examines the specific case of the migration o…
Reflections on the call centre — a reply to Glucksmann
The point of departure is the welcome contribution to Work, Employment and Society by Miriam Glucksmann (2004) to the call centre debate. The principal contention of Call Configurations is that the existing literature has provided only limited conceptualization. For, she argues, despite the 'wealth of empirical data detailing the inner workings of call centres, managerial strategies and labour process ... and their conditions of employment', prov…
Indian call centres and business process outsourcing
In this exploratory study of union formation in the Indian call centre/business process outsourcing sector, the authors draw upon evidence from the first detailed survey of members of the recently formed UNITES, and from extensive interviews. This paper engages with mobilisation theory and analyses of trade union formation
They can't be the buffer any longer
This article reasserts the value of the examination of class relations. It does so via a case study of tax-processing sites within HM Revenue and Customs, focusing on the changes wrought by the alterations to labour and supervisory processes implemented under the banner of 'lean production'. It concentrates on the transformation of front-line managers, as their tasks moved from those that required tax knowledge and team support to those that narr…
Before the disaster
On 11 May 2004, nine workers were killed and forty injured in an explosion which devastated the Grovepark Mills plant in Glasgow of ICL Plastics Ltd.This was the worst health and safety incident in Scotland since Piper Alpha in 1988 and the most serious on the Scottish mainland since the 1960s.The narrative presented is that of Laurence Connelly, a production worker with 14 years' service, who left the company only weeks before the disaster. Gene…
Sick and Tired? Working in the Modern Office
It was absolute hell
As part of a broader current of critique of the economic and political dynamics of prison privatisation - a critique that initially emanated from the USA - this paper focuses on Scotland and on research carried out at its then only private penal institution, HMP Kilmarnock. The authors dismantle the government's case for extending prison privatisation by drilling deep into the experience of Kilmarnock and demonstrating the deleterious effects of …
Not For Lipstick And Lager’
It is almost impossible to juggle classes, lectures and studying and work together with all the things that keep you sane boyfriends, friends. Working 20 hours a week does not, for me, mean more money for lipstick and lager, but is essential for paying rent bills etc. I'll still leave University £6,500 in debt. This hectic timetable is draining on time and on physical and emotional energy and leaves you with no leeway and no time to cope with per…
Class Reimagined? Intersectionality and Industrial Action - the British Airways Dispute of 2009-2011
This article explores the inter-relationship of gender, sexuality, race and class among cabin crew, members of trade union BASSA, in the British Airways dispute of 2009-2011. It evaluates the utility of intersectional analysis in the context of industrial action, investigating the ways crew mobilised intersectional identities and class interests. In their narratives, crew evoked the 1984-1985 miners' strike, but rejected a version of class and mi…
The Only Way is Essex
This contribution to On the Front Line records a dialogue between two female Fire Brigades Union (FBU) representatives in the Essex Emergency Control Room, who led industrial action over the imposition of a shift system that stretched their work-life balance to breaking point and constrained their ability to work full-time. Their testimony reveals how male members were mobilised in the interests of predominantly female control staff. Kate and Lyn…
The New Law of Education
Labour Time, Work Measurement and the Commensuration of Labour
Managerial work study directed at the intensification of labour character-ises specifically capitalist production. According to the British Institute of Management standard textbook, 'work study ' consists of procedures for 'method study ' and 'work measurement ' which "can be used in any situ-ation where human work is performed " (Currie, 1977, p. 48). Do such procedures provide the basis for a socialist organisation of production? Th That is, d…
The World Bank & Africa
(1992). The World Bank & Africa: a case of mistaken identity. Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 19, No. 54, pp. 92-96
Sick and Tired? Working in the Modern Office
Sick and Tired? - Working in the Modern Office
Through the Looking Glass
‘An assembly line in the head’
To date, academic studies of the call centre ‘sector’ remain limited in scope. Here the authors attempt to remedy that omission by analysing the recent and spectacular growth of call centres in the UK, drawing on a wide variety of sources, including two extensive surveys of developments in Scotland during 1997
Not For Lipstick And Lager’
It is almost impossible to juggle classes, lectures and studying and work together with all the things that keep you sane boyfriends, friends. Working 20 hours a week does not, for me, mean more money for lipstick and lager, but is essential for paying rent bills etc. I'll still leave University £6,500 in debt. This hectic timetable is draining on time and on physical and emotional energy and leaves you with no leeway and no time to cope with per…
Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre
This article presents a thoroughgoing critique of Fernie and Metcalf’s perspective, that the call centre is characterised by the operation of an ‘electronic panopticon’ in which supervisory power has been ‘rendered perfect’. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre the authors analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance
Rising from the Ashes? Labor in the Age of ‘Global’ Capitalism Edited by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peter Meiksins and Michael Yates New York
Rising from the Ashes? labor in the Age of ‘Global’ Capitalism
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Seizing the Time? Union recruitment Potential in Scottish Call Centres
Examines the potential of Trade Union membership in Scottish call centres
Work Organization, Control and the Experience of Work in Call Centres
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 w…
Subterranean Worksick Blues
This article engages in debates stimulated by previous work published in Organization Studies, and more widely, on the purpose and effects of workers' humour and joking practices. The authors emphasize the subversive character of humour in the workplace, rejecting perspectives which see humour as inevitably contributing to organizational harmony. Drawing on methodologies, including ethnography, which permitted the authors to penetrate the organiz…
A Unique Working Environment
This article fills an important gap in our knowledge of call centres by focusing specifically on occupational ill-health. We document the recent emergence of health and safety concerns, assess the responses of employers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), critique the existing regulatory framework and present a holistic diagnostic model of occupationally induced ill-health. This model is utilized to investigate quantitative and qualitative…
Independently verified reductionism
The Scottish Parliament recently considered proposals, which, if implemented, would lead to a considerable expansion of prison privatization. Both the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Executive used what they claimed to be an independently verified cost saving of £700 million as the major justification for these proposals. The way this figure was constructed and used provides an example of the increasing tendency on the part of government…
India calling to the far away towns
In recent years prominent companies have migrated call centre services to India provoking much-publicized fears for the future of UK employment. This article challenges the widely-held assumption that offshoring voice services is a seamless undertaking, principally through an investigation of the Indian call centre labour process. This enquiry is informed initially by an analysis of the political-economic factors driving offshoring and shaping th…
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
This paper locates the emergence of call centres within the broader political economy. We demonstrate how British Gas responded to privatisation, restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by radically changing work organisation. Using documentary evidence and oral testimonies, we show how the call centre was pivotal to tightening control over the labour process, to intensifying work and transforming the experience of work
The Meaning of Work in the New Economy
This book analyzes the multiple levels of meaning which people attach to work today, and the role of work in people's lives. By looking at call centres and software development, the book evaluates som
Reflections on the call centre — a reply to Glucksmann
The point of departure is the welcome contribution to Work, Employment and Society by Miriam Glucksmann (2004) to the call centre debate. The principal contention of Call Configurations is that the existing literature has provided only limited conceptualization. For, she argues, despite the 'wealth of empirical data detailing the inner workings of call centres, managerial strategies and labour process ... and their conditions of employment', prov…
United by a Common Language? Trade Union Responses in the UK and India to Call Centre Offshoring
The offshoring of business processes from the global North to low‐cost countries of the global South has grown spectacularly in the current decade. Self‐evidently, transnational relocation presents considerable challenges for organised labour since it suggests both a ‘race to the bottom’ in respect of pay, conditions and workers' rights and wholesale redundancies in the developed economies. This paper examines the specific case of the migration o…
It was absolute hell
As part of a broader current of critique of the economic and political dynamics of prison privatisation - a critique that initially emanated from the USA - this paper focuses on Scotland and on research carried out at its then only private penal institution, HMP Kilmarnock. The authors dismantle the government's case for extending prison privatisation by drilling deep into the experience of Kilmarnock and demonstrating the deleterious effects of …
Indian call centres and business process outsourcing
In this exploratory study of union formation in the Indian call centre/business process outsourcing sector, the authors draw upon evidence from the first detailed survey of members of the recently formed UNITES, and from extensive interviews. This paper engages with mobilisation theory and analyses of trade union formation
Before the disaster
On 11 May 2004, nine workers were killed and forty injured in an explosion which devastated the Grovepark Mills plant in Glasgow of ICL Plastics Ltd.This was the worst health and safety incident in Scotland since Piper Alpha in 1988 and the most serious on the Scottish mainland since the 1960s.The narrative presented is that of Laurence Connelly, a production worker with 14 years' service, who left the company only weeks before the disaster. Gene…
On the front line
Work, Employment and Society is inviting contributions to a new section of the journal entitled 'On the Front Line'. Submissions should ordinarily consist of first person narratives to a maximum of 4000 words and include a short explanation that situates the narrative in its most appropriate contexts, whether organizational, sectoral or geographical, and briefly indicates how it engages with relevant sociological debates or developments. Submissi…
Political science (28 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Sociology (24 obras) · Economics (22 obras) · Engineering (20 obras) · Employment and Welfare Studies (18 obras) · Emotional Labor in Professions (17 obras) · Business (16 obras) · Labor Movements and Unions (16 obras) · Law (14 obras)