Call Centres

By John Burgess and Julia Connell (eds)

Special issue of Labour & Industry. Outlines emerging call centre research. The papers are drawn from a conference held at the University of Newcastle in December 2003.

Phil Taylor and Peter Bain look at Call Centre Offshoring to India and ask if this is the revenge of history. They examine claims of inexorable and cataclysmic moves of UK call centres to India and the dynamics of call centre offshoring, using a two year study of firms operating from Scotland as their research base.

Sharif N As-Saber, Peter Holland and Julian Teicher examine Call Centres in India. They have been a significant employment growth area for the past ten years in many countries, and outsourcing has also been a big growth area. Despite it being seen as a modern industry, in many ways traditional work place issues dominate, with the problems of managing employees in routinised jobs often in stressful conditions remaining.

Diane van den Broek looks at Globalising Call Centre Capital: gender, culture and work identity. Corporate restructuring has changed the nature and location of work as well as nations, communities and families. Such restructuring of industrial traditions, based on specific industries and phases of capital mobility, are shaped by and shape spatially identifiable family, class and gender relations and political beliefs. As in other industries, global restructuring of call centre capital to countries like India is not as an abstract process based on undifferentiated labour power, but has quite specific socio-cultural implications.

Putting Call Centres in their Place by Renee Paulet examines the impact of place on the location of call centres, on the nature of the work performed, and the impact of place on the way call centre operations are managed.

Bob Russell asks Are All Call Centres The Same? and provides an assessment of Foucaldian, labour process, and neo-Weberian approaches to call centre employment through a comparative case study analysis. An examination of four call centres suggests a convergence of conditions not only around common technologies but also in respect of shared cultural artefacts.

Keith Townsend's article, when the LOST Found teams: a consideration of teams within the individualised call centre environment examines the team paradox within call centres, to demonstrate that individuals within teams take very different approaches to the importance of teams.

Alison Barnes get down and dirty with her paper Diaries, Dunnies and Discipline resistance and accommodation to monitoring in call centres. She develops the concepts of dignity and self-preservation. Findings from her study of three call centres suggest that, although the technology in use has potentially augmented management's control over the labour process, this development has not gone unchallenged. Employees found ways to manipulate the technology and exploit its weaknesses, thereby gaining a measure of control over what were seen as unfair management practices.

The issue wraps up with Vivienne Hunt's look at Call Centre Work for Women career or stopgap? Her exploratory work with key informants in New Zealand suggests that the call centre work experience provides product or company knowledge and skills, which may assist women to gain promotion to management positions, internally or externally. The New Zealand call centre industry is dominated by smaller centres and government sector call centres. This may explain trends that seem at variance to international literature.

(Labour & Industry; vol. 14, no. 3, April 2004)