Chris Baldry

Getting on or getting by? Employee flexibility and coping strategies for home and work

Recent speculation about the impact on family life of contemporary patterns of work has prompted considerable and concerted social research activity in which the workplace and household have figured prominently. This article extends these studies to examine employment in prototypical new sectors of the economy, namely call centres and software, which at the time of the study were enjoying spectacular growth. Employees in both sectors reported spillover from work to home, though the extent, nature and intensity of spillover varied significantly between the sectors. The study identified the different and hitherto unexplored ways in which employees in these different sectors attempt to cope with complex articulations between home and work, and the varying resources which they bring to bear in doing so. Contemporary work settings indicate little change from more established sectors in that gender, status and labour market strength are important factors in offering work boundary discretion.

‘Bright Satanic Offices’: Intensification, Control and Team Taylorism

From the outside, the contemporary office certainly looks good: curtain walling of smoked or reflective glass, a marble-floored entrance area, perhaps an atrium with luxuriant plants (some of them real). It is a built environment clearly designed to impress the passer-by or the visiting client with the suggestion of corporate or organisational prestige and modernity. The office worker, however, sees none of this. For her it is the place where, day after day, she endlessly repeats a series of familiar routines as she handles the mortgage application, the personal loan, the insurance premium, the welfare benefit, or the customer complaint. To do this she will use the telephone, the keyboard and the computer display screen, with few breaks during the working day. Her work is rigidly structured around a sequence of tasks dictated by the software, and to tight time and performance schedules in which she is answerable to her team leader or supervisor. The office space in which this work is done, and which she shares with maybe forty or even a hundred other workers, is likely to be open-plan and will deliver what somebody has decided are acceptable or optimum levels of fresh air, working temperature and lighting. If she experiences these environmental conditions as unpleasant, or if they adversely affect her work, there is no respite as, by design, the windows are sealed and unopenable and she is forbidden by management to bring in a fan or portable heater. In this sealed environment she may experience repeated coughs, stuffiness, sore throat and headache to compound the stresses of the job. For this worker, the office can be hell.

'A unique working environment': health, sickness and absence management in UK call centres

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 data from a case study in the privatized utility sector, where the relative contributions to employee sickness and ill-health from factors relating to ergonomics, the built environment and work organization are evaluated. The principal conclusions are that the distinctive character of call-handling is the major cause of occupational ill-health and that effective remedial action would involve radical job re-design. Finally, the limitations of recent HSE guidance are exposed and industrial relations processes and outcomes analysed.

`Space - The Final Frontier'

For too long the built working environment has been excluded from the analysis of work organisations. Buildings, like other cultural artefacts, encapsulate social and economic priorities and values, and represent prevailing power structures. Work buildings, such as offices and factories, both make possible the organisation of the labour process and also serve as structures of non-verbal communication, providing cues on hierarchy, status and appropriate behaviour. Control over the working environment can be seen as a constituent part of the control of the labour process, displaying similar cyclical movements. Human resource management and information technology are currently combining to encourage a reappraisal of the working environment, but one that is not without its own contradictions.

The open-plan academy: space, control and the undermining of professional identity

The introduction of open-plan (OP) academic offices is critically examined through interviews undertaken in Scotland and Australia. The development is discussed in the context of the increased managerialism in higher education. The conclusion is that, despite a rhetoric of synergy, the dominant rationale for OP is one of cost reduction and that the experience for many academics is proving detrimental to both scholarship and professional identity.

Daddy, I don't like these shifts you're working on because I never see you: coping strategies for home and work

Recent evidence confirms that many working people, full-time as well as part-time, also carry significant caring and domestic responsibilities (Dex, 1999). With political and economic pressures exerted on people, including mothers, to enter into and remain in paid employment (Taylor, 2002), workers with caring responsibilities are faced with the need to develop strategies to organise their lives in order to negotiate between the demanding pressures of both home and work. This chapter examines the interplay between home and workplace pressures faced by employees and the sort of strategies that staff working in four call centres are adopting to cope with these compound pressures in order to maintain this precarious balancing act. Call centres were chosen for this study as representative of fast-growing ‘new work’ service sectors, increasingly typified by shift and seven-day working, integration with new communicative technologies and populated by high proportions of women operatives and team leaders, often working to tight performance targets (see e.g. Frenkel et al., 1999; Taylor et al., 2002).

Off the rails: factors affecting track worker safety in the rail industry

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to focus on the serious but under‐examined incidence of fatalities and injuries among rail trackworkers. It identifies the pressures on trackwork, locating them within an analysis of the economic structure of the privatised rail industry and illustrates the consequences of these pressures at the operational level.Design/methodology/approach – A series of semi‐structured interviews was held with management representatives of the infrastructure and maintenance companies, rail safety bodies and officials and representatives of the RMT. These were supplemented by focus‐group style discussions with track maintenance workers in Scotland and the North of England. The paper then relates these qualitative data to the analysis of recent major incidents which have involved fatalities of rail employees.Findings – Within the structure of the post‐privatised industry, improvements to the safety regime are always in danger of being constrained by countervailing economic and orga...

Back to the Future? Change and Continuity at Work

The original title for this book was ‘Should life all labour be?’ Tennyson’s evocative summation of the duality that work has always represented in our lives: recognized for its sustaining necessity but at the same time resented for its dominance. It could be argued that, historically, the prevailing work ethic in society has striven to enhance the former meaning and diminish the latter and, in the introduction to this book we noted that, in recent government economic and social policy, we can discern the constituents of a new work ethic for our time. The repeated theme that full citizenship and personal fulfilment are only attainable through participation in paid work has elevated the concept of work centrality, the philosophical importance in people’s lives of the work they do, beyond the somewhat confined circles of academic discourse and into the area of policy.

Women and Men

A little-discussed component of the knowledge society model has been the predicted eradication of the gendered inequalities that have been a feature of industrial capitalism. Castells (1996), for example, claimed that information and communication technologies would reverse the relegation of women to deskilled or menial jobs as historical stereotypes were replaced by the demand for an autonomous, skilled labour force. As relatively new employment sectors, we might expect call centre and software work to demonstrate this convergence between men and women. Yet, they already represent horizontally segregated occupations with female-dominated (call centres) and male-dominated (software) workforces, and are often presented as examples of distinctively women’s and men’s work. Our data is also suggestive of vertical segregation: women were underrepresented at management levels in call centres despite their numerical dominance within the occupation, and in software, our findings showed a tendency for women to be located in less technical, lower-level roles.

The Pressures of Commitment: Taking Software Home

The current era has seen a number of academic and policy debates over the claimed increase in the porosity of the boundary between the work and domestic spheres of social activity (Baldry et al., 2007; Houston, 2005; Warhurst et al., 2008). The causes of this have been identified variously as the shift to more “flexible” forms of employment (Department of Trade and Industry, 2004), an increasing rate of female participation in the labour market with consequent demands on child-care resources (Cousins and Tang, 2004; Crompton, 2002), the intensification and extensification of the labour process in time of heightened competition (Cousins and Tang, 2004) or economic crisis and the enabling qualities of IT which have made possible an increase in both mobile work (Hislop and Axtell, 2009) and teleworking at home (Haddon and Brynin, 2005).