Diane van den Broek

Managerial control and workplace regimes: an introduction

Managerial control and its wider setting in workplace and societal regimes has been an important feature of debates in Work, Employment and Society since its inception, providing some of its most highly cited articles. This Introduction to the first e-special seeks to present 10 key and diverse articles, situating them in the context of debates inside and beyond the journal. Core themes and contentious issues are identified and particular attention is paid to the nature of normative controls. After a period in the 1990s when the control debate dipped, it is argued that there are positive signs that more recent articles are rediscovering the broader focus on workplace regimes that was characteristic of earlier, classic contributions.

Teams without teamwork? Explaining the call centre paradox

Call centres are evidently an inhospitable environment for teams given a work design based on individualized, largely routine work regulated heavily by technology and managerial scripts. The article explores a number of potential explanations for this paradox in the context of comparable case studies from the UK and Australia. The case studies con.rm that teamworking did not exist in any substantive or traditional sense within any of the plants. But it is argued that teams can exist in the absence of teamwork based largely on their normative bene.ts to management and to a much lesser extent team members. Even allowing for this differentiation, only one of the companies had sustained normative objectives and these were only partially successful. The existing sociotechnical design of call centres is not conducive to teams, but this may not be true of other types of service work.

Monitoring And Surveillance In Call Centres: Some Responses From Australian Workers

Abstract The call centre industry has grown rapidly both in Australia and overseas. Research on the industry has been wide-ranging, with one strand of the research involving a reassessment of labour process debates about managerial control and employee resistance. This reassessment has been partially sparked by the distinct technological features of call centre operations. Technical systems in call centres automatically distribute calls, and management have acquired an increased capability to measure and monitor employee performance and behaviour. These advances have led some scholars to argue that new heightened forms of control have emerged within the call centre industry. This article examines the extent and nature of monitoring in the call centres of two large telecommunications firms and analyses the way customer service representatives (CSRs) responded to such conditions. The article questions whether increased monitoring and surveillance, characteristic of the industry, can be conceptualised as a n...Abstract The call centre industry has grown rapidly both in Australia and overseas. Research on the industry has been wide-ranging, with one strand of the research involving a reassessment of labour process debates about managerial control and employee resistance. This reassessment has been partially sparked by the distinct technological features of call centre operations. Technical systems in call centres automatically distribute calls, and management have acquired an increased capability to measure and monitor employee performance and behaviour. These advances have led some scholars to argue that new heightened forms of control have emerged within the call centre industry. This article examines the extent and nature of monitoring in the call centres of two large telecommunications firms and analyses the way customer service representatives (CSRs) responded to such conditions. The article questions whether increased monitoring and surveillance, characteristic of the industry, can be conceptualised as a new form of totalising labour control. It suggests that control has not proved to be complete. As in other workplaces, workers have been able to undertake a variety of actions that attempt to restore a sense of power over their work conditions.

Human Resource Management, Cultural Control and Union Avoidance: an Australian Case Study

Non-union industrial relations bas generated increasing interest among researchers both in Australia and overseas. Changes in public policy toward a more deregulated and individualised industrial relations system, as well as increasing employer interest in techniques associated witb human resource management, have become closely linked with the rise of non-union firms. Despite this development there remains a lack of empirical research in Australia that identifies how corporate culture and commitment strategies attempt to exclude, or become substitutes for, workplace trade unionism. In addressing tbese questions, this paper presents evidence from one Australian organisation in which the development of a strong culture and related human resource management practices played a central role in limiting employee propensity to unionise.Non-union industrial relations bas generated increasing interest among researchers both in Australia and overseas. Changes in public policy toward a more deregulated and individualised industrial relations system, as well as increasing employer interest in techniques associated witb human resource management, have become closely linked with the rise of non-union firms. Despite this development there remains a lack of empirical research in Australia that identifies how corporate culture and commitment strategies attempt to exclude, or become substitutes for, workplace trade unionism. In addressing tbese questions, this paper presents evidence from one Australian organisation in which the development of a strong culture and related human resource management practices played a central role in limiting employee propensity to unionise.

Anti-unionism, Employer Strategy, and the Australian State, 1996-2005

One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. While some tactics have emerged organically through new management practices, the reconfiguration of employer strategies has been primarily state-led; legislative and non-legislative interventions have created opportunities, incentives and pressures for firms to adopt anti-union strategies.

Aestheticising retail workers: Orientations of aesthetic labour in Australian fashion retail:

The term ‘aesthetic labour’ has come to describe the recruitment, selection, development and deployment of physical and presentational attributes geared towards ‘looking good and sounding right’ (Warhurst and Nickson, 2007: 104). Further research has identified a degree of stratification within interactive service work, with further distinctions developing around how particular aesthetic requirements reflect firms’ brand strategies, market orientations and how they appeal to different consumer groupings – what we term, following Pettinger (2004, 2005), ‘aestheticised labour’. This article presents quantitative data and analyses the prevalence, character and use of aesthetic and aestheticised labour in the Australian fashion retail industry based on a study of fashion retail stores in the central business district of Sydney, Australia. Building on previous work, it identifies that what constitutes aesthetic labour varies according to the market segment and character of the store and brand. As such it reinforces the utility of ‘aestheticised labour’ as a means of identifying nuances in the intensity and orientation of aesthetic labour within the retail sector.

Transformations in Network Governance: The Case of Migration Intermediaries

Market liberalisation has fundamentally changed state interventions in the supply of services and supportive infrastructure across a range of public services. While this trend has been relatively well documented, there has been a dearth of research into the changing nature of state interventions in migration and mobility. Indeed, the increasing presence of migration intermediaries to service the many and varied needs of migrant workers, particularly skilled migrants, remains significantly under-researched both theoretically and empirically. In providing an analysis of the location, role and changing nature of migration intermediaries, we highlight the implications of commercially driven governance structures. In particular, we suggest that the shift from government to network governance has important implications for skilled migration including greater dependence on (largely unregulated) private intermediaries and variable access to information regarding the process of migration and labour market integration. Accordingly, we present empirical examples of migration intermediaries to illustrate their role and the relationship with and implications of their exchange with migrants.

Commercial Migration Intermediaries and the Segmentation of Skilled Migrant Employment

Like all migration, skilled migration depends on intermediary operators providing services that assist the mobility, labour market entry and integration of migrant workers. However, within what is a relatively disparate body of literature on migrant work, there is often either a complete neglect, or only fragmented acknowledgement and analysis of how migration intermediaries influence migrants’ access to destination labour markets. By re-engaging with the literature on skilled migration, the authors highlight the importance of new theorizing and empirical investigations into the labour market implications of intermediary activities, which at present remain poorly understood. Most particularly, this article highlights how migration intermediaries shape recruitment, selection and placement, thereby in part determining labour market outcomes for particular groups of migrant workers.

Great expectations: Gender, looks and lookism at work

Drawing on archival data of employment discrimination from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission in Australia, this article examines the issue of employee looks, women and lookism in interactive service work. From existing research on emotional and aesthetic labour, lookism might be expected to occur primarily in services and primarily involve female workers. The findings suggest that these expectations are largely met. However, the data also reveal that men in services also claim lookism and that lookism extends beyond interactive services into other industries such as manufacturing. This article concludes by discussing the implications of these unexpected findings for the study of lookism.

Call to Arms? Collective and Individual Responses to Call Centre Labour Management

Industrial restructuring, technological change and a greater interest in new management practices have focused attention on the shift from an industrial to ‘post-industrial’ or ‘knowledge economy’. Within this broader rubric of organizational and social change, there has been considerable debate about how labour is managed and the causes, nature and implications of these changes. An extensive literature has analyzed shifts from traditional control-based labour management to a commitment-based human resource (HR) approach (Bell, 1974; Walton, 1985; Drucker, 1993). This debate, which is particularly relevant to call centre operations, pivots on the relevance of post-industrial and, more recently, postmodern models of managerial control (Frenkel et al., 1999; Thompson and Warhurst, 1998).