Dirk Bunzel

Work-Life Imbalance in Call Centres and Software Development

The paper evaluates the centrality of work to employees in two growing employment sectors, call-centres and software development. It then examines evidence for extensions of work into household and family life in these two sectors. Extensions are identified as tangible, such as unpaid overtime, or intangible, represented by incursions imported from work, such as exhaustion and stress. The study finds that organizational pressures, combined with lack of work centrality, result in work intruding into non-work areas of employee lives, though intrusions manifest themselves in different ways according to type of work, levels of worker autonomy and organizational support.

Images of the model worker in state‐socialist propaganda and novels – the case of Romania

The importance of the model worker in building the ‘multi‐faceted socialist’ society was at the heart of Communist Party propaganda in Eastern Europe. The ‘new man’, the so‐called ‘homo socialisticus’, who was prepared to sacrifice his (sic!) immediate goals and needs for the good of the society was seen to be essential for paving the road towards communism. We draw on literary work written at the height of the communist regime in Romania to shed light on some of the existing worker identities which, far from endorsing the model worker depicted in Party propaganda, highlight the mundane struggles and dilemmas of ordinary Romanian working men and women. The novel under study entitled Refuges (Buzura 1984) constitutes a landmark in modern Romanian literature and was considered a dissident novel until the Revolution from 1989.

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.

Romanian Socialist Directors: Heroes or Tricksters?

This chapter explores the ambivalent identity of Romanian directors operating in the socialist regime. It suggests that one way to understand their identity is by reference to Romanian fairytales. As symbolic renderings of crucial life experiences, fairytales embody the accumulated wisdom of collectivities and individuals (Campbell, 1949/1993), making the unbelievable believable and the impossible possible in people’s minds (Bettelheim, 1976). The traits of the archetypal characters present in the most popular Romanian fairytales appear to be reflected in how the directors studied represent their abilities, aspirations and motivations to themselves, their bosses and workforces.

Class and Status

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.

Organizational Life: The Management of Commitment

One of the research goals was to evaluate whether, after twenty years of the HRM agenda as the new orthodoxy, work had been elevated to a more central position in employees’ lives, as measured by stated levels of organizational commitment. Despite the stated aim of integrating employment practice to company business strategy (Storey, 1992; Guest, 1989), HRM theory is often strangely de-contextualized, apart from token references to globalization and an enhanced competitive environment. For the purposes of HRM, the company is often treated as semi-autonomous capsule, isolated from the rest of society, and this narrow focus on the workplace is, ironically, mirrored in many critical studies of control in the work organization, whether undertaken from a labour process or Foucaultian perspective. Yet movements and changes in the operation of the capitalist economy, such as market turbulence and relations between units of capital (financial and industrial), often have a direct influence on all members of work organizations and on the employment relationship at the level of the firm (Hyman, 1987; Thompson, 2003). Thus we would argue that a major reason for the oft-observed disjunction between the HRM rhetoric and the experienced reality (Legge, 1995; Thompson, 2003) lies in the particular political-economic context within which organizations are located at any point in time and to which they must respond.

Organizational Life: The Nature of Work

In this, and the following chapter, we are concerned with the overarching and broadly-defined concept of organizational life, and focus on two core themes. In the present chapter we examine work organization, labour process and management control, and employee experiences and perceptions in relation to these, and explore the contrasts that exist between the sectors. On the basis of previous knowledge, although with important qualifications, we expected call centres to more approximate regimes of ‘direct control’, while software development would exhibit strong tendencies towards ‘responsible autonomy’. In Chapter 4, we explore management strategy and, in particular, subject to critical scrutiny the extent to which the much-heralded agendas of human resource management deliver the promised, but elusive, outcomes of commitment and job satisfaction. This chapter includes discussion of pay and pay systems. A third related theme pertaining to organizational life, which considers worker attitudes, and principally investigates the claim that individualism has replaced collectivism as a new orthodoxy of employee relations, will be discussed in Chapter 8. We begin by outlining the work settings of our individual case studies.

Work Attachment, Work Centrality and the Meaning of Work in Life

In recent times, a new orthodoxy has become established, claiming simultaneously to describe, explain and indeed shape contemporary economy and society. Concepts associated with the knowledge economy now permeate academic, populist, policy maker and practitioner thinking, to such an extent that they have become axiomatic nostrums informing government agendas (e.g. DTI, 1998; 2004a, b). Accordingly, it is widely accepted that we are living through a new and distinctive epoch, in which the dominant principles organizing human society have changed fundamentally and dramatically. Yet, the ‘big picture franchise’ (Thompson, 2003) of the knowledge economy is but the latest in a succession of paradigm break theories proclaiming the end of industrialism and Fordism, meta-characterizations themselves fraught with definitional and conceptual difficulties (Williams et al., 1987). Since the 1980s, post-Fordism, post-modernism and the surveillance society have been advanced as models, each successively claiming to provide the indispensable framework for understanding socio-economic phenomena of all kinds.

Into the New Century: The Changing Terrain for Work and Employment

Discussions, assertions and policy statements concerning the nature of work at the end of the twentieth century can only be fully understood if we review them against wider socio-economic contexts. These comprise both substantive and observable trends in employment and society in the UK and, given the location of this study, in Scotland, and also of a conceptual element: the prevailing theories, models and predictions about what such trends mean. This latter, conceptual context — broadly that a paradigm shift has taken place in society, economy and the world of work — is associated with the knowledge economy model. This may be seen to constitute a key element of an interpretative hegemony that so pervades policy statements and popular discourse as to have become received common sense.