Ernesto Noronha

Being Professional Organizational Control in Indian Call Centers

The relationship between technocratic and socioideological control in organizations is contested among scholars. In an attempt to understand this complex interlinkage, the present study examined organizational control processes in inbound and outbound call centers in Bangalore, India. Relying on qualitative interviews and thematic analysis, the study demonstrated how organizations invoke the concept of professionalism in their employees. Organizational efforts in this direction result not only in employee compliance but also internalization of professionalism such that agents’ sense of self changes to embrace employer-defined professionalism. Socioideological control thus sets the stage for the acceptance and effectiveness of technocratic control. Rather than viewing organizational identities and organizational cultures as additional or separate extensions of the substantive, structural, material dimensions of control, the findings of the study highlight that socioideological and technocratic forms of control build on and feed each other. Nonetheless, the managerial notion of control espoused through the appeal to professional identity continues to be contested.

The workplace bullying-organizational change interface: emerging challenges for human resource management

Though previous research has established organizational change as an antecedent of workplace bullying, issues about the source, aetiology, target orientation and level of organizational involvement and the role of HRM remain unstudied. Addressing these gaps through a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry of Indian IT sector employees laid off during the 2008–2009 financial recession, downwards depersonalized bullying rooted in the organizational context, stemming from the implementation of the change endeavour and indicating the complicity of HR managers emerged as predominant. Apart from adding the perspective of workplace bullying to the lay-off literature, the study proposes the concept of ‘compounded bullying’ and has implications for the definition of workplace bullying, the legitimacy of organizational power and the scope of HRM.

Engaging the Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India

The extremely challenging external environment poses numerous challenges to union formation among call centre agents in India. Complicating matters is the acquired professional identity of call centre agents. In this scenario, the union organising call centre employees envisaged that partnership with employers was the only possibility acceptable to call centre agents, employer organisations and society at large, enabling them to regain some acceptability and credibility for the heretofore tainted Indian trade union movement.

Doing Emotional Labour

A qualitative study undertaken in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, on subjective work experiences of call centre agents, uncovered four major themes addressing agents’ perceptions of and responses to emotional labour demands. These include reorienting self, balancing expectations, neutralizing stress and humouring irate customers. The findings further our understanding by highlighting the presence of normative control, the relevance of dispositional factors, the implications of coping mechanisms and the complexities introduced by global outsourcing.

Technical Call Centres: Beyond 'Electronic Sweatshops' and 'Assembly Lines in the Head'

Views on call centres as work systems represent a dichotomy. While, on the one hand, call centres are seen as conforming to an engineering or mass service model, on the other hand, they are described as high commitment service organizations. Technical call centres, studied as part of a larger qualitative study on experiences of working in call centres, back offices and medical transcription in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, were found to resemble high commitment service organizations. Task complexity, variety and autonomy were distinguishing factors in technical call centre jobs, the presence of which promoted employee well-being and satisfaction. At the same time, the emotional labour required by front-line service work remained an important part of the job profile. The emergence of cross-cultural interactions in call centre work, stemming from the contemporary outsourcing trend, is highlighted.

Ambivalence : Employee responses to depersonalized bullying at work

The present article furthers our understanding of the nascent concept of depersonalized bullying by exploring employee responses to the phenomenon. Through a qualitative enquiry of international-facing call centre agents in India, the major theme of ‘bounded benefits’ captured employees’ response of ambivalence. Valuing their professional identity and material returns while ruing the depersonalized bullying of their oppressive work environment, participants recognized that their gains were limited by but inextricably linked to workplace demands. Perceiving no alternative to the continuity of their benefits, participants emphasized positive aspects of their experiences to reduce their misgivings. In contrast to interpersonal bullying where targets are victimized and undergo severe strain such that they usually exit the employer organization, depersonalized bullying entails a dualistic response where well-being and strain coexist and where approach dimensions compensate for avoidance dimensions such that compromise and trade-off facilitate coping.

The experience of work in India's domestic call centre industry

Research on Indian call centres has focused almost exclusively on international-facing operations, at the expense of its domestic sub-sector, which is driven by different economic dynamics, namely the expanding Indian ‘new economy’ and the growth of discretionary spending by the countrys new middle class. The paper breaks new ground with its detailed examination of the experience of work in this domestic sector and draws upon extensive employee survey and interview data. The findings demonstrate that Indian domestic work lies at the extreme quantitative end of the call centre spectrum – its employees subject to tight controls, extensive work hours and authoritarian management practices in common.

High commitment management practices re-examined: The case of Indian call centres

Considerable debate exists in the West about the effectiveness of high commitment management (HCM) practices in reducing the negative features associated with work in mass-production call centres. This debate has been glossed over the Indian context. Addressing the gap by critically examining the role of HCM practices in Indian call centres, this article highlights the crucial influence of the organizational agenda and the Indian sociocultural milieu. The findings support the crossvergence thesis while confirming that HCM practices rarely undermine the organizational imperative of control. Indeed, organizational interests prevail, being manifest via the ‘sacrificial HR strategy’. Clearly, employer organizations committed to promoting employee well-being and reducing attrition need to examine issues of job design, task demands and psychological contract obligations apart from implementing HCM practices.

Employee Dilemmas in the Indian ITES—BPO Sector

Offshoring and outsourcing are not recent by-products of the emergence of the new economy in services. The first wave of offshoring and outsourcing, encompassing the manufacturing sector, began in the mid-1980s, motivated by low costs, the availability of skilled labour, the promotion of a business-friendly environment and the existence of production and supply networks in places such as China, Republic of Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan (Bardhan and Kroll, 2003). At that time, it was predicted that developed nations, nurtured by giant multinational corporations (MNCs), would evolve into service-based economies (Dossani and Kenney, 2003), requiring buyers and sellers to be frequently available in the same geographic location (Henley, 2006). This implied that while manufacturing jobs would move to other areas of the globe, service jobs would remain in the West.

Workplace bullying in the context of organisational change: the significance of pluralism

The presence of depersonalised bullying during organisational change, highlighted through empirical research on lay-off procedures in Indias information technology sector, underscores the rhetoric of unitarist human resource management and reinforces the importance of union action and co-worker mobilisation. The findings support the emergent view that collectivisation is the only solution to workplace bullying.