Marek Korczynski

Human resource management in service work

Service Work The New Service Management School Critical Perspectives on Service Work Service Work: The Customer-Oriented Bureaucracy Analysing Distinctive Types of Front Line Work Sales Work Empowerment on the Front Line? Managing Emotions Gendered Segregation and Disadvantage Trade Unions and Service Work Conclusion: Reconsidering Modern Times References

Organizational and Occupational Commitment: Knowledge Workers in Large Corporations

Previous discussion of knowledge work and workers tends to overlook the importance of contextual knowledge in shaping the organizational form of knowledge workers who are employees in large corporations. This paper proposes a model to understand the way knowledge base and organizational form are related to the work commitment, effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. The model is derived from (1) a critical examination of the market model of knowledge work organization, and (2) the results of empirical research conducted in two large corporations. We argue that contextual knowledge is important in the relationships between the corporation and knowledge workers. A dualistic model and an enclave organizational form are suggested to examine the relationships between the commitment, work effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. We noted from our empirical cases that enclave-like work teams enhanced the expertise and job autonomy of knowledge workers vis-a-vis management. These work teams together with the performance-based pay system, however, led to unmet job expectations including limited employee influence over decision-making and careers, and communication gaps with senior management. Under these circumstances, and in contrast to the impact of occupational commitment, organizational commitment did not contribute to work effort. The study highlights the importance of managements strategy in shaping the organizational form of knowledge work. The paper concludes by noting general implications of our study for the management of expertise and for further research. Copyright 2002 Blackwell Publishers Ltd..

Service Work in Consumer Capitalism: Customers, Control and Contradictions

There is an important literature suggesting that the consumer has become a key focus of identity and figure of authority in contemporary society. Within this literature, however, there is little consideration of the role that the identification with the customer could play in management control within production, nor of the ensuing potential contradictions. This paper examines these issues in front line call centre work. Control in this setting is theorised as being informed by dual logics of customer-orientation and bureaucratisation. The paper shows the important use of norms of customer identification in control. It also highlights two levels of contradictions in the use of these norms. First there is the contradiction between continuing bureaucratic control and the attempts to develop normative control. Second, there are contradictions within the development of customer-related normative control. Specifically, the definition of the customer as the focus for normative commitment is a contested terrain, with systematic and significant differences existing here between call centre workers and management.

The Political Economy of Trust

There has been a considerable rise in discourses concerning trust from a range of academic disciplines and perspectives. Unfortunately, many of these literatures have talked past, rather than to, each other. This paper develops an analysis of trust in economic activity through a dialogue between the disciplines of economics and sociology. It outlines the relationship of trust to economic co–operation and identifies a number of types of trust. The potential benefits of these different types of trust to advanced capitalist economies are identified. Consideration is given to the processes of trust creation and destruction in market economies. Particular emphasis here is on how far trust can be symbiotic with, or contradictory to, power and the market. With an analysis of the key properties of individual agents which make them more or less prone to trusting behaviour, the paper is then able to identify the critical factors likely to underlie high–trust and low–trust economies. This has important public policy implications given the potential benefits which trust can have for advanced economies.

The Mystery Customer: Continuing Absences in the Sociology of Service Work

This article charts the historical and contemporary absences in the sociology of service work. Although studies of service work have now become the empirical mainstream in the sociology of work, there have been few attempts to conceptualize broad patterns of worker—customer relations in ser vice work. This neglect is to be regretted because whether the customer is an alienating figure for service workers constitutes a key unasked question in contemporary sociology of work. The article highlights three factors that are likely to have a key influence on workers’ sense of alienation vis-a-vis the customer. It highlights divergent literature in each of these areas and hence ends with a call for research on this topic.

The invisibility of violence: constructing violence out of the job centre workplace in the UK

This article explores the social construction of violence within the front-line context of job centres in the Employment Service (ES). The issue of violence within organizations is typically approached using positivistic methods. In contrast, this article deepens understandings of violence in organizations by using an interpretive approach. Through an analysis of data generated through an in-depth case study, this article argues that although ES front-liners experienced much of customer behaviour as violent, this high level of violence was systematically denied by the organization. In effect, the formal organization constructed violence in such a way that it was rendered invisible. This article examines not only how management, formal policies and procedures construct violence as invisible, but also the role of the staff themselves as active agents in the social construction of violence out of the workplace.

The Point of Selling: Capitalism, Consumption and Contradictions

Although the point of selling is one of the key moments of exchange where the latent contradictions in capitalist social relations may become manifest, there is a gap in our knowledge about exactly what form of consumption takes place within sales interactions. The key contribution of this paper is that it offers an original conceptualization of the form of consumption that is promoted within the sales interaction. It argues that sales management and sales workers tend to promote not only rational information exchange and trust-building but also enchantment. There is a contradictory relationship of instrumental empathy between the capitalist firm and the customer, and sales management and sales workers attempt to manage this contradiction by promoting the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty. Here consumption involves the customer experiencing a sense of sovereignty but in such a way that space is also opened up for the sales worker substantively to influence the behaviour of the customer. Managerialist sales research and critical ethnographic studies of sales work are drawn on to support the arguments. The paper also considers the systematic likelihood of customer resistance to the forms of consumption promoted.

Service work : critical perspectives

1. Critical Perspectives on Service Work: An Introduction, Marek Korczynski and Cameron Macdonald 2. Chaplins Modern Times: Service Work, Authenticity, and Nonsense at the Red Moon Cafe 3.The Globalization of Nothing and the Outsourcing of Service Work 4. The Disneyization of Society 5. Understanding the Contradictory Lived Experience of Service Work: The Customer-Oriented Bureaucracy 6. Labor Process Theory: Putting the Materialism Back into the Meaning of Service Work 7. Intersectionality in the Emotional Proletariat: A New Lens on Employment Discrimination in Service Work 8. The Globalization of Care 9. The Promise of Service Worker Unionism 10. Conclusion - Latte Capitalism and Late Capitalism: Reflections on Fantasy and Care as Part of the Service Triangle

Back-Office Service Work: Bureaucracy Challenged?

Much of the current literature on service work has focused on front-line, customerfacing jobs. Research and theory suggest that while the way in which this work is organized is to a significant degree underpinned by rationalization, there is also an important customer-oriented strand in the organization of front-line work. This begs the question of how work is organized in back-officeservice work, i.e. service jobs involving work with and for the front-line staff but in which there is no direct interface with customers. Are these jobs also organized as a ‘ customeroriented bureaucracy’ or are they subject to more straightforward bureaucratization? This article reports on case studies of two types of back-office work – staff in the back office to a call centre in an insurance firm, and staff in the back office to a mobile sales force in two financial service firms. The organization of work is examined systematically across the dimensions of work tasks, form of control, affect in relation to the customer and lateral relations with the front-line staff. It is concluded that to a significant degree back-office work in the three firms is organized according to bureaucratic principles.The conclusion argues that these results are likely to be typical for much of back-office service work.

The Dialectical Sense of Humour: Routine Joking in a Taylorized Factory

Starting from the premise that context is central to understanding humour, the paper examines humour in three key contexts of the workplace – the labour process, control relations and peer relations. The paper argues that there have been important studies which have shown humour embedded in control relations and peer relations, but the way in which humour may be embedded in the labour process has not received the same sustained attention. The paper reports on a participant-observation ethnography in a Taylorized blinds factory in which humour embedded in the labour process was the central form of humour. Particularly important were forms of humour categorized as ‘routine humour’ and ‘routine absurdity’ in which workers played with the routine labour process. Overall, the humour in this factory primarily had resistive meanings, and contributed to an autonomous shopfloor culture which informed acts of informal collective resistance. At the same time, much of the humour lubricated the enactment of the labour process. The paper contributes to knowledge by drawing on Bergson to offer a theoretical framing for, and extending our understanding of, humour embedded in the labour process. Specifically, it suggests the importance of the dialectical sense of humour – humour which enacts the labour process, while having implicitly resistive meanings.