Peter Bain

India calling to the far away towns: the call centre labour process and globalization

In recent years prominent companies have migrated call centre services to India provoking much-publicized fears for the future of UK employment. This article challenges the widely-held assumption that offshoring voice services is a seamless undertaking, principally through an investigation of the Indian call centre labour process. This enquiry is informed initially by an analysis of the political-economic factors driving offshoring and shaping the forms of work organization to have emerged in India. A critical review of literature on call centre work organization provides a conceptual framework, through which Indian developments are analysed. Data comes from fieldwork conducted in India and a complete audit of the Scottish industry, through which UK trends can be evaluated. We conclude that the Indian industry reproduces in exaggerated and culturally-distinctive forms, a labour process that has proved problematical for employers and employees alike in the UK and elsewhere.

‘Subterranean Worksick Blues’: Humour as Subversion in Two Call Centres

This article engages in debates stimulated by previous work published in Organization Studies, and more widely, on the purpose and effects of workers’ humour and joking practices. The authors emphasize the subversive character of humour in the workplace, rejecting perspectives which see humour as inevitably contributing to organizational harmony. Drawing on methodologies, including ethnography, which permitted the authors to penetrate the organizational surface of two call centres, rich evidence of satire and joking practices were uncovered. While long-acknowledged motives were revealed, particularly relief from boredom and routine, workers’ use of humour took novel, call centre specific forms. Overwhelmingly, though, humour contributed to the development of vigorous countercultures in both locations, which conflicted with corporate aims and priorities. However, the particular combinations of managerial culture, attitudes to trade unionism and dissent, and the nature of oppositional groupings helped impart a different character to humour between the two call centres. At Excell, the presence of a group of activists seeking to build workplace trade unionism in circumstances of employer hostility was a crucial contrast. These activists were instrumental in their use of humour, aware that it helped make the union popular and served to weaken managerial authority. This evidence, that subversive satire can be allied to a wider collective union organizing campaign at workplace level, makes a distinctive contribution to the recent literature on organizational humour.

'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.

The determinants of trade union membership in Britain: A survey of the literature

Trade union density, defined as the number of union members divided by the total number of workers, fell in Britain from 55% in 1979 to about 41% in 1989. (By comparison, the corresponding U.S. figures for those years are 23% and 16%.) Even before the decline began, British scholars and practitioners began focusing increasing attention on the determinants of union growth and decline. This literature review traces debate on the subject in Britain to the work of George Bain and his colleagues starting in the mid-1970s, and examines several key contributions of more recent years. The authors differentiate “structuralist” studies, which emphasize environmental determinants of union membership (such as the business cycle), from “interventionist” studies, which place more emphasis on the influence of unions themselves (through the involvement of full-time officials in recruiting, for example).

Call centre offshoring to India: the revenge of history?

Abstract This paper subjects claims of inexorable offshoring and cataclysmic UK call centre job loss to critical inquiry, and challenges the theoretical assumptions on which they rest. As the first academic study of the dynamics of call centre offshoring to India, this paper breaks new ground, presenting evidence from a two-year research project. Firstly, we analyse the current outsourcing practices, and interrogate the future intentions, of call centre firms operating in Scotland As a key region of call centre activity, Scotland provides a useful prism through which general trends can be evaluated Secondly, we provide a comprehensive review of developments in the Indian sector. Synthesising research findings from Scotland and India enables us to identify and analyse factors driving, facilitating and inhibiting call centre migration.

No passage to India? Initial responses of UK trade unions to call centre offshoring

This article focuses on the first wave of call center off-shoring from the UK to India (2002-04). Trade union responses in five case-study companies are documented. Drawing upon theories of union power resources, including international action, the relative efficacy of these union responses is analyzed.

‘Once I Get You Up There, Where the Air is Rarified’: Health, Safety and the Working Conditions of Airline Cabin Crews

The working environment of the modern aircraft and the conditions in which airline cabin crews operate are issues which have been largely ignored in the industrial relations literature. This article considers recent trends in airline industrial relations and argues that the aircraft cabin is host to a number of hazards which pose serious threats to the health and safety of those who work in it.

Human resource malpractice: the deregulation of health and safety at work in the USA and Britain

Business deregulation has been an important and growing component of governmental policy in recent years, and workplace health and safety has not been immune from such pressures. The article analyses the origins and aims of the deregulation campaigns in the USA and Britain, the attitudes of employers and unions, and suggests that the issue is unlikely to disappear.

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.