Phil Taylor

‘An assembly line in the head’: work and employee relations in the call centre

To date, academic studies of the call centre ‘sector’ remain limited in scope. Here the authors attempt to remedy that omission by analysing the recent and spectacular growth of call centres in the UK, drawing on a wide variety of sources, including two extensive surveys of developments in Scotland during 1997.

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.

‘Bright Satanic Offices’: Intensification, Control and Team Taylorism

From the outside, the contemporary office certainly looks good: curtain walling of smoked or reflective glass, a marble-floored entrance area, perhaps an atrium with luxuriant plants (some of them real). It is a built environment clearly designed to impress the passer-by or the visiting client with the suggestion of corporate or organisational prestige and modernity. The office worker, however, sees none of this. For her it is the place where, day after day, she endlessly repeats a series of familiar routines as she handles the mortgage application, the personal loan, the insurance premium, the welfare benefit, or the customer complaint. To do this she will use the telephone, the keyboard and the computer display screen, with few breaks during the working day. Her work is rigidly structured around a sequence of tasks dictated by the software, and to tight time and performance schedules in which she is answerable to her team leader or supervisor. The office space in which this work is done, and which she shares with maybe forty or even a hundred other workers, is likely to be open-plan and will deliver what somebody has decided are acceptable or optimum levels of fresh air, working temperature and lighting. If she experiences these environmental conditions as unpleasant, or if they adversely affect her work, there is no respite as, by design, the windows are sealed and unopenable and she is forbidden by management to bring in a fan or portable heater. In this sealed environment she may experience repeated coughs, stuffiness, sore throat and headache to compound the stresses of the job. For this worker, the office can be hell.

'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.

You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone: Re-Contextualising the Origins, Development and Impact of the Call Centre

This paper locates the emergence of call centres within the broader political economy. We demonstrate how British Gas responded to privatisation, restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by radically changing work organisation. Using documentary evidence and oral testimonies, we show how the call centre was pivotal to tightening control over the labour process, to intensifying work and transforming the experience of work.

From Taylorism to Ms Taylor: the transformation of the accounting craft

Abstract The history of professionally qualified accountants and their regulatory processes command considerable attention in the academic accounting literature. In contrast, “non-qualified”, clerical employees have been virtually excluded from serious accounting research. This paper aims to overcome this serious deficiency in the academic literature. The framework used in the paper to analyse the work practices of accounting clerks draws strongly on the theoretical foundations of Marx and subsequent development by Braverman. We will show that the majority of work experience in the accounting industry is one of deskilling according to Tayloristic “Scientific Management” principles.

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.

'Stressed out of my box': employee experience of lean working and occupational ill-health in clerical work in the UK public sector

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions – notably stress – and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be ‘safe’. This study’s locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, in the context of efficiency savings programmes. The key initiative was lean working, which involved redesigned workflow, task fragmentation, standardization and individual targets. Utilizing a holistic model of white-collar OHS and in-depth quantitative and qualitative data, the evidence of widespread self-reported ill-health symptoms is compelling. Statistical tests of association demonstrate that the transformed work organization that accompanied lean working contributed most to employees’, particularly women’s, ill-health complaints.

‘Too Scared to Go Sick': Reformulating the Research Agenda on Sickness Absence

This article argues that our understanding of absence and absenteeism, deriving from seminal studies in the sociology of work and employment, has been overtaken by hugely significant developments in political economy, regulation and employment relations. A new research agenda that addresses the changed organisational politics of absence management and the consequences for employees is urgently required.