Eyes wide shut? Querying the depth of call centre learning

Call centres are high‐pressure work environments characterised by routinisation, scripting, computer‐based monitoring and intensive performance targets. This promises a series of business advantages, but also risks counterproductive outcomes. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic field data, it is suggested that both desired and risked outcomes are mediated by personal modes of coping and organisational sustaining mechanisms. A central concern is to explore the underlying assumptions of call centre design and management, and to establish whether or to what extent information systems have been constructed as learning sites or behavioural control sites. When behavioural control is a primary goal this introduces a climate of resistance, further inflated by the culture of measurement and enforcement that is likely to ensue. In this environment, agent, manager and organisation become defensive and the main outcome is a destructive crisis of trust that creates important and difficult implications for the capacity to learn.

[1]  The New American Workplace: High Road or Low Road? , 1998 .

[2]  Yiannis Gabriel.  The Unmanaged Organization: Stories, Fantasies and Subjectivity , 1995 .

[3]  Andy Danford,et al.  Work Organisation Inside Japanese Firms in South Wales: A Break from Taylorism? , 1998 .

[4]  G. Sewell.  The discipline of teams: The control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance. , 1998 .

[5]  Paul Thompson,et al.  Workplaces of the Future , 1998 .

[6]  P. Thompson,et al.  Work Organisations: A critical introduction , 1990 .

[7]  David Knights,et al.  ‘What Happens when the Phone goes Wild?’: Staff, Stress and Spaces for Escape in a BPR Telephone Banking Work Regime , 1998 .

[8]  James Cornford,et al.  REVIEW OF TELEWORK IN BRITAIN: IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC POLICY , 1995 .

[9]  M. Dodgson.  Organizational Learning: A Review of Some Literatures , 1993 .

[10]  Shoshana Zuboff.  In the Age of the Smart Machine , 1988 .

[11]  Steve Taylor.  Emotional Labour and the New Workplace , 1998 .

[12]  G. Murphy,et al.  R. Sennett (1998). Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism . New York: W.W. Norton and Co , 1999 .

[13]  Andrew Sturdy,et al.  Customer Care in a Consumer Society: Smiling and Sometimes Meaning it? , 1998 .

[14]  Karen Shire,et al.  Beyond bureaucracy? Work organization in call centres , 1998 .

[15]  J. Brown,et al.  Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation , 1991 .

[16]  Mary E. Boyce.  Collective Centring and Collective Sense-making in the Stories and Storytelling of One Organization , 1995 .

[17]  Anna Pollert,et al.  Farewell to flexibility , 1992 .

[18]  Philip Stiles,et al.  Performance management and the psychological contract , 1997 .

[19]  A. V. D. Ven,et al.  Using Paradox to Build Management and Organization Theories , 1989 .

[20]  C. Stanworth,et al.  Telework and the Information Age , 1998 .

[21]  Carrie R. Leana.  The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism , 1998 .