Call centres are a rapidly growing, IT-based channel for service and sales delivery, particularly in the financial services and telecom industries. Although little research has been undertaken on the human resource aspects of call centres, two contrasting images are emerging. The first emphasizes the bureaucratic, constraining nature of these work settings, while the second image points towards worker empowerment characteristic of knowledge-intensive settings. Which of these two images more faithfully portrays the nature of work organization in call centres is the subject of our paper. Drawing on qualitative research undertaken in six call centres and a survey of front-line workers, we show that elements of both models coexist and that a hybrid model predominates. The theoretical basis for this contention, and its institutionalization as mass customized bureaucracy, lies in management's on-going attempts to reconcile two conflicting principles: standardization of processes and customization of products. The paper also explores, as key consequences of mass customized bureaucracy, front-line workers' satisfaction with various facets of their job and their overall job satisfaction, in addition to discretionary work effort. Only in relation to job security and co-worker relations could front-line workers be considered satisfied. Overall, these employees were ambivalent in their responses. They were however more likely to give more discretionary work effort than indicated by their extent of satisfaction. We conclude that, although the existing pattern of work organization may be superior to more bureaucratic forms, it is by no means ideal from the standpoint of either front-line workers or management.

Beyond bureaucracy? Work organization in call centres

Jobs differ along many dimensions including firm size. The wage gap due to firm size of 35% is comparable to the gender wage gap of 36% for men over women and greater than the wage gap of 14% for whites over black employees. The size-wage premium is larger for men and varies across industries. It is larger in the US than in other industrialized countries. Large firms demand a higher quality of labor defined by such observable characteristics as education, job tenure, and a higher fraction of full-time workers. Part 3 examines three behavioral explanations. (1) Productive employees are matched with able entrepreneurs to minimize the sum of wages and monitoring costs. (2) Big firms pay efficiency wages to deter shirking. (3) Big firms adopt a discretionary wage policy to share rents, or in Slichter's words, “Wages over a considerable range reflect managerial discretion. When management can easily afford to pay high wages, they tend to do so.” We advance a productivity hypothesis. A large organization sets a higher performance standard that raises labor productivity but has to be supported by a compensating wage difference. In the service industries, the pace of work depends on the customer arrival rate. The economies of massed reserves generates a positive wage-size profile. The capital/labor ratio is higher in bigger firms which also are early in adopting new technologies. Both forces raise the demand for skilled labor where skill and productivity are often unobservable traits. Production organized around teams calls for conformance to common work rules which result in paying rents to infra-marginal team members. The odds of survival are higher for big firms which enable them to “produce” more durable employees who are more productive because they get more training. Firm size is a function of external market forces, technology, managerial decisions, and luck. The surplus of revenues over labor costs per employee is positively related to firm size for three reasons, lower prices for non-labor inputs, possibly greater market power, or larger overhead costs to amortize the sunk costs for capital and firm -specific work force. Rent sharing cannot be dismissed as an explanation for the wage-size premium. Taxation and regulation can also affect the size distribution of firms. The organization of work and the selection of employees (whose productive traits are not always observable) are responsible for the positive relation between wages and employer size.

Chapter 33 Firm size and wages

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes.

/pdf/who-s-got-the-look-emotional-aesthetic-and-sexualized-labour-2zpkamdtcb.pdf

'Who's Got the Look?' Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services

This research note aims to develop labour process theory by dividing labour power into two elements: effort and mobility power. Conventional labour process theory concentrates upon conflictual relations between workers and managers in the production process, especially around the effort or wage bargain (see Thompson, 1989; Thompson and Smith, 2001 for a full account of labour process debates). The paper develops the position that worker’s mobility choices and employer’s retention strategies are closely related to the organization of the labour process. The paper is mainly theoretical, but using secondary historical and contemporary research it shows how the double indeterminacy of labour structures work relations between workers and employers. The paper has seven parts, beginning with a review of the concept of indeterminacy and its two components within the capitalist employment relationship. Section two discusses research that has attempted to examine the link between the theme of labour turnover to conflicts in the labour process, and the strengths and limitations of this research. Sections three and four explore the wider political economy of labour mobility through the labour process, and section five the historical development of research on labour turnover. Section six examines the theory of internalization of labour within the large firm, and attempted management of mobility through career controls. Finally, section seven suggests the need for future research to examine the interaction between labour process and labour mobility in the representation of work relations in contemporary capitalism.

The double indeterminacy of labour power Labour effort and labour mobility

Acknowledgements: The research on which this study is based would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of managers, workers and union officials at NUMMI. Gary Robinson helped transcribe taped interviews with them and discern the key points. This article has benefitted from the comments of several NUMMI people and from the responses of many friends and colleagues: thinking has also been stimulated by the reaction of colleagues to presentations at the USC, Harvard Business School, NYU, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. My thanks to all these people, many of whom still disagree.

/pdf/the-learning-bureaucracy-new-united-motor-manufacturing-inc-v6oxbsfvku.pdf

The ‘learning bureaucracy’: new united motor manufacturing, inc

Efficiency and Effort.

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