The introduction of open-plan (OP) academic offices is critically examined through interviews undertaken in Scotland and Australia. The development is discussed in the context of the increased managerialism in higher education. The conclusion is that, despite a rhetoric of synergy, the dominant rationale for OP is one of cost reduction and that the experience for many academics is proving detrimental to both scholarship and professional identity.

The paper explores the impact of the physical environment on employee resistance and accommodation. The findings suggest that the physical nature of call centres, whether purpose built or not, can be a focus of employee dissatisfaction and reflect broader, less concrete conflicts. It notes that the advantage of the physical environment as an arena for resistance lies in its tangibility.

Call centre work is highly individualistic and technologically regulated. Processes, scripts and company procedures are usually standardized. As such there is a fundamental irony in the fact that most call centre operations organize their workforce around team structures. In recent years, much of the research has identified how teams might lead to the workers shifting toward a shared firm identity and sociability, either voluntarily or through an involuntary internalization of managerial objectives. However other factors have not been fully investigated in the team literature. In this article we analyse how workers might 'team up' to ameliorate the relentless conditions of work through collaboratively manoeuvring around call centre technologies as well as 'teaming up' around customer relations. We provide a counter argument to both the 'teams are good for business' position, and the 'teams provide self imposed cages for workers to compete with each other' argument. Control and resistance remain an important factor in analysing teams in call centres, while shallow and short-lived team arrangements might provide important social mechanisms for worker support.

The emergence of web 2.0 technologies led to optimistic predictions that social media (SM) might alter traditional gendered patterns of member participation in trade unions. Greene, Hogan, and Grieco and others suggested that the forms of communication and engagement these technologies offered to unions and their members had the potential to foster gender inclusion and contribute to union diversity, arguably central to effective representation. This article reports on a survey of union members’ experiences with and perceptions of their union's SM services, to identify whether there is a gendered dimension to members’ use. The findings indicate that for most union members regardless of gender, more traditional communication channels such as face‐to‐face contact and email remain the preferred means of communication. However, the findings also show that women are just as likely as men, if not more so, to engage with union SM. Given that historically, women largely participated less in union activities than their male counterparts, this broad parity of use by women supports the conclusion that SM has substantial potential to improve women's participation in unions.

Debates over whether customer service work is deskilled or part of the knowledge economy tend to focus on single issues such as control, emotional labour or information management. Call centre work, however, falls within a spectrum of service jobs requiring simultaneous and multifaceted work with people, information and technology, This activity, which we call 'articulation work', is often performed within tight timeframes and requires workers, first, to integrate their own tasks into an ongoing 'line' of work, and second, to collaborate in maintaining the overall work-flow. The requisite skills, of awareness, interaction management and coordination, tend to be poorly specified in competency standards that subdivide work into discrete tasks. We compare examples of call centre competency standards with case study accounts of the use of articulation work skills, arguing the need for a taxonomy allowing the recognition of different levels of these skills across the service sector.