Call centres are growing rapidly and are receiving attention from politicians, policy makers and academics. While most of the latter focus on work relations, notably patterns of control and surveillance, this paper explores the role of recruitment, selection and training in the shaping call centre labour. The paper uses data from a case study of a call centre (Telebank) to argue that the increased significance of social competencies within interactive service work gives these procedures greater salience and that they are used by management to address the indeterminacy of labour, in part, outside the labour process. Primary data from management and customer service representatives is used to examine and contrast their respective perceptions of recruitment, selection and training. The paper shows the contested and contradictory tendencies associated with how a particular company identifies and then uses social competencies. Tensions in the labour process between the mobilization of employee attributes and the deliberate moulding and standardization of such competencies is merely part of wider and unresolved tensions concerning the contested nature of emotional labour and the demands of quantity and quality in the management of call centre work. Call centres represent important new forms of work; both in terms of the increasing size of the sector and number of employees (Datamonitor, 1998) and through the nature of the labour process. Understandably, therefore, call centres are attracting an increasing amount of academic attention. Equally unsurprisingly the work process and its attendant control and employment relations has been the primary focus of debate (Fernie and Metcalf, 1997; Frenkel et al., 1998). Given that these employees will be working in an environment where job tasks are often highly scripted and performance is closely monitored, some authors have

Call centres represent a new strategy by capital to reduce unit labour costs. While this strategy has been applied to many different types of work, it is particularly successful in cutting costs in routine interactive service encounters. Telebank, the case study research site, is one of four integrated call centres throughout the UK. Data collection includes taped semi-structured interviews with customer service representatives and managers as well as non-participant observation of recruitment, training and the labour process. This article argues that management has developed a new form of structural control. Theoretically this draws heavily on Edwards's concept of technical control, but not only is this shown to be extended and modified, it is also combined with bureaucratic control, which influences the social structure of the workplace. Contrary to Edwards such systems are not distinct; rather they are blended together in the process of institutionalizing control. Part of the rationale for this is to camouflage control, to contain conflict by making control a product of the system rather than involving direct confrontation between management and workers. Despite such attempts the struggle for transforming labour power into profitable labour remains, and the article ends by exploring confrontation between workers and managers and worker agency more generally.

This article builds on recent critiques of the knowledge economy to argue that key growth areas in future employment will be in low level service jobs rather than knowledge work as currently understood. The article discusses the knowledge, skills and competencies involved in interactive service work. It suggests that knowledge which is contextual, social or tacit has been taken to be of lesser value in relation to competitive advantage. It highlights the contrast, therefore, between the growth in interactive service work and the focus of the knowledge management literature on a small sub-set of total employment. Two case-studies of interactive service work, one drawn from a range of service sectors and the other from a call-centre setting, provide empirical material which highlights the skills required by employers in this area. Technical skills were seen as less important than aesthetic and social skills. These cases highlight the management of social skills and competencies as critical to interactive service work. Workers need to develop an understanding of themselves that allows them to consciously use their emotions and corporeality to influence the quality of the service. This leads to the conclusion that the interactive service sector should not be conflated with knowledge work. Rather, it is more important to focus on the broader need for knowledgeability in work, and so broaden understanding of labour in the contemporary workplace.

Call centres are evidently an inhospitable environment for teams given a work design based on individualized, largely routine work regulated heavily by technology and managerial scripts. The article explores a number of potential explanations for this paradox in the context of comparable case studies from the UK and Australia. The case studies con.rm that teamworking did not exist in any substantive or traditional sense within any of the plants. But it is argued that teams can exist in the absence of teamwork based largely on their normative bene.ts to management and to a much lesser extent team members. Even allowing for this differentiation, only one of the companies had sustained normative objectives and these were only partially successful. The existing sociotechnical design of call centres is not conducive to teams, but this may not be true of other types of service work.

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