This article examines workplace conflict in an Irish call centre. It criticizes managerial and post-structural accounts of resistance for failing to see that workplace conflict continues to be located in structural issues, such as the employment relationship, making pay, productivity and work intensification the source of conflict. In adopting Martinez Lucio and Stewart's (1997) notion of the collective worker, the article will show that in subordinated work conditions, workers engage in a recipe of informal collective practices that are organically borne out of their daily work experiences.
KEY WORDSinformal collective responses / responses / tacit alliances / trade union organization
This article examines teamworking in a call centre and how this is shaped for the employees by an increase in technical control, the dynamics of emotional labour and gender politics. The research is based on a case study of call centre work organisation in different sectors, and this paper draws specifically on ethnographic research on two teams and their managers in broadcasting. Drawing on theoretical insights, it suggests that teamworking results in a fundamental contradiction involving a “soft” discourse versus a regime of increasing managerial control. Participation is measured against Thompson and Wallace’s three‐dimensional notion of participation, showing that employees have little discretion over the way work is organised. The normative aspect of team organisation accommodates managerial coping strategies in conditions of staff shortage via numerical flexibility. However, management’s efforts to disguise control are resisted by employees who transform workplace discourses into an oppositional politics, shattering the illusion of unity promoted by the pundits of team organisation.
The focus of this article is the character of the entrepreneurial, managerial and preservation strategies characterising successful family businesses. It includes majority white and minority ethnic business in a variety of enterprises across the different sectors and argues that the notion of a shared business culture embedded in a shared class background best describes their approach to enterprise. This particular business culture which embodies a set of values, beliefs and strategies is derived from the practice of creating, managing and sustaining the institution of family capitalism, but is essentially an expression of the middle class social attributes of the business families as opposed to a reflection of specific ethnicities.
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