To date, academic studies of the call centre ‘sector’ remain limited in scope. Here the authors attempt to remedy that omission by analysing the recent and spectacular growth of call centres in the UK, drawing on a wide variety of sources, including two extensive surveys of developments in Scotland during 1997.

This article presents a thoroughgoing critique of Fernie andMetcalf's perspective, that the call centre is characterised by the operation of an 'electronic panopticon' in which supervisory power has been 'rendered perfect'. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre the authors analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance.The very recent, and extremely rapid, growth of call centres in the UK is the principal reason for the paucity of academic writing on this major industrial development. Significant early contributions concentrated on the emergence of 'branchless' retail banking and the spatial and regional aspects of growth Richardson and Marshall, 1996), developments in Australia and the growing importance of considerations of quality (Frenkel and Donoghue, 1996) and payment systems (Fernie and Metcalf, 1998). The last of these attracted widespread media attention, although not for the study of payment systems themselves, but rather for the authors' headline-making declarations. They asserted that call centres were the 'new sweatshops' and that managerial powers of electronic surveillance were akin to those systems of dominance which existed in Jeremy Bentham's prison Panopticon.At the same time, with the call centre sector 1 thirsting for self-knowledge, and university research lagging behind developments, consultants' reports achieved considerable influence and authority (

This article engages in debates stimulated by previous work published in Organization Studies, and more widely, on the purpose and effects of workers' humour and joking practices. The authors emphasize the subversive character of humour in the workplace, rejecting perspectives which see humour as inevitably contributing to organizational harmony. Drawing on methodologies, including ethnography, which permitted the authors to penetrate the organizational surface of two call centres, rich evidence of satire and joking practices were uncovered. While long-acknowledged motives were revealed, particularly relief from boredom and routine, workers' use of humour took novel, call centre specific forms. Overwhelmingly, though, humour contributed to the development of vigorous countercultures in both locations, which conflicted with corporate aims and priorities. However, the particular combinations of managerial culture, attitudes to trade unionism and dissent, and the nature of oppositional groupings helped impart a different character to humour between the two call centres. At Excell, the presence of a group of activists seeking to build workplace trade unionism in circumstances of employer hostility was a crucial contrast. These activists were instrumental in their use of humour, aware that it helped make the union popular and served to weaken managerial authority. This evidence, that subversive satire can be allied to a wider collective union organizing campaign at workplace level, makes a distinctive contribution to the recent literature on organizational humour.

Despite the integration of telephone and VDU technologies, call centres are not uniform in terms of work organization. It is suggested that diversity can best be understood by reference to a range of quantitative and qualitative characteristics. Consequently, perspectives that treat all call centres as if they were the same hybrids of customization and routinization are rejected, along with over-optimistic interpretations of labour control over work organization. Empirical evidence from nine `workflows' in two call centres - an established financial sector organization and a rapidly growing outsourced operation - provide excellent grounds for an examination of similarity and difference. A picture emerges of workflows which are volume-driven and routinized, involving low levels of employee discretion, and, by contrast, those less dominated by quantitative criteria offering higher levels of operator discretion and an emphasis on the quality of customer service. Despite these distinctions, larger numbers of operators report an experience of work which is driven by quantitative imperatives, most manifest in the pervasive implementation of targets. Targets are also used increasingly to assess and mould the quality of the call centre operator's interaction with the customer. Overall, the evidence casts doubt on the optimistic perspective that call centre work, in time, will come to resemble `knowledge work'.

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