Gender, emotional labour and teamworking in a call centre

Abstract

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.

Political will, political skill, and political behavior

“…Subsequent work suggests that emotional labor may be the result of job demands (Morris & Feldman, 1996), job structure (Mulholland, 2002), and/or employee characteristics (Schaubroeck & Jones, 2000). This research has been limited in that it only addressed emotional labor as it relates to employee-customer interactions.…”

Are All Call Centres The Same?

“…A second genre was more impressed with the continuities with the past than with an emergent electronic dystopia. Grounded in critical labour process theory, this research portrays the call centre as an information factory,' an assembly line in the head' to use the memorable phrase coined by Taylor and Bain (1999;200 I;Baldry, Bain & Downloaded by [Eindhoven Technical University] at 09:48 21 November 2014 Taylor 1998;Bain & Taylor 2000;Callaghan & Thompson 2001;Miozzo & Ramirez 2003;Mulholland 2002). The use of automated call distribution systems and predictive dialing, short job cycles that are further sub-divided into the various components of a customer enquiry and explicit call handling targets renew tendencies towards Taylorising work and deskilling workers.…”

Themed articles: Virtuality and emotion: Introduction

“…The evidence on the alienative climate of call centre work, the loneliness of the teleworker, cyber-bullying and harassment, and the ways virtual technologies can be employed for covert surveillance of worker behaviour, suggest that all is not entirely well on the virtual front (e.g. Holman et al, 2002;Korczynski, 2003;Mulholland, 2002;Sczesny & Stahlberg, 2000). Here emotion is intimately connected with the way power relations at work are exploited or reconfigured in the virtual environment -to the benefit of some, but not others (Lyon, 2006;Mirchandani, 2007).…”