Re-embedding agency at the workplace scale: Workers and labour control in Glasgow call centres

Abstract

Following recent calls for the development of a more embedded sense of labour agency, this paper focuses on the scale of the workplace which is largely absent from recent labour geography debates. Drawing on studies in the labour process tradition, the paper presents empirical research on call centre work in Glasgow, utilising this to revisit the concept of local Labour Control Regimes. We argue that rather than being simply imposed by capital and the state 'from above', workplace control should be seen as the product of a dialectical process of interaction and negotiation between management and labour. Labour's indeterminacy can influence capital in case specific ways as firms adapt to labour agency and selectively tolerate and collude with certain practices and behaviours. Workers' learned behaviours and identities are shown to affect not only recruitment patterns in unexpected ways, but also modes of accepted conduct in call centres. Accordingly, the case is made for the influence of subtle -yet pervasive -worker agency expressed at the micro-scale of the labour process itself. This, it is argued, exerts a degree of 'bottom-up' pressure on key fractions of capital within the local Labour Control Regime.

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

“…), as the historical evidence from PKS demonstrates. But incorporating lived experiences within the everyday spaces and places of work remains equally crucial to sharpen understandings of the shifting opportunities, struggles, divisions, and constraints facing workers and their communities (Coe and Jordhus‐Lier ; Hastings and MacKinnon ). This article has sought a contribution towards grounded labour‐centred research, developing intra‐labour agency as an analytical lens to draw critical attention to uneven lived experiences and expressions of agency among workers within capitalist workplaces.…”

“…The empirical case utilised to elaborate intra‐labour agency typifies many general outcomes of restructuring that unfold in workplaces organised around differentiated job tasks and work crews, internal hierarchies, and competition (Hastings and MacKinnon ; Siemiatycki ). In theorising across the “landscape[s] of highly uneven political possibilities” labour encounters (Coe and Jordhus‐Lier :219), researchers are rightly concentrating on the various social arenas and institutional contexts where workers are differentially connected.…”

“…). Globally oriented analyses of restructuring help contextualise and de‐romanticise labour's agency while the need also remains to engage workers' experiences “up‐close” within daily spaces and places of labouring (Hastings and MacKinnon ).…”

“…Such approaches and scales of analysis are under‐represented in recent studies that situate labour, its agency potential and constraints, in global context. Placing labour globally is vital—including for theorising uneven development—but workplaces also remain significant socio‐spatial arenas where labour markets and processes are grounded (Rutherford ), life matters negotiated, and agency “exercised and expressed on a day‐to‐day basis” (Hastings and MacKinnon :105). Second, I centre the lived experiences of workers and their families, contrasting most restructuring studies that focus on union–management relations.…”

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control, Self‐valorisation, and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

“…Many practices drew admonishment from Management, including routines of “slaggin’ off the lassies” (a common patriarchal practice in Gov‐Tel which employed several former factory workers and staff drawn from other areas of the Glasgow Council), and the use of whipping boys and pranks at Sales‐Com. Reflecting the backgrounds of particular groups, workers in many cases sought to embed their own personally desired norms and routines, at times clashing with both the ideals of others and reinforcing gender and social power relations around call centre work cultures (Cleaver :56; Hastings and MacKinnon ) . The point here is not the morality of worker actions in these moments, but rather the ability of workers to construct their own “times and spaces with alternative activities and new forms of sociality” (Cleaver :64).…”