Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management

Bain, Peter; Watson, Aileen; Mulvey, Gareth; Taylor, Phil; Gall, Gregor

doi:10.1111/1468-005x.00103

Cited by 173 publications

(145 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Although research draws attention to the diverse nature of the call centre industry (see for example Batt & Moynihan, 2002, Bain, Watson, Mulvey, Taylor & Gall, 2002Houlihan, 2002), the image of the passive worker succumbing to the routinization and computerization of the work is locked in people's mind (see Taylor and Bain, 1999 'assembly line in the head'; Fernie & Metcalfe, 1998 'electronic sweatshop'), and it is this image and perception that both managers and workers at Cygnus attempt to evade through the symbolic resources provided by the brand.…”

Section: Negotiating the 'Expectation' Of Professional Skilled Work Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

Brannan

Parsons

Priola

2014

Organization Studies

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Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations' external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the 'work of the brand', we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to 'cope' with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity. Keywordsbrand, call centres, employee branding, ethnography, identity, organizational control 'All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away.'Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space 'In ev'ry job that must be done, there is an element of fun.You find the fun and snap! The job's a game. And ev'ry task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.'

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Section: Negotiating the 'Expectation' Of Professional Skilled Work Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

Brannan

Parsons

Priola

2014

Organization Studies

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“…Whereas scientific and technological advancements were supposed to increase both productivity and leisure time, working hours remained static or became longer and often more intense (Basso 2003;Schor 1991). The advanced technologies of the new economy coexist with 'temporally regressive' methods of labour controlthe former tightening the screws of the latter -leading some critics to speak of 'electronic sweatshops' and 'assembly lines in the head' (Bain et al 2002;Ong 2006;Taylor and Bain 1999). 'Lean' production methods are applied to service work.…”

Section: Time Arbitragementioning

confidence: 99%

The uses and abuses of time: globalization and time arbitrage in India's outsourcing industries

Nadeem

2008

Global Networks

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A central, if often neglected, aspect of globalization is its effect on time. Most typically, scholars argue that globalization has sped up the pace of life and some even propose a new temporal order: a 'timeless' or 'network' time that supplants or displaces 'natural' and pre-existing cycles (Harvey 1989;Hassan 2003;Virilio 2006). Castells (2000) writes of the general freeing of capitalism from the constraints of time, but this is only one part of the picture. Time is not dissolved in the global circuits of capital; ideologies of flexibility notwithstanding, there is considerable

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“…Thus North clearly separates institutions from organisations. 3 See Bain et al (2002) for a contemporary study of taylorism.…”

Section: National Institutional Complementarities In Southeast Asiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsustainable varieties of capitalism along the Thailand–Malaysia border? The role of institutional complementarities in regional development

Andriesse

Westen

2008

Asia Pac J Manag

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Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management

Cited by 173 publications

References 10 publications

Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

The uses and abuses of time: globalization and time arbitrage in India's outsourcing industries

Unsustainable varieties of capitalism along the Thailand–Malaysia border? The role of institutional complementarities in regional development

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