‘We Recruit Attitude’: The Selection and Shaping of Routine Call Centre Labour

Abstract

Call centres are growing rapidly and are receiving attention from politicians, policy makers and academics. While most of the latter focus on work relations, notably patterns of control and surveillance, this paper explores the role of recruitment, selection and training in the shaping call centre labour. The paper uses data from a case study of a call centre (Telebank) to argue that the increased significance of social competencies within interactive service work gives these procedures greater salience and that they are used by management to address the indeterminacy of labour, in part, outside the labour process. Primary data from management and customer service representatives is used to examine and contrast their respective perceptions of recruitment, selection and training. The paper shows the contested and contradictory tendencies associated with how a particular company identifies and then uses social competencies. Tensions in the labour process between the mobilization of employee attributes and the deliberate moulding and standardization of such competencies is merely part of wider and unresolved tensions concerning the contested nature of emotional labour and the demands of quantity and quality in the management of call centre work. Call centres represent important new forms of work; both in terms of the increasing size of the sector and number of employees (Datamonitor, 1998) and through the nature of the labour process. Understandably, therefore, call centres are attracting an increasing amount of academic attention. Equally unsurprisingly the work process and its attendant control and employment relations has been the primary focus of debate (Fernie and Metcalf, 1997; Frenkel et al., 1998). Given that these employees will be working in an environment where job tasks are often highly scripted and performance is closely monitored, some authors have

The human side of skills and knowledge

“…This is not to deny that the emotions deployed are those that management prescribe and workers in these situations often have very little official freedom over their responses. As Callaghan and Thompson (2002) note, even dropping your voice inappropriately during a sentence can result in additional (remedial) training. Yet in reality workers in front line roles may carve out spaces of freedom, misbehaviour and resistance.…”

“…Rather, they are the ones their employers consider most useful in the workplace, whether the requirement is for warmth, anger, calm or empathy (Hochschild 1983;Mann 1999;Bolton 2005a;Putnam and Mumby 1993;Callaghan and Thompson 2002). Conformity to emotion rules is not novel, nor is it restricted to employment.…”

“…The call centre workers described by Callaghan and Thompson (2002) gave freely of their time to late night callers because they felt empathy for them, not because they were told to do so by management (see also Bolton and Boyd 2003). Then too, Bolton's studies of nurses reveal professional and protective feelings to patients and anger or irritation at the increasing bureaucratisation of the health service rather than emotional dupes mindlessly following ‗feeling rules' (Bolton 2005a(Bolton , 2005b.…”

L’expérience de travail en centre d’appels : aux confins de l’engagement et de la distanciation

“…Ces principes s'articulent autour de certaines valeurs sociales telles que le désir d'aider le client à résoudre ses problèmes (Korczynski, 2002), la démonstration d'un niveau d'empathie envers lui et la volonté de négocier avec lui (Callaghan et Thompson, 2002). Ces principes guident leur logique d'action, les animent et les amènent à continuer à exercer ce travail exigeant.…”

Emotional Conflicts and Coping Strategies: The Case of Life Insurance Agents in China

“…This term refers to 'the act of evoking or shaping, as well as suppressing, feeling in oneself' (Hochschild 1979: 561). Following the study done by Hochschild, one notable paradigm regarding emotional analysis in the workplace has been emerging in recent theories (Hochschild 1979(Hochschild , 2003(Hochschild [1983; Wharton 1993; Morris and Feldman 1996;Fineman 2000;Lord et al 2002;Diefendorff and Gosserand 2003) and empirical studies about the emotional labour in professions such as call centre workers (Deery and Kinnie 2002;Callaghan and Thompson 2002;Korczynski 2003), sales agents (Martin et al 1998) and frontline service agents (Ashforth and Tomiuk 2000). The main themes included in this paradigm are emotional labour process, emotional rules and conflict, emotional management/ control, gender difference and inequality, and job burnout (Maslach et al 2001) or other consequences caused by work.…”