'You don't know what you've got till it's gone': re-contextualising the origins, development and impact of the call centre

Abstract

This paper locates the emergence of call centres within the broader political economy. We demonstrate how British Gas responded to privatisation, restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by radically changing work organisation. Using documentary evidence and oral testimonies, we show how the call centre was pivotal to tightening control over the labour process, to intensifying work and transforming the experience of work.

Time reclaimed: temporality and the experience of meaningful work

“…Thompson (1967) asserts that it is the control of workers' time, rather than their skill and effort, which has gained primacy in efforts to extract surplus value. While it might seem that the commodification of time may be more of a concern among unskilled occupations, the symbolism of time as a currency of control may be as much of an issue for knowledge workers through explicit and tacit cultures of long hours, work intensification and performance management processes (Ellis and Taylor, 2006;Jemielniak, 2009). The organic rhythms of open-ended, unstructured 'thought-time' (Noonan, 2015: 116) or socially embedded 'process time' (Davies, 1994: 277) risk being progressively eroded through the instrumental pressures of capitalist imperatives.…”

Upgrading Local Economies in Central and Eastern Europe? The Role of Business Service Foreign Direct Investment in the Knowledge Economy

“…Third, processes of offshoring and outsourcing will be shaped by institutional influences in sender and receiver countries (Lakha, 1994;Balasubramanyan and Balasubramanyan, 1997;Grimshaw and Miozzo, 2006). At an international level important institutional developments such as the deregulation of financial markets, GATS, TRIPS and EU enlargement have been important in differentiating the geography of space and costs (Ellis and Taylor, 2006). Two of the contributions (Sass and Fifekova, and Hardy and Hollinshead) critically evaluate the assumption that low labour costs are the important factor in selecting new locations.…”

Financialization and the workplace: extending and applying the disconnected capitalism thesis

“…Even when not applying the thesis, a range of studies have referenced it in broad support of the argument that financialization in the economy has led to divergent work and employment demands and weakened capacity to sustain collaborative, progressive practices (e.g. Cullinane and Dundon, 2006;Delbridge, 2007;Ellis and Taylor, 2006;Jenkins, 2007;Reed, 2005). Recent work by Appelbaum et al (forthcoming) is notable for expanding the emphasis on broken bargains or 'implicit contracts' to consider a wider range of stakeholders.…”