Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine a specific aspect of restructuring in the public sector: the implementation of call centres in customer service and its effects on job quality. The general trend towards organising customer services through call centres gained worldwide importance in the 1990s, but in the public sector it has emerged relatively recently in connection with strategies of ‘new public management’. This article presents five international case studies from the public sector that exhibit different forms of restructuring. They range from internal reorganisation and the establishment of a public-private partnership to the full outsourcing of telephone-based customer services. The article concludes that, despite national differences, the introduction of call centres into the public sector, especially when combined with outsourcing, has dramatic impact on the quality of employment, especially in relation to three aspects: forms of employment, skills and know-how and interest representation.
Highlights
Over the past decade the public sector has undergone massive restructuring all over the world
Many of the current developments are strongly linked to the concept of ‘new public management’ (NPM), which implies an adoption of commercial management techniques in the public sector
Many common private sector management techniques stemming from business process restructuring and lean production have been imported into the public sector and adapted to suit public sector requirements, for example the introduction of benchmarks for measuring efficiency and increasing customer orientation (Proeller & Schedler, 2006; Kegelmann, 2007)
Summary
Over the past decade the public sector has undergone massive restructuring all over the world. The five public sector case studies from Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, UK and Sweden which are analysed here all represent organisations which underwent a major restructuring of customer services, resulting in a centralisation of telephone-based customer service and the implementation of call centre technology. At PCC in Sweden, for example, there exist contracts that specifying performance levels between different in-house departments In most of these cases, trade unions were involved in the process of restructuring and were able to a considerable extent to safeguard the interests of their original constituency, the workers presently employed as direct public sector employees. At Dutch Telecom, for example, employees were moved from the public sector organisation to the private subcontractor in the course of outsourcing They kept their permanent positions, but had to accept a substantial wage reduction, a complex system of temporary compensations was introduced to mitigate the effects of the transition. These are: forms of employment, skills and know-how and interest representation
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