Electronic Sweatshop Research Articles

The job demands-resources model of work engagement in South African call centres

Orientation: A ‘sacrificial human resource strategy’ is practised in call centres, resulting in poor employee occupational health. Consequently, questions are posed in terms of the consequences of call centre work and which salient antecedent variables impact the engagement and wellbeing of call centre representatives.Research purpose: Firstly, to gauge the level of employee engagement amongst a sample of call centre representatives in South Africa and, secondly, to track the paths through which salient personal and job resources affect this engagement. More specifically, the relationships between sense of coherence, leadership effectiveness, team effectiveness and engagement were investigated, thus testing the Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement.Motivation for the study: To present an application of the Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement in a call centre environment in order to diagnose current ills and consequently propose remedies.Research design: A cross-sectional survey design was used and a non-probability convenient sample of 217 call centre representatives was selected. The measuring instruments comprise the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale to measure engagement, the Team Diagnostic Survey to measure team effectiveness, the leadership practices inventory to gauge leadership effectiveness, and the Orientation to Life Questionnaire to measure sense of coherence. A series of structural equation modelling analyses were performed.Main findings: Contrary to the ‘electronic sweatshop’ image attached to call centre jobs depicted in the literature, results show a high level of employee engagement for call centre representatives in the sample. Also, personal resources such as sense of coherence and job resources such as team effectiveness related significantly to engagement. A non-significant relationship exists between leadership effectiveness and engagement.Practical/managerial implications: Both the content and context of jobs need to be addressed to increase the personal and job resources of call centre representatives.Contribution/value-add: The Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement can be used to improve the occupational health and performance of employees in call centres.

Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions: Multi-Surveillances in the Global Interactive Service Industry

Global call centers, such as those in India receiving back office work from the U.S., are testing grounds for new ICTs (information and communication technologies). While the “electronic sweatshop” has been the prevailing model for understanding the implications of these ICTs, this analysis proposes that a multi-surveillances framework offers a more compelling account. It widens the lens from managers alone, and uncovers a web of actors directly involved in the daily operations of Indian call centers—technology vendors, American outsourcing clients, American consumers, Indian shopfloor supervisors, and Indian employees. Using a case study of the Indian call center industry, this analysis shows each of these actors participates in their own independent surveillance of the others. It charts the proliferation of the technologies themselves and shows how devices like emotion detectors, answering machines, and online unions are symbolic of changing relations in global interactive service.

‘Being yourself ’ in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control

This article extends research about high-commitment management practices in tightly controlled work environments typified by the call centre. One promising research avenue suggests that normative management systems in such contexts, involving ‘fun’ exercises and culture programmes, etc., are more about distracting employee attention away from other, more taxing controls. This article develops such an approach by exploring the specific nature and conditions of such distraction. An empirical study of a call centre in which employees were encouraged to ‘ just be themselves’ (in relation to lifestyle differences, sexuality, diverse identities, etc.) reveals how the distractions are partly informed by the dysfunctions of existing technical, bureaucratic and conventional cultural controls, all of which homogenize workers. Furthermore, the new regime not only serves to distract employees, but proves instrumental in capturing their sociality, energy and ‘authentic’ or ‘non-work’ personalities as emotional labour. At the same time, it gives rise to some contestation and less individualistic forms of authenticity. These outcomes have wider implications for our understanding of worker autonomy in and around hybrid control systems.

The Call Centre and its Many Players

Call centres have been presented as a poster child for many things ranging from a leap in management success, to a locale of total panoptic power, to electronic sweatshops, to the latest effort in deskilling physical and emotional labour for corporate profit, to an outpost of corporate empire. Proponents of these positions frame their assertions with theoretical positions that advance particular views of either ‘nature’ or ‘society’ as the commonsensically-present ‘active ingredient’ behind the forces at play. Aided by actor-network theory, this article attempts to avoid these theoretically-constructed positions to describe how some of the many and varied actors (both human and non-human) contribute to the day-to-day production of call centres and call centre work in and of themselves. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates how artefacts produced in the field itself both help and enable self-discipline of the living in an ongoing reflective accomplishment of order.

Running the electronic sweatshop: Call centre managers' views on call centres

AbstractCall centres have been described as ‘electronic sweatshops’ and ‘slave galleons of the twenty first century’ and, contrarily as progressive, team based and career fulfilling work environments. Drawing on data from a survey of call centre managers in Australia, it is shown that there are elements of call centre management with practices from both extremes of the descriptive continuum and in some instances these elements coexist in the one centre. Whilst call centres are managed with a high level of control and the work of call centre agents is subject to intense scrutiny and monitoring, the simplistic notion that they are electronic sweatshops, or that the metaphor of the Panopticon applies, is rejected.

Running the electronic sweatshop: Call centre managers' views on call centres

AbstractCall centres have been described as ‘electronic sweatshops’ and ‘slave galleons of the twenty first century’ and, contrarily as progressive, team based and career fulfilling work environments. Drawing on data from a survey of call centre managers in Australia, it is shown that there are elements of call centre management with practices from both extremes of the descriptive continuum and in some instances these elements coexist in the one centre. Whilst call centres are managed with a high level of control and the work of call centre agents is subject to intense scrutiny and monitoring, the simplistic notion that they are electronic sweatshops, or that the metaphor of the Panopticon applies, is rejected.

Organizing the Electronic Sweatshop: Rank-and-File Participation in Canada's Steel Union

Organizing the Electronic Sweatshop: Rank-and-File Participation in Canada's Steel Union

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States Priscilla Murolo and A. B. Chitty. New York: The New Press, 2001. Labor's Story in the United States Philip Yale Nicholson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. American Labor: A Documentary Collection Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin, Editors. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004. These three texts, two surveys, and a collection of documents, are recent contributions to the rich history of American workers. In a sense there cannot be too much scrutiny of how the United States labor force has lived its struggle. From the shop windows of mega stores to the more rarefied Book Notes talk shows on C-Span, the working class is inevitably edged out in favor of highly touted volumes on presidents, wars, politicians, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. While many confrontations between workers and management have been scandalous-government troops firing on women and children at Rockefeller-owned mines in strike-torn Telluride, Colorado in the early 1900s comes readily to mind-these are not the scandals that sell. Murolo and Chitty, Nicholson, and Dubofsky and McCartin render an essential service in reminding general readers as well as scholars and college instructors of the other American history. Yet in so doing they have also raised important questions about the voice of the people. What is the worker to a society dedicated to the idea of fluid or even nonexistent class boundaries? All three books are faithful to the rise of class formation in decades before the American Revolution, the imposition of an antebellum factory regime, and the response to deskilling of early artisans and guilds. They move logically from the earliest trade unions in carpentry and allied crafts and the subsequent rise and decline of the innovative, and racist Knights of Labor. Slavery and blacks' post-Emancipation relegation to what the skilled trades dismissed as nigger work shadow the slow progress toward inclusiveness in the traditional, native-born, or English-speaking male and pale labor force. A parallel set of concerns is the exclusionary American Federation of Labor struggles of the late nineteenth century and the key industrial battles in steel, coal, and light manufacturing; the ideological struggles over syndicalism and inclusiveness within the Socialist Party; and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) of the pre-World War I era. Crucial too in these books is workplace contractualism before collective bargaining. Cornerstones are the Depression era advances in industrial democracy, the continuing schisms of race, gender, and ethnicity, and the attempts of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations to unite all industrial workers. The Taft-Hartley Act and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the incursions on labor, and the business unionism of the 1960s through the present are scrutinized as preludes to the decline of American labor organizing and the current battles with international Big Business as the robotic if well-paid assembly line and electronic sweatshop become global. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend is featured in catalogs put out by organizations such as Union Communications Services (http://www.unionist.com). Unlike the Nicholson volume, it signals an emphasis on trade unions and prominority organizations placing an extensive list of abbreviations before the first chapter: The venerable American Railway Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers share space with the little-known 1930s Japanese-Mexican Labor Association and the stillcontroversial Young Lords Party of the inner-city 1960s. Murolo and Chitty's approach nicely balances watershed events in the story of workers with anecdotes, eyewitness testimony, and reminiscences not usually found in broad surveys of this kind. Woven into a discussion of the colonial labor force (many histories begin much later with the 1870s strikes in mining and rails) is a reference to the forgotten Magdalena Zeh. …

Customer Service Versus Performance Metrics in an Electronic Sweatshop?: Managers' Perspectives on Issues in Running Call Centres

Call centres have been described as 'electronic sweatshops' and 'slave galleons of the twenty first century' and, contrarily as progressive, team based and career fulfilling work environments. Drawing on data from a survey of call centre managers in Australia, it is shown that there are elements of call centre management with practices from both extremes of the descriptive continuum and in some instances these elements coexist in the one centre. Whilst call centres are managed with a high level of control and the work of call centre agents is subject to intense scrutiny and monitoring, the simplistic notion that they are electronic sweatshops, or that the metaphor of the Panopticon applies, is rejected.

Cultural tensions exploring call centres in the public sector

The mostly private sector literature on call centre work suggests two distinct images: electronic sweatshops and customer focus (Deery and Kinnie, 2002). In the public sector, call centres have become widespread as governments import private sector management practices. Under the rubric of New Public Management (NPM), contestability and client focus require call centres and other public services to compare or at least benchmark against the private sector. However, the limited literature on public sector call centres highlights distinctive features of the sector along with the pervasiveness of private sector operational and managerial practices. This paper explores the cultural tensions between traditional public sector work organisation and the marketisation of public services through case studies of call centres in two large Australian government agencies. This discussion is organised around the themes of the characteristics and tensions of the call centres, the organisation of work, and the management of the employment relationship.

Phoning in sick? An overview of employee stress in call centres

This paper reviews three studies that examine the main causes of employee stress and well‐being in call centres. All three studies were conducted by the author and his colleagues and reveal that employee well‐being in call centres is associated with: effective job design; performance monitoring that is not perceived to be intense and which aims to develop employees; supportive management; and, supportive human resource practices. Furthermore, levels of well‐being in call centres are shown to compare favourably to other forms of work. The studies challenge the image of call centres as “electronic sweatshops” and question the idea that call centre work is inevitably stressful. It is argued that managers have a choice in how to organise call centre work and can take steps to actively design employee stress out of call centre work. Practical recommendations on how to reduce employee stress in call centres are discussed.

The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. Barbara GarsonScience, Technology, and Social Progress. Steven L. GoldmanTechnology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth. David C. Mowery , Nathan Rosenberg

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews. Barbara Garson . Steven L. Goldman The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. Barbara Garson Science, Technology, and Social Progress. Steven L. Goldman Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth. David C. Mowery , Nathan Rosenberg Dominick A. PisanoDominick A. Pisano Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 83, Number 1Mar., 1992 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/356092 Copyright 1992 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Big Brother and the Sweatshop: Computer Surveillance in the Automated Office

Several authoritative sources have raised the possibility that computer counting and monitoring of work in automated workplaces will transform offices into electronic sweatshops. This paper examines this idea from the vantage point of industrial sociology and managerial theory. Five theoretical models are developed, each of which generates hypotheses about the contexts in which work monitoring becomes important. A brief history of clerical work is given which shows the antecedents of surveillance and work-measurement in this sphere, and a case study of control in an automated office is presented in order to illustrate certain practical limitations on the use of computer surveillance. These insights are combined into a synthetic model which describes those contexts in which surveillance would be likely to result in speed-ups, and those where it would not.