Re-Organising Service Work Call Centres in Germany and Britain

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Re-Organising Service Work

Call Centres in Germany and Britain

URSULA HOLTGREWE Chemnitz University of Technology

CHRISTIAN KERST

Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg KAREN SHIRE

Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg

Ashgate

Aldershot • Burlington USA • Singapore • Sydney

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Selection, editorial matter, Chapter 1 © Karen Shire, Ursula Holtgrewe and Christian Kerst 2002

Individual chapters (in order) © Sandra Arzbächer; Ursula Holtgrewe;

Christian Kerst; Peter Bain; Phil Taylor; Susanne Bittner; Marc

Schietinger; Jochen Schroth; Claudia Weinkopf; Nestor D’Alessio; Herbert Oberbeck; Paul Thompson; George Callaghan; Vicki Belt; Carsten Dose;

Marek Korczynski; Catrina Alferoff; David Knights; Kerstin Rieder; Ingo Matuschek; Philip Anderson 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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List of Contributors

CATRINA ALFEROFF is a research assistant in the Department of Management at Keele University on an ESRC-funded project investigating work in call centres. Areas in which she has researched and published include discrimination in employment and training for older workers, employment and training for people with disabilities, direct mail and the problem of privacy, and out-of-hours health service provision. She has lectured in Sociology and HRM at Staffordshire University.

PHILIP ANDERSON is research assistant on the project ‘Service Work as Interaction’ at the Chemnitz University of Technology. His research interests include intercultural communication and associated stress factors in service work as well as various themes in the field of migration studies.

PETER BAIN lectures in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Strathclyde, and worked in the engineering and car industries before entering the groves of academe. Areas in which he has researched and published include occupational health and safety, techno- logical change in the workplace, and contemporary developments in trade unionism. He is a lead member in a joint Scottish universities’ project researching work in call centres and software development, funded under the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Future of Work’ programme.

VICKI BELT is a Research Associate at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), a multi-disciplinary research centre at the University of Newcastle, UK. Her research and publications cover the changing nature and experience of work and employment in the service economy with a specific focus on call centres, the nature of women’s employment in the industry, the implications of the growth of call centres for regional economic development and the provision of pre-employment training for call centre work in old industrial regions, particularly focusing on the case of the north east of England. Her work on women’s employment in call centres has received considerable coverage in the UK media at both local and national levels.

SUSANNE BITTNER is researcher in the research group ‘Flexibility and Social Security’ at the German Institute for Work and Technology (IAT).

Her main topics of research are services, labour market and employment.

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GEORGE CALLAGHAN is a Staff Tutor working with the Open University in the United Kingdom. His PhD is in the labour process field through a study of flexibility, mobility and skills in the labour market. More recent research has included a project, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, into the work organisation of call centres.

NESTOR D’ALESSIO is Staff Tutor at the Sociological-Research-Insitute at the University of Göttingen. His main areas of research are: structural changes of the service sector, ecology, the finance sector, sociology of labour and organisation.

CARSTEN DOSE is a policy administrator at the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science Council), Cologne. He studied Sociology at the University of Frankfurt/Main and was a member of the graduate school ‘Technology and Society’ at Darmstadt University of Technology from 1998-2000 with a scholarship from the DFG. His research interests lie in the fields of socio l- ogy of work and technology.

URSULA HOLTGREWE is principal investigator (with Hanns-Georg Brose) in the project ‘Call Centres: Organisational Boundary Units between Neo- Taylorism and Customer Orientation’ at the University of Duisburg. Until the end of 2001 she was a fellow in the Lise-Meitner post-doctoral program. She is now working at Chemnitz University of Technology in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Department of Innovation Research and Sustainable Resources. Her recent research and publications include organisational fields, boundaries, subjectivity in organisational change, and experiences and value commitments between the spheres of work and other activities.

CHRISTIAN KERST is a researcher in the project ‘Call Centres: Organisa- tional Boundary Units between Neo-Taylorism and Customer Orientation’

at the Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg, Institute of Sociology. His research is in the field of the sociology of work and organisations, industrial relations, and the sociology of technology and innovation. He is interested in the change of service work in the context of change of industries within their respective institutional environments.

DAVID KNIGHTS is Professor of Organisational Analysis and Head of the School of Management at Keele University. He is the editor of the journal Gender, Work and Organisation and his recent research and numerous publications range from post-humanist feminism, resistence, control, trust,

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power and identity in organisations, ICT and virtuality, call centres, financial services, education and social exclusion. He is the co-author (with H. Willmott) of Management Lives: Power and Identity in Work Organisations (Sage Publications) and co-editor (with H. Willmott) of The Re-engineering Revolution: Critical Studies of Corporate Change (Sage).

MAREK KORCZYNSKI teaches employment relations and the sociology of work at Loughborough University Business School. He is author of Human Resource Management in Service Work (Palgrave and MacMillan), and co- author of On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy (Cornell University Press). He is continuing to write and research in the sociology of production and consumption in services.

INGO MATUSCHEK is researcher in the DFG research group ‘New Media in Everyday Life: From Individual Use to Socio-Cultural Change’ at the Chemnitz University of Technology. He coordinates the research project

‘Autonomy and Standardization in Media-Related Boundary Unit Work- Informatised Conversation Work in Communication Centres’. Together with two colleagues he edited Neue Medien im Arbeitsalltag. Empirische Befunde – Gestaltungskonzepte – theoretische Perspektiven (Westdeutscher Verlag). He is interested in conversation analysis, the sociology of time, new forms of service and media-related work and subjectivity of workers.

HERBERT OBERBECK is Professor of Sociology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His main areas of research are: structural changes in industry, structural changes of the service sector, changes of social struc- ture and social conflicts about ecology.

KERSTIN RIEDER is a researcher at the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck, Psychological Institute. Her PhD is a study of work conditions, the guiding principles of society and work identity in nursing. She is an associated partner of the research project ‘Service Work as Interaction’ at the Chemnitz University of Technology. Her research interests include the customer’s role in service interaction as well as stress factors for service workers.

MARC SCHIETINGER is researcher in the research group ‘Flexibility and Social Security’ at the German Institute for Work and Technology (IAT).

His main topics of research are services and working time.

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JOCHEN SCHROTH was researcher in the research group ‘Flexibility and Social Security’ at the German Institute for Work and Technology (IAT) until October 2001. He is now working for a trade-union.

KAREN A. SHIRE is a professor of sociology and Japan studies, and managing director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the Gerhard- Mercator-Universität Duisburg. Her research and publications cover work and organisation in knowledge and information-intensive services, in comparative perspective. She is the principle investigator of two projects for the German Ministry of Education and Research program on the Future of Work – one on the organisation of knowledge and information-intensive services and an second on virtual organisations. She is also the principle investigator of a DFG project on Employment Diversification in Japan. She is co-author of On the Front-Line:Organization of Work in the Information Economy (Cornell University Press).

PHIL TAYLOR is a senior lecturer in industrial relations/HRM in the Department of Management and Organization at the University of Stirling.

Areas of recent research and publications include call centres, employment relations in microelectronics, occupational health, student part-time employment, trade unions and HRM and the white-collar labour process.

Current call centre research includes projects on health and safety, international employment relations and trade union organising. He is a lead member of an Economic and Social Research Council ‘Future of Work’

project based across three Scottish Universities investigating the meaning of work in two emerging sectors, call centres and software development.

PAUL THOMPSON is Professor of Organisational Analysis in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Strathclyde. His research and publishing interests focus on organisational analysis, the labour process and workplace innovation. Recent published work includes Workplaces of the Future (edited with Chris Warhurst, Macmillan, 1998) and Organisational Misbehaviour (Sage, 1999, with Stephen Ackroyd). He is a co-organiser of the International Labour Process Conference and Editor for the Palgrave Series, Management, Work and Organisations and Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisations.

CLAUDIA WEINKOPF is senior researcher and coordinator of the research group ‘Flexibility and Social Security’ at the German Institute for Work and Technology (IAT). Her main topics of research are services, labour market and employment.

Re-Organising Service Work Call Centres in Germany and Britain