Call to Arms? Collective and Individual Responses to Call Centre Labour Management

Industrial restructuring, technological change and a greater interest in new management practices have focused attention on the shift from an industrial to ‘post-industrial’ or ‘knowledge economy’. Within this broader rubric of organizational and social change, there has been considerable debate about how labour is managed and the causes, nature and implications of these changes. An extensive literature has analyzed shifts from traditional control-based labour management to a commitment-based human resource (HR) approach (Bell, 1974; Walton, 1985; Drucker, 1993). This debate, which is particularly relevant to call centre operations, pivots on the relevance of post-industrial and, more recently, postmodern models of managerial control (Frenkel et al., 1999; Thompson and Warhurst, 1998).