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Call
centres
illustrate the consequences of globalisation for labour
perhaps more clearly than any other form of employment. Call-centre
workers sit at the interface between the global and the local, having
to transcend the limitations of local time zones, cultures and speech
patterns. They are also at the interface between companies and their
customers, having to absorb the impact of anger, incomprehension,
confusion and racist abuse whilst still meeting exacting productivity
targets and staying calm and friendly. Finally, they take the brunt of
the conflict at the contested interface between production and
consumption, having to deal in their personal lives with the conflicts
between the demands of paid and unpaid work. Drawing, amongst others,
on organisational theory, sociology, communications studies, industrial
relations, economic geography, gender theory and political economy,
this important collection brings together survey evidence from around
the world with case studies and vivid first-hand accounts of life in
call centres from Asia, North and South America, Western and Eastern
Europe. In the process it reveals many similarities but also
demonstrates that national industrial relations traditions and workers’
ability to negotiate can make a significant difference to the quality
of working life in call centres.
Contents
Working at the
interface: call-centre labour in a global economy
Ursula Huws
Global or embedded service work? the (limited) transnationalisation of
the call-centre industry
Ursula Holtgrewe, Jessica Longen, Hannelore Mottweiler and Annika
Schönauer
Experiencing depersonalized bullying: a study of Indian call-centre
agents
Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha
Looking behind the line:
privatisation and the reification of work in a Brazilian
telecommunications company
Simone Wolff
Double workload: a study of the sexual division of labour among women
telemarketing operators in Brazil
Claudia Mazzei Nogueira
Call-centre work, convergent unionism, and the Canadian
telecommunications sector: assessing the Aliant strike
Enda Brophy
Standardising public
service:
the experiences of call-centre workers in the Canadian federal
government
Norene Pupo and Andrea Noack
In spite of everything: professionalism as mass customised bureaucratic
production in a Danish government call centre
Pia Bramming, Ole H. Sørensen and Peter Hasle
Creating trust through practising gender in call-centre work
Päivi Korvajärvi
Employment in call centres in Bulgaria
Vassil Kirov and Kapka Mircheva
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