Fernie and Metcalf’s (Not) Hanging the Telephone Payment System in the New Sweatshops (1998) study of call centre remuneration system using the Foucauldian perspective has
surveillance system within the workplace gave management total control over the workforce. This was induced through the panoptic effect engraved in the technological system itself. It is believed that the new workplace rendered the human supervisory powers redundant as the ‘all seeing machine’ sought to monitor, assess and measure the work: “…
for call centres, Bentham’s panopticon was truly the vision of the future and these organisations are the very epitome of what Foucault had in mind” (1998: 2). This referred to the intensity of control and monitoring of work through technology with every individual worker visible to the machine. This form of unobtrusive power displaced the physical cohesive power by the managers as the workers regulate their ‘own’ behaviour through the panopticon power. Based on the individualising nature of the labour process, call centres seemed to be less sympathetic to collective organisation as the rewards and punishment are individualised. Fernie and Metcalf (1998: 2) went further to argue that “the tyranny of assembly line is but a Sunday school picnic compared with the control that management can exercise on computer telephony”. The control imperative in the call centre labour process goes beyond the Fordist assembly line which paced and control worker movement.
The ‘lack’ of movement by workers is due to the Automatic Caller Distribution (ACD) which seeks to ‘fire’ call after call without any break in between calls. This means workers will be attached to their chairs until official breaks as the central machine locates and directs calls as soon as one ends. This Automatic Caller Distribution, along with other software, controls the pace, length and ‘quality’ of each call. The latter is ensured by call recording and anonymous listening to customer-worker interactions. Constant silent surveillance through call recording means that operators do not know which conversation is recorded or listened to. As a result it direct supervision is redundant as the operators are constantly under surveillance with less resistance (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a). Though some have criticised the ‘totalising panoptic power’ in the workplace, Fernie and Metcalf’s work sparked debates between Foucauldians and Labour Process theorists. The latter saw greater continuities with the call centre in forms of control and resistance rather than something entirely new (Callaghan and Thompson, 2001; Taylor and Bain, 1999 Bain and Taylor, 2000).
Bain and Taylor’s, Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call Centre (2000) research in Scottish Banks depicted different individual and collective forms of call centre resistance. They argued against the neglect of worker resistance in the Fernie
and Metcalf (1998) account of call centre work. Bain and Taylor (2000) argued for the heterogeneous nature of call centres based on size, industry, market, complexity and call cycle time. The use of the electronic panopticon as ‘totalising control’ of the workplace is very ‘simplistic and false’; it ignores the complexity of the employment relationship and call centre labour process. Despite the Faucouldian belief about the internalised gaze (Bain and Taylor, 2000), they continued to argue for worker resistance in the call centre. According to Mulholland (2004) the challenges faced by managers in call centres include high turnover, high absenteeism, work avoidance, sales sabotage, and sick leave rates, which hardly symbolises any perfect panopticon control.
Thompson and Ackroyd (1995: 625) went further to argue that the Foucouldian framework is flawed; it is not, as claimed, a better alternative to accounts of workplace social relations.
Control is not only about discipline and creation of obedient and docile bodies, it is part of capitalist logic to create profit. “By treating workplaces as an extension of disciplinary practices and the factory, hospital, and other organisations as paler versions of carceral institutions, the specific character of the employment relations is lost” (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995: 624). This means capital-labour relations is localised and without any significant inclusion of labour as an actor in the relationship. The managerial intentions to control can never be assumed to be the actual practice, as the workers find ways to observe whether they are being listened at or not. This is echoed by Adesina who argued that “the perfect control apparatus has not been invented. This is mainly, because unlike other commodities entering the production process labour power has a unique character of being bound-up to its bearer, the workers who are thinking, living and active human beings”
(1988: 388). In the end, Bain and Taylor (2000) argued, control and surveillance within these call centres are a means to an end, rather than an end in itself forming part of the ability “to compete and make profits”.The fixation with electronic panopticon has been criticised by LPT proponents arguing for the lack of credible evidence in surveillance as the ‘dominant managerial control’. Thompson (2003a) strongly criticised the ‘newness’ of the unobtrusive nature of the surveillance and its ‘continuity’ from second wave LPT debates. He argued that Edwards, Burrawoy and Friedman clearly demonstrated the shift from “direct and coercive nature of control” towards a consensual and indirect one, so this unobtrusive control
surveillance system with the ‘circuits of capital’, which seems to be totally neglected by the individualising post structuralist in the ‘electronic panopticon age’.
On the other hand, Head (2003) strongly believed that Fordist production and Taylorist principles guide the labour process of these call centres which make it difficult to assess any change to cleaner jobs. He argued that this “digital assembly line” performs the same functions that Henry Ford applied in the conveyor belt where the pace of work was controlled by the assembly line. The routinisation and standardisation of answering calls has resulted in call centres being described as electronic sweatshops, battery farms, assembly line or production lines, the epitome of panoptic power. During the labour process, work is
‘produced and consumed’ at the same time within this interactive industry. Work is intensified through scripting and engaging the worker’s feelings and body for a capitalist to maximise profit. This view saw the call centre labour process as the epitome of the assembly line production with management using the electronic surveillance for control over the labour process. Whether these call centre can be fitted within the so-called post-industrial workplace is a different question.
On the assembly line, discipline and control could be enforced by the line itself so there was no need for supervisors to determine the speed. This gave the power to the managers to accelerate the pace of work whenever it wanted to. All that was needed was to press a button and the line would go faster. The worker was simply a ‘cog in a machine’ within the production system (Head, 2003). This resilient workplace design is said to be the most common in the call centre labour process, as the Automatic Caller Distribution (ACD) controls the pace and number of calls within the ‘digital assembly line’. The Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) and ACD with the scripting programmes have fragmented the labour process in itself while workers have to deal with routine calls and standardised answering mode (Bain and Taylor, 2000).
The ACD receives inbound calls, automatically place calls on queues, and (in conjunction with other software) offers management information gathering package (Bain and Taylor, 2000). The technology in call centres tends to control speed, and ensure that the operators know their queue numbers and average waiting period. Dubbed the ‘new ruthless economy’
(Head, 2003) the call centre labour process possesses the manufacturing sector’s
characteristics with its scientific managers, overwhelming power unconstrained by labour organisations, disregard of labour laws, and controls not only the speed in the assembly line but also the minds, feelings and appearance of the workers (Head, 2003: 109). This
‘industrialisation’ of the service industry has led to high turnover within the call centre industry as the workers tend to vote with their feet.
Poynter (2000) endorsed this view by arguing that new forms of service work embody practices that were once the preserve of the assembly line and manual employees, routinising and deskilling professional work. A form of organisation that was once the preserve of manual labour has been rapidly diffused within industries that were previously associated with white-collar workers and the exercise of the ‘mental’ labour (2000: 151).
This resuscitates the negative and Marxist views of the office, as Poynter (2000: 151) argued mental labour has become variously “Taylorised, de-professionalised, routinised and manual, sharing many of the traits of the assembly line”. The digital surveillance and control forms the epitome of call centre woes.
Technological supervision of the call centre is dependent on the ACD, IVR and scripting software integrated in the labour process. ACD physically locks workers into the computer workstation by call distribution immediately after the wrap up time. This also enhances management monitoring of the labour process, information gathering and measurement.
Through the ACD, managers are able to gather information about the timeframe of the call and number of calls taken by the operator. As much as technology distributes the number of calls, it also records the conversations between the customer and operator during the interaction process through IVR. The latter is a quality-monitoring tool used by the management to discipline and punish when necessary. Monitoring calls ensures a standard way of treating the customer in addition to scripts (Korczynski et al., 1996; Callaghan and Thompson, 2001; Bolton and Houlihan, 2005).
Coming from a Weberian perspective Frenkel et al (1999) and Korczynski, Shire, Frenkel and Tam (2000) have posed the major critique of the Labour Process Theory (LPT) perspective of call centres. They argued that the absence of the frontline worker in the labour process due to its fixation with the manufacturing sector. The presence of the customer in the frontline
This approach argued that the rise of service work and interactive service work (in particular) challenges the focus on management and labour as the main role-players in the labour process. The customer has to be included in the analysis of the labour process especially in the interactive service work.
The more important point is the recognition of this third party participation but also that it can no longer be assumed that the interests of each party are in conflict (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005). The customer is also under the control of both algocratic and bureaucratic systems. For instance, through the IVR system the customer has to queue and punch the right information in order to be redirected to the relevant consultant. The customer has to be patient and cautious to follow careful instructions given by the IVR machine as she could restart the whole process of calling if she gives wrong information or punches the wrong key on the phone keypad. This is why Aneesh (2006: 15) argued that “the computer has become the commander of both the frontline and the customer”.
The extension of ‘McDonalidisation’ (Ritzer, 2001) in the service sector has meant that management controls not only what the workers ought to do but also what they should say and how they are supposed to say it. Through scripting and voice/accent training, managers control the frontline, by limiting their interaction through scripts. Despite the customer (as the new boss) and the algocratic systems to control the labour process of the call centres, operators still have to adhere to the company regulations, which means meeting the targets. Through this performance management system, call centre operators are required to use their interactive skills to keep the customer ‘happy’ but also maintain the targeted numbers prescribed by the organisations.
This Weberian perspective (Frenkel, Korczynski, Shire and Tam, 1999; Korczynski et al., 2000) on how call centres are controlled by ‘customer-related normative values’ which supplements the ‘hierarchical and bureaucratic control’ tends to over-emphasise the customer presence in the frontline. This approach on the elevated status of the customer presence and authority in the frontline fails to acknowledge Braverman’s (1974) foresight on different control mechanisms including the ‘habituation of the worker’ to facilitate the extraction of the surplus value from the workers. “Putting the call centre frontline on the shoes of the customer” (Korckzynski et al., 2000: 675) is part of the training and creation of
the sustained indirect forms of control for the worker to counter resistance from an early age of those who enter labour market.
Chapter 6 of LMC, ‘The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist mode of Production’, is dedicated to control beyond the physical means of scientific management. Braverman (1974: 97) argued that
… generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve. The necessity of adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form, for overcoming natural resistance intensified swiftly changing technology, antagonistic social relations, and the succession of generations, does not therefore end with the ‘scientific organisation of labour’ but becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society.
Cohen (1987) is very critical of reducing labour process debates to ‘control and deskilling’.
She argued that profitability and accumulation is at the centre of capitalism which makes the labour process less about control and more about exploitation: “Exploitation is both central to the capitalist labour process and contradictory within it, in that it is a relationship which delivers surplus value and produces an inherent conflict of interests of which undermines the production of surplus value” (42). Workers do not struggle for ‘power’ but they resist exploitation. This forms the centre of the bargain between ‘effort and reward’ as the workers seek more while capitalists give less. She further argued that “within control paradigm workers could be depicted as engaged in an ongoing process of resistance to and thwarting of the domination of capitalism” (Cohen, 1987: 45). This could be criticised for lacking consciousness as workers focus on their economic needs rather than the
‘revolutionary’ struggle, but as Cohen (1987) noted, this fight against exploitation is
‘political’ in its nature. The absence of economic analysis of the capitalist labour processes tends to define the labour process only in political terms without connecting it to the material conditions of workers. This means the ‘contested terrain’ of work is not only rooted in ‘power-related’ struggles or ‘transformation’ but economic exploitation of workers by the logic of accumulation and profitability (Cohen, 1987).