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The article shows how linguistic criteria have become central when defining job categories in the outsourced call centre sector in Spain. Language occupies a central role in the production processes of informational capitalism: in call centres, language functions as the raw material, scripts as tools and conversations as a product. Yet the ways in which linguistic production affects key elements of job categories have received little attention. Drawing on in‐depth interviews in the call centre sector, the analysis of scripts and collective agreements, this article shows how trade unions and workers are pushing to adapt Fordist arguments based on job autonomy to informational production, arguing that job categories may depend on linguistic autonomy from the scripts during the labour process.

Employee turnover is a major problem in off-shored Indian call centres. Agents who service Western customers often face hostility and racial abuse because of who they are and where they are located. A substantial part of job-related training focuses on teaching employees to manage their identity and modify their accent. Based on a sample (n = 211) of Indian call centre workers servicing international customers, we explore these issues and investigate how they affect employee turnover intentions. The study utilises Taylor and Bain's (2005) distinction between factors particular to the Indian context and those more generic to the call centre labour process to better understand the drivers of turnover. We found that a number of distinctive factors including accent modification difficulty, stigma consciousness, racial abuse and perceived favouritism were associated with turnover intentions. The study also revealed that certain job-related factors related to intentions to leave, including routinisation and poor promotional opportunities.

This paper focuses on an under-researched employee category in the call centre literature—the team leader. The paper, drawing on data from nine Australian call centres, finds that the team leader role is integral to the effectiveness of call centres, yet it is a role that consists of considerable complexity and contradictions. The research demonstrates the critical role performed by team leaders: coach, mentor, trainer, performance evaluator, communicator and supervisor. It also shows team leaders as being far more positive about many of the features of the call centre work environment compared with those on the front line. However, there does appear to be a need for greater acknowledgement of their challenging role, the contradictions that are inherent in the job and the need, in many cases, for increased support being made available to assist.

This paper analyses a form of electronic surveillance in a call centre that was not automatically performed through or by information and communication technology but required the active involvement of peers to provide feedback on each other's work by using an online reporting tool. Increased surveillance led to a tightening of control over certain aspects of work as advisors modified their call-handling practices. But surveillance was simultaneously undermined by technical and bureaucratic control linked to existing information systems, which affected the ability and availability of peers to perform monitoring. Electronic peer surveillance was also unable to provide objective information or unobtrusive control as performing and evaluating surveillance became a highly political and contested process. Various forms of resistance arose, which were not always directed at management, but were instead manifest through increased animosity between teams.

This paper examines the genderised experience of employment in call centres. While existing studies have acknowledged structural and agential constraints on women in the workplace, this paper goes further by illustrating the gendered nature of career choice and progression in a context which, in certain respects, appears to have benefitted women's desires for advancement. Drawing on quantitative and in-depth qualitative data from four Scottish call centres, the study provides evidence of gender inequality shaped by structural and ideological workplace and household constraints.

In this exploratory study of union formation in the Indian call centre/business process outsourcing sector, the authors draw upon evidence from the first detailed survey of members of the recently formed UNITES, and from extensive interviews. This paper engages with mobilisation theory and analyses of trade union formation.

This article examines how trade unions in different country settings have utilised call centre technologies. Rather than viewing union call centres as simply a means of service delivery, our research suggests they can also enable a more strategic approach to workplace organising. We explore the implications of union call centres for debates on servicing and organising models of trade unionism.

This paper explores the interpretive negotiation of professional values by nurses working in a large public-sector organisation in the UK, namely the NHS Direct (NHSD). Reported are findings from a number of case studies of NHSD, undertaken in response to calls for more research into so-called professional call centre settings.

Personal, job, as well as contract characteristics and workplace attitudes were related to frequency of absenteeism and intention to leave of call centre employees. Frequency of absenteeism and intention to leave were found to be mainly influenced by contract characteristics and workplace attitudes, while job characteristics and personal characteristics were less important.

This paper advances an extended material analysis to the study of technological change in a call centre. It shows how such an analysis is particularly apropos for understanding the distance that often separates managerial intentions in introducing a new technology from the outcomes associated with how workers utilise it.

This article reports an ethnographic study of call centre work. Analytics are applied enabling study of relations between power and subjectivity. Findings indicate that organisational ‘truth’ claims about workers are produced in a constellation of architectural, technological and managerial apparatuses. Workers orient to and reify the power of these claims, even when resisting.

This case study examines the management of frontline employees in an Israeli call centre by focusing on the organisational rhetoric of ‘professionalism’ and the implementation of integrative human resource practices (debriefing, covert call monitoring, information and technology software, and a monthly bonus). This culture is critically explored as a ceremonial facade that covers the conventional quantity/quality tension.

Popular images of teleworkers' autonomy, such as 'the electronic cottage', give unrealistic pictures of the control exercised over teleworkers, particularly when these are call centre operators and highly integrated information and communication technology systems facilitate pervasive forms of control. However, this study of Italian home-located call centre operators demonstrates that extensive and multifaceted monitoring practices cannot 'solve' the controversial issue of control.

A number of employees individually and cooperatively resist the controls of the electronic surveillance systems in the PowerGrid call centre. However, this is not the case in all teams. One team is faced with a labour process that directs their resistance to be focused directly at management, rather than at management via the machine.

Tertiary labour is the fastest growing form of work in the West. Additionally, computer and telecommunication mediation of labour is increasingly prevalent. However, little research focuses on subjectivity in technology-mediated tertiary labour. Taking a Foucaultian orientation, this paper describes how desires of subjects and organisations are rendered into power/knowledge and affect subjectivity in one variant of technology-mediated tertiary labour.

Studies of call centre working have focused almost exclusively on the sophistication of technological and bureaucratic systems of labour control. The commercial context in which firms operate remains relatively under-researched, despite exerting a significant influence on job structures and the working out of labour relations.

Amid structural and regulatory change, Australian telecommunication companies, more than other utilities, emphasised the need to adapt to commercial realities by embracing concepts associated with the new economy and new employment relations. Part of the expansion of telecommunication services during the 1990s involved the growth and consolidation of call centre operations closely associated with the industry. Alongside this expansion has been discussion about the types of job-growth dominating the economy and changes to the way labour is managed. Those who suggested that management replaced traditional direct and hierarchical labour control with more cooperative and individualised relationships, were contrasted with others who argued that normative and cultural elements dominated labour management in contemporary workplaces. Along with literature on customer control, much of this literature relied on the merging of consumption and production, and a subjective analysis of identity.

Changes in organisational forms are central to the way new technologies impact on the future of work and employment. Drawing on case–study evidence of a call centre and its client relations and a multinational IT firm and its partnership with a government department, this paper explores the implications for skill and managerial control.

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women’s employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women’s ‘feminine’ social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised.

This article presents a thoroughgoing critique of Fernie and Metcalf's perspective, that the call centre is characterised by the operation of an 'electronic panopticon' in which supervisory power has been 'rendered perfect'. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre the authors analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance.