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Management Material: Understanding the Contradictory Perspectives of Lower Level Managers in a Canadian Call Centre by R. Elizabeth A. Maddeaux A thesis submitted in partiRl fulfillment of the degree rf'<:11;n~m"'!lt,: . for a Master of Arts to the Social Justice and Equity Studies Master's Program Brock University St. Catharines, ON ©2012 Abstract Call centres have emerged during a time of rapid technological change and represent a form of ready employment for those seeking to replace or supplement "traditional" forms of employment. Call centre work is considered characteristic of the kinds of service work available in the new economy. This paper examines the experiences and practices of lower level managers in a call centre in southern Ontario. Findings are based on analysis of semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that lower level managers resolve the contradictory social space they occupy by aligning themselves primarily with more powerful executives,in part because they know this might lead to increased job security. The implications of this trend for building a strong labour movement capable of combating neoliberal discourses regarding the need for work restructuring are discussed. Taking the place ofthe social rights-bearing citizen ... is one who is re-familialized, individualized, and marketized ... [AJ shift from secure employment with benefits and decent wages to precarious jobs that are short term, unprotected, and poorly compensated has .. become a strong symbol of the general trend towards a marketized citizen. Many ofthese transformations in paid work are extensively documented and undeniable. What they mean for the well-being of individuals and their communities is, however, an intensely contested question. - Janet Siltanen for Dean I am honoured to have been supervised by Ann Duffy and June Corman and wish to express my sincere thanks for their help. Ann and June are good supervisors, yes, but more than that, they are leaders-by-example. Many thanks to Dean, Evelyn, and Grant; to the staff and faculty of the Sociology and Social Justice departments at Brock University- supports, inspirations, colleagues and friends; and especially to my research participants - class acts everyone. All rights reserved. Use shall not be made of the material contained herein without the proper acknowledgement. Table of Contents Introduction - Why Call Centres? ............................................................ 1 Marxist theoreticalframework ............................................... 3 Lower level managers .............................................................. 8 The new economy ................................................................... 14 Unionizing the Service Sector - What We Already Know ................................. 24 Life in the call centre ............................................................. .26 New employees for a new economy ........................................ 30 Unionism and the labour left.................................................. .35 Methodological Considerations - Looking for Labour .................................. .43 Profile of the research participants ........................................ 52 Management material- Situating Lower Level Managers ............................... 57 Labour process and policy in the call centre ......................... 58 The experience of managing others ............................... 62 Perceived relevance of collective action ................................. 71 Interpersonal problems ............................................................ 81 Conclusions - State of the Unions ........................................................... 87 Works Cited .................................................................................... 95 Appendix I - Research Ethics Application ................................................................. 102 Appendix II - Letter ofInvitation .............................................................................. 114 Appendix III - Informed Consent Form ................................................................... .115 Introduction Why Call Centres, Why Now? My professional interest in working-class culture and the transfonnation of work in the latter half of the 20th century and the impact of those changes on workers in the new millennium is a natural extension of my own experience in the world of work. The inspiration for this particular project came when those of my friends and family who had been employed in call centres began to receive promotion into the supervisory and low level management positions which abound in the contemporary workplace. My research questions sprang from my own observations of their experiences transitioning from life "on the phone" to suddenly supervising and managing those on the phones and adapting to the conflicting demands faced by the lower echelons of management staff. In the past ten years there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of research on r,an ~entres globally, mirroring the expall3ion of the industryl from a method for large; companies to handle their customer call overflow to a global enterprise used by both the public and private sectors. The existing call centre research runs the gamut from praist for this innovative scheme for employing those displaced from traditional sectors of employment to unmitigated critiques of '''battery hen' operations" (Lamer, 2002: 147). The vast majority of the research focuses on the real plight of telephone agents -those call centre workers at the front lines: handling inquiries, providing technical support, making hotel reservations, and so on. These are the workers who must juggle the competing demands of customers, managers, and clients (see especiallY-Belt, Richardson, I Call centres do not form their own industry, properly speaking. In Canada, call centres are subsumed under the Business Support Services Industry. For simplicity's sake, I will refer to call centres as an industry throughout. See Ernest B. Akyeampong (2005) for a discussion ofjob categories in Canada. Here I will briefly note that according to Vincent and McKeown (2008) this "industry" reported revenues of $2.76 billion in 2006 (4). 1 and Webster (2000); Brannen (2005); Hanna (2010); Huws arid Dahlmanim (2009); McFarland (2002); Mirchandani (2004); Pandy and Rogerson (2012); Pupo and Noack (2010); and Taylor and Bain (2008)). Such research, while valuable, leaves out a range of experiences, including the experiences of call centre workers who are not actively engaged in taking customer phone calls. Hence, my motivation for undertaking the current research project was two fold. First, I wanted to explore the work processes behind the calls by interviewing lower level managers responsible for carrying out those duties which ensure the day-to-day functioning of the call centre. These "off-phone" positions can include human resource jobs, training jobs, finance jobs, and quality control jobs. Clearly, the existing literature's focus on frontline workers has left a gap in the research on call centres, because, as Goertyel (1979) tells us, managers have a distinctive, under-researched view (as cited in Livingstone and Mangar.,.l996: 22\ Second, I felt compelled to add a specifically Marxist analysis to the academic ccnversation about call centres to contest those analyses which provide an unproblematiC version of the emergence of call centre work. An explicitly Marxist, worker-centred response to the call centre industry and other forms of employment emerging in the new economy is important to revitalizing a flagging labour movement. It is difficult for workers to have a strong sense of their rights and to be able to formulate a coherent critique of the various market forces that shape their lives in a social milieu that does not have a strong "pro-labour" discourse on which workers can draw and, in addition, that is characterized by decreasing access to unionized employment. In the new economy, the delegimization of the "labour left" coincides with layoffs in traditionally unionized 2 sectors and drastic losses in union density. The jobs that are emerging to replace manufacturing jobs have not been unionized in large numbers.2 The consequences of these dual trends can be wide-reaching, demanding a coherent response from researchers studying the world of work. In addition, the apparent ubiquity of neo-liberal interpretations of work have a nullifying effect on the consciousness of workers. Where neo-liberalism is still relied upon for the creation of policies related to employment, research which analyses the impact of neo-liberal discourse on the consciousness of Canadian workers is vital. Marxist Theoretical Framework A Marxist approach to call centre work is perhaps best equipped to destabilize . neo-liberal discourses about work which have become both common-place and, more importantly, "common sense." Such discourses ask workers to accept increasingly precadous work aiTai1g~ments and low wages, and mask aiienaling and. exploitative working conditions as natural, orif not natural, then inevitable or unavoidable. A Marxist theoretical framework assumes that the interests of workers and capital are "diametrically opposed to each other" (Marx, 1933: 39). That is, what is necessary for the expansion of capital is precisely what is detrimental to workers, an~ vice versa. For example, survival of capital depends on a continuous rise in profits, which in turn relies on a decrease in wages relative to