Re-organising Service Work: Call Centres in Germany and BritainRoutledge, 29. sep. 2017 - 244 sider This title was first published in 2002. Call centres are a type of service work that stand at the interface between corporations and consumers. They exemplify more general tendencies present within service work. They also have a particular public image - being associated in the public mind with low skilled and regimented work. This volume presents contributions from British and German management academics and industrial sociologists based on primary research on call centres in both countries. The contributions cover the genesis and development of call centres as a new form of organization, or indeed a new industry; the rationalization and control strategies of organizations that establish call centres; and the nature of service work and service interactions. The findings of this volume challenge the common public image of call centres and finds that call centre employment is in fact very diverse. So, for example, skilled advising and consulting services are often performed over the phone. Along with the sometimes skilled nature of call centre work, work organization and working conditions vary as well. The text also seeks to contrast the British and German experience of call centre work and employment. In Germany clerical work has traditionally been embedded in the specific traditions of co-operative industrial relations that define the German model. Call centres present a strategic challenge to this model, and the expansion of call centres has been at the forefront of changes aimed at making employment more flexible in Germany. This work offers a choice of country cases, which permit a comparison of service employment within both a liberal capitalist and a socially embedded economy. |
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areas argued back-office Bain and Taylor bank Basingstoke behaviour call centre agents call centre employers call centre industry call centre managers call centre operators call centre workers cent coaching com communication companies competencies con concept cus customer service customer service advisors customer sovereignty customer’s Datamonitor economic emotional labour employees enchanting myth established example financial services focus Frenkel German call centres Holtgrewe industrial relations institutional internal interviews job enlargement job enrichment Kerst Korczynski labour market labour process London monitoring myth of customer Netherlands North Rhine-Westphalia number of call Oberbeck organisa organisational field Outsourced Call Centre part-time performance pro production Randstad rationalisation recruitment role Ruhr area Schietinger sector ser service interactions service organisation service quality social skills staff standardisation strategies structure Taylor and Bain Taylorist team leader telephone tion tomer trade unions unionised ver.di women workforce workplace X-Bank