ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the development of call centres, explores the German-British comparisons and reviews previous sociological research on call centre work and employment. Call centres are a rationalisation strategy for customer service work associated with the development of personal computers, networking capabilities and software innovations linking communications and information technologies. From the beginning the rise and expansion of call centres was linked to technical developments in communications and later integrative information technologies. The development of management information systems generated real-time statistics on a range of activities, such as number of calls, transactions and sales, as well as work process related measures, such as average length of calls. Workers may indeed turn the managerial rhetoric of customer-orientation around in order to resist standardisation and control, focusing instead on truly giving good service. In fact, call centre workers mainly derive satisfaction from customer relations. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.