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Managing to manage? Stories from the call centre floor

Maeve Houlihan (University College, Dublin, Ireland)

Journal of European Industrial Training

ISSN: 0309-0590

Article publication date: 1 March 2001

25466

Abstract

Call centres are centralised operations where trained agents communicate with customers via phone and using purpose built information and communication technologies. The normative model of call centre organisation is that tasks are tightly prescribed, routinised, scripted and monitored. What are the implications for managers and management? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on middle management in call centres: how they work, how they talk about their work and what alternatives they see. It describes an emerging understanding of a manager who is as constrained as a worker under this mass customised bureaucracy. Lack of strategic support and development, a powerfully normative focus on micromanagement and deeply embedded goal conflicts combine to undermine these managers’ scope to truly manage. Like the agents they supervise, call centre managers are engaged in a coping project. In this context, they perform their identity with ambivalence: sometimes role embracing, sometimes resisting.

Keywords

Citation

Houlihan, M. (2001), "Managing to manage? Stories from the call centre floor", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 25 No. 2/3/4, pp. 208-220. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090590110395816

Publisher

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MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 2001, MCB UP Limited

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