Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Managing to manage? Stories from the call centre floor

Managing to manage? Stories from the call centre floor 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of European Industrial Training Emerald Publishing

Managing to manage? Stories from the call centre floor

Journal of European Industrial Training , Volume 25 (2/3/4): 13 – Mar 1, 2001

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/managing-to-manage-stories-from-the-call-centre-floor-Ku2i0YV3uO

References (28)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 MCB UP Ltd. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0309-0590
DOI
10.1108/03090590110395816
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

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.

Journal

Journal of European Industrial TrainingEmerald Publishing

Published: Mar 1, 2001

Keywords: Customer service management

There are no references for this article.