The call centre: a nursery for new forms of work organisation?

Within the existing literature, call centre work is defined as a combination of taylorism, emotional labour and surveillance. Yet call centres also involve new forms of customer relationship. Call centre work is abstracted from any geographical location, it can involve many people separate in time and space and the customer can often monitor it directly. We term such work ‘virtual’, ‘poly-authored’ and ‘market supervised’. These new forms of work are now spreading beyond conventional call centres, partly because of the new expectations of customers, partly because of the migration of call centre employees into other areas of the enterprise.