Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor

2014-03-26 Business & Economics

Author : Andrew J.R. Stevens
Release : 2014-03-26
Genre : Business & Economics
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 68X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor by : Andrew J.R. Stevens

Download or read book Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor written by Andrew J.R. Stevens. This book was released on 2014-03-26. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call centers have come, in the last three decades, to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. The offshoring and outsourcing of call center employment, part of the larger information technology and information-technology-enabled services sectors, continues to be a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs and providing new services. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and "offshore" labor forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labor unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call center workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call center industries located in Canada and India, this book contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, the sociology of work, and labor studies.

Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor

2014-03-26 Social Science

Author : Andrew J.R. Stevens
Release : 2014-03-26
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 671/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor by : Andrew J.R. Stevens

Working at the Interface

2009 Call center agents

Author : Ursula Huws
Release : 2009
Genre : Call center agents
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 003/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Working at the Interface by : Ursula Huws

Download or read book Working at the Interface written by Ursula Huws. This book was released on 2009. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call centres illustrate the consequences of globalisation for labour perhaps more clearly than any other form of employment. Call-centre workers sit at the interface between the global and the local, having to transcend the limitations of local time zones, cultures and speech patterns. They are also at the interface between companies and their customers, having to absorb the impact of anger, incomprehension, confusion and racist abuse whilst still meeting exacting productivity targets and staying calm and friendly. Finally, they take the brunt of the conflict at the contested interface between production and consumption, having to deal in their personal lives with the conflicts between the demands of paid and unpaid work. Drawing, amongst others, on organisational theory, sociology, communications studies, industrial relations, economic geography, gender theory and political economy, this important collection brings together survey evidence from around the world with case studies and vivid first-hand accounts of life in call centres from Asia, North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe.In the process it reveals many similarities but also demonstrates that national industrial relations traditions and workers' ability to negotiate can make a significant difference to the quality of working life in call centres.

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday

2018-12-07 Political Science

Author : Juanita Elias
Release : 2018-12-07
Genre : Political Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 07X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday by : Juanita Elias

Download or read book Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday written by Juanita Elias. This book was released on 2018-12-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection interrogates the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered socio-economic practices at the level of the ‘everyday’. It brings feminist insights to bear on the emerging International Political Economy (IPE) debates about ‘the everyday’, showing how gender is key to understanding how political economy is enacted and performed at the local level, by non-elites, and via various cultural practices. Drawing on ‘everyday’ IPE and a longer-standing body of feminist scholarship that documents and theorizes the mutually constitutive nature of, on the one hand, global markets, and on the other, households, families, relations of social reproduction and gendered socio-economic practices, this collection charts the lived realities of people and communities across a wide range of sites and spaces of the global political economy. It considers how globalizing capitalism affects and is in turn affected by Argentine sex workers, Nepalese private security contractors, Canadian call centre workers, Southeast Asian domestic workers, workers and players in British bingo halls, working class households in the UK, and much more. It demonstrates, through detailed empirical research, that a gender lens is crucial for understanding how, and on what terms, individuals and households are becoming ever more enmeshed in capitalist social relations, and how they actively and creatively resist these processes. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Globalizations.

Language Put to Work

2017-08-11 Social Science

Author : Enda Brophy
Release : 2017-08-11
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 443/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Language Put to Work by : Enda Brophy

Download or read book Language Put to Work written by Enda Brophy. This book was released on 2017-08-11. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER of The Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize, awarded by the Canadian Communication Association, and the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, Book of the Year Award. This book examines the striking rise of call centres over the past quarter century through the lens of the resistance and collective organizing generated by workers along the digital assembly lines. Drawing on field research in Atlantic Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand, Enda Brophy investigates the contested making of the transnational call centre workforce and its integration into the circuits of global capitalism. Moving beyond depictions of call centre labour as either entirely liberated or utterly subordinated, Language Put to Work inquires into the forms of work refusal and insubordination provoked by the spread of these communicative workplaces, including informal strategies of quitting, slacking and sabotage, conventional trade union activity, tactical innovations at the margins of the labour movement, and forms of self-organization forged by workers outside of the established trade union movement. Weaving rich empirical evidence together with political-economic analysis and theories of resistance, this book argues that the submission of language to the production of value in the call centre is a process of proletarianization rather than professionalization, and that the new working class has widely opposed this transformation.

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