Call Centers And The Global Division Of Labor

Author : Andrew J.R. Stevens
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113511868X
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor written by Andrew J.R. Stevens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 235 pages. 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.

Author : Andrew J.R. Stevens
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135118671
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor written by Andrew J.R. Stevens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 249 pages. 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.

Author : Ursula Huws
Publisher : Merlin Press
ISBN 13 : 9780850367003
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Working at the Interface written by Ursula Huws and published by Merlin Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 157 pages. 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.

Author : Juanita Elias
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135133607X
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday written by Juanita Elias and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 148 pages. 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.

Author : Enda Brophy
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1349952443
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Put to Work written by Enda Brophy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 306 pages. 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.

Author : Cecilia M. Rivas
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813571839
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Salvadoran Imaginaries written by Cecilia M. Rivas and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s, El Salvador has now emerged as a study in contradictions. It is a country where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now at peace but still grappling with a legacy of violence. It is a place marked by deep social divides, yet offering a surprising abundance of inclusive spaces. Above all, it is a nation without borders, as widespread emigration during the war has led Salvadorans to develop a truly transnational sense of identity. In Salvadoran Imaginaries, Cecilia M. Rivas takes us on a journey through twenty-first century El Salvador and to the diverse range of sites where the nation’s postwar identity is being forged. Combining field ethnography with media research, Rivas deftly toggles between the physical spaces where the new El Salvador is starting to emerge and the virtual spaces where Salvadoran identity is being imagined, including newspapers, literature, and digital media. This interdisciplinary approach enables her to explore the multitude of ways that Salvadorans negotiate between reality and representation, between local neighborhoods and transnational imagined communities, between present conditions and dreams for the future. Everyday life in El Salvador may seem like a simple matter, but Rivas digs deeper, across many different layers of society, revealing a wealth of complex feelings that the nation’s citizens have about power, opportunity, safety, migration, and community. Filled with first-hand interviews and unique archival research, Salvadoran Imaginaries offers a fresh take on an emerging nation and its people.

Author : Debbie J. Goldman
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252047230
Total Pages : 183 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Disconnected written by Debbie J. Goldman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call center employees once blended skill and emotional intelligence to solve customer problems while the workplace itself encouraged camaraderie and job satisfaction. Ten years after telecom industry deregulation, management had isolated the largely female workforce in cubicles, imposed quotas to sell products, and installed surveillance systems that tracked every call and keystroke. Debbie J. Goldman explores how call center employees and their union fought for good, humane jobs in the face of degraded working conditions and lowered wages. As the workforce coalesced to resist the changes, it demanded the Communications Workers of America (CWA) fight for safe and secure good-paying jobs. But trends in technology, capitalism, and corporate governance--combined with the decline of unions--narrowed the negotiating options for workers. Goldman describes how the actions of workers, management, and policymakers shaped the social impact of the new digital technologies and gave new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change. Perceptive and nuanced, Disconnected tells an overlooked story of service workers in a time of change.

Author : Tommy Isidorsson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351358529
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility written by Tommy Isidorsson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the era of flexibility. Under constant pressure to be adaptable, organizations increasingly adopt employment practices such as zero-hours contracts, the casualization of the workforce and the use of temporary and agency labour. These flexible practices are central to debates about the changing nature of job quality and its causes, trends and consequences. Arguing that job quality is central to understanding contemporary work, this book explores the internal and external pressures for flexibility in workplaces, professions and sectors and how this pressure shapes workers’ experiences of job quality. By studying job quality dynamics via case studies from organizations and occupations in the UK, Poland, Belgium and Sweden, the volumes illustrates the diversity of practices and experiences, as well as market pressures and institutional arrangements which effect working lives. Finally, the editors propose a policy debate on the new concept "flexiquality" - a combination of flexibility and job quality that can be beneficial for both management and workers.

Author : Lisa Disch
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190623616
Total Pages : 1088 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory written by Lisa Disch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

Author :
Publisher : Elsevier
ISBN 13 : 0081022964
Total Pages : 7278 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Human Geography written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 7278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context