IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-28880-5_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Introduction: The Nature and Management of Call Centre Work

In: Call Centres and Human Resource Management

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen Deery
  • Nicholas Kinnie

Abstract

There has been a substantial growth of employment in telephone call centres over the last five years. It is now estimated that around two workers in every 100 in the United Kingdom have jobs in call centres (Income Data Services, 2001, p. 11; Key Note, 2002, p. 19). In the USA they employ about 3 per cent of the workforce while in Europe the figure is just over 1 per cent (Datamonitor, 1998; 1999). Call centres are said to be the most rapidly growing form of employment in Europe today (Paul and Huws, 2002, p. 19). The number of call centres in France and Germany has more than doubled since 1997 (Key Note, 2002, p. 79). These developments reflect a more general shift in economic activity from goods production to service provision. Call centres epitomize many of the characteristics of service work that have come to dominate developed economies. Like most customer service organizations they provide an intangible, perishable product, which is highly variable and engages the customer in its production (Korczynski, 2002). However, distinctively, call centres require their employees to be skilled at interacting directly with customers while simultaneously working with sophisticated computer-based systems which dictate both the pace of their work and monitor its quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen Deery & Nicholas Kinnie, 2004. "Introduction: The Nature and Management of Call Centre Work," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Stephen Deery & Nicholas Kinnie (ed.), Call Centres and Human Resource Management, chapter 1, pages 1-22, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-28880-5_1
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230288805_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chris Smith & Raffaella Valsecchi & Frank Mueller & Jonathan Gabe, 2008. "Knowledge and the discourse of labour process transformation: nurses and the case of NHS Direct for England," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 22(4), pages 581-599, December.
    2. Diogo Gonçalves-Candeias & Maria José Chambel & Vânia Sofia Carvalho, 2021. "Is Stress in Contact Centers Inevitable?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(6), pages 1-17, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-28880-5_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.