Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor

Call Centers and the Global Division of Labor
Author: Andrew J.R. Stevens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135118671
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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.

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday
Author: Juanita Elias
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 135133607X
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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.

Salvadoran Imaginaries

Salvadoran Imaginaries
Author: Cecilia M. Rivas
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2014-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813571839
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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.

Language Put to Work

Language Put to Work
Author: Enda Brophy
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1349952443
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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.

Disconnected

Disconnected
Author: Debbie J. Goldman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2024-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0252047230
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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.

Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility

Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility
Author: Tommy Isidorsson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351358529
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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.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory
Author: Lisa Disch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1088
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190623616
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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.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
Author:
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 7278
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0081022964
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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

A Nation on the Line

A Nation on the Line
Author: Jan M. Padios
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2018-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822371987
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In 2011 the Philippines surpassed India to become what the New York Times referred to as "the world's capital of call centers." By the end of 2015 the Philippine call center industry employed over one million people and generated twenty-two billion dollars in revenue. In A Nation on the Line Jan M. Padios examines this massive industry in the context of globalization, race, gender, transnationalism, and postcolonialism, outlining how it has become a significant site of efforts to redefine Filipino identity and culture, the Philippine nation-state, and the value of Filipino labor. She also chronicles the many contradictory effects of call center work on Filipino identity, family, consumer culture, and sexual politics. As Padios demonstrates, the critical question of call centers does not merely expose the logic of transnational capitalism and the legacies of colonialism; it also problematizes the process of nation-building and peoplehood in the early twenty-first century.

Global Perspectives on Gender and Work

Global Perspectives on Gender and Work
Author: Jacqueline Goodman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2000-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1461636809
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Central to all our lives, work affects our status in the state, the family, and the economy. This comprehensive reader examines the myriad ways in which work—whether it is well-paid, unpaid, or underpaid—profoundly influences our roles in both the public and private spheres. Jacqueline Goodman has selected a key set of essays that examine influential arguments on such central themes as (1) the origins of the gendered division of labor; (2) historical trends and economic transformations that affect and are affected by women's position in market and non-market work; (3) the effects of occupational and job segregation by sex on status, pay, and promotion; (4) the ways in which formal and informal organizational culture shape and in turn are shaped by gender in professional and managerial positions; (5) class consciousness among wage-earning men and women; (6) the different forms of gender discrimination that women and men face in the workplace; (7) the problems working parents face and the ways in which different societies, subcultures, and genders cope; and (8) alternative approaches to improving the lives of working women and their families in the global economy. With its rich interdisciplinary perspective, this text is ideal for courses in sociology, political science, anthropology, and women's and gender studies. Contributions by: Amel Adib, Kevin Bales, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Sharon M. Collins, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Susan Eisenberg, Ashley English, Yen Le Espiritu, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Nancy Folbre, Carla Freeman, Michele Ruth Gamburd, Jacqueline Goodman, Janet C. Gornick, Yvonne Guerrier, Luigi Guiso, Shannon Harper, Heidi Hartmann, Ariane Hegewisch, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Jacqueline Jones, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ivy Kennelly, Alice Kessler-Harris, Michael Kimmel, Eleanor Leacock, Judith Lorber, Susan E. Martin, Marcia K.Meyers, Ferdinando Monte, Martha C. Nussbaum, Jennifer Pierce, Pun Ngai, Barbara Reskin, Tracey Reynolds, Leslie Salzinger, Paola Sapienza, Joan W. Scott, Tyson Smith, Margaret Talbot, Louise A. Tilly, Christine L. Williams, Muhammad Yunus, and Luigi Zingales. , , ,