Revisiting the Digital Assembly Line: New Perspectives on Call Centre Work

None of the floor managers spoke to me on my last shift and at 11pm that night I signed off for the last time, gave Gareth my headset, handed my security pass to the guard on the way out, said my goodbyes and went and got drunk.¹

Thus ends the six-month stint endured by British researcher Anthony Lloyd at “Call Direct,” a Middlesbrough, UK call centre. The “feeling of relief” upon quitting his job, Lloyd notes, “was almost indescribable.”² Discussions with ex-colleagues would later confirm this sentiment was common among those who left the call centre. In fact, Lloyd’s refreshingly candid account of his dislike of the job reflects the experience a significant portion of the global call centre workforce has had of this relatively new workspace. Distaste for the labour conditions, the desire to leave them, and the eventual acting upon this need have all surfaced consistently, in both scholarly research and popular accounts, as endemic features of one of the fastest-growing forms of labour to have emerged over the last quarter century.³ From the United States to India, from Europe to Latin America, from China to South Africa, call centres have been established on every continent and every country. In many developed nations, estimates of the number of those making a living in these workspaces are in the millions of people, meaning that a significant portion – often between two and four per cent – of the entire workforce toils within them.⁴ While the labour process and conditions of employment do present some variety from call centre to call centre and region to region, as we shall see, the composite picture of call centre work that has emerged is of low pay, lack of autonomy, disciplinary management, advanced forms of surveillance, and exceedingly high turnover rates. In the end, many millions across the world take the route opted for by Lloyd and simply leave.

Scholarship on the condition and experience of call centre work has progressed from early skirmishes of the late 1990s, in which scholars of the labour process⁵ decisively rebutted research suggesting that the rise of the call centre signalled the arrival of a more humane “post-industrial” workplace and an empowered “knowledge worker”⁶ within it. As global capital has careened from the dotcom recession to the subprime crisis over the last decade and a half, more recent research has confronted a broader set of concerns as well as assessed the regional variations within this quintessentially informational profession, where capital valorizes the language, sociability, communication, and affect of its vast workforce.⁷ The three books surveyed here are part of a more recent and diverse wave of research on call centre labour, one that has applied a variety of ethnographic, post-colonial, cultural studies, political economic, and activist approaches to this sizeable workforce. Despite their deep differences, as we shall see, among the key concerns uniting the three efforts is the question of worker identity, and the related investigation of the arguably ambivalent subjective dimension of the call centre workforce.

Anthony Lloyd’s effort takes us to Middlesbrough in the northeast of England, one of many cities across Europe and North America that has been trying to come to grips with deindustrialization after the 1970s.⁸ While pursuing his doctoral work, Lloyd’s covert ethnography takes him into a local call centre (which he dubs “Call Direct”), which answers calls from customers of another company, “Internet Plus,” which has outsourced its customer service operations. At Call Direct, Lloyd worked alongside his subjects of study for six long months, “doing the same job as them, taking the same calls, dealing with the same...