Collaboration, Co‐operation or Collusion? Contrasting Employee Responses to Managerial Control in Three Call Centres
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | Graham Sewell,Daniel Nyberg |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2012.00920.x |
Collaboration, Co-operation or Collusion?
Contrasting Employee Responses to
Managerial Control in Three Call Centres
Daniel Nyberg and Graham Sewell
Abstract
This article draws on ethnographic studies of three call centres in a single,
medium-sized insurance company to explore how employees responded differ-
ently to similar techniques of managerial control. Considering recent discus-
sions of compromise in the workplace, we identify a response to control that sits
between implacable resistance and supine acquiescence. We style this collusion
and distinguish it from other states of compromise, such as collaboration and
co-operation. Drawing on the work of Edwards et al., we argue that a dynamic
and politically sophisticated collusive compromise can exist between parties
whose control and developmental concerns are in conflict. From this position,
we extend existing theories of compromise: (a) to accommodate different
permutations of control and developmental concerns; and (b) to predict when
collaboration, co-operation and collusion are likely to occur under ostensibly
similar conditions of managerial control.
1. Introduction
Organization and management literature have traditionally considered orga-
nizational control as having two faces: the ‘technical’ and the ‘normative’
(Barley and Kunda 1992). Reflecting the technical face, it became fashionable
in the 1990s to argue that, simply through the use of electronic surveillance,
managers could realize Frederick Taylor’s elusive dream of total managerial
control (Bélanger 2006). This argument was developed in parallel with
studies drawing attention to the use of unobtrusive forms of managerial
control that exerted disciplinary effects through normative or ‘ideational’
forces (Fleming and Spicer 2007). What united these two arguments,
however, was a tendency to exaggerate the extent to which these new systems
Daniel Nyberg is at the University of Sydney. Graham Sewell is at the University of Melbourne.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2012.00920.x
52:2 June 2014 0007–1080 pp. 308–332
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
of control — whether technical, normative or even a combination of the two
— were increasingly difficult to resist, and had therefore become more effec-
tive at subordinating the interests of employees to those of their employers as
managers sought the perfectly compliant worker (Bélanger and Thuderoz
2009). It became clear, however, that reports of the ‘death of resistance’ were
indeed exaggerated through the work of people like Thompson and Ackroyd
(1999), Callaghan and Thompson (2001), and Fleming and Sewell (2002),
who demonstrated that it was possible to resist both technical and normative
control, no matter how sophisticated and extensive these were.
In parallel to this re-evaluation of resistance, another critical stream of
literature was developing, dealing with its obverse — compromise in the
workplace (e.g. Bélanger and Edwards 2007; Edwards et al. 2006; Wright
2000). Of course, compromise and conflict are not mutually exclusive, and
politically sophisticated actors are likely to engage in a complex and dynamic
set of relations in which both strategies can be observed (Edwards et al.
2006). Our principal objective is to extend our understanding of this dyna-
mic tension between compromise and conflict. We develop a conceptual
approach to frame an ethnographic study of workplace control where
employees chart a path between the poles of implacable resistance and supine
acquiescence. We first identify three possible states of compromise based on
how employees pursue their ‘control concerns’ and ‘development concerns’ in
the workplace under the conditions of surveillance operating in diverse call
centre settings (cf. Edwards et al. 2006; Wright 2000). These states of com-
promise are collaboration,co-operation and collusion, and although such
terms are normally treated as synonyms, we draw some important distinc-
tions among them, allowing us to address the subsequent cases in a manner
that incorporates insights from the bodies of critical literature on resistance
and compromise. We show how managers and workers — parties who are
traditionally seen as being on opposite sides of the ‘frontier of control’ —
come to define the purpose and consequences of surveillance through local-
ized acts of sense-making that depend on contrasting approaches to under-
standing the nature of the employment relationship (cf. Deery et al. 2010).
The empirical setting for our discussion on the nuanced nature of compro-
mise is the now-familiar customer service call centres. These have been the
focus of investigation for several years, notably through the activities of the
Global Call Centre Network (Holman et al. 2007). Members of this group
have made major contributions to our understanding of the nature of call
centre work, but use mostly large-scale surveys to make national or interna-
tional comparisons about the sector on, for example, the effectiveness of
strategic human resource management (Wood et al. 2000), in-house versus
outsourced pay rates (van Jaarsveld and Yanadori 2011), or the impact of
employment practices on labour turnover and customer service levels (Batt
and Colvin 2011). Our focus, however, is in the quotidian ebb and flow of
compromise and conflict as played out through the dynamic social relations
of production in individual workplaces. We build on research that adopts a
localized and immersed ethnographic approach to managerial control in call
Collaboration, Co-operation or Collusion? 309
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
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