“Good afternoon, how may I appear to help you?”

Distant Voices and Temping Bodies in a UK Call Centre.

Contents

Introduction 3

PART ONE 7

Chapter One-
FROM NOWHERE TO NOTHING
Organisation Theory 8
After Ford 13
Intelligence 16
Agency 17

Chapter Two-
DISTANT VOICES
Privatisation 20
Pylonic Modernity 24

PART TWO 28

Chapter Three-
DETAILS OF CONTROL
Genealogy 29
Taylorisation 32

Chapter Four-
SURVEILLANCE
Monitoring 35
Inspection House 38
Clarification of terminology 45

Chapter Five-
DEPOLITICISATION
Normative commitment 49
Prevention of collective action 55

Chapter Six-
RESISTANCE
Coping strategies 59
Consumer action 65
Milgram Environment 69

Conclusion 71

Bibliography 75

Introduction

PREAMBLE

“I got a letter from the government/ the other day/ I opened and read it/ it said they were suckers/ they wanted me for their army or whatever/ picture me giving a damn/ I said never”
(from ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’, Public Enemy, 1989).

After finishing my undergraduate studies I returned to the dole office in Upper North Street, Brighton, and reopened my claim. During the process they ask you to list three jobs that you will be looking for. I can’t remember the other two, but I put “anthropologist” for the third. The lady behind the desk informed me that I would have to change it because there was no code on the computer for such a job. Refusing to be defeated, I searched through their register and, hiding under “social worker”, I found the code. I think it was 00347.

After a week or so I received a letter from the job centre’s bureaucratic letter machine. The computer had noticed that I was a graduate and wanted to offer me the chance to work on the frontline, signing people on. I knew people who had taken the job in the past and so I knew exactly how miserable it would be. Furthermore, even though I’m the least money-oriented person I know- £9,000 per annum for a full time job? There was no way I was going to accept the job. “There’s no way I’m going to accept this job,” I told them. When you sign on you do so in the cultural knowledge that, although the principle of the welfare state is a good thing, the people who sign you on are evil.

I was told that, as I had refused their job, I was no longer actively seeking work and was therefore not entitled to job seeker’s allowance. So that’s how they run it, I thought to myself, a press-gang racket. There was only one option outside of slavery or starvation. I walked into a nearby employment agency and took the first job that they would give me. As it turned out, this meant that I would spend the next year of my life in a call centre.

I was employed as a Customer Service Agent (CSA) through Kelly’s Services on a temporary contract at £6 per hour. The same job is now available through Select Appointments for £4.50 per hour. I worked in the call centre of Seeboard customer services department on the Portland Road and I wasn’t alone. There are now well over 400,000 people working in call centres in Britain, accounting for one in fifty of the workforce (Stevens, pg 2). It has been estimated that by next year there will be 8.9 million seats in call centres worldwide and Britain already houses half of the European total (Information from Communications International, FIET, November 1999). The sector now employs more people than the coal, steel and motorcar industries put together but is not an industry in its own right (Stevens, pg 3). Call centres are money-saving devices utilised by large corporations to replace costly high street stores or other physical public-interfaces. Seeboard’s telephony departments in particular have expanded in direct response to the controversial closure of its retail branches.

My role was to answer calls from customers regarding emergency situations and debt queries. I found the environment more depressing than the job itself and saw my time there as some cruel punishment. However, partly in order to salvage some personal utility from the experience, I decided to return. In the summer of this year I asked to come back part time and was assigned to the evening shift. During this period I conducted ethnographic research using covert participant observation. I did not view any ethical problems in the use of undercover techniques because of the nature of the environment. I felt that I was in a moral power-cut, for reasons that will become clear.

Seeboard is highly representative of call centre environments both in working conditions and in employee demographics. The average CSA is upper working class, typically either a young 20something person hoping to gain white collar experience or a 40something female returning to work with an outdated sub-secretarial background. With the rise in antisocial shiftwork has come the trend towards employment of overqualified, lower middle class intellectuals and others trying to avoid career-minded options. If these seem gross characterisations it ought to be noted that they accord not only with prolonged observation but also to my brother (20something), my step-mother (40something) and myself (no comment), all of whom have laboured in this field.

I saw the call centre as a space of exceptionally intense surveillance and thought that it would be interesting to study the strategic behaviour that people utilised to negotiate this hierarchical scrutiny. What I found instead was the marked absence of resistance and contestation, a field of obedient slaves seemingly passive to workplace control. This was not the conclusion that I wanted to come to. It seemed almost unanthropological, heretical. I knew that there were no unions in call centres and that I shouldn’t expect strikes or overt pay disputes but I had been convinced that I would find at least some everyday micro-political action. The only response to this situation was to develop a new approach. I decided to apply an inter-disciplinary eye to the processes of control themselves, in order to analyse how they had achieved this social domination. Although this study is still primarily about control, I found that obedience was not total or ubiquitous throughout the organisation and that the conception of the CSA agents as slaves was both flawed and tasteless. In deference to the present-day realities of actual slavery, I have preferred to use the term Muppets . This is a more pleasing term, not only for its valuably multiple meanings. Firstly, it has an obvious suggestion of puppetry and ventriloquism. This is apt due to the excessive standardisation of verbal phrasing that the agent is subject to. Secondly, Muppet is also a colloquialism for “idiot” or “plonker”. This is apt due to the public perception of the call centre worker as a person of limited ability.

STRUCTURE

This paper will be divided into two parts. Part One will cover the social and theoretical background to the study. Part Two addresses the main concern of this paper- the details of control.

The first chapter of Part One provides a summary of organisational theory. It will conclude by setting forth the primary model of the power grid and the concept of organisational intelligence. The intention is to discuss the nature of the work organisation structure as a mechanism of control without diminishing the notion of agency within that structure. The second chapter details the history and repercussions of privatisation in order to argue that these control structures are situated within a wider culture of consumerism. Both the distant voices of the customers and the temping bodies of the CSA agents are Muppets of this depoliticised consumer culture.

The first two chapters of Part Two detail the techniques of the control process. They are concerned with the ways in which surveillance and the harvesting of intelligence are used to reconstruct the identity of the agent. Chapter five outlines the ways in which these techniques operate to preserve the hierarchy within the power grid. As with the consumer culture, the main feature is depoliticisation. This feeds into the discussion on resistance. It will be argued that, due to the non-political nature of this relationship, self-proclaimed oppositional actions will have to be re-categorised. The agent is instrumentalised by the work structure to the point where no point of rupture can occur. The anxious Muppet, caught in a power-cut, comes to identify with the hand that controls it; and for a Muppet to turn against its Muppeteer is unthinkable.

CHAPTER ONE
From Nowhere to Nothing

For the purposes of this discussion, organisation theories will be categorised for simplicity as either classical, system/action or critical. There is also a body of negligible theory that will be considered in the “After Ford” section as a means of teasing out a definition of control. It is useful to work through a discussion of previous theory in order to formulate and define the notional approach of this paper. The theoretical discussion is followed by an explanation of this approach’s attitude towards information, summarised by the concept of organisational intelligence. This chapter is concluded by a consideration of this conceptual approach with respect to notions of agency.

ORGANISATION THEORY

“Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing” (Bierce, pg 99).

Weber's notion of complex organisations as bureaucracies dominates the classical approaches (Thompson and McHugh, pg 14). Weber’s key principles of bureaucracy describe administrative systems as defined by their laws, rules, regulations and hierarchies (Anderson, pg 57). Despite the grand differences between their perspectives, Salaman noted that both Weber and Marx saw organisations as structures of control (Salaman, pg 213) and was dubbed a “Radical Weberian” for his troubles (Thompson and Hugh, pg 43). Marx’s materialist history revealed the significance of the appropriation of the means of production. Within the classical theories, this serves as the most explicit reason for the existence of these controlling mechanisms (Grint, pg 109). Pre-emptive of Foucault and other critical theorists of embodiment, Weber wrote of the “psycho-physical apparatus produced by the grasp of discipline” (Weber, pg 261-2, 1948, quoted in Clegg and Wilson, pg 241). Therefore, although primarily concerned with diverse issues such as capitalism, authority and legitimacy, these approaches regarded control as fundamental.

The next approaches to be considered are the system/action theories. “The torturous history of organisation theory and practice in fact reveals a consistent tension between technical-administrative perspectives such as system theory and approaches of the human relations type” (Thompson and McHugh, pg 46). Some have characterised action theories as Weberian and system theories as Marxist (e.g. Eriksen, pg 43) possibly to account for the pronounced antagonism between them. However appealing it may be, this characterisation has to be dismissed as contrived. Systems theories have a more unfashionable pedigree in evolutionary functionalism and Durkheimian organic metaphors (Grint, pg 138; Thompson and McHugh, pg 25). System theory’s therapeutic approach of treating conflict as a structural illness is typified by Mayo, who conducted the earliest anthropological investigations into the American workplace (Baba, pg 2). Despite the charges that they have served to reify organisations (Grint, pg 137-8), these approaches also served to challenge the static, hermetically sealed view of organisations characteristic to classical conceptions (Thompson and McHugh, pg 25). System perspectives differ from action perspectives in their preference of social structure as a causative power over and above human agency. Action theorists, on the other hand, recognised that subordinates have power beyond the structure and so valued emic perspectives as more revealing than those of the observer (Grint, pg 142). This perspective flatlined in the fog of ethnomethodology, blanking the concept of structure entirely (Rapport and Overing, pg 129-135; Thompson and McHugh, pg 36). Thompson and McHugh opine that action theories could no longer understand the meaning of power or control because they were contained and expressed beyond the face-to-face interactions of emic reality (Thompson and McHugh, pg 37). This critique is unsatisfactory in that it involves a direct reification of organisational structures. A far more suitable approach can be derived from Gidden’s (1979) fusion of action and structure that alleviates the voluntarism of the former and the determinism of the latter (quoted in Edwards and Scullion, pg 277). System theories need to take account of the social reproduction of organisational structures and the controlling forces of individual human agency while action theories need to take account of the environmental constraints of structure such as managerial control. Giddens theoretically syncretic conclusion is that some actors have greater resources to define the structure than others (ibid, pg 280). As a sensible attempt at the definition of organisational power, this is a notable achievement.

This paper will attempt a combination of Gidden’s fusion with a range of critical theories. The category of “critical” here includes the poststructuralist and “labour process” approaches, as opposed to the more splintered groupings found in the literature (e.g. Grint cites Marcuse and Habermas as critical while Thompson and McHugh suggest Marcuse represents labour process approaches as distinct from Habermas’ radicalism). The reason for this is that writers such as Foucault and Marcuse share a common concern for issues of power, control and the restriction of freedom. Their differences lie in their conception of the nature of power- for Marcuse it is bound up with a dichotomy of capitalistic rationality versus human freedom (Grint, pg 136) while for Foucault it is a more multifarious game (Clegg and Wilson, pg 237).

Bertrand Russell said that power is to the social sciences what energy is to physics (quoted in Eriksen, pg 43). He meant that, although the practice of the discipline would be impossible without the concept, nobody had been able to agree on a permanent definition. In tribute to this quotable comparison and to the tradition of the abuse of emic terminology, this paper will deploy the metaphor of the electrical power grid for the network of relationships and encounters that maintain organisational control. This grid will indicate a shifting energetic network contained by the organisational structure yet given meaning and movement by the human actors that create and recreate it constantly through social action.

Clegg and Wilson peddle a dichotomy between Foucault and Marx. They claim that Marxist analysis describe disciplinary power as being oriented towards capitalist exploitation while Foucault points it towards the creation of the obedient body (Clegg and Wilson, pg 240). This is an unfair description for several reasons. Firstly, the orientations specified are those of the viewpoints themselves and therefore possess an obvious relation to any form of power considered. Furthermore, it also errs in presuming a mutual irreconcilability. The purpose of the control process in the call centre, for example, is obviously addressed to the production of a docile workforce but this would lack contextual meaning without the extraction of profit. That Marxist perspectives of particularly capitalistic powers were of apparently little application to the study of the public sector (Clegg and Wilson, pg 229) is of meagre consequence in that the particular aspects of control under consideration are the products and bedfellows of privatisation. Control is not dependent on economic factors but to rule out even the Diet-Marxism inherent in treating capitalism as a socially productive ideology risks a serious misrepresentation of the territory. I would argue that the range of control techniques within the call centre are addressed more to assuaging the burden of intensification than the ownership of the means of production.

Capitalism depends on progress. The “boom and bust” economy of the late 20th century is a microcosmic reflection of the larger cycles of war and depression that capitalism, as a progressive system, depends upon. Like a shark, it must keep moving forward or die. However, the cost of great wars and great depressions within the globalised nuclear age is too high to be routinely acceptable (Mattick, pg 40). Therefore the only means of achieving the maintenance of capital’s progressive affluence is to continuously increase productivity (Mattick, pg 41). This means an ongoing intensification of the workload that would be impossible to enforce with anything but the most docile and obedient of workforces. Ultimately, though, this is purely economistic speculation. The principal concern of this paper is not the why of control but the how.

Edwards and Scullion write that the “details of control over the labour process, not influences like overall management style or levels of bureaucracy, explain patterns of workplace attitudes and behaviour” (Edwards and Scullion, pg 260). It is precisely these “details of control” that this paper is orientated towards analysing. This is in response to initial experiences in the field where the most striking aspect of everyday call centre life was the ubiquity of obedience. The missing acts of defiance and the overpowering rule of fear appeared in greatest need of revelation. It is disquieting to find that Salaman, perhaps the most famous student of workplace control, describes control as a necessary element of organisational survival (Salaman, pg 109). Salaman does not mention, however, what the utility of this survival would be. At the expense of human happiness that these controls entail, perhaps the justification lies in the continued extraction of profit. Lafarge’s “The Right to be Lazy”, Russel’s “In Praise of Idelness”, Jesus of Nazareth’s “Consider the Lillies”, all echo Kropotkin’s suggestion that human satisfaction should take priority to market profits (Grint, pg 21). Marcuse wrote that where we ought to have the abolition of labour we have instead the pacification of existence through workplace control (Marcuse, pg 16). Mattick rejects this as an inhuman and utopian fallacy, arguing that labour alone separates man from beast (Mattick, pg 27). Mattick seems oblivious to the line that only fools and horses work, although Mattick is clearly no horse. Marcuse himself rejected the accusation of utopianism when he wrote that the unrealistic sound of his propositions was indicative only of the strength of the forces that prevented their realisation (Marcuse, pg 4). Workplace control, then, is not strictly “necessary” but a context-specific cultural device concerned with the restriction of human agency for the ultimate purpose of the generation of surplus.

Was Valerie Solanas, “the woman who shot Warhol”, being unreasonable when she suggested that we overthrow the government, eliminate the money system and institute complete automation? Perhaps. Was Robert Zimmerman being unreasonable when he decided to hand in his notice at Maggie’s Farm? Perhaps. But, unless we forget the darkest one-liner of the 20th century, it should be remembered that the gates of Auschwitz were lying when they claimed that Arbeit macht frei.

AFTER FORD

“Twenty years ago, Paul’s father had brought him up here, and the play’s message had been the same: that the common man wasn’t nearly as grateful as he should be for what the engineers and managers had given him, and that the radicals were the cause of the ingratitude”
(Vonnegut, pg 188).

The body of negligible theory produced by management consultants constitutes a potentially useful cultural text yet should not expect to be considered canonical. Among the psychobabble and guru-speak it contains a management-centric view of organisations. This is similar to the therapeutic approach common to the 1940s-50s anthropology of work (Baba, pg 5). Later critics dubbed these researchers “managerial sociologists” because of their unquestioning approach to the unequal distribution of power and their ethically compromised positions (ibid).

In order to understand managerial thinking, it is useful to ask how management first came to dominate the landscape of work. The mass production of the Fordist age created a new corpus of middle managers oriented towards the discipline, monitoring and control of the workforce (Thompson, pg 4; Anderson, pg 61). These managers were always subject to the rule of another. As Nietzsche said of Christianity, management is a slave religion, a servant mentality (Anderson, pg 61). Management-consciousness experiences organisational structure as a culture of servile behaviour that can be enriched through slogans, mission statements, rambling rhetoric, teambuilding exercises and corporate workshops (Grint, pg 132). They are the active agents of the techniques of control used to subdue the mass of the workforce, yet they themselves do not control these techniques. Control is a process, not a possession.

Seeboard’s hierarchy is a fluctuating, yet rigidly vertical, chain of command. At the lowest rung are the CSAs, or agents. They represent the epitome of post-Fordist flexibalisation, temporary and interchangeable. The CSAs are overseen by “teamleaders” who are often recruited internally; promoted from the ranks of the timid they somehow become the most enthusiastic of intimidators. Higher levels of management are removed from the office floor and secreted elsewhere. Despite their bondage to the process of control, neither the supervisory teamleaders nor the higher management can be said to possess true or total control. Marcuse refers to these positions as a vicious circle that encloses both the Hegelian master and servant (Marcuse, pg 33) but if a writer is unable to locate the master at all then they become open to the charge of reification (Grint, pg 138). Salaman uses Marcuse’s “technological veil” (Marcuse, pg 32) to argue that a process of mystification obscures the real profiteers (Salaman, pg 181). This is a characteristically Marxist frustration with the absence of an objective capitalist oppressor to vilify. Mulholland points the finger at institutional shareholders (Mulholland, pg 188) suggesting that the drive to profits at the expense of humanity can be traced to the abstract quantification of economic “realities”- the ultimate faceless reduction. One could just as simply target multinational company directors, politicians and the share-owning public but this would still obscure analysis. Control is not something possessed by the ostentatiously powerful but something suffered by the ostensibly powerless. Various actors advantageously positioned throughout the structure experience temporary control over the direction of resources as they travel through a fragmented grid of power. Strategic action is used to increase the frequency and duration of these temporary holds. This action appears to be available to CSAs only in terms of behaviour that is oriented to securing promotion, thus their relative powerlessness and apparent inability to exercise or deflect the techniques of control.

Initial participation in the field suggested a simplistic reality of powerful supervisors and powerless agents. This summary was eventually countered through further observation. The supervisors were found to lack any totalising control while the agents demonstrated the exercise of power horizontally, for example amongst themselves and between departments. Yet there was a persistent zone of the grid where the exercise of power appeared to remain absent, a control blackout. This zone concerned the agent’s seeming inability to counter the techniques of control and the lack of resistance to intensification and arbitrary command.

It is for the purpose of testing this apparent situation and confronting the concept of control at its blunt end that this paper is concerned primarily with the experience of the CSA. Baba believes that the theoretical shift from management to employee-level concerns represents a proletarian-centric countercultural-Marxist dead-end of analysis (Baba, pg 13). This critique also charges that such perspectives are virtually incapable of producing formal organisational theory (ibid). Baba’s accusations are flaccidly conservative and naive. The proposed alternative of a fusion of management and worker “knowledge” for the production of a more balanced analysis is hopelessly ignorant of the constraints that internal power relations place upon the construction and uses of knowledge . This issue is discussed in more detail in the section below.

INTELLIGENCE

“No understanding of organisations- and especially processes of control within organisations- is possible without some consideration of the ways in which organisations construct and use knowledge” (Salaman, pg 174).

The vast and often vacuous body of literature on the subject of office politics is largely concerned with what Dubrin calls the “information game” (Dubrin, pg 146). Such texts are useful because the corporate strategies of individual success that they describe often take the place of a normative compulsion to conformity. Dubrin describes a range of self-advancement techniques concerned with the control of information. These include promoting oneself as a confidante, stockpiling ideas, listening to gossip, asking impressive questions, bearing good news and dropping buzz words (Dubrin, pg 146-159). Information control techniques have also been suggested as examples of workplace resistance- for example restricting the vertical flow of data (Grint, pg 109; Salaman, pg 175). What these examples actually demonstrate is the role of human agency in the reconstruction of the SNAFU principle. SNAFU is an example of Namspeak, a fusion of military abbreviations, redneck, Harlem and World War II GI slang (Nam magazine, pg 90, part 3, “Chapter 18”, 1987); it stands for “Situation Normal (All Fucked Up)”. The phrase was employed by self-styled guerrilla ontologist Robert Anton Wilson to describe the organisational theory that communication is only possible between equals (DRK, pg 2) . Information must be re-coded into the appropriate emic terms in order to demonstrate perception-conformity to the reality tunnel of superiors (Wilson, pg 206-7). There is no comparable institutional requirement for information transmitted to accord with observable reality. Dubrin advises superordinates to accept counsel with caution, not because the information is structurally distorted but because “the more advice you accept, the more power you surrender” (Dubrin, pg 163). In this way, part of the maintenance of control is bound up with the rejection of the uphill traffic of data. This rejection of uphill reality is complemented by the constructive force of the downward-flow, via the gathering of information about subordinates.

This paper will employ the term “intelligence” because it lacks the subjective implications of “knowledge” and the neutrality of “information”. Intelligence evokes satisfying connotations of the militaristic gathering of objective data through surveillance and deceit for the purposes of administrative supremacy. Organisations make use of gathered intelligence in decision-making processes. The statistical data that feeds this process is more than a contributing factor towards strategy- it is strategy. The data harvesting mechanisms create a system of intelligence-farming in that they constitute socially productive forces. The world is made through the act of its apprehension and, to confound Gregory Bateson, the map becomes the territory.

AGENCY

Once it is claimed that a structure of control uses intelligence to restructure agents and techniques of surveillance to restrict action, it then becomes imperative to define the nature of that structure’s relationship to agency so as to avoid systematic determinism. Although briefly discussed above, this issue deserves a more thorough explication.

Structures do not exist objectively, nor are they mere subjective phantoms. There is no structure without agency but this is not therefore contained exclusively within the mind’s grasp. Structures represent social networks, complex series of relationships dominated by the desire of those who control the flow of resources through the network to retain that control and therefore direct the ongoing construction/reconstruction of the structure to their continued advantage. Bateson (1972) wrote that human individuals should be conceived of as energy sources, just as R.D. Laing (1968) described people as origins of actions (Rapport and Overing, pg 3-4). When this paper details the process of structural control over individual agents, it is not to argue that the agent is then controlled in the sense of a conscious decision to obey like a Pavlovian dog, but that the agent acts through iron masks of their own complicity. Controls are internalised through agentive action in the performance of docility and are recreated externally through the techniques of control detailed below. It is admitted that, in attempting to define a system of obedience, there is a difficulty in handling the matter of agency and avoiding accusations of structural determinism.

Leach (1977) draws from Camus’ “essential rebellion” to argue that the essence of being human is to resist the dominion of present structures (Rapport and Overing, pg 5). This paper does not refute this existentialist notion of agents as architects of themselves, as possessing power through creativity and the power to imagine a different world. It merely states that there is a conflictual play between agency and structure and that, in the case of call centres, we find the crushing of a zone of the agent’s agency by structure. To demonstrate the inclusion of this notion, the CSAs will be referred to as agents throughout. This term has a multiple benefit in its implications of espionage when coupled with the notion of information as intelligence. In the surveilled deeps, using covert fieldwork, undercover metaphors become resonantly meaningful.

Debates concerning resistance and control are often addressed to the ability of individual actors to influence the construction and reconstruction of a given social structure. Central to this creation is the repression of the creative powers of others, the suppression of subordinate agents and the recreation of those agents in your own image, which in turn becomes the image of the meta-agent. Power is the ongoing ability to guide the hand of creation. It is achieved through the successful domination of resources- techniques of control, intelligence, etc. Its exercise need not be coercive- for example there is great pressure to conformity within the system of the promotion of compliant wills (Clegg and Wilson, pg 242). Thus the hierarchy sustains itself in part through the mere act of existence.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

This chapter had presented the electricity power grid as a model for the network of relationships that sustains the organisational structure. Individual actors within the grid are conceived as energy sources, generators. These individuals employ strategic action to maximise their temporary control over the flow of resources (people, intelligence, capital etc) through the grid. It has been observed that the point of encounter between CSAs and superordinates represents a zone of control blackout for the agents. This paper will be primarily concerned with the details of this “loss of supply”.

CHAPTER TWO
DISTANT VOICES

This chapter will first address the history and social meaning of privatisation. This will be a means of exploring the organisation to be studied, the creation of the consumer culture and the relativity of economic beliefs. This is followed by a discussion of modernity in relation to the client group of the featured department.

PRIVATISATION

“Since all the riches of this world/ May be gifts from the Devil and earthly kings,/ I should suspect that I worshipp’d the Devil/ If I thank’d my God for worldly things”
(Verse XIX of ‘Several Questions Answered’, Blake).

In this section I am going to discuss privatisation. It will be shown that privatisation involved large-scale social change, including the widening of the gap of material inequality. Some writers have pointed towards prices and the quality of services as indicators of the success/failure of privatisation. However, I intend to claim that complaints are in fact the greatest indices. The staggering rise in the level of complaints represents the kind of social change that privatisation effected, as well as people’s dissatisfaction. Privatisation was a political programme designed to create the consumer society, rather than the enterprise culture of its rhetoric, a nation of shoppers, rather than yuppies.

The 1947 Electricity Act nationalised the electricity industry, consolidating what had been over 560 different companies into 14 regional boards (Robinson, pg i). Seeboard, the South Eastern Electricity Board, was officially formed on April Fool’s Day the following year (ibid). As a nationalised utility, it supplied electricity to the counties of Surrey, Sussex and Kent . The organisation endured an uneventful history until privatisation, where it narrowly avoided assimilation into the proposed British Electricity plc (Middlemas, pg 83).

The neo-liberal campaign of privatisation instituted dramatic social change. Over 41 billion pounds worth of state assets were disposed of in the “largest transfer of power and property since Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries” (Saunders and Harris, pg 6). Seeboard was deregulated into seven separate “business units”, including Customer Services and Supply. In 1995 it was taken over by an American multinational as part of the widespread globalisation of British utilities (ibid).

The floating of the British utilities saw an almost immediate rise in customer debt and disconnection (Ernst, pg 166). The new water companies alone issued over a million court summonses (Saunders and Harris, pg74). There is a range of information to suggest that the negative impact overall was greater upon low-income households (e.g. Ernst, 1994). Economic polarisation, the growth in material disparity, has been a major social consequence of privatisation (McCahil, pg 57). The promotion of share-ownership excludes poor households, signifying the project as an unequal redistribution from its inception (Ernst, pg 105). In the electricity supply business, this “structural adjustment” had the effect of transforming and degrading employment conditions and relations (Mulholland, pg 187). As a microcosmic reflection, this often took the form of a socio-economic polarisation between management and staff (Saunders and Harris, pg 97-98).

The quality of service delivery and the value of prices have been the conventional indicators of the success or failure of privatisation (e.g. Mulholland, pg 187). However, these are also the chosen indices of the companies themselves. Far more revealing pictures can be drawn from analysing complaints, both in terms of volume and in meaning. Complaints are obviously of great appeal if for no other reason than the corporate desire to disguise or dismiss them. Ernst suggests that the 128% rise in OFWAT (the ombudsman for the water industry) registered complaints from 1991 to 1994 can be explained by the rise of new complaints mechanisms (Ernst, pg 165). However, this is identical to OFWAT’s own compromised defence (Saunders and Harris, pg 72). Saunders and Harris argue that most customers are ignorant of OFWAT’s existence and that the rise in complaints is due to the controversy surrounding private sector marketisation (Saunders and Harris, pg 72-73). If this were the case then complaints would not still be increasing in volume by 2001. The reason for the rise in the level of complaints is that privatisation assisted in the creation of a consumer culture where people identify themselves as customers, not citizens, hostile shoppers with loyalty cards where they once carried party membership ID.

Privatisation was a political initiative (Kay, 1996, quoted in Mulholland, pg 187), in the same fashion as post-war nationalisation (Mattick, pg 64). According to Marxist theory, capitalism’s definitive principle is the private ownership of the means of production (Mattick, pg 65). Alterations in the system of ownership are therefore explicitly political.

Some writers have argued that privatisation concerned an attempt to create an enterprise culture (e.g. Saunders and Harris, 1994) yet this merely parrots the government propaganda of the time. The “people’s capitalism” of wide (yet shallow) share ownership conceals the illusory relationship between ownership and control (Mattick, pg 66). This disempowered nation of pseudo-entrepreneurs finds its greatest mascot in Del Boy’s sub-Gordon Gecko yuppie pretension .

Privatisation’s social failures (low wages, intensification, exploitation) have been glossed over in ideologies about the sovereignty of the consumer (Mulholland, pg 187). This is what Salaman and du Gay refer to as the “cult(ure) of the customer” (quoted in Beirne et al, pg 86). Consumer rights, fortified by a Watchdog militancy, replace human rights in terms of everyday priority. It is a government-endorsed public-opinion ideology of the God-given entitlement to standardized corporate service and money-saving special-offer deals. If a decrepit train is derailed in an affluent Western country with a well-developed infrastructure, the highest ambition of the victims is to put in a complaint to head office. Perhaps they may even get a full refund, who knows, it’s best not to hope for too much. The transference of responsibility from Whitehall to the FTSE represents an immense depoliticisation of British culture and the inauguration of the age of the Great Consumer.

Arguments as to the purely economic motivations behind privatisation fail to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the terminology employed. For this reason they can be categorised as simplistic and/or misleading. Before 1930, the term “economy” was only used in reference to the verb “to economise” (Silverman, pg 70). This is similar to the difference between “to diet” (as in a specific restriction on calorific intake) and “diet” as simply whatever food a person usually eats. In the 1930s, new ideas about monetarist government intervention led to the gradual personification of the economy as a symbolic physical entity in newspaper cartoons (ibid). By the 1940s, the economy had become a fully “embodied” being, like Father Time, depicted pictorially as an animal or monster (ibid). Economics then becomes abstracted, dis-embedded, removed from the social context- a “virtual reality” (Carrier and Miller, pg 2). As industrialisation abstracted economic activity from the social network (from cottage industry to the factory), it can now be abstracted away from the international political context (Carrier and Miller, pg 3). The free trade zones and Maquilladoras, the IMF and the multinational agreement on investment, all demonstrate that this reality now operates at a post-national level. Economic doctrines are not absolutes but cultural biases presented as scientific principles (Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, quoted in Dean, Issue 3, pg 12). Dean compares Thacherite finance, with its mechanistic model of the economy, to Japanese business metaphors of organic systems (ibid). From the vantage ground of anthropological relativism, it can easily be argued that economic policies are selected more for their appeal to cultural predilections than for their objective rationalism. This point can be illustrated by Marcuse’s notion that “economic freedom”, if it is to indicate any real liberty, must mean freedom from the economy (Marcuse, pg 4).

PYLONIC MODERNITY

“Electricity seems destined to play a most important part in the arts and industries. The question of its economical application to some purposes is still unsettled, but experiment has already proved that it will propel a street car better than a gas jet and give more light than a horse” (Bierce, pg 35).

This section is concerned with questions of social participation and modernity. I intend to use the pylon as metaphor for a modernist vision of human progress through domestic technological innovation. The distant voices of my fieldwork belonged to domestic electricity consumers whose meters ran on a pre-payment system. I will argue that these meters constitute a conditional and temporary access to that pylonic modernity.

New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman notoriously claimed that no two countries with McDonalds franchises have ever gone to war with each other. His supporters claimed that opening a McDonalds in Buenos Aires sometime before April Fool’s Day 1982 would have prevented the Falklands War. This argument represents one side of a curious “battle of the burger metaphor” between the neo-Liberal orthodoxy and the anti-Globalisation “McDonaldisation” critiques. Buckminster Fuller had a (somewhat) similar idea to Friedman when he proposed a global electrical grid. He intended the world-grid to reduce the possibility of a nuclear war, as nobody stands to gain an advantage through bombing the other end of their electricity system (Wilson, pg 114).

This connection between pylons and burgers is interesting in that while burgers have become the symbol for everything from neo-colonial dystopia to global capitalist harmony, the aesthetically superior pylon has been comparatively undertheorised. It’s hard to imagine what they must have looked like when they first appeared- monstrously futuristic wicker men standing in formation across the fields, giant metal scarecrows from outer space. To the optimistic they were a symbol of modernity (Middlemas, pg 11), as was domestic electricity consumption in general. As a pre-war poster of the Brighton Corporation Electricity Undertaking announced “To be modern you must use ELECTRICITY- not only electric light!” (Middlemas, pg 17). This vision of a pylonic modernity conceals a cultural ambiguity. Electricity is both a luxury item and a utility. Only a third of the world’s population have access to electricity and yet it is a basic “necessity” of modern life in the UK. A child deprived of its use may be considered neglected, maltreated. It is a consequence of comparative poverty that someone who cannot afford a regular supply is effectively being punished for their status through restricted access to modern time (pylonic modernity) and space (the developed infrastructure of the West).

In the Seeboard area of Metroland this means key meters. The “Key Budget Meter” is a token-based prepayment system, similar in nature to the antiquated coin-meters or pay-as-you-go cell phones. Within the Seeboard organisation the key meter is a byword for poverty, debt and crime.

The majority of key meter customers face financial hardship. Many have had the meters installed with large debts collecting through them, often without their consent. The company routinely obtains warrants to forcibly enter properties with outstanding bills and fit these meters to ensure payment. Other customers have had them installed because they are in receipt of social security and so cannot cope with large quarterly bills. In the familiarly ironic nature of the false-economy of the poor, it is well known that customers on key meters pay more for their electricity. This is not a recent development. Two years after nationalisation, the rate for credit meters was 7d, as opposed to 8d for prepayment customers (Robinson, pg 7).

When the money on the meter runs out, the electricity supply is automatically disconnected until the meter receives further credit. If the customer has no more money or the shops are closed, they have no option but to remain without power. If there is a fault with the key token used to charge the meter, the power will cut out. If they lose their key, the power will cut out. With a key meter, it is quite a challenge to keep the power on. For the more chaotic and vulnerable households (the most likely to have a key meter fitted) it is often impossible. Just as the pylon is a fitting technological symbol of electro-modernity, the key meter is a suitable symbol of the conditional access to that modernity.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

Privatisation’s production of the consumer culture represents a macro-level example of the ongoing process of social depoliticisation. This process will later be shown to operate on a smaller scale within a specific work culture. Within the department studied, the CSA’s central task was to take calls from key meter customers- the distant voices of the title. Their shared exclusion at the hands of the organisation concerns their mutual blackouts. For the customer the loss of supply is real but has an allegorical use in demonstrating a disconnection from the social ideal and (via consumerist depoliticisation) the body politic. For the CSA the loss of supply is allegorical of the disconnection from any real power to resist their domination by the social organisation. While the distant voice is the cry of consumer culture, the temping body is the Muppet of corporate culture.

PART TWO

CHAPTER THREE
Details of Control

The first section of this chapter provides a broad historical overview of the development of work control. It will consider the disciplining of time and space to assist the understanding of control as an ongoing process. The second section considers the influence of standardisation and measurement techniques known as Taylorisation. This section will reject nearsighted conclusions of a link between technology and alienation. The aim is to discuss the process of instrumentality, enslavement and the illusion of choice from the perspective of the victim of institutional controls rather than the technophobic perspective of the leftwing social critic.

GENEALOGY

“Recent developments in Russia, and recent advances in science and technology, have robbed Orwell’s book [1984] of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody’s predictions” (Huxley, pg 12).

Work is “about” control (Wallman, pg 1). If the “primeval purpose” of work was the control of nature (ibid), what interests this study is the control of people. Historically, this process of work organisation control is inaugurated by the isolation of the workplace (Anderson, pg 23). The shift from the bazaar or home to the factory or industrial zone represented an abstraction away from social realities (Carrier, pg 3) and a retreat from public observation (Anderson, pg 23). Salaman referred to this as systematic location for the purposes of organisational control (Salaman, pg 106). Further isolations, or “retreats”, concern divisions such as the separation of paperwork from the production centre and the hiving off of the front office as an area of exclusive “secret activity” (ibid). Blake’s dark satanic mills themselves originated in the desire to control the work force and the labour process, rather than out of technological necessity (Baldry et al, pg 164). The very existence of the modern factory or office is arguably a consequence of the desire for managerial control, what might be called “space-discipline” (after Thompson, see below).

Foucault’s genealogy (Smart, pg 54) of the mechanisms of institutional control traces a process of dissemination from the prison through school, army, asylum and, eventually, to the workplace (Clegg and Wilson, pg 236). Keiser traces their origins further back to the monastery (Clegg and Wilson, pg 238). This opinion is worth noting in that the monasteries employed a rigorous schedule according to the liturgical hours (Eco, pg 7). Monastic “Rules” were specific in their combination of particular tasks, such as collation or labour, with particular hours of the day (Eco, pg 8). This represents what Thompson refers to as “time-discipline” (quoted in Clegg and Wilson, pg 238). Blakelock wrote that the “social order of any society is a time order” (quoted in Anderson, pg 116). The clock is a central device of managerial control and measurement. It is intimately connected to payment systems and so to the heart of the work experience. The clock is the whip of pylonic modernity and yet, impervious to manipulation, decentres organisational control. The clock is significant because it permits standardisation and measurement. Coupled with the techniques of surveillance it becomes one of the central meters of obedience and deviance. The instrumentation of the agent and the panoptic effects discussed below all serve allegiance to the passionless regulation of the clock’s control.

Control is addressed to the shifting energetic network, the temporary power grid contained by the organisational structure itself. The power grid is always temporary because it is always in flux in the constant interplay between structure and anti-structure. Control concerns the ability of various agents operating within that structure to bring resources of power to heel. It represents the ability both to enforce one’s will upon others and to direct the ongoing construction of the organisational structure. This is not to suggest that all organisational life takes the form of an endless battle between combatants, nor is it to direct Sun Tzu metaphors at the process of social construction. Control is an aspect of the experience of organisational life that operates on these culturally specific and contextually relevant terms. Control is not the finite reserve implied by mechanistic theories of power (e.g. labour process analysis- Clegg and Wilson, pg 230) but an ongoing process .

The preconditioning environment for the experience of control time-spaces is that of primary education. Schooling familiarises the mind and the body with a “specific form of discipline and rank” (Mannheim, in Anderson, pg 56). This conditioning is tailored to the requirements of the workplace. “Now, at the beginning of the Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to 'fortify', to 'develop the body', to prepare the child 'for a future in some mechanical work', to give him 'an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits' (Talleyrand's Report to the Constituent Assembly, September 1791, quoted by Foucault, pg 208).

TAYLORISATION

“God money/ nail me up against the wall”
(from ‘Head like a Hole’, Nine Inch Nails, 1993)

Much of the literature on the subject of work organisation theory begins by considering the work of Frederick Taylor who, writing in the early twentieth century, introduced “scientific principles” to the development of management techniques (Thompson and McHugh, pg 22). The practice of timing agents and simplifying their physical actions has been described as originating from the revolution of mass production in the motor car industry (Thompson, pg 4). Interestingly, not only was it Taylor himself who coined the term Fordism, but he did so as part of a hostile critique (ibid). This fact has not protected Taylor from consistent vilification, particularly from socialist theory. Lenin described scientific management as “the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation” (Everett, pg 2), while Gramsci described it as the “real purpose of American society... the elimination of the working class from the world of work” (Thompson, pg 4).

Taylorisation has come to refer not only to “scientific management and technological specialisation” but also the removal of decision making ability from the agent (Clegg and Wilson, pg 226). “Taylorised automatons, operating in a work setting dominated by management” have no control over their work and have no freedom in how they operate technology (Harris, pg 232). The loss of control is a significant element of the work experience (Rawson, pg 140). Alienation and boredom are frequently cited as the results of a monotonous technological interface, but this deterministic explanation is unsophisticated (Edwards and Scullion, pg 271). It is not the tedious nature of the task which fosters workplace isolation but rather the intense managerial control over the actions of the agent (ibid).

Managerial control is evident in the “intensity of the workload” the “fragmentation of tasks” but most pertinently in the ability to switch the agent between tasks at will (Linhart’s 1981 study of a French car factory, ibid). The experience is heightened when, as a temp, the agent has little or no formal job description. At Seeboard, these switches were frequent and arbitrary. At least once and often twice a day, I would be instructed to move from one pod to a specific seat on another. The reason given was often “I want to keep a better eye on you.” Throughout the day you were also vulnerable to being switched between tasks on a teamleader’s whim. Interestingly, the attitude to agents who were permanently promoted to non-phone duties was always positive because “Anything is better than being on the phones”. However, when a CSA was requested to come off the phones and perform another task such as data entry or manning reception, this was always viewed as a less prestigious task. This uneven cultural categorisation of activities only compounds the humiliation of being switched. You experienced no greater consideration of your humanity than a multitask domestic appliance.

The temporary and shifting nature of task allocation reveals the cultural predispositions of human resources management. Not only are workers viewed as a negative expense against profits (Mulholland, pg 189) but also as instruments (Clegg and Wilson, pg 226). “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing” (Marcuse, pg 33, my italics). The nature of managerial culture’s attitude towards its employees is obscured discursively. Through the use of “self-determining words”, coercion is given the gloss of individualistic consumer choice (Dean 3, No. 3). Dean describes “incentives” that are actually threats and “benefits” that are compulsory (ibid). Baldry refers to “team working”, “empowerment” and “performance targets” as examples of corporate euphemisms for intensification (Baldry et al, pg 167). “The efficiency of the system blunts the individual’s recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole” (Marcuse, pg 11).

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

The discipline of space is ensured through the isolation of the workplace while the discipline of time is achieved via the clock. Socially and psychologically, the conditioning that indoctrinates the kind of controlled hierarchical environment that work provides can be traced to primary education. Control is therefore an ongoing process not only in the workplace structure itself but also throughout history and throughout an individual’s life. The Taylorisation of labour represents the final instrumentalisation of the individual by managerial manipulation. It is not the vacuous nature of the work itself or the repetitive technological interface that achieves the transformation of the agent into an alienated appliance but the lack of control over their work-life. This practical enslavement is concealed through a corporate discourse that promotes the illusion of choice.

Nowhere does the “efficiency of the system” appear more vital to the corporate discourse than in surveillance and the pursuit of targets.

CHAPTER FOUR
Surveillance

An agent lives under constant surveillance. As a technique of control it is simultaneously the most crude and the most sophisticated. This chapter is devoted to unravelling its details as a mechanism of suppression and as a culturally constructive force. The first section is concerned with the monitoring of agent’s work rates for the production of statistical intelligence. The second section examines the physical confines of the call centre through a comparison with Bentham’s Inspection House. This section is broken down into four smaller ruminations on specific similarities between the two. The chapter is put to bed by a clarification of terminology- particularly the definition of surveillance as distinct from monitoring. Overall, this chapter will argue that the call centre is an environment of near-total surveillance that reconstructs the employee from the intelligence gathered.

MONITORING

“Just arrived at work, computer switched on, software started, logged into the
telephone system. The teamleader comes over: "Here are your statistics for
yesterday. Your break was one minute and 25 seconds over the limit!" I wish
she would die right here in front of me, but she had just started:
"Furthermore, your not-ready-times are 10 percent longer than those of the
other agents. And you have not met the average of 20 calls an hour. So you
won't get a bonus again" (Hotlines, pg 1 ).

Following the second revolution in car manufacturing (Thompson, pg 4), work measurement shifted from the factory floor to the office, following the adage of flexibalisation- “to measure is to control” (Salaman, pg 106). The surveillance and monitoring of the workplace is not a recent development. Remote eavesdropping has been practised in telephonic services since the 1940s while the measurement of call duration dates back to the 1920s (Botan, pg 4). However, the unique synthesis of telephone and computer found in the call centre permits a higher intensity of supervisory monitoring and measurement than in any other environment. The telephonic surveillance of the operator is combined with the “silent monitors” (after Grint pg 119) of the factory, the ever-present statistical indicators of work rates. The call centre’s microcosmic reproduction of the surveillance society is encouraged by the (corporate) cultural endorsement of penetrative techniques. For example, the slogan “Total Control Made Easy” has been used to advertise call centre monitoring software (Stevens, pg 1). ACD (Automatic Call Distribution), QMAX and other systems permit managers access to statistics showing the number of calls in the queue, how many CSAs are on calls, how many are away from their phones, how long they have been away, how long on average they spend every day away from their phones, how many calls they handle a day, how long they spend on each call on average, how long they have spent on their current call, whether the call is inward or outward bound etc (Stevens, pg 1). Every second is accounted for. If the agent’s shift is due to begin at midday, they must be at their desks, rebooted and logged-in to the telephone system by midday. A BT employee reports that their breaks were also monitored “if we take more it shows up on our stats and we get grief from the manager. And if we want to use the toilet it is taken out of our 10 min break” (Hotlines, pg 3). Any unregulated activity becomes a quantifiable deviance in the personalised statistics. These figures are monitored in real time on the supervisor’s screen diagrammatically, with colour-coded alarms triggered by “emergencies” such as someone taking too long on a call. The statistics are also collated and packaged for daily, weekly and monthly review where they can be checked against “performance benchmarks” or targets (Everret, pg 1).

“The outcome is an organisational obsession with targets and measurements of outputs which would have delighted Taylor” (Baldry et al, pg 172). Targets are set against statistics with feeble regard to either achievability or the quality level of customer service. At Seeboard the targets were always set unfeasibly high. During my time there, Joyce was the only CSA ever to succeed in meeting them. Her technique involved politely agreeing to do everything the caller required but in reality doing nothing for any of them, thus enabling her to field an impressive amount of calls. It was felt by the other staff that her technique was generating additional work for them in dealing with aggrieved customers and taking the time out to complete her unfinished tasks. Complaints about her behaviour were met with disinterested responses from supervisors. Her capabilities in meeting individual targets overrode the teamleader’s inclination to register her overall impact. When the department was segregated into “teams”, her statistics would benefit the team’s appearance while her negative impact would register more widely, across the department, so as to be undetectable. When Baldry refers to an obsession with targets there is little in the way of overstatement. Targets are received as categorical imperatives. They define an area of superhuman effort, anything below which is designated as immoral and shiftless. Stats then serve the process of ideation as “maps” to assist the supervisor in the construction of the employee (after Bateson, quoted in Rapport and Overing, pg 104). These maps are microscopically detailed in ergonomic areas, but other realms remain terra incognita.

THE INSPECTION HOUSE

“Prison, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that- “Stone walls do not a prison make,” but a combination of the stone wall, the political parasite and the moral instructor is no garden of sweets” (Bierce, pg 104).

The construction of organisational maps is premised on the initial conquest of the material territory. The social sciences have been accused of negating the power dynamics of space (e.g. Baldry et al, pg 164). A justifiable fear of environmental determinism may unfortunately have prevented the inclusion of a range of relevant data from affecting past analysis. This is not an attempt to argue, like Sartre, for the notion of a “material field of buildings and artefacts” that governs human behaviour (Eriksen, pg 187) but to merely contend that the construction, control and manipulation of the environment must not be regarded as a neutral activity. Material structures such as architecture, urban planning and office furniture all play a role in constructing social possibilities. Just as the motivation for the construction of factories was the desire for regulation of the workforce, the modern open plan office is also a structure of control (Baldry et al, pg 166). The prevention of privacy (both visual and acoustic) that it entails is a product of the long relationship between the workplace and the art of surveillance. Botan offers three reasons for the pervasiveness of this relationship- that information handling environments are pre-wired with the practical potential for surveillance, that the techniques of surveillance are less cost-effective in non-work contexts and, thirdly, the “doctrine of employment at will”, a Faustian ideology whereby an employer is free to set any condition of work providing the employee continues to accept the wage (Botan, pg 4). This ideology will be shown to have an effect in securing normative commitment, in that it serves to present the control techniques as perfectly reasonable in the work context (Marcuse, pg 9).

One particular “material structure” occurs so thoroughly throughout the material on surveillance that its mention seems clichéd. However, its appearance in this paper is, hopefully, justified. Jeremy Bentham invented the Inspection House, or Panopticon, in 1787 in a series of letters from Russia. It was a total-surveillance building designed for a variety of establishments including prisons, factories, poorhouses, hospitals, asylums and schools. It consisted of a ring of cells, all of which presented an open face to the central inspection point, designed so that none could perceive where the inspector’s gaze had currently fallen. Foucault famously made use of the Panopticon as a metaphor for the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977).

Modern techniques such as the open-plan office, the ACD software and the telephone-computer dyad have superseded the Panopticon’s design and demonstrate the crudity of its corporality. Botan’s communication-studies analysis of workplace surveillance makes use of an “Electronic Panopticon Metaphor” to explore situations in which there is a contrast between the “visibility of the employee and the invisibility of the surveilling authority” (Botan, page 8).

In this paper the term “Panopticon” will be reserved for the discussion of Foucaultian panoptic effects while “Inspection House” will be used as the metaphorical model for the control process within the call centre. This relates to the subjective experience of imprisonment, constant surveillance and anxiety.

Imprisonment

“I will not pester you with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be... The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences”
(From Letter XVI of Bentham’s Panopticon Letters).

Burrel says that we are always incarcerated in one organisation or another (Grint, pg 147). The similarity between prisons and other social organisations is not just one of compulsion or captivity, detention or duration. There are also trivial material parallels, for example in environmental conditions. The lighting in the call centre is bright and oppressive. Employees frequently reported headaches and several took to wearing sunglasses in the office. The glare from the lights is complemented by the bolted smoked glass windows “so when you go out you get blinded...you feel like you’re getting out of prison” (Baldry et al, pg 179). Agents are forbidden from speaking to each other or rising from their seat without adequate reason. As a recent television documentary concluded, “they may as well handcuff them” (Howe, 2001).
“For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously” (Orwell, pg 112).

In Harvey et al’s notorious “A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison” , the “guards” fostered a regime of dependency and emasculation. The “prisoners” were subject to arbitrary controls over everyday functions such as having to ask for permission to use the toilet (Harvey et al, pg 69). Nobody had told the guards to do this; they just decided autonomously to designate such necessities as privileges (ibid). A report from a Hotlines activist who worked at Seeboard shows a pertinent comparison:- “To go to the toilet, you need to ask your team leader for permission, who comes and dials the code that allows you to go. If you try and leave your desk without asking for permission the computer will deduct the time from your wages. In this way they can keep track of everything you do while at work. In some departments you are not even allowed to talk to each other, and we get told off quite often for chatting” (Hotlines Brighton leaflet). There have also been reports of a manager in a Welsh call centre who forced his staff to enter time away from their desks into a “toilet book” and threatened that the worst offenders would be made to wear nappies (Stevens, from the TUC hotline) .

The irony is that not only are call centres a form of prison but a prison is now also a form of call centre. Lags at the Pittsburgh Institution, Ontario, currently have the opportunity to work in “Canada’s first prison-based call centre” (Alphonso, pg 1). The level of surveillance is purportedly only fractionally higher than elsewhere. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Foucault, pg 228).

Constancy of surveillance

“I flatter myself there can now be little doubt of the plan's possessing the fundamental advantages I have been attributing to it: I mean, the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression,) combined with the extreme facility of his real presence” (From Letter VI of Bentham’s Panopticon Letters).

Call centre agents experience constant surveillance via the statistics produced electronically regarding their speed with respect to various tasks (Stevens, pg 1). The “apparent omnipresence” of the Inspection House, however, relates more directly to the technique of blind monitoring (Everret, pg 2). The supervisors and teamleaders are able to listen-in directly to any of the calls being conducted in their section, in order to check that the CSA is using the correct phrasing such as the “corporate opening” and that they have a “smile in their voice”. Agents are told that their voice is their uniform and that without the standardisation of phrases they would be naked. At Seeboard the corporate opening was “Good morning/afternoon/evening, you’re through to Seeboard Energy key budget meters department, Steve speaking, may I start by taking your postcode please?” I was reprimanded on my first day of fieldwork for not using the correct corporate close and for using the forbidden phrases mate (common, over familiar) and problem (too negative- customers are not allowed to have “problems”).

As the CSAs are unable to tell when they are being monitored in this way the effect is equivalent to a constant monitor. This produces the permanent self-consciousness that the Panopticon is designed to elicit. Thus, the operations of control become “automatic” and surveillance becomes permanent even when it is only transitory (Foucault, pg 196). The Inspection House of the call centre succeeds in creating what might be called a preactive auto-censorship through the concealment of the inconstancy of surveillance

Anxiety.

“Pacified. Classified. Keep in line. You’re doing fine. Lost your voice? There aint no choice. Play the game. Silent and tame” (from ‘You’re Already Dead’, Crass, 1983).

The more teamleaders a department can have, the more floorwalkers and buddies and expert users, then the greater the chance of deviant behaviour being apprehended. The greater the consequent “anxious awareness of being observed” among employees, the lower the rate of deviance (Foucault, pg 198). The intimidation and harassment of staff merely serves to amplify the stress of answering streams of randomly abusive calls (Stevens, pg 2). The anxiety is such that, after a day of work, many CSAs are unable to answer the phone at home (Mac, pg 1). Questionnaire-based research suggests that the experience of surveillance produces a range of “panoptic effects” including a reduction of the sense of privacy, increased uncertainty, reduced inter-staff communication and lowered self-esteem (Botan, pg 16).

CSAs are continually mocked by their own monitors. Many operatives have their real-time stats displayed in permanent windows on their computer screens. Others sit beneath the glare of flashing LCD indicator boards displaying team stats and percentile indices against targets. An employee of Hewlett Packard in Amsterdam reported that various individual’s statistics were being posted up onto the office walls and that “sometimes the teamleaders run around and criticise agents for their allegedly bad statistics” (Hotlines, pg 5).

A structurally generated angst is produced by the constant sense of underperformance induced by the unfeasible targets and unavoidable statistics. This plugs into the stressed-out fear-scene of the CSA, increasing the capitulation to command. Psychological studies demonstrate that obedience is incremented by supervision (Osherow, pg 84) and fear (Dabbs and Loventhal in Aronson pg 87) because “it’s easier to discipline people when they’re worried about the consequences of disobeying” (Dean 7, issue 3). An employee of Ansett in Melbourne reported that it was fear that kept the staff in line. Fear “and the knowledge that if they don't like what they hear they will be talking to you... maybe in half an hour, maybe tomorrow or maybe next month in your performance review” (quoted in Everret, pg 3). This is the power of what Foucault called the disciplinary gaze, the power to induce conformity on the basis of a potential detection and response (McCahill, pg 44), but it is not merely the invisibility of the power that secures control, nor is it merely the Panoptic machine technology. “Technological somnambulism” (Pfaffenberger, quoted in Eriksen, pg 186) may be easily countered but to neglect individual human agency is to fall prey to technological determinism. These techniques of intelligence too easily veil the spy behind the glass.

Hominis in Machina

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (Nietzsche, quoted in Moore 1986).

The surveillance web is a structure replete with micro-social human processes. It is not simply an automated inhuman oppressor, nor is it a voyeur-machine. The voyeur exists in the act of omniscience above the actual material perception itself, just as the secret agent is ordered more towards the gathering of intelligence than to the spymaster. Conrad’s Verloc, for example, who, with his three masters would have made an excellent ethnographer. The surveillance web exists not to peep but to process intelligence. The processing of the data gathered involves its constant filtering through social beings (McCahil, pg 46). For example, crimes monitored by CCTV cameras do not automatically equal arrests (ibid). Operation Eagle Eye led to an increase in the surveillance of ethnic minorities as a result of cultural bias rather then mechanical inevitability. The rise in CCTV and other computer-aided monitoring systems has not led to a decrease in human supervision (Baldry et al, pg 174). There must be human agency in the decision to deploy surveillance, in the processing and filtering of data, in the manner of its presentation and in the decision as to whether or not to act upon it. Deployment concerns a conscious choice of those in control to extend their control (Botan, pg 6). This knowledge enables us to reject the simplistic technology versus humanism arguments of critics such as Rawson (1956). The robots of humanity’s enslavement come not from outer space but from the hands of hominoids.

As mentioned previously, this paper does not intend to purport that teamleaders or higher management are themselves the puppetmasters of the agents. Control is an ongoing process, a temporary positioning of resources in the grid, it is not a permanent possession. In this way, the actors operating the surveillance web must also be regarded as its victims. Marcuse observes that the growth of technological totalitarianism is matched by a growth in the dependence of its administrators “Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technician as their planners and executors?” (Marcuse, pg 33). This ironic mutual enslavement to surveillance finds its greatest motif in the CCTV cameras that monitor the police agents who operate the high street CCTV systems. “By every tie I could devise”, said the master of the Panopticon, “my own fate had been bound up by me with theirs” (Bentham, quoted in Foucault, pg 200). The master of the Panopticon is the supervisor, the warden of surveillance. Through the routine operation of the intelligence harvest, their achievements are as openly visible as those of the inmates themselves. A superior, on inspector, would be able to judge “at a glance” how the entire system is functioning (ibid). Who watches the watchmen? Other watchmen.

CLARIFICATION OF TERMINOLOGY

“I hope no critic of more learning than candour will do an inspection-house so much injustice as to compare it to Dionysius' ear. The object of that contrivance was to know what prisoners said without their suspecting any such thing. The object of the inspection principle is directly the reverse: it is to make them not only suspect, but be assured, that whatever they do is known, even though that should not be the case. Detection is the object of the first: prevention, that of the latter. In the former case the ruling person is a spy; in the latter he is a monitor. The object of the first was to pry into the secret recesses of the heart; the latter, confining its attention to overt acts, leaves thoughts and fancies to their proper ordinary, the court above” (From Letter XXI of Bentham’s Panopticon Letters).

Bentham’s distinction between the Inspection House and Dionysius’ ear is potentially useful. Here the Panopticon demonstrates the inspection principle of prevention through the assurance of surveillance. It is concerned with “overt acts” of the body, leaving the penetration of the mind to God. By contrast Dionysius’ ear, an eavesdropping device , demonstrates the surreptitious surveillance of thoughts- detection as opposed to prevention. While the call centre appears to follow the inspection principle- the agents know their calls are monitored and counted- there is in fact a Dionysius’ ear in operation. CSAs wear telephonic headsets connected to a “turret” that is then linked to the computer network. Agents are aware that their on-line phone conversations are routinely listened to but none of the CSAs encountered had even suspected the possibility that they might also be bugged in-between calls. Just as the general public are not aware that the microphone in their home telephones (the “speaker” end) can transmit sound even while on the receiver, the CSAs did not realise that their brief and surreptitious comments were also being recorded. Taking into account the fact that the majority of inter-staff communication concerned grievances and insults directed at their teamleaders (the most frequent monitors) this news came as a disconcerting shock.

Vicky’s reactions to the revelation were typical, if slightly extreme. They took in the three common phases of disbelief, hostility and absurdity. She had been complaining that the new automatic managerial software, QMAX, was “like Big Brother”. Pursuing this line of conversation, I asked if she had ever considered my theory. Her initial disbelief was strong “They can’t do that, they couldn’t,” she exclaimed “it would violate every human right in the book.” Her mood then became aggressive. I found this reaction to be unanimous within my sample but can give no thorough accounting for it save to guess that it was motivated by fear and a strong desire that it might not be true. It is hard to imagine a CSA who has not, at least once and more commonly on a daily basis, said something they would regret being overheard by relevant parties. If not for the fact that it would make them appear unpleasant but for the fact that it redefined their relationships to their teamleaders. If the supervisors knew how much the agents hated them and had kept this intelligence secret then how much did the supervisors hate the agents? Some studies have argued that the act of surveillance tends to provoke a negative view of the target (Raven and Kruglanski 1970, French and Raven 1959, Raven 1993, quoted in Botan pg 7-8). The monitoring agent’s distrust grows almost exponentially in a vicious circle of coercion, devaluation and the exercise of power (ibid).

Vicky’s final response, once she had accepted the possibility of interim surveillance, was absurdity. This responsible middle-aged woman seized the mouthpiece and hissed obscenities into the receiver. She then went on to disclose intimate gossip about the departmental manager’s ongoing extramarital affair into the headset. It was apparent to both of us that this was an entirely illogical action but she repeatedly insisted, “I don’t care”.

Bentham’s separation of surveillance into prevention and detection has some weight in that it serves to separate this kind of response from the usual panoptic experiences. Vicky’s reaction reveals that there is a tacit social acceptance of the acknowledged Inspection House techniques but that the undreamt Dionysius’ ear techniques constitute an intolerable breach of the normative framework. However, this is the limit to this distinction’s utility. McCahil posits a distinction between the accumulation of coded intelligence and the direct supervision of activities through a hierarchy (McCahil, pg 43). The former can be said to relate to statistics while the latter indicates their wider application within the work organisation structure. The narrow definition of the intelligence gathering aspect reflects other studies that specify divisions on the basis of statistical collection for the purposes of regulating pay (Attewell, 1987 and U.S. Congress 1987, quoted in Botan, pg 4). Botan is more politically stark in his split between monitoring and surveillance (Botan pg 4). Monitoring indicates the collection of all intelligence used to practice surveillance which itself indicates the control of subordinate behaviour (Rule and Brantley, 1992, quoted in Botan, pg 4). All surveillance incorporates monitoring, but not all monitoring is used for surveillance (ibid).

In the call centre a more applicable distinction appears around the points of identity construction within the web. Firstly, the context-specific surveillance of the “Inspection House” relates to the reconstruction of one’s self from the outside. This is the institutional product of preactive obedience. Secondly, the monitoring of quantified surveillance serves the employer’s construction of the employee through statistical indices as ideational maps of the person.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

Performance and deviance from conformity is registered statistically for the consumption of the organisational hierarchy. This intelligence is used to construct a map of the agent that the company then manipulates for the purposes of control. The office itself is designed to maximise the collection of this intelligence both overtly and covertly in the manner of a prison. The subordinate’s experience of this psuedo-constant surveillance is one of deep anxiety. This engenders a preactive auto censorship whereby the process of institutional control is internalised and performed subjectively. It is important to notice that these techniques are not the automated conclusion of a war between humanism and technology but are resources deployed throughout the grid by human actors. The purpose of this axis of surveillance and monitoring is the reconstruction of the organisational structure and the preservation of the power grid. This is achieved via two separate special effects- the engenderment of normative commitment and the prevention of collective action.

CHAPTER FIVE
Depoliticisation

Privatisation has been described above as a process of social depoliticisation that worked through the promotion of the consumer culture. This chapter will attempt to describe the depoliticisation of the corporate workspace. The removal of political action from the agent’s strategic repertoire will be seen as serving to perpetuate the blackout in the zone of control’s negotiation. The first section describes the means by which normative commitment is ensured. This will involve a consideration of the construction of institutional identity and the socialisation of cognitive dissonance. The second section addresses the prevention of collection action through techniques of individualisation.

NORMATIVE COMMITMENT

“Whatever commandment the condemned man has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. This condemned man, for instance...will have written on his body: HONOUR THY SUPERIORS!” (from ‘In the Penal Settlement’, Kafka, pg 174).

The classical explanation for the variety of controls in the workplace is the continuing expropriation of the workforce from ownership of the means of production (Grint, pg 109) . Grint argues that this control takes the form of a Weberian legitimation of authority through bureaucracy and its normative acceptance (ibid). This normative commitment might be more explicitly understood in this context as the internal obedience to the norms of corporate culture. Salaman imagines that middle management’s commitment is jeopardised by the alienating experience of surveillance and can only be secured through bureaucratic participation (Salaman, pg 129). Beyond this, several writers believe that corporate commitment is no longer required from middle management at all. The scientific management techniques of Taylorism, it is said, have eliminated the need for goodwilled commitment (Harris, pg 108). In privatised utilities like Seeboard, Mulholland claims mechanisms of control enforce conformity to corporate culture without the need for internal loyalty (Mulholland, pg 202).

Lower down the simian hierarchy, the presence of normative commitment has been questioned among the common employees. Edwards and Scullion regard the shop-floor view that absenteeism is a “natural” form of work escapology as proof of a rejection of commitment to managerial interests (Edwards and Scullion, pg 260). In a study of call centres, Taylor presents examples of the perceived resistance (see below) of controls as evidence for a pragmatic, rather than normative, acceptance (Taylor, pg 100). He believes that this pragmatic acceptance is the result of material factors rather than the discursive power of corporate-enterprise culture (ibid).

Yet these arguments fail to address the consequences of panoptic effects for the construction of the agents work identity. The power of the range of surveillance techniques is that they are preactive- they act upon the agent’s internal anxiety of detection as a preventative measure, mind over mind (Foucault, pg 202). The Faustian arrangement of the “doctrine of employment at will” (Botan, pg 4) is one of the social controls that ensure commitment appears perfectly reasonable within the work context. These controls diminish what Marcuse terms the “private space”, namely the internal mechanism that prevents total identification with external society (Marcuse, pg 10). Once this is diminished, the ability to construct an identity from within is crippled and the agent becomes the unshielded victim of a command-urge to emotionally engage with the corporate organisation. That this does not correspond to a totalising psychic obedience is obvious- if the system produced mental slaves then it would be impossible to pierce the veil to reveal my own condition in this way. What normative commitment does concern is the acceptance of institutional values within the context of a controlled emotional environment through the identification with externally constructed masks and performances.

Taylor refers to the work of CSAs as “emotional labour” to indicate that, due to constant surveillance, the agent is unable to deploy a simulation of empathy with the customer and must instead construct genuine emotional responses (Taylor, pg 93). The fact that the agent invariably retains a deep sense of irritation and resentment towards the customer strikes Taylor as a mild irony (Taylor, pg 94) yet reveals a great deal about the construction of agent identity. Taylor’s analysis of the emotional labour process is flawed, as the work culture requires the specific opposite of empathy towards the customer. The CSA’s task is to defend the company’s honour, to justify their arbitrary regulations, to rationalise their costs and encourage a relativism towards their mistakes. This is what is being sought through the ongoing process of control, what is being looked for under the disciplining gaze of surveillance. This, therefore, is the direction towards which emotions of loyalty are commanded through surveillance. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault, pg 198).

Osherow’s analysis of the Jonestown “suicides” makes use of the theory of cognitive dissonance. Although there are obvious problems with the application of psychological theory to anthropological studies, the classic “Social Animal” experiments do provide a range of germane concepts for the understanding of normative acceptance. Cognitive dissonance indicates the unpleasant tension brought about by the performance of actions inconsistent with an individual’s self-identity (Osherow, pg 81). In the situation where an actor is structurally underpowered, the only way for them to reduce this dissonance is to reconstruct their identity, to retune themselves. In this way, a commitment is achieved through a careful fabrication, rather than an oppressive alteration of the individual (Foucault, pg 215).

Towards the end of my initial period at Seeboard I was most frequently found in the training rooms. These rooms were a series of interconnected portacabins plastered with the humiliating designation “University of Customer Satisfaction”. I was in an excellent position from which to observe the procedural norms of indoctrination. I was able to repeatedly view a striking example of what might be regarded as a cultural dissonance. Part of the training process involved sitting with CSAs and listening-in to their calls via a second headset. The trainees were always shocked by certain customer’s situations, such as having no electricity to heat their baby’s bottle or being elderly and in the dark etc. Their compassion would be offset by the CSA’s weary cynicism. On several occasions I heard CSAs inform trainees “All key meter customers are lying scum.” This belief was so common as to form an organisational taboo. In logging notes on files the customer was referred to as “CONS”, short for consumer. Reports always began “CONS claims...” as if doubt preceded all else. Teamleaders actively discouraged any display of sympathy outside of the repetition of standardised platitudes. Crusading on behalf of unjustly disconnected households would be regarded as an offensively emotional display of gullibility. From the training rooms it was possible to witness cognitive dissonance in action, as new agents would become increasingly frustrated with the clash between their unwanted sympathy and their mandatory cynicism. An agent’s work is demanding enough, without this extra conflict. After an indeterminate period, the agent would make the adjustment to scepticism just as a means to cope with the day.

An almost sociopathic regard for the customer is endorsed as part of the work culture. The promotion of office norms and opinions is undertaken “on the floor” by the teamleaders. I witnessed several examples of teamleaders encouraging a callous attitude that far outstripped the answering-machine-indifference I had expected of a call centre. An elderly woman’s key meter ran out of money and disconnected her supply, leaving her trapped halfway up her stairs on her electric-powered Stanneh chairlift. Vicky was shocked by her teamleader’s response. They had refused to prioritise an emergency callout and suggested that the situation was the fault of the woman concerned, who should have foreseen such a possibility. I also witnessed a situation where a caller had been fitted with an electronic tag by the probation services to enforce a house arrest. They had lost their key and were unable to recharge their meter. Once the few pennies left on their machine were used, the power on the tag would be disconnected and the police would be automatically summoned to return them to prison. The official company response was beyond the usual “He shouldn’t have a key meter, then”. I was told that if the customer had not broken the law in the first place, none of this would have happened. On this occasion, the customer was being excluded not only from pylonic modernity but also from liberty itself.

These are examples of the cynicism of the stabilised network towards the distant voice. “Stabilised networks” are organisations such as McDonalds that “seem to insist on annihilating our personal experience” (Star, pg 49). They are characterised by an institutionalised solipsism that doubts the reality of anybody else’s pain, an anaesthetisation to suffering (after de Beauvoir, quoted in Star, pg 47).

Surveillance, then, doesn’t jeopardise normative commitment as Salaman claims but instead helps to invade private space and ensure the emotional loyalty to corporate culture. This emotional commitment is endorsed by the socio-institutional convention of agent/technique integration and corporate identification. It manifests in activities such as voluntary contributions to organisational efficiency (Harris, pg 235).

Trevor had worked as a CSA through the temp agency for several years. A physics graduate, his careful manipulation of organisational intelligence had seen him quickly promoted to floorwalker, a safe “institutional survivor” position (after Dubrin, pg 154). Despite the offer of an increased wage, Trevor refused to accept a company contract, as he believed that it would mean selling out. He was cynical of attempts at managerial ingratiation and frequently dismissed any work-ethic enthusiasm with venomous sarcasm. Yet, despite his displays of antipathy, he spent large amounts of time with Vicky discussing ways to solve institutional problems. Marcuse observed that a consequence of worker’s movement from physical to mental labour was that people begin to “think with unexpected attention and lucidity about the financial management of the firm” (Marcuse, pg 31). While discussing whether to book an emergency callout for a borderline situation, Vicky argued against the call, reasoning, “Emergency callouts cost us £50.” The use of “us” to designate the company is an obvious verbal code of identification but the sense of responsibility for its money is more slippery. One could argue for the existence of a link between the agent’s finances and those of the corporations in the sense of the desired continuation of wages. However, even the vaguest concession to Marx allows for the fact that the wage is a device to assuage the appropriation of resource control (or “the ownership of the means of production”). “Every slave knows or ought to know ‘I am making someone rich’- they don’t know so they have no fight in them... it’s a semi-ignorant philosophy that keeps them at heel” (Howe, 2001). The wage cannot signify the practical economic symbiosis of agent and corporation when it is simultaneously the greatest tool of the removal of the agent’s rights to ownership. Vicky’s identification is an illustrative example of the normative acceptance of the managerial “good”.

In this manner, surveillance assists the reproduction of the organisation but it also serves to preserve the vertical power relations. This is achieved through the prevention of collective action.

PREVENTION OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

“Whether looking at historical accounts or at the world today, one is most struck not by the rebellions of the oppressed who rise up to destroy the political system that exploits them. Rather it is the overwhelming conformity of the people living in such societies that is most impressive” (David Kertzer, pg 39).

The most effective technique for the prevention of rebellion was forged in the colonial encounter. Distant or tenuous authority is best served by the tactic known as divide and rule. The prevention of employees confronting the employer as a homogenous entity is an interest that has been stitched into the fundament of work organisations (Salaman, pg 158). Collective action horizontally would constitute the formation of a practical-class consciousness out of the latent structurally implicit opposition to management (after Edwards and Scullion, pg 12). “Discipline”, the maintenance techniques of the organisation’s power grid, prevents collective action through vertical partitioning (Foucault, pg 218). This entails the division of labour, the separation of departments, the splitting of shifts and the creation of interdepartmental rivalries (Salaman, pg 158). These procedures often appear so illogical, counter productive and inefficient that it is difficult not to suspect an element of conscious strategic intent. The Hotlines activists explain the process in militant terms “But why do the bosses divide work in this form, even if it obstructs the smooth and productive cooperation? Because they do not see any other possibility how to divide us, control us and force us to work” (Hotlines, pg 2). Even without supposing a deliberate Machiavellian intent on management’s behalf to divide the workforce, it is possible to argue that there is a deliberate attempt to create personal issues out of political situations. The experience of arbitrary and cruel discipline within a fragmented structure provokes a critique of individual managers rather than of the nature of managerial control more generally (Edwards and Scullion, pg 260).

When I returned to Seeboard to undertake fieldwork, I was assigned to a new teamleader, Dick. Dick and Janet had both been promoted to the position of teamleader for the evening shift about a year beforehand. One of the most frequently asked questions of my first week back at the job would be “Who is your teamleader?” When I replied the response would invariably be similar to responses such as “Oh, you poor sod... Mind you, they’re both arseholes anyway.” It seemed that the teamleaders had to be conceptualised as individually predisposed bullies rather than acknowledging the structurally prescribed nature of their position. I would have elicited identical responses no matter which of them was my personal teamleader. Trevor’s disputes with new regulations or working conditions were always addressed to Dick and were soon transformed into personality clashes with him. This personalisation of structural politics is a major factor of corporate culture’s depoliticisation in that it keeps protest individualised (Edwards and Scullion, pg 261).

The culture of competitive and anxious individualism is achieved through surveillance, monitoring and the collation of personal statistics- all of which contribute to the isolation of the agents (Marcuse, pg 25). Teamleaders maintain constant visual surveillance of the agents within their department in order to “catch” them talking to each other when they should be on calls (Baldry et al pg 175). At Seeboard the permitted level of agent-to-agent interaction was nil. The only opportunity for communication was during breaks, but when the new QMAX software was installed it coordinated everybody’s break times so that there would be no overlaps and only one person would be off-line at any one time. The Inspection House was designed specifically so that there would be “no quarellings, nor confederatings, nor plottings to escape” (Bentham, Letter VIII).

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

Normative commitment does not mean total indoctrination or psychological reprogramming. Agents construct institutional masks and careful performances of obedience. The omniscience of the surveillance web provokes the agent to modify their behaviour through preactive auto censorship. This is complemented by the erosion of a private internal world of difference. The agent then starts to identify with the mask, with the external production of self, with the organisation’s map of their identity. The agent is encouraged through socialisation and organisational taboos to disbelieve and despise the customer. They are forced, through ever-intensifying restrictions, to punish and exclude the customer from pylonic modernity. A phase of cognitive dissonance eventually ensures conformity to the belief that the customer really deserves this treatment. Commitment is thus achieved through the delicate reorientation of the agent’s identity, rather than an oppressive reprogramming of their mind. There are two examples of this normative commitment in action. Firstly, the culturally endorsed sociopathic regard for the suffering of the customer. Secondly, the eager contributions to the financial betterment of a structure geared towards the extraction of one’s own financial entitlements.

Collective action is the greatest potential threat to the current organisation of the power grid. It is prevented through a manipulation of structure that enforces a systematic individualism. Any otherwise collective or political grievances are personalised and neutered. Once the possibility of collective action is eliminated, the only remaining option for the escapologist lies presumably within individualised resistance.

CHAPTER SIX
Resistance

This chapter will begin with a brief overview of the concept of resistance. It will then test the concept against a range of examples from the call centre. The second section analyses action in terms of the consumer culture. This chapter will conclude with a discussion of the Milgram experiment, a renowned study in obedience.

COPING STRATEGIES

“Resistance is futile” (Borg slogan).

Resistance emerged as an anthropological concept from a fusion of radical (British cultural Marxists, French structural Marxists, Gramsci, Foucault etc) and interpretive (symbolic anthropology, Geertz etc) approaches (Barnard, 1996). The concept opens up the possibilities of social conflict analysis from the narrower class-based Marxist method (Scott 1985, pg 243). Central to the use of the term is the distinction between formal and informal resistance. Formal resistance is overt and includes paramilitary opposition, revolts and terrorism. Informal resistance is covert and "everyday" and includes sabotage, heel-dragging, slowdowns, feigned ignorance, gossip, disrespect, passive non-compliance, evasion, deception, dissimulation, false compliance, slander, arson etc (Scott 1985 and Harper 1968). Scott, architect of the informal, pulled together an over-arching method and theory from a growing field of analysis, such as Bailey's discussion of "reputation" as the poor man's control (Bailey, 1971). The degree to which resistance is overt or covert is determined by the extent and nature of the dominant oppression, in much the same process as counter-hegemonic movements are influenced in their form by the prevailing hegemony (Keesing, 1994, pg 41-53).

Recently, the majority of focus has been on the covert, informal forms of resistance and most definitions of the concept reflect this emphasis. For example- resistance is "action which impedes or subverts power relations" (Barnard, 1996). Scott's everyday forms of resistance have been taken further into hidden forms, and much attention has been focused to the ways in which resistance may be deflected into religion as a form of social camouflage (Comeroff 1985, Taussig 1980, Nash 1979, Ong, 1987). It is through this deflection into religion that covert resistance has often been negated through hegemonic categorisation as millenarian and non-political (e.g. Keesing, 1992). Another aspect of this negation occurs when the resistors are categorised as "savages" and their acts of defiance are interpreted as murderous and not lacking conscious political agency (Keesing 1994, pg 5).

Salaman argues that agents are never merely passive to control, that they always attempt to resist (Salaman, pg 144). The Hotlines activists also share this view “As workers we feel the necessity to fight and we show it all the time” (Hotlines Brighton leaflet, pg4). They present examples such as absenteeism, cheating the clock and, of course, dialling the Zimbabwean speaking clock (Hotlines 4, pg 2). Taylor finds “numerous examples of overt resistance” in his call centre study which are presented as evidence that managerial control is partial, rather than complete or total (Taylor, pg 96-98). These include CSAs disconnecting callers, withholding relevant information, talking in monotone and gesticulating impolitely (ibid).

Nevertheless, these actions are all taken when there is a certainty that surveillance is not being maintained and, as such, are far from overt. Furthermore Taylor demonstrates an ignorance of the fact that control is an ongoing process and has no understanding of intensification, as if the environment studied were static and unchanging. This undifferentiated use of “resistance” if an example of what Edwards and Scullion term a naive radicalism (Edwards and Scullion, pg 257). Their method instead involves the consideration of particular actions as the responses to particular circumstances, namely the contextualisation and systematic distinction of a variety of conflicts. They attempt a more thorough four-point definition of conflictual modes- overt, non-directed, institutional and implicit (Edwards and Scullion, pg 10-12).

I would argue that these examples demonstrate coping strategies rather than resistance strategies. Gene had been a CSA in several companies. Because he was a “Muslim” rather than simply “Indian” , he was singled out by the teamleaders as a different type of agent. He was smartly dressed but chatted indiscreetly and soon became targeted as a troublemaker. Gene asked me several times in my first week back whether I knew about his recent “run-in” with Dick. He told me the story several times, presenting it as an example of his dignity, courage and power. The more times he told the story the more it began to sound like Dick had just stood over him and told him off while he sat quietly without opposition. The key phrase of his defiance was “I just sat there. I didn’t say anything.” It struck me as strange that, if the muted are the most powerless group, then silence is a curious resistance (after Lukes, 1977). As a field experiment I had returned late from my first break only to find Dick waiting for me. As I later explained to Gene, Dick had flourished his watch and patronised me with sarcastic comments. In preservation of my pride I had refused to apologise for my behaviour, and took consolation from the fact. However, no apology had been required of me. As I told Gene “I just stood there. I didn’t say anything.” My submissive silence was bold enough to contain the absence of that which had not been sought.

These tactics are coping strategies, means of retaining a degree of self-respect rather than means of everyday opposition. When the agent reports that the behaviour was part of an act of defiant resistance it must be understood that this claim is also, in itself, a coping strategy. Actor perspective approaches to workplace conflict set a primacy on worker’s conceptions of their actions (e.g. Edwards and Scullion, pg 1-2). The notion that these conceptions will always represent the most pure and honest account of their actions is somewhat hopeful. Agents have pride and this can lead to the need for the misrepresentation of actions, particularly to outsiders. This is not to reject actor-oriented perspectives, merely to mention that, as an actor/agent myself at a level of “reality” deeper than the standard participant observer, I know that we lie to ourselves and to each other as an everyday means of survival .

It is naive radicalism to present such things as examples of resistance (Edwards and Scullion, pg 258). Callers are disconnected when the CSA is exasperated by the stresses of the workload, not as a broadside to the offensive presence of managerial control. That the workload is a consequence of that control is mystified and too veiled to operate as the immediate target of the action. Hotlines activists are autonomists and anarcho-syndicalists. It is easy to identify with their passionate desire to see their fellow employees fighting against exploitation but the everyday encounter is more one of acquiescence and obedience. Their views can be characterised as “over-resistance” theories. Harris would say that they were influenced by radical or structural Marxist critiques that read informal class warfare into every example of hostility (Harris, pg 218). In reality, however, there isn’t really even a significant degree of hostility. Individual protest or politically-motivated conflict is prevented by the ubiquity and normative acceptance of social controls. These controls, forged in rationalism, appear so “Reasonable” (Marcuse, pg 9) that any resistance appears irrational and neurotic (Salaman, pg 160). They operate to stifle not only overt conflict but also covert and everyday forms of opposition. “To oppose, sidestep or obstruct the automated forms of control is, in essence, to question the legitimacy of management’s right to manage, to resist ‘progress’ and as such is clearly a difficult, and ultimately political step” (Salaman, pg 107). The political aspect is a particular deterrent- when “progress” insists on its neutrality, any objection is illegitimate to anyone with even a modest degree of subjective conformity (Clegg and Wilson, pg 226). Taylorist/managerial orthodoxy contains the built-in, or implicit, negation of political resistance.

It is too easy for “resistance” to become a simple plate tectonics of managers acting and workers resisting (Edwards and Scullion, pg 225). In this over-resistance viewpoint, actors actually lose agency because they are denied the power of action other than in the sense of reaction (Clegg and Wilson, pg 237). Resistance, in these complex grids wherein conflict can occur horizontally, vertically, at practically any of the intersections of the grid, at any of the stations or substations (Clegg and Wilson, pg 237), is better conceived as a "useful metaphor" rather than as a universally prescribable analytical concept (Keesing, 1992, pg 224). As the following example demonstrates, conflict is often more prevalent amongst equals.

Seeboard is a cracked and splintering organisation. If poetic metaphors are permitted, it might be described as an iceberg heaving itself apart under the sun’s unfiltered beams. As each department is packaged and bundled to become individually active, a distancing act is engaged. In an unimpaired organisation, departmental rivalry is a common occurrence. Each section regards itself as the most important and regards its own interests as “coincident with the ‘real’ interest” of the organisation as a whole (Salaman, pg 149). This self-importance often results in the belief that uncooperative activity from other sections is simple bloody-minded behaviour (Salaman, pg 158). What these actors do not take into account is that the other department is as much subject to the controlling factors of the organisational structure as their own (Salaman, pg 159). Within a “broken-up” company such as Seeboard, these relationships are far more frequent.

One of the central tasks of frontline CSAs is to ascertain whether or not to book emergency “callouts” for customers. CSAs are under great pressures to achieve targets and quotas, so it is vital to them that this activity is undertaken without undue impediment. If a customer calls in with a meter fault, it will be necessary for the CSA to book an open-ended appointment for Powercare, the emergency metering service, to dispatch an engineer to the premises. Powercare is a separate company to Seeboard, and their offices are remotely located. It is completely within their power to define which situations do, or do not, qualify for a callout. Over the years their restrictions, communicated via fax, have become increasingly strict with respect to key meter customers. In 1998 they would call to correct faults or replace key tokens if the customer had less than a pound’s worth of credit on their meter. By 1999 this figure was 50p and by 2001 the customer was required to already have lost supply before they were able to join the queue of jobs. Customers regularly languished in the queue throughout the night, often into the next working day. Powercare provide a “24hour emergency callout service” but by 2001 they had stipulated that if a customer had not been visited by 10PM then they would have to call back the next day to raise another job.

Key meter CSAs frequently complained about the lack of cooperation from Powercare, their harsh restrictions and the absence of sympathy towards elderly or disabled customers. Powercare’s telephonists were regarded as rude, arbitrary and uncompromising. The complaints connected the restrictions to the telephonists in such a way as to imply the belief that they had the power individually to improvise controls as they saw fit. An irony of this fact is that the CSAs often encountered this very belief from their own customers. What they were failing to take account of is that everybody within an organisation, even one that is “broken up”, is subject to the same quotas and pressures (Salaman, pg 159). What this relationship demonstrates is that complaints born of a consequence of the quota system were addressed not to that system or its hierarchical enforcement but to people doing more or less the same job.

Although these conflicts demonstrate the ability of agents to exert power horizontally, they are also limited by a nearsighted personalisation of potentially political activity. Outside of coping strategies or horizontal negotiation there is a category of actions that concerns the agent-supervisor relationship in an apparently negotiative capacity. While some may rush to label them as examples of resistance, they can more cautiously be dubbed conscious consumer strategies.

CONSUMER ACTION.

“I wanna be instamatic/ I wanna be a frozen pea/ I wanna be dehydrated/ In a consumer society” (from ‘Art-I-Ficial’, X-Ray Spex, 1977).

Negotiative consumer strategies should be considered in the light of the actor’s own subjective identity construction (after Ong, 1987). For the CSA this occurs through the process of corporate construction. Just as corporate discourse obscures the instrumental manipulation of the agent through self-determining words, so to is defiance given the gloss of individualistic consumer choice. The absence of union activity within the call centre work culture is only one of a range of causative factors for the lack of collective choice. There are three categories of deliberately oppositional behaviour available as mass-manufactured pre-packaged lifestyle choices to both agent and customer- complaining, departure and criminality.

Complaining represents the greatest form of participation in the consumer culture. For the customer it represents an opportunity to exercise their consumer rights, a selection of generally imaginary entitlements to a certain corporate-defined level of appropriate service. For the employee it involves the transformation of political issues into personal ones, via the technique of the prevention of collective action detailed above. For both parties the experience can be a futile and useless journey through the official channels of dissent, wherein end-of-level guardians become professional whipping boys to ensure the illusion of apologetic service delivery. Where complaining does have a role to play in negotiating levels of supervisory control is in the creation of a field of social pressure. Within the office, if enough people present enough personalised grievances to their teamleaders, these teamleaders may be worn down enough to enter into a periodic inertia. This slackening of controls is thus caused not by direct action but by a form of erosion, a kind of chaos theory of fragmented class action. It could be considered as an example of resistance between supervisors and management but would more accurately be regarded as a strategic means of coping with the erosion of will. Higher management eventually counters this attrition, once the statistical evidence of a decline has been collated. This managerial pressure takes the form of new rules and new initiatives, following the therapeutic mentality. Eventually these new rules in turn will be slacked again (Harris, pg 221). Due to the goldfish memory of institutions, the new rules often take the form of previously abandoned initiatives.

Departure is the next strategy. Customers disappointed with the emergency callout service would regularly make use of deregulation by signing up to a different company for their electricity supply as a protest bid. In the office we called this a “change of supply”. Customers would pay their bills to another company who would then pay Seeboard for the electricity. Seeboard would still own the meters themselves and would still be the service to call out in an emergency situation. Customers who had changed supply to a different company could expect an even worse standard of emergency care than before. Employees had a similar option in that they could always register their frustration by quitting. However, they would invariably find themselves working in one of the other call centres in Brighton, thus effecting little more than a change of supply. Both Vicky and Gene had left their jobs at the Cable and Wireless call centre in protest over conditions only to suffer worse conditions at Seeboard. Both sought to blame different factors for their ironic situations. Vicky felt that American ownership and management by accountants were to blame, whilst Gene stuck to personality clash explanations.

The category of criminal behaviour includes acts such as violence and theft. For the customer this might mean bypassing the meter or physically assaulting members of staff. For the employee it involves disruption through deviance such as the theft of a supervisor’s equipment. These rare forms of action represent perhaps the greatest evidence that the techniques of preactive obedience and normative identification are not total. For both parties the actions involve a degree of bypassing the official structure of the organisation, a culturally unsanctioned “cheating” to achieve a personal advance at the expense of the wider power network.

It may appear confusing to consider criminal behaviour as a consumer action rather than a coping strategy or some form of resistance. The fact that a power structure designates certain actions as “criminal” does not mean that they are automatically non-political or not revolutionary. Counter hegemonic opposition is often categorised as deviant and criminal in order to negate its political content. However, the individualised depoliticisation of action and the lack of a counter hegemonic subalternity within the privatised workspace means that the tag of covert resistance would here lack contextual meaning. At the same time, criminal actions cannot be considered as coping strategies. This typology is reserved for actions that agents are compelled to perform in order to preserve enough of their dignity, sanity and humanity to continue working. In order to justify this categorisation, it will be necessary to reconsider the nature of consumer culture.

Consumer culture is premised on the promotion of narcissistic greed. L’Oreal’s recent by-line “Because I’m worth it” is an apposite example. The self-serving aspects of this mentality explain its enduring popularity over and above any entrepreneurial pretensions of the materialistic “enterprise” revolution. Consumerism transcends the awkward class connotations of wealth and success and keys directly into the reptilian hindbrain of petty self-advantage and the overglorified notion of “survival” as some kind of social achievement. Consumers, like the criminal, are encouraged to believe in their God-given right to certain goods and services. That the consumer “pays” and the criminal “blags” is not a particularly significant distinction. “Blagging” is culturally keyed, not as an oppositional revolutionary action opposed to the status quo, but as an opportunistic heightening of shopping pleasure. You deserve that stuff anyway. You’re worth it.

In a depoliticised power black out, criminal acts are merely exo-structural accelerations of consumerist consumption. It could be argued that these actions create an organisational paranoia that leads to greater workplace restrictions. However, these actions are neither the result nor the cause of the techniques of control. Managerial hatred for subordinates flows from the dehumanisation of surveillance, rather than the fear of petty theft.

MILGRAM ENVIRONMENT.

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion” (Snow, quoted in Milgram, pg 28).

Stanley Milgram’s Behavioural Study of Obedience, originally published in 1963, details a renowned experiment on obedience. Milgram wanted to test for “the point of rupture”, the moment when an average American of the sixties would disobey the instructions of an authority figure (Milgram, pg 28). The subjects were instructed to administer ever-increasing electric shocks to an unseen “victim” who was in actuality a confederate of the experimenter. The subject is able to hear the victim’s cries until the 300-volt mark, after which there is only silence. The subject is urged by an authority figure (the experimenter in white lab coat and clipboard) to continue administering shocks until the end. The final stages are marked “450 volts”, then “Danger: Severe Shock”, then “XXX” (Milgram, pg 29-35). Advance predictions were that nobody but “lunatics” would knowingly administer over 150 volts (Dean, issue 2, pg 5). By the end, nobody had stopped before 350 volts and only a third stopped before the very end (Milgram, pg 35).

It is possible to conceive of the call centre as a Milgram environment. The distant voices of the callers represent unseen worlds of pain. Agents are urged not to accept that the pain is genuine, to deny succour. An uncooperative impersonation of assistance- the sociopathic psuedo empathy of customer care- the agent’s task is to prevent the customer from appropriating the company’s money- their money. Intensification means that the guidelines become ever more strict, that the amount of assistance at the CSAs disposal becomes ever smaller. The caller’s protests become background noise to the CSA’s anxious performance of conformity, and, as the quality of service is further economised, they flatline out into one long and abusive bleep. It is in the absence, though, in the structural impossibility, of the point of rupture that the call centre really becomes the Milgram environment. As the depoliticised and individualised agent identifies with the organisation and thus with its reconstruction of their identity, they become instrumental to the dictates of an irresistible clipboard authority.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

This chapter has seen the rejection of the concept of resistance in the context of the call centre. The actions presented are better understood as coping strategies, and the agent’s performance of them as resistance can itself be understood as a coping strategy. The depoliticisation of the power grid has deprived any act of political resistance of its oppositional cultural meaning. Devoid of meaning, the performance of these acts appears pointless and neurotic. Negotiation of control within the grid occurs at a multiplicity of points and in several directions at one time. This model is preferable to the simplistic plate tectonics of managers acting and workers resisting. However, the blackout zone remains. Actions of an apparently conflictual nature such as complaining or criminality are the strategies of the depoliticised consumer culture. They do not represent a conflict over the question of ownership of resources but demonstrate the ideology of consumer’s rights that those resources only possess meaning as consumer goods.

Only once the issue of resistance has been addressed could the metaphor of the Milgram environment be presented. It assists in detailing the absence of the possible “point of rupture”- the act of true disobedience, not just petty resistance, but complete refusal. Consumer culture does not provide the option of a meaningful denial of clipboard authority.

Conclusion.

Work organisations can be understood as power grids arrayed with energetic actors. Control is an ongoing process within that grid of power. This paper has been addressed to the relations between agents and their superiors in the Seeboard call centre. It appears that this particular zone of the grid suffers a power blackout. The agents are unable to satisfactorily negotiate the process of control within this zone. Their obedience has been ensured through a social depoliticisation that is characteristic of the post-privatised neo-liberal consumer culture.

Seeboard is typically representative as an example of the post-industrial call centre environment. While this has been an ethnographic study of a particular workplace, that workplace is not particularly significant or unique in itself. The organisation is in the process of being further “broken-up”, but this is not a pathological feature. The flow of agents between different corporations is liquid, with various temp agencies enabling the instrumental switch. As discussed above, the switch between organisations is often a tactical consumer strategy both on behalf of the customer and the agent. In spite of a situationally normative commitment, loyalty is in fact as flexible as the working arrangements.

Classical Marxist approaches would argue that the reason for the diversity of workplace control techniques was the continued expropriation of ownership. However, this paper has more specifically addressed an environment characterised by the oppression of intensification rather than ownership. Without wishing to risk the reification of organisations or the universalising of economic laws, it appears that capitalist systems within a globalised network may depend upon intensification for continuance. The purpose of control would then be intensification without protest.

Yet this paper is concerned not so much with the why of control but the how- the details of control. An analysis of the micropolitical techniques of workplace order is necessary to account for the apparently ubiquitous absence of even covert resistance to managerial authority. The details of control within the blackout zone are a complex set of techniques that can be broadly classified under three categories.

Firstly, the agent is imprisoned and instrumentalised by the work process, thus preventing escape. Instrumentalisation occurs when the worker is switched between tasks and locations arbitrarily. This creates the temping body, the human tool. In contrast to the standard literature on Taylorisation, this paper has argued that alienation stems not from the repetitious mechanisation of tasks but from the absence of the operative’s control over the work process.

Secondly, the agent is re-imagined and reconstructed by the eye of superior agents, thus diminishing the dissonant rebellion of internal identity. This technique is achieved within a total surveillance web. This web gathers intelligence used in the reconstruction of the agent, enforcing conformity through anxiety and encouraging a preactive obedience to the hierarchy. The statistical data, once collated, becomes more valuable to the organisation than the actual performance it represents. The example of Joyce’s work-tactic was used to illustrate the method whereby managerial analysis creates employee maps. These maps effectively become the point of identity for the agent within the organisation.

Thirdly, the agent is individualised, thus preventing collective action or horizontal unity. Vertical partitioning within the structure is compounded by office-floor bans on agent-to-agent interaction. This renders the agent as a socially isolated being. Relations with higher management are then conducted through individual teamleaders, thus personalising the point of potential grievance. Oppressive control is experienced as a teamleader character trait, rather than an organisational technique. This personalisation of conflict removes the possibility of political action.

The agent’s identity is therefore reconstructed from the outside via ideational mapping and surveillance/intelligence techniques. A normative commitment to organisational taboos ensures conformity and obedience. This commitment is founded on the erosion of internal spaces of difference. The agent is discretely reoriented through the attempt to nullify the anxiety of cultural dissonance. In this way the work environment engenders a re-identification with the agent’s new exterior construction.

Once this is achieved it is possible to discuss the socialisation of agents in terms of obedience rather than in relation to possibilities of resistance. These techniques of control remove the power of the agent to perform the point of rupture, the moment of clear defiance. Instead the agent survives through a series of coping strategies. Many critics would regard these actions as examples of covert, everyday resistance. However, the lack of definitive sensitivity and the absence of contextualisation renders this designation as naive and undifferentiated. These theories tend towards an awkward plate tectonics of push-me-pull-you conflict. The coping strategy preserves a degree of self-respect and dignity without breeching the buried zone of political activity. The self-deception inherent in considering these strategies as acts of resistance is also in itself also a coping strategy.

Attempts at non-everyday opposition are abstracted into consumer actions that can be harmlessly digested by the consumer/corporate culture. This diversion negates the political potential and disqualifies the attempt at rupture by retaining the act within the boundaries of consumerist ideology. Shoplifting is still shopping.

The Milgram experiment becomes the greatest metaphor for the relationship between the temping body of the agent and the distant voice of the customer. Both are imprisoned within the consumer culture, both actors typecast by corporate structures and structural adjustment policies. The agent becomes the unwitting gatekeeper of pylonic modernity, a temping body switched between tasks and masks like a tool, unable to interact with the corporate structure in any way other than consumerism. The customer becomes the unwanted guest of pylonic modernity, a distant voice shouting nowhere about nothing, unable to interact with the political structure in any way other than consumerism. Both are political weapons, the worker, the citizen, made clipboard tools.

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Copyright 2005 Steve Cake.