Taylorism

Draft

Taylorism, Targets and the Quantity-Quality Dichotomy in Call Centres

Peter Bain, Aileen Watson, Gareth Mulvey, Phil Taylor and Gregor Gall (Universities of Strathclyde and Stirling)

Paper presented at the 19th International Labour Process Conference, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 26-28 March 2001

Acknowledgements

The paper is based on data collected as part of an ESRC project funded under the Future of Work Initiative (award number L212252006) – ‘Employment and Working Life Beyond the Year 2000: Two Emerging Employment Sectors’ (1999-2001). The full research at Strathclyde, Stirling and Glasgow Caledonian Universities is as follows: Peter Bain, Chris Baldry, Aileen Watson, Dora Scholarios, , Dirk Bunzel, Gregor Gall, Kay Gilbert, Jeff Hyman, Cliff Lockyer, Philip Taylor, Abigail Marks, Nicholas Bozionelos and Gareth Mulvey.

1

Introduction: Taylorism and white-collar work In tandem with the massive growth in white-collar employment in the post-war period, the literature concerning the nature of office work in particular attracted everincreasing interest (Lockwood 1958; Braverman 1974; Crompton and Jones 1984). Concurrent debates focussed upon issues related to the perceived proletarianisation, Taylorisation and/or feminisation of white-collar work. In rejecting Klingender’s assessment that mechanization had already completed ‘the technical proletarianisation of clerical labour’ by the 1930s, Lockwood’s analysis linked the relatively low level of investment in machinery to the size of the average office and to the nature of clerical work itself (Lockwood 1958: 92-96). Nonetheless, in considering developments in office work by the mid-1950s, Lockwood (1958: 92) acknowledged the growth of situations in which, ‘…the mechanization and rationalization of office work has proceeded to the extent that relatively large groups of semi-skilled employees are concentrated together…performing routinized and disciplined work, often...