PurposeThis paper seeks to offer a strategic and socio technical analysis of the productivity of telephone call centers from the perspective of Galbraith's organizational design theory.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a quantitative survey of 155 call center managers in France, which benefited from extensive preparation through ten case studies.FindingsWhen focusing the analysis on call centers handling only inbound calls, five main factors: the profile of the telephone operators, division of labor, goals, reward system and the technology – including automated call distribution, computer telephony integration and e‐mail – are found to be important productivity enhancersResearch limitations/implicationsPerceptual measures when used are based on single items.Practical implicationsThe findings confirm the paramount impact of human resources' profile on the efficiency of call centers. As expected, automated call distribution is above all a productivity tool and should be recommended to all call centersSocial implicationsDivision of labor is important but, beyond a personal relationship with each customer, work in call centers has a collective component, which is best reflected by the efficiency of collective rewards.Originality/valueThe paper provides an evaluation method of call center productivity based on a first literature review on call centers from an IS perspective. It adapts Galbraith's organizational design theory and shows that for inbound call centers, which can be considered as a group of domains or set of tasks in Galbraith's organizational design theory, people, structure, goals assigned, rewards and IT all have an impact on productivity measured with the rate of efficiency.

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Rural tourism serves as an important engine for rural development, but also brings environmental pressure. The balance between sustainability and local economic benefits is critical to rural tourism development in developing countries. Incorporating the theories of green supply chain and front–back stage decoupling, this paper proposes a new model of green tourism supply chain for rural tourism to relieve the dilemma between economic efficiency and environmental sustainability. Back-stage functions have been decoupled from individual rural tourism service units to form shared service centers, which centralize the provision of back-stage functions and generate an independent tier of suppliers in the green Tourism Supply Chain (TSC). Field practice experiences relating to green TSC construction and operation are also discussed. The new structure of green supply chain shows positive environmental and economic effects of rural tourism. It increases the tourism business efficiency without sacrificing the local environment. The paper intends to present a new perspective and explores a new research path to green supply chain research in tourism and other service industries which have been previously limited in manufacturing framework and provide some insights into tourism destination practice.

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This paper investigates human resources management in call centers. Three case studies of call centers focusing on information exchange show that, even if Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) result in the displacement of the basis of a firm's core competencies from those that may be attributed to individuals to those which may be attributed to a collective, the employees' strengths, customer pressure, environmental competitive pressure, and the specificity of the service production process all exert influences on the organizations so as to limit or even prevent such a collectivization of knowledge. In order to maintain a dynamic process of knowledge management, human resource managers have to re-equilibrate the basis of the firm's core competencies. In the following paper, we introduce the concept of re-equilibrating human resource management. It is through this process that management promotes a harmonious dialogue between tacit knowledge and codified knowledge and succeeds in maintaining a dynamic flexibility in skills.