From Internal to Network Labor Markets? Insights on New Promotion Processes from the Call Center Industry

Abstract

Research on network forms of organization suggests that “business units” may be a more useful analytical unit than “firms” in understanding restructuring of internal labor markets. We find evidence for this proposition by analyzing promotion opportunities in 1760 call centers in sixteen countries. We find substantial differences in promotion opportunities internal to the unit versus elsewhere, related to the use of explicit versus tacit knowledge in performance evaluation, distinctions between unit‐specific and general‐firm knowledge, and network‐bridging organizational characteristics.

Does economic upgrading lead to social upgrading in contact centers? Evidence from South Africa

“…The opportunities for future employment expressed as labor mobility both within and across the sectors of an economy (that is, occupational mobility) is seen as key for labor agency (Vira and James, 2012) and hence for improved job quality. Contact center jobs in South Africa rarely allow for the internal progression of agents within a firm (Benner, 2006;Benner and Mane, 2011). This stands in contrast to experiences in India, where contact center workers have a greater chance of achieving upward labor mobility (James and Vira, 2012), due to a bigger national economy and its position as the world's leading player in outsourced services (Kleibert, 2015).…”

The impact of call centre stressors on inbound and outbound call‐centre agent burnout

“…An important change in call centres is that inbound work has progressively become more computerized with inbound tasks becoming less varying and more repetitive. Inbound call centre work typically relates to more complex calls as outbound (telemarketing) calls typically have a standardized script or content, whereas incoming calls are typically more varied (Benner and Mane, 2011). In addition, it is also now possible to continuously monitor inbound agents’ performance (Kjellberg et al , 2010).…”

“…Importantly, inbound calls not only tend to be more unpredictable and variable than outbound calls, but they also frequently involve customers who have had some interaction elsewhere in the organization, e.g. banking customers may call to query a charge, or to transfer money and therefore inbound call centre agents are required to know how to provide quality customer service, but also to be knowledgeable about the other products and services provided by the organization (Benner and Mane, 2011). Thus, in an inbound call centre context, because of the more unpredictable nature of human interactions requiring emotional labour (Hampson et al , 2009), increased time pressure (Deery et al , 2010), decreased autonomy (Wegge et al , 2006) and increased performance monitoring (Ball and Margulis, 2011; Deery et al , 2010), we expect the magnitude of these relationships to be stronger with inbound workers.…”