We’re All Partying Here: Target and Games, or Targets as Games in Call Centre Management

Abstract

It is easy to make parallels, as do Fernie and Metcalfe (1997), between the organization of work in call centres and Foucault’s conceptualization of ‘heavy duty’ surveillance that occurs in prisons and other carceral organizations. An aesthetic reading of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991) evokes almost the same shivers as a chilling fairy story. We empathize with the fate of the prisoner and other victims of internment, finding in their subjection and interrogation by the gaze analogies with bureau-corporate control in call centres where ‘the objective discharge of businesses is according to calculable rules and without regard for persons’ (Gerth and Mills, 1991, p. 215). In the typical call centre, serried ranks of mainly female workers donned in cumbersome telephone headphones are bent over their computers seeking to translate micro-electronic data into meaningful customer communication. Charged with providing high levels of customer service, there appear to be few opportunities for social interaction between work-mates. Behaviour is not only observable by managers dotted around the room in strategic positions, but also by the electronic panoptican that has the capacity to track the individual on a moment by moment basis and display their activities in hyper-real simulation (Baudrillard, 1983) as colours on a computer screen.