"Let Me Tell You Who I Am": A Qualitative Study of Identity and Accountability in Two Electronically-monitored Call Centres
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis describes and analyses the ways in which employees in two front line call centre settings report their experience of qualitative and quantitative monitoring in the workplace, and its impact on their work and work life. I conducted ethnographically informed fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews, in two financial service call centre sites. Emerging from the rich descriptions participants shared about their work life, identity and accountability stood out as key themes. The sites, which use similar methods of monitoring and performance measurement, had quite different management strategies in place which affected staff perceptions of identity and accountability. I modified an activity theory framework to create a model of organisational, professional and peer identities and accountabilities, and to examine the ways these connect, interact, and sometimes disconnect, with one another. Call centres are contentious workplaces in the literature, generating ongoing debate about the extent to which electronic monitoring is effective as a method of control and about the way monitoring and surveillance affects workers. Using this framework allows me to look at common call centre issues, such as the quality/quantity dichotomy, through a different and potentially helpful lens, one that is novel in the call centre literature. My findings suggest that when the various facets of identities and accountabilities are poorly aligned, workers are forced to prioritize one over the other, often to the detriment of both. In the financial service call centres I studied, workers often chose to prioritize professional and peer identity over organisational accountability when organisational requirements were strongly felt to conflict with the ways in which a professional banker should behave towards customers and colleagues. Workers made these choices despite clearly understanding the potential consequences to themselves in terms of achieving performance metric targets and supervisory approval. Conceptualizing call centre workers’ responses to monitoring and measurement from an identity and accountability perspective offers new insights into the reasons why financial service call centre workers are often dissatisfied or frustrated with standard call centre measurement practices, leading to potential practical solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".