Call centers, modern factories? The paradoxical rationalization of telephonic relations

Call centers, a recent invention, are expanding fast as places of intense technological, managerial and organizational rationalization. A case study led in the French insurance industry brings to light the points of fragility and ambivalence as well as the contradictions running through this process. Even as the center's management is doing ever more to rationalize work along industrial lines, wage-earners and labor unions are developing several strategies for resisting by mimicking and transforming management's actions. A tacit compromise, renegotiated day after day by employees, supervisors and the unions, leads to organizational socialization. The socioeconomic context-the labor market, forms of competition, societal beliefs - partly determine this compromise. 2002 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.