Customer service versus performance metrics in an electronic sweatshop? Managers' perspectives on issues in running call centres

Call centres have been described as 'electronic sweatshops' and 'slave galleons of the twenty first century' and, contrarily as progressive, team based and career fulfilling work environments. Drawing on data from a survey of call centre managers in Australia, it is shown that there are elements of call centre management with practices from both extremes of the descriptive continuum and in some instances these elements coexist in the one centre. Whilst call centres are managed with a high level of control and the work of call centre agents is subject to intense scrutiny and monitoring, the simplistic notion that they are electronic sweatshops, or that the metaphor of the Panopticon applies, is rejected.