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Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management
Abstract
The paper locates the rise of the call centre within the context of the development of Taylorist methods and technological change in office work in general. Managerial utilisation of targets to impose and measure employees’ quantitative and qualitative performance is analysed in four case–study organisations. The paper concludes that call centre work reflects a pardigmic re–configuration of customer servicing operations, and that the continuing application of Taylorist methods appears likely.
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In the citing paper
“The importance of situating organisational practices, such as management control and surveillance, within their historical context is underscored by the enduring influence of scientific management (see Bain et al. 2002;Conti and Warner 1993;Carter et al. 2011).”
From Reflections on Sociotechnical Change: New Directions for and Continuities in Research on New Technology, Work, and Employment (2026) · cites this paper as Bain et al. 2002
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Citations
Cited by
Pope, C., Halford, S., Turnbull, J., Prichard, J., Calestani, M., & May, C. (2013) · BMC Health Services Research · doi:10.1186/1472-6963-13-111 · Cited by 101
Between control and participation: The politics of algorithmic management
Krzywdzinski, M., Schneiß, D., & Sperling, A. (2025) · New Technology, Work and Employment · doi:10.1111/ntwe.12293 · Cited by 74
Turnbull, J., Pope, C., Rowsell, A., Prichard, J., Halford, S., Jones, J., May, C., & Lattimer, V. (2014) · Health Services and Delivery Research · doi:10.3310/hsdr02030 · Cited by 22
Technology introduction on ships: The tension between safety and economic rationality
Bhardwaj, S., Bhattacharya, S., Tang, L., & Howell, K. E. (2019) · Safety Science · doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2019.02.025 · Cited by 19
Howcroft, D., Lucio, M. M., & Taylor, P. (2026) · New Technology, Work and Employment · doi:10.1111/ntwe.70049 · Cited by 1
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Bain, P., Watson, A., Mulvey, G., Taylor, P., & Gall, G.
- Venue
- New Technology, Work and Employment
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2002-11
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 170-185
- ISSN
- 0268-1072
- 1468-005X
- Cited by
- 143
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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- The paper
- Bain, P., Watson, A., Mulvey, G., Taylor, P., & Gall, G. (2002). Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management. New Technology, Work and Employment. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-005x.00103
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
