‘You're Not Going Anywhere’: Employee Retention,Symbolic Violence and the Structuring of Subordination in a UK-Based Call Centre

Introduction

Call centres have become a significant feature of the post-industrial employment landscape and a leitmotif for the growth of globalized service economies. Studies of employment relations in call centres identifies low morale and high turnover (Taylor and Bain, 1999; Mukherjee and Malhotra, 2009; Hechanova, 2013) as key characteristics attributed to the routine and repetitive nature of the work process and relatively low wages (Taylor et al., 2002). Turnover is considered endemic with recorded rates moving little in the past decade with averages of 25 per cent (IDS, 2004) and 24 per cent (CFA, 2012) per annum recorded respectively. Curiously little consideration has been given as to why employees continue to seek, and remain in call centre employment in such large numbers (currently 3.7 per cent of the working population in the United Kingdom, ContactBable, 2012). Turnover, often articulated as a business problem, is usually investigated from the perspective of employers with consideration given to ways to reduce replacement and training costs. Sociological treatments are rare but offer the opportunity to explore employee and societal implications more widely and this is important given that the ten occupations with the largest jobs growth between 2000 and 2010 is dominated by front-line service based work including food preparation and service work, customer service representatives, and retail sales (Yates, 2003). The issue of turnover is also a public policy issue (Batt et al., 2009) given the regional concentration of call centre employment. The north-east, north-west, Scotland and Yorkshire regions of the UK all have more than 5 per cent of total employment working in call centres (CFA, 2012) for example.

Traditionally, the literature on retention of employees has focused either upon highly qualified and highly experienced staff, yet in the case of front-line service work (Leidner, 1993) it is typically the low paid, low skilled service worker who provides the continuity and customer service on which businesses are built. Exactly those employees most likely to leave the organization due to a range of factors including low pay and high routinization.

In contrast to taking high levels of turnover as a given, this paper explores the extent to which the managers within the case study prioritize employee turnover as an organizational issue and devised strategies to ameliorate it. Conceptually, this article draws upon some of the theoretical resources employed by Pierre Bourdieu, specifically in relation to his concern with structures of subordination, and the way that forms of domination are experienced as legitimate. Interestingly such strategies work in stark contrast to academic understandings of employee retention which often originate from an economic perspective which focuses on pay and invokes the ‘efficiency-wage hypothesis’ ¹ (see, eg, Burchill and Rubery, 1994). The cultural or sociological perspective offered here complements existing analysis in order to understand the ‘stickiness’ of employment. The paper interprets the findings within a Bourdieusian framework to argue that the strategies witnessed in the call centre are examples of reconfigured forms of pedagogic action in that they work to impose cultural meanings and understandings about the nature of the call centre experience that reflect and further the interests of employers. Moreover the effectiveness of such strategies is partially explained by the way in which they tended to be interpreted as legitimate by front line service workers, a process that necessarily involves symbolic violence. The central argument here is that whilst high rates of employee turnover are endemic in the industry, in this case at least, they are neither tolerated nor accepted as inevitable. Understanding the nature of symbolic violence at work is key to understanding why workers remain in employment where such work is monotonous, and greater rewards and possibly more favourable career opportunities can be found elsewhere.

The paper is organized as follows. Firstly, to contextualize the analysis and draw attention to the role of values and beliefs in the management of contemporary service workers I examine the relevance of retention strategies targeted at front-line service workers. I then briefly summarize Bourdieu's work as it relates to understanding organizations as sites for the production of forms of domination. The process of ethnographic data collection is then outlined and following the tradition of Van Maanen (1979), who establishes the division between the presentation and the analysis of data, I then present some observational data from the case study and, in a subsequent discussion, explore the links between the various strategies observed in relation to the conceptual resources utilized by Bourdieu.

Retention strategy and front-line service workers

In an era that equates business success with the ability of organizations to harness the commitment and creativity of their employees (Becker and Gerhart, 1996), managerial focus on employee retention appears to have increased. Particular attention has been paid to the retention of highly or uniquely skilled staff as sources of competitive advantage who might be difficult to replace ² (Huselid, 1995). The growth of service work and, in particular, interactive service work where the front-line service worker has ‘direct contact with the customer’ (Korczynski, 2002: 2) complicates the retention debate. In industries where the front-line service worker becomes ‘the product’ (Macdonald and Sirianni, 1996), organizational success is largely determined by the quality of the worker-customer interaction. Under such circumstances, the retention of front-line service employees, whether for reasons of quality or continuity, assumes a far more immediate importance.

As a relatively young industry, high rates of labour turnover are identified as a key characteristic ³ (Taylor and Bain, 1999; Bain and Taylor, 2000) and general perceptions of call centre work are far from positive. Deery and Kinnie note that call centre work is ‘characterized as “dead-end” with low status, poor pay and few career prospects’ (2004: 3). Internationally call centres tend to exhibit similar characteristics in terms of job design (Pal and Buzzanell, 2008; Neus et al., 2013). Indeed, it has even been suggested that high rates of labour turnover are in fact beneficial, with, for example, Wallace et al., finding that high rates of turnover were ‘tolerated, if not encouraged’ (2000: 175). Such ‘sacrificial’ (ibid.) managerial policies, it is claimed, present opportunities to avoid the problems of employee burnout and emotional withdrawal by actively seeking to replace existing employees after a defined period of service: a mode of organizational catharsis.

Addressing high turnover often appears to be based upon a locus of extrinsic factors such as pay, reward and work-life balance. Thus the problem of retention might be solved by increasing employees' pay (Kinnie et al., 2000); increasing the level and extent of employee engagement (Francis and D'Annunzio-Green, 2005) and hence commitment (Arrowsmith and McGoldrick, 1996); providing greater opportunities for employees to secure a more favourable work-life balance (Doherty, 2004); or some possible combination of these. Work has also focused upon the possibility of increasing employee autonomy and providing for greater task variety (Holman, 2002; Kinnie et al., 2000; Castanheira and Chambel, 2010; Rod and Ashill, 2013).

By contrast, the adoption of a more proactive approach to initial screening and training of employees (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002) attempts to actively select candidates who are most likely to be able to cope with the demands of call centre employment. Callaghan and Thompson's focus upon notions of ‘appropriateness’ (2002: 241) and ‘predisposition’ (2002: 234) in the context of selecting the ‘right’ employees draws attention to workers' values and beliefs and how these may ‘fit’ into or align with the existing organizational context and culture. Such an approach clearly invokes a sociological sensitivity attuned to the production and reproduction of organizational hierarchies through an analysis of work and employment as central to, rather than removed from, wider social practice. Following this approach, understanding the willingness of employees to remain in employment gives us a better understanding of the inter-organizational as well as intra-organizational dynamics at play. In the following section Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Jenkins, 2002) is explored to explain how systems of meaning become imposed by call centre managers upon employees yet are, in many cases, experienced as legitimate.

The relevance of symbolic violence to organizational contexts

Bourdieu's work implicitly recognizes organizations as important sites for the production and reproduction of social inequalities; places in which the reproduction of forms of domination and subordination are hidden. Organizations are seldom a site for the collection of empirical data for Bourdieu but the workplace remains an important space acknowledged but little explored.

A notable exception to this is in the collection of accounts themed around ‘social suffering’, a suffering distinct from, but often including material suffering but related more fully to ‘positional suffering’. In Weight of the World, Bourdieu et al. (1999) provide an understanding of the experiences of ‘individuals in social categories that might well be found together’ through ‘complex and multi-layered representation’ (1999: 3). Indeed, reinforcing the claim that Bourdieu often acknowledges organizational context implicitly, the sections of the Weight of the World that deal with explicit workplace sites, such as the Sochaux Peugeot assembly plant (Pialoux and Beaud, 1999; Pialoux, 1999; Beaud, 1999) the central sorting Post Office (Christin, 1999), and an ‘authoritarian parternalistic small business’ (Christin, 1999: 309) are interwoven with consideration of less formal organizational configurations.

While the conceptual apparatus for what might tentatively be labelled a ‘general theory of symbolic violence’ is to be found throughout much of Bourdieu's work, its ‘foundations’ are explicitly outlined in book I of Reproduction (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1977). The concept itself originates from an attempt by Bourdieu to apprehend the production, inherent in all societies, of relative stability and order through indirect cultural mechanisms rather than through direct overt coercive control. The distinction between cultural and direct control is important for Bourdieu and is partly explained in relation to existing power relations:

Bourdieu's focus upon ‘cultural’ forms of control therefore echoes much of contemporary organizational theory in two important respects. First, we see a general concern with comprehending the basis upon which organizations (or institutional forms) appear both relatively stable and enduring. Second, the development and flourishing of forms of cultural control (as opposed to more direct control imperatives) relate directly to their effectiveness in terms of reproducing the dominant social-economic order, are necessarily historically specific and relate to forms of capitalist development. In other words, the appearance of specific forms of control is directly related to their effectiveness in attaining objectives associated with dominant interests.

The concept of legitimacy, a vital element in the distinction between coercive and cultural control, occupies a central role in the enactment of symbolic violence. Following Weber's concept of ‘legitimate domination’ (Weber, 1978), symbolic violence is the imposition of systems of meaning in such a way that they are experienced as ‘legitimate’, and it is this veneer of legitimacy that, for Bourdieu, obscures the power relations that permit the initial imposition of meaning. Moreover, the culture of the subgroup tends to facilitate this process being ‘seen’ as legitimate. Thus, for Bourdieu, symbolic violence is ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:167).

The exercise of symbolic violence occurs through pedagogic action, and confers the power to act (often misrecognized as legitimacy to act), reflects the interest of dominant groups, excludes ideas as ‘unthinkable’, and positively inculcates meaning and culture (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977:5). For Bourdieu the interests of dominant groups are denied (Swartz, 1997:89) through a process of ‘misrecognition’ wherein power relations, upon which dominant interests are formed, become obscured. Pedagogic action works to reproduce an arbitrary culture, and in doing so, helps to reproduce the power relations upon which it is built. For Bourdieu, all cultures are arbitrary in that, although their specificity can be traced to historical development and specific loci of power relations, they have no ‘absolute’ value or appropriateness and are mere reflections of specific historical configurations of power relations. Crucially, however, some cultures are experienced as more ‘appropriate’ than others. In the following section the methodological approach is mapped before consideration is given to the case study itself.

Methodology

Ethnographic research is particularly well suited for exploring the experience of work, on the one hand, and endogenous understandings of work practices, on the other. Historically invoked to suggest the writing of culture (Yanow et al., 2012), but more usually associated with immersive fieldwork and participant observation (Brannan and Oultram, 2012), ethnography facilitates a relational approach to organizational research and may thus allow access to ‘the emergent subtle life of organizations’ (Hodson, 2001: 52). Ethnographic techniques have a rich tradition and are particularly relevant (Brannan et al., 2007) to exploring interactive service work and form a growing literature (see, inter alia, Brannan, 2005; Houlihan, 2001; Knights and McCabe, 2003; Mulholland, 2002; Wray-Bliss and Willmott, 1999; Wray-Bliss, 2001).

Requiring ‘direct and sustained social contact with agents’ (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 5), I sought employment as a Customer Service Representative (CSR) between March 1999 and April 2000 at ‘Dioscuri’ ⁴ as part of an ethnographic project to understand new forms of work and employee relations in call centres. Employed on a standard shift pattern and undertaking all duties required of an employee I participated in a number of social events and engaged in some voluntary work along with other CSRs. ⁵ At the point of recruitment my research interests were made known to call centre managers who, dismissive of academic work, sanctioned the fieldwork ‘as long as it doesn't get in the way of you making calls’.

Participation as a CSR allowed me to gain experience of managerial strategies aimed at reducing employee turnover first-hand and to observe and discuss the impact of these with other CSRs. Participant observation thus fostered sensitivity to the lived realities of life as a front-line service worker and how employees made sense of their working experiences. Field notes were compiled in situ and recorded on my workstation to form an extensive fieldwork journal. Interviews conducted six months after withdrawal from the field allowed for fieldwork observations to be discussed and refined with participants. In addition I returned to the site (April 2009) to gain a sense of how the field had changed over the course of a decade and it became clear that whilst the vast majority of employees had changed, the managerial practices seemed to have remained similar. Patterns of behaviour that through the lenses of the original ethnography looked like the idiosyncrasies of particular managers could now no longer be explained as such. Revisiting the original unstructured entries into the fieldwork journal, notes and interviews transcripts supplemented with more recent observational material and informal discussions with current CSRs and managers provides the basis of analysis presented here.

The organization and its structure

Dioscuri is a non-unionized, inbound, domestic, business-to-business call centre employing CSRs who are required to collect and organize information from clients pertaining to computer failures, log this information and initiate appropriate responses to resolve reported problems. These characteristics make the call centre ‘similar’ to call centre management models found across social market economies, liberal market economies and recently industrialized economies (Holman et al., 2007). During the time of the participant observation the call centre was divided into teams of between four and ten CSRs. Team members' workstations were tightly grouped together, although the call centre was situated in an open plan style office environment. The office contained a number of communal areas, and these locations often provided opportunities to talk with other team members: sites of significant importance were a kitchen area, staff canteen, toilet area and cloakroom and outside smoking area.

Individual teams reported to specific corporate clients (the call centre's ‘customers’) and incoming calls were allocated through an automatic call distribution system and interactions were standardized. The call centre exhibited a relatively flat hierarchy: most employees worked as entry CSRs with limited promotion prospects to the post of ‘problem solver’, which carried only a minor pay increase but included greater autonomy and discretion. Problem solvers could work off-line and thus avoid answering incoming calls. CSRs might expect promotion to problem solver after approximately two years' experience. Beyond this, the position of team leader was appointed by the call centre management team and often externally recruited. During the period of the fieldwork the call centre expanded from around 250 staff to 400 with one team leader and problem solver per team.

The CSRs' primary task was to ensure that calls from customers were answered promptly and information recorded quickly and accurately. Following an initial assessment of the problem, the CSR would resolve it, or, more typically, refer it to a third-party support agency. In this sense their work tasks included aspects of autonomy and problem solving, applied within a remit of established and scripted procedures.

Discussion

Given the high rates of turnover in comparable organizations, the reduction in employee turnover, from a tolerated level of 70 per cent for new starters to below 10 per cent for CSRs with more than 6 months' experience, represents a significant success for call centre managers. This success is even more remarkable given the environmental context in which this call centre was operating: the high percentage of CSRs employed as temporary employees, the availability of alternative similar employment in the local area, the rapid expansion of the call centre, and the evident level of dissatisfaction expressed by many CSRs in relation to their current job role are all factors which might impact negatively upon employee retention. Reflecting upon the data presented here, it seems clear that Dioscuri was largely able to employ highly qualified staff (in terms of formal educational attainment) in roles that were generally perceived as being of sub-graduate level. Although Dioscuri offered a slight wage premium, this is not sufficient to explain its success in terms of retention given the absence of extensive training and development opportunities, financial participation and autonomy and flexibility.

That these turnover characteristics endured throughout the period the researcher was in the field, and remained in place a decade later, suggests that Dioscuri's cultural approach to the management of turnover was far from a temporary or idiosyncratic phenomenon. Although the assessment of employees' ‘best interests’ is a subjective judgement, on the basis of the data presented here, it would be difficult to argue that graduate CSRs were well served during their employment in the call centre. Indeed, an explanation of the inherent domination required to maintain retention stability, together with an apparent collusion in this domination, appears to mirror Bourdieu's proposed theory of ideology that combines enduring class interests with an identification of the mechanism that allows for misrecognition of these interests (Fowler, 1997).

From an organizational perspective, Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 168) offers a useful explanation for why organizational members may act against their own interests and pursue those of the organization. Moreover, approaching the organization as a locus for processes of symbolic violence sensitizes us to the commission of pedagogic action, rendering intelligible both Dioscuri's attempts to inculcate systems of meaning within subordinate groups and the complicity of those subordinates in that process. This recruitment process implicitly favoured the employment of graduates, recruited for their perceived mix of intellectual and social skills which, whilst clearly of value to Dioscuri, were arguably secondary in importance to the ‘cultural code’ likely to be inscribed within the university graduate. The graduate recruit's exposure to extensive pedagogical action via formal education made them predisposed to thrive in the call centre environment and embody a cultural ethos based upon the pursuit of performance-based organizational objectives, and receptive to organizational cultures based on advancement. A work hard play hard culture fuses the sociability required in customer service with a work ethic based on deferred reward in return for investment in hard work and unquestioning devotion to abstract work. Interestingly in many economies service sector growth has been accompanied by an expansion of HE.

Domination at Dioscuri was subtly structured through segmentation; the presence of a numerically significant insecure element of the workforce caused anxiety and division. The route to overcoming this anxiety, and to securing a permanent contract ‘performance for permanency’ demands symbolic exchange of performance by CSRs in pursuit of permanent contracts. The concept of exchange captures the legitimization of the pedagogic authorities' definition of performance, which reinforces the right to monitor and assess. Surveillance of CSRs' response to initial enculturation through organizational induction and training was particularly invasive with experienced colleagues often sitting next to new CSRs and listening directly to their calls. However, as the quotation from the HR manager clearly illustrates, management wanted this process to be completed quickly, with those unable to demonstrate suitable characteristics and behaviours released from their contracts upon its conclusion.

Employee reviews and appraisals were explicitly couched in the language of progression and sought to reward CSRs with permanent contracts following demonstrations of performance (expressed by the achievement of individual targets). In subscribing to this careerism, and adopting management's ethos, CSRs ultimately legitimized the deployment of such contracts. The award of permanent contracts was always celebrated with social events making the segmentation process highly visible to all CSRs, and offering aspiring temporary workers a positive and concrete example of progression. This reinforced the apparent meritocratic and careerist ethos of Dioscuri and further legitimated the widespread use of temporary contracts.

Once recruited, however, CSRs could not expect a slackening of emphasis on performance, and one of the key ways in which performance was induced was through the notion of ‘performance for progression’. During the initial recruitment process, new CSRs were encouraged to think about careers that lay beyond the confines of the call centre, and although many CSRs felt over-qualified, the potential for career advancement was mapped out. Company appraisals reinforced the myth of the ILM by exploring CSRs' own career goals – often constructed, with the assistance of call centre managers, by reference to the aspiration to move out of the call centre.

The appraisal system therefore became a key aspect of the promotion of Dioscuri's ILM, the symbolic exchange of performance for progression being perfectly articulated by Rachel, who conveyed a sense of symbolic investment, the accrual of which is yet to be realized. Despite the apparent managerial enthusiasm for movement out of the call centre, CSRs were often frustrated in their attempts to do so. The constant but apparently unfulfilled promise of movement outside the call centre represented a uniquely unsustainable project. Yet CSRs, despite a sense of growing frustration, appeared to still believe in the possibility of such career progression, and over the shorter term the build-up of tension was effectively defused by strategic reorganization of personnel. Despite the lack of possibility for, or examples of, CSRs moving from the call centre into other areas of the business, CSRs frequently reproduced romanticized notions of the possibility of progression as they saw it. In part, the celebration of the ILM formed part of a much larger process whereby Dioscuri sought to distinguish itself from other local call centres. This was achieved through the construction and reinforcement of myths surrounding the nature of the work at Dioscuri in relation to that at other call centres and the celebration of factors such as the working ‘atmosphere’, the staff canteen, car-parking facilities, and transportation options.

The impact of these strategies became mutually self-reinforcing. Recruitment preferences, for example, focused upon groups that were likely to identify with the prevailing careerist ethos that the call centre sought to promote. Thus graduates who had been unsuccessful in securing what they considered appropriate graduate jobs were likely to view the call centre as offering work experience to gain further employment within the wider auspices of Dioscuri. The employment of many CSRs as temporary workers provided an incentive to subscribe to the system of appraisal that was linked to the conferment of permanent posts. Furthermore, the nature of the work process required a high level of social skill, which managers considered graduates more likely to have. More precisely, the promotion of non-work socializing was an important aspect of attracting and retaining ‘up for it’ recruits.

Conclusion

The account presented here explores the experience of managerial practices designed to minimize the turnover of established employees, which has been identified as a key challenge facing service-based organizations. I highlight the high levels of labour turnover experienced of new employees and note that little was done to ameliorate this either by managers or fellow CSRs. In contrast to existing literature, which appear to take high rates of turnover as either given, or beneficial, this research finds that call centre managers deployed a number of coterminous strategies to ensure the continued employment of staff that had completed initial training and induction.

The constellation of recruitment, segmentation, the prospect of entry onto the ILM, and socialization provides an effective process of re-aligning CSRs' expectations. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence is used here to suggest how these processes ‘worked’ upon their subjects, with the result that, to a large extent, graduate CSRs, whilst considering themselves over-qualified, sought to align themselves with the dominant managerial ethos of Dioscuri. I therefore point to the crucial role that employee collusion and consent, in the form of misrecognition, plays in understanding the effectiveness of this particular turnover strategy, especially when managerial practices are seen as forms of pedagogic action.

This is not to assume that this ethos was totalizing; employees are clearly not eternally trapped within this or any other organization. Whilst some fully trained CSRs did leave Dioscuri and dissent and frustration were often voiced, in general the organization has clearly been successful in reducing the level of turnover. A reading of Bourdieu that interprets managerial practices as pedagogic action which engage with pre-socialized subjects that emerge from HE, together with an analysis of the centrality of CSR complicity in the project of governing the call centre appears to make some sense of retention at Dioscuri. Bourdieu's analysis of the structuring of subordination offers a theoretically rich framework for the interpretation of the production and reproduction of domination, which might usefully be extended into organizational domains to make sense of the experience of organizational life. Furthermore, the analysis presented here draws attention to the intersection of various forms of pedagogic action, in this case between university education and management practices, and further work might usefully seek to explore these intersections more fully. This would complement Bourdieu's analysis by understanding the organization as an important site of domination but also contribute to organizational analysis by considering the confluence of subordinating inscriptions that converge at the point of production.