Women Labour in Call Centres: Understanding Characteristics of Work

This paper is concerned with the work experiences of women employees in info-service-based offices as telephone call centres. Call centres have grown rapidly in Tur-key in recent years, creating a large number of new jobs. In particular, it is concerned with the question of whether call centre jobs are offering women new opportunities for career progression, or whether a more common bias is taking place in which women are being drawn into highly routinized jobs. The collection of data was carried out so-urcing a heterogeneous plurality of instruments. Our research confirms that work pro-cesses in call centres are close association of surveillance technologies (technologic panoptican), exploitation and high levels of discipline, highly repetitive and heavily mo-nitored, and that the association with the assembly line and Taylorism have dominated much of the rhetoric on call centres. In addition, we have observed that, the structure of women’s employment in the call centre industry tends to polarise.