Drawing upon case studies of three organisations operating six call centres in Australia, this thesis explores the manifestations and interplay of employee resistance and accommodation in response to five facets of employer control: electronic monitoring; repetitious work; emotional control; the built environment; and workplace flexibility. Accommodation refers to the ways workers protect themselves from and adapt to the pressures that make up their day-to-day experiences of work. Accommodation, unlike resistance, which implies opposition to control, may superficially resemble consent to control. I argue that resistance and accommodation are not polar opposites; rather they are both reflections of the conflict and tensions that lie at the heart of the employment relationship. At the study sites, employees utilised resistance and accommodation both separately and concurrently. An explanation of these seemingly contradictory responses and of the links among accommodation individual resistance and collective resistance lies in the concept of ???self???. In this thesis, ???self??? refers to workers??? perceptions of fairness, dignity and autonomy. I examine how these notions frame worker discontent and promote employee solidarity. ???Everyday resistance???, a concept first developed by Scott (1985) in relation to peasant struggles, is employed to highlight the existence of subterranean struggles in workplaces that otherwise appear to be harmonious. At the study sites, everyday resistance was a multi-faceted, widely employed strategy whose strength lay primarily in its immediate impact. There was, however, no necessary sequential development from accommodation, through everyday resistance to overt, formal forms of conflict. What was evident was that multiple responses to employer control could co-exist and inhibit or promote one another. But it was through organised collective resistance that more formalised gains were made and widely held grievances addressed. I suggest that, although everyday resistance may lay the groundwork for more formal struggles, one should not conclude that traditional collective resistance is ???genuine??? resistance and everyday resistance is simply a second-best prelude to it. Although conflict is always present, its intensity differs. If we are to understand the complexity of worker responses to managerial control, we need to expand the theoretical frameworks within which we analyse and interpret conflict.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187969 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Barnes, Alison Kate, School of Industrial Relations & Organisational Behaviour, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Alison Kate Barnes, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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