Collective Emotional Work

Communities of Coping: CollectiveEmotional Labour in Service Work

Marek KorczynskiLoughborough University Business School, UK

Abstract. This article argues that communities of coping among front-line service workers are an important part of what Hochschild has called‘collective emotional labour’ in service work. The analysis is framed in asociological understanding of the customer as a key source of bothpleasure and pain for service workers. Irate and abusive customers, whoare systematically part of the social relations of the service workplace,may occasion real pain to service workers. The structure of workers’social situation means that they are likely to turn to each other to copewith this pain, forming informal communities of coping. Drawing onextensive research in four call centres in Australia and the USA, thearticle highlights this process in action. The communities of coping werean important social process in these workplaces, creating informal, densecultures among the workforce. These cultures had important implica-tions for how far the social relations of the workplace were open tomanagement control. Key words. abuse; coping; culture; customers;emotions; service

Hochschild’s (1983) path-breaking work set the terrain for the examina-tion of emotional labour in service work involving direct contact withservice recipients (here referred to as customers). Unfortunately, as anumber of authors have convincingly argued, there are a number of cruciallimitations in her analysis (Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Korczynski,2002). While I share the view that Hochschild’s mono-focus on the harmof emotional labour is unhelpful, here I would like to resurrect and

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develop one of the neglected themes in The Managed Heart, namely, thatthere is an important collective aspect to the emotional labour of front-line service work. The article does this first by summarizing Hochschild’sarguments and re-articulating them through the concept of communitiesof coping, a concept which is part of a wider and more adequatesociology of service work than Hochschild presents. The second sectionof the article outlines research undertaken in four call centres in Aus-tralia and the USA. The following section presents the research findingsregarding the important role of communities of coping in these work-places. The concluding section reiterates the argument and considerswider implications of this for the sociology of service work.

Collective Emotional Labour and Communities of CopingFor the most part, Hochschild’s analysis of the harm of emotional labourfor flight attendants focuses upon the damaging psychological processeswithin the individual worker. This focus upon the individual mirrors thehighly individualized labour process of much service work. DespiteMathews’s (1994) arguments that a team-based interdependence of taskswas about to sweep through service industries, it remains the case that agreat deal of service work involves a customer interacting with anindividual front-line worker who has very limited task interdependencewith other workers (Frenkel et al., 1999). Within this individualizedterrain, however, Hochschild does raise the issue of what she terms‘collective emotional labour’ (1983: 114). For Hochschild, an importantpart of the ‘emotional tone’ of the flight attendant’s work is set by theupbeat banter that is swapped between attendants as well as betweenattendants and passengers. Further, emotional labour is collective in thesense that attendants rely on each other for mutual emotional support.Hochschild suggests that management seeks to avoid workers sharingwith each other ‘grudges’ against passengers. She quotes a trainer cau-tioning against individual workers spreading their anger among the restof the workforce (Hochschild, 1983: 116). The trainer is quoted as saying:‘When you’re angry with a passenger, don’t head for the galley to blow offsteam with another flight attendant . . . There’ll be two of you hot totrot.’

Just when Hochschild’s discussion begins to intrigue, unfortunatelyshe moves on to another topic. This means that although she dignifies theconcept of ‘collective emotional labour’ with its own subheading, theconcept is left as a sketch and is not developed into a full picture. This isto be regretted because the idea of a collective nature to emotional labourclearly sits well with wider conceptualizations of emotions which stresstheir essentially social nature (Domagalski, 1999; Elias, 1987; Fineman,1996). To turn this sketch of an idea into a picture that illuminates, it isnecessary, first, to include the customer in our sociological under-standing of service work. This is to take seriously Whyte’s (1946: 123)

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observation that ‘when workers and customers meet . . . that relationshipadds a new dimension to the pattern of human relations in industry’.

There is a large management literature that stresses how customers areincreasingly seeking service quality in their interactions with serviceworkers (Heskett et al., 1997; Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996). Deconstructingthis literature, Korczynski (2002) has argued that increasingly in servicefirms, management aims that the key sign-value that customers consumeduring service interactions is the enchanting myth of their own sover-eignty. Service interactions are increasingly structured such that itappears to the customer that they are in charge of the interaction (Benson,1986). Consumption, however, is a fragile process (Edwards, 2000).Enchantment may easily turn to disillusionment in the moments whenthe individual customer’s lack of sovereignty becomes starkly apparent.As Ritzer (1999) suggests, customer disillusionment may occur preciselybecause the continuing, rationalizing, bureaucratic imperative of produc-tion becomes apparent.

It is when enchantment turns to disillusionment that the customer mayreact angrily. As Leidner (1993: 131) notes, discourtesy expressed bycustomers to front-line workers occurs when the bureaucratic ‘inflexibleroutines’ of the production organization intrude upon the service inter-action (and its associated myths). This anger is vented at the closestsymbol of the customer’s painful journey from enchantment to dis-illusionment: the front-line service worker. In this important sense, theirate and abusive customer should be seen as a systematic part of thesocial relations of service work. For many service workers, customeranger and abuse is likely to occasion real and meaningful pain (Bitner etal., 1994). To have expressions of anger and abuse directed at you maycause pain in many social situations, but there are two specific elementsof the service worker’s social situation which are likely to make suchpain all the more sharply felt. First, service workers are likely to havebeen recruited on the basis of pro-customer attitudes, beliefs and values(Stanback, 1990; Korczynski et al., 2000). Recruitment on the basis of pro-customer attitudes can be seen as tapping into wider social mores ofconsumption-based identity and identification (Bauman, 1988, du Gay,1996). Second, it is the pleasurable emotional labour that occurs inservice interactions that service workers regard as one of the mostsignificant and satisfying aspects of their jobs (Tolich, 1993; Williams,1987). The pain occasioned by irate customers is made sharper becausecustomers are also a key source of meaning and pleasure in service jobs.Unfortunately, in Hochschild’s framework, there is no space for thisinsight because she focuses solely on the harm of emotional labour. Shetherefore cannot see how, in Benson’s memorable phrase, that customersare ‘our friend, the enemy’ (1986). Service workers who are positivelydisposed to customers and who seek meaning and pleasure from helpingcustomers, but who are confronted with abuse from a customer, are,therefore, likely to feel pain from this abuse.

Communities of CopingKorczynski

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In recoiling from, and coping with, this pain service workers are likelyto seek support from each other, thus creating communities of coping.1

These communities of coping are likely to be informal, but may con-stitute a crucial part of the social relations of the service workplace.There is passing evidence from research into a variety of front-line jobswhich shows that workers do tend to cope communally and socially.Meyerson (1989) notes the importance of how some medical socialworkers would seek solace from each other. Benner and Wrubel (1989)and Norbeck (1985) show the importance of nurses collectively copingwith the emotional strains of their work. Indeed, the work of Menzies(1959), Satyamuri (1981) and Handy (1990) all indicate that collectiveforums may help in dealing with stressful situations. Mennerick (1974)has suggested that the collective informal creation of client typologiesamong front-line staff functions as a method of coping in the job (see alsoBlau, 1974: 181–2). Sutton’s (1991) study of debt collectors at workshowed that desk-thumping and cursing was used as a signal for thesharing of experiences. Communities of coping may be formed during thelabour process, or may occur in ‘off-stage’ areas. As Fineman and Sturdy(2001: 146) note:

Rest rooms, galleys, corridors and other ‘off-stage’ areas provide an oppor-tunity for employees to drop their corporate mask, free from the scrutiny ofsupervisors and customers. ‘Undesirable’ emotions, such as fear, anger,hurt and frustration can be vented or expressed . . . in the presence of a‘willing’ audience of colleagues.

The labelling of these emergent, informal, oral-based, social modes ofcoping as communities of coping explicitly draws on the language ofBrown and Duguid (1991), who label emergent, informal, oral-based,social modes of workplace learning as ‘communities of practice’. Both ofthese forms of work-related ‘community’ are constituted by the ‘associa-tional solidarity’ (Heckscher, 1988) that develops from important col-lective elements within the labour process.

While there is a significant body of research which suggests theexistence of communal coping in a range of service settings, communitiesof coping, their origins, and their implications have not yet been a centralfocus of any study. The studies alluded to above have mentioned commu-nal forms of coping in passing and have not sought to incorporate theminto a wider sociology of service work. Most crucially, these studies havetended not to draw out the implications of these communities of copingfor wider workplace relations. At one level, these communities of copingmay act in a way that is functional to management requirements. Byproviding a way for service workers to survive the systematic tensions oftheir working days, communities of coping may help preserve the ‘fragilesocial order’ of the service workplace (Korczynski, 2002). They canpotentially reduce the level of staff turnover and its attendant costs formanagement. However, at another level, these communities of coping are


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likely to constitute strong informal workgroup cultures which may makeworkplace relations more difficult for management to control. Thesecommunities of coping may also spill over to inform acts of directresistance to management directives. In Noon and Blyton’s terms, theymay constitute ‘a curious mixture of consent and resistance to work’(1997: 140). For instance, it is possible to see the apparently sharedpractices of staff in the Disney theme park regarding the over-tighteningof safety belts of awkward customers (Van Maanen, 1991) as being both acommunal mode of coping and an act of resistance. Such cultures mayalso constitute a form of ‘tacit collectivism’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999)which could nurture trade union organization. For these reasons, man-agement tends to advocate other modes of coping—modes which aremore amenable to direct management intervention and which have lesspotential oppositional implications. So within the managerialist lit-erature on Calming Upset Customers (Morgan, 1996), managers areadvised to steer their staff away from informally coping among them-selves. For instance, in Morgan’s survey instrument, service workersscore highly on customer service levels if ‘after dealing with an upsetcustomer, I don’t waste time telling my co-workers about it’ (1999: 153)and they score poorly if they do share their feelings with their col-leagues.

Despite these management attempts, research suggests that commu-nities of coping do exist in service workplaces. This article begins torectify an important gap in our knowledge regarding them. It studiescommunities of coping in four call centres in Australia and the USA. Itdemonstrates their origins and examines their implications for the widersocial relations and management of these workplaces.

Research Methods and Research SitesCall centres are an important and growing form of front-line service work(Datamonitor, 1998). Within existing studies of call centres, while themain focus has been on control, resistance, and routinization relating tothe management-workforce dyad (Frenkel et al., 1998; Alferoff andKnights, 2000; Taylor and Bain, 1999), some studies have considered therole of the customer in workplace relations (Wray-Bliss, 2001; Taylor andTyler, 2001). Research has highlighted the emotional labour demanded ofworkers in these jobs (Lankshear et al., 2000; Taylor and Tyler, 2000), buthas not considered the collective nature of emotional labour, in the formof communities of coping. The importance of call-centre work and thegaps in our knowledge of it make call centres a suitable site for theexamination of communities of coping. Another factor that makes callcentres an apt site is that the labour process of call-centre workers tendsto be highly individualized. Call centres are often set up followingbusiness process reengineering initiatives which have been undertakento both cut costs and to ensure that customers have a ‘one stop shop’. The


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aim is that with sufficient IT support individual workers should be ableto deal with a wide range of customer queries, minimizing the customers’often opaque journeys through bureaucratic organizations. This meansthat the individual call-centre worker’s job tends to be structured to haveminimal task interdependence with other workers, thus creating a highlyindividualized labour process, involving a series of interactions withindividual customers. If the collective aspect of emotional labour can beshown to be significant within a structure of individualized jobs then itsappeal as an important concept is strengthened.

The research was part of a larger study on the nature of service work. Acentral focus in this research project was upon emotional labour andupon the nature of the lateral relations between the front-line serviceworkers. In this article, research is reported from four call centres. Threewere located in Australia. These were INSCO, OZ-BANK, and TELCO.USA-BANK was located in the USA. The smallest centre employed 80staff, and the largest 130. In all the call centres, customer servicerepresentatives (CSRs) received incoming calls from customers. The workwas primarily service work, involving CSRs acting on customer requestsand problem-solving further to customer queries. USA-BANK, OZ-BANKand INSCO were in the financial services industry and TELCO in thetelecommunications industry. In Keltner and Finegold’s (1998) schema ofmarket segmentation in service delivery, these customer service siteswere located in the ‘mass customisation’ segment. Trade unions wererecognized at INSCO and TELCO, but not at the other sites. At TELCO,the union was in a corporate-level partnership agreement with manage-ment. This partnership agreement only affected the issue of irate custom-ers in a tangential way, as is discussed below in the section on workforceresponses at TELCO. No significant differences regarding emotionallabour and communities of coping were found between the Australianand the US sites.

Within each site two researchers were present full-time for a minimumof three weeks. One part of the research involved semi-structured inter-views of approximately one hour with CSRs, supervisors, middle andsenior managers, and trade union officials. An average of 70 interviewswere undertaken in each site. While management attempted to steer us tointerview ‘model’ CSRs, we asked to interview a range of ‘good’ and‘poor’ performers, men and women, full-timers and part-timers, newrecruits and experienced workers. Also central to the research strategywere observations of the labour process. Taylor (1998: 97) argues that inthe study of emotional labour, ‘the ethnographic approach . . . whichincluded the verification of reported behaviour (in interviews) throughdetailed non-participant observation of the labour process is the bestavailable means to analyse such phenomena’. This method is equallyimportant when studying informal lateral relations within the workplace.Observations of the labour process were, therefore, undertaken in eachsite. Such observations involved the researcher sitting beside the CSR


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listening in to the call with a headset, discussing the calls if possible, andnoting informal interchanges between nearby CSRs. In addition, a rangeof team meetings, service training sessions, recruitment interviews, andmeetings of middle management were observed. On average, 45 observa-tions were made in each site. Relevant documentation was also inspec-ted. Researchers also shared ‘off-stage’ areas with CSRs: having lunchwith them, waiting with them for meetings to start, and stopping off inthe coffee and tea room with them. Most CSRs were female (70 percent,on average), had a relatively short tenure on the current job (on average,just under a year), and were less than 30 years old. The importance ofwho the CSRs were is taken up below.

Research FindingsThis section is structured as follows. First, important context data aregiven regarding the CSR’s job, highlighting its emotional labour content,its individualized labour process and the degree to which CSRs heldattitudes favourable to customers, and derived satisfaction from inter-acting with customers. Next, the systematic presence of irate customers ishighlighted. This leads on to a discussion of the meaning of these iratecustomers for the CSRs. While management tried to promote indi-vidualized coping among CSRs, staff mainly coped communally. Thefinal section examines some implications of these informal, but denseand important, lateral relations for wider workplace relations.

Context DataIn the sites, work was highly individualized. The central work taskfeatured individual workers dealing with individual customers. CSRs didnot work in teams with interdependent tasks working around customers,as cell production teams work around cars, for instance. Individual CSRsused expert IT systems that provided a range of information on individ-ual customers, and in a number of sites management were expanding theability of these IT systems to give individual CSRs a more holistic pictureof the customer. There was a strict division of labour between directcustomer contact work and ‘back-office’ work, with management espe-cially keen that the front-line workers should spend at least 85 percent oftheir time in direct customer contact on the phones. Although work washighly individualized there was considerable management rhetoricregarding ‘teams’ in the sites. The ‘teams’ in which CSRs were locatedhad little to do with the division of labour, but effectively denoted thespan of control and responsibility for individual supervisors. In addition,these ‘teams’ served as a forum for learning, with part of weekly teammeetings being devoted to a swapping of customer-related and product-related information.

CSRs in all of the sites were employed in jobs which demandedemotional labour. A manager at OZ-BANK noted that: ‘there is definitely


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emotional labour involved in the job . . . Taking ownership of a problemimplies emotional labour and commitment.’ This expresses the manage-ment view that CSRs should care about customers, and about resolvingtheir problems. Emotional labour centred on the empathy that CSRs wereexpected to show toward customers. In all of the sites, management andsupervisors, or team leaders as they were called in the call centres,monitored and assessed a selection of calls taken by CSRs. A keycriterion in this assessment was the degree to which the CSRs showedempathy and understanding with the customers. As a manager at USA-BANK put it, ‘a key skill lies in empathising with customers’. A commonmotif that expressed a key difference from the approach of the ‘street-level bureaucrat’ (Prottas, 1979) was the aim that CSRs should speak witha ‘smile in your voice’.

Given the importance of empathetic emotional labour in the job, it waslittle surprise that a pro-customer attitude was the key recruitmentcriterion in all of the sites. It was management’s view that technicalaspects of the job, such as working on the computer, accessing multipleforms of information, holding product knowledge, could be relativelyeasily trained, while it was much more difficult to train CSRs to hold pro-customer attitudes. A training strategy document at USA-BANK put thisplainly: ‘it is easier to train to knowledge and skills and hire to self-images, traits and motives because they tend to be more difficult todevelop or train’. The job candidates who would be recruited at thiscentre would be the ones with a ‘positive, service-driven attitude’. Theprocess of selection at all the sites was designed to distinguish candidatesaccording to this criterion. Management also sought to develop pro-customer attitudes through training sessions. Customer service trainingsessions for newly hired staff were observed at INSCO. Both the sub-stance and the form of this training focused on the development ofcustomer empathy. The trainer set up a series of role plays in whichnewly hired staff alternated between playing the staff role and thecustomer role. The role plays were analysed by the trainer and the classin terms of how ‘helpful’ and ‘friendly’ the staff member had been. On anumber of occasions, the trainer stressed the importance of ‘puttingyourself in the customer’s shoes’. The training method involving CSRsrole-playing as customers served to back this up.

Research data indicate that for a large majority of the workforce,interactions with customers constituted a key source of meaning andpleasure in their jobs. In all interviews with CSRs, researchers asked anopen-ended question about what they regarded as the best aspect of thejob. A large majority of CSRs mentioned the pleasure they felt when theywere able to help and satisfy customers:

One of the best aspects of the job is the feeling of appreciation sometimesfrom the customers. It’s good helping people when you can. (CSR)


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The best part is the customers, the things you can do for them, the rapportyou have with them. Most of them are nice. (CSR)

Note that in this final quotation, the CSR adds a reservation: it is only‘most of them’ that are nice.

Irate Customers, Their Meaning and Communities of CopingWhile there was pleasure and satisfaction to be gleaned from interactingwith customers, there was also a downside. Indeed, it is only by seeingthe pro-customer attitudes, and the pleasures experienced in helpingcustomers that it is possible to understand the real pain that irate andabusive customers could bring to CSRs. Irate and abusive customers werean important part of the social relations of all the call centres. Althoughthey constituted only a small percentage of calls, they had an importantimpact on workplace relations.

The number of irate customers at each site waxed and waned, withsignificant increases occurring when there were (periodic) faults in thefirms’ systems (for example, systematic errors in monthly mortgagestatements sent out to customers). Such faults meant that the customers’enchantment turned to disillusionment. The CSR was positioned as thefirst and main point of contact for the customer and therefore consistently‘copped the flak’, in the words of a CSR at TELCO. At OZ-BANK, theproblem of abusive and irate customers was an acute one because therewas a large number of customers phoning wanting solutions to unusualand difficult problems. As a consequence, the length of the queue toreach a worker was considerable, and this turned many already frustratedcustomers into irate customers. Some customers could be very threat-ening. A worker stated that ‘from the customer’s verbal phone manneryou know what you’re in for. Swearing is common, a female CSR wasthreatened and we get the odd psycho.’

At INSCO abusive customers were also an important part of the socialrelations of the workplace. One manager noted, ‘our people are beingabused by customers. Customers are becoming more abusive’ and anotherthat, ‘a lot of times they [the CSRs] get yelled at’. In a training session oncustomer service skills, CSRs kept bringing up the subject of iratecustomers, despite the manager’s attempt to cement the norm of customerempathy. The manager moved on the agenda in the training session byconceding that the issue of irate customers ‘sounds like a real live issue,doesn’t it?’

That customer disillusionment would readily turn to anger and abusewas in part a consequence of the telephonic mediation between customerand worker that is part of call-centre work. As Bauman (1989) has noted,the greater the social and technological distance between two parties, thegreater the likelihood of inhuman and disrespectful behaviour. A CSR atINSCO stated that, ‘it’s been proven that people are much more likely tobe hostile over the phone. They’d be docile in front of you.’ CSRs in all ofthe sites were expected to put up with abusive behaviour from customers


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so that the firm could keep that customer’s business. The formal docu-mented management policy at OZ-BANK regarding irate customers, forinstance, was as follows: ‘Call Management. Unacceptable things includebeing hostile/angry, hanging up on the customer or not doing what thecustomer wants (within policies and procedures).’ This was clearly notjust a paper policy as the following quotation from a CSR shows:

The customer fucked up a card application and got really aggressive andangry and swore, said ‘bastards!’ But CSRs have been told never to hang upon customers and as she refused to finish, I had to hang on.

CSRs would be disciplined for being irate back at customers. At USA-BANK, a manager noted that ‘I had one rep swear to the customer—this isgrounds for instant dismissal.’ Further, management strongly discouragedthe practice of CSRs ‘escalating’ calls to the supervisor. For instance, atOZ-BANK, at a management meeting a manager noted the situation inwhich the CSRs were placed:

CSRs rant to me. They jump up and down. Poor kids, they come to me. I tryto get them to deal with it; I say the supervisor is not on the floor eventhough I expect the customer to go off the mega deep-end.

These irate and abusive customers led to CSRs experiencing real painat three of the sites: INSCO, USA-BANK, and at OZ-BANK. At TELCO themeaning of irate customers was rather different and is examined sepa-rately, below. One CSR at OZ-BANK stated that, ‘Yesterday there was aguy who was using every swear word you’ve heard of. I just ignored theswearing, extracted the relevant info, but a lot of staff don’t do this andlet it get to them.’ Indeed, it was clear that irate customers did frequentlyget to workers. One manager at OZ-BANK said that, ‘staff will feeldejected for the rest of the day after one abusive phone call’. Anotherpointed out that ‘morale is extremely low; it is much more stressful andpressured; they are having to deal with upset and abusive customers’. Amanager at INSCO noted that ‘there have been complaints [from CSRs]about foul and sexual language of some customers’. A supervisor at USA-BANK noted that in the previous team meeting, there had been ‘a wave ofpeople complaining about aggravating customers’. A selection of CSRquotations from interviews give further testament to the pain frequentlyincurred:

Abusive calls are very hard not to take personally. Once or twice I’ve beenin tears. I’m shocked at how aggressive people are over the phone. (CSR)

Two bad calls can kill a day. (CSR)

Irate callers can really affect you. People can be very rude. (CSR)

The pressures of feeling empathy toward somebody being abusive wasexpressed by another CSR:

I get a lot of customers who want a fight—pick, pick, pick—I sympathise totry to keep them happy. Customers . . . talk down to CSRs all the time. I justanswer it accurately . . . I’m often on the verge of going bananas.


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Management was aware of the tensions experienced by the CSRs whowere asked to be empathetic to customers, but who were also expected toput up with anger and abuse from them. Management adopted twomechanisms for guiding the way in which CSRs coped with this situa-tion. The first involved promoting individualized methods of what Mann(1999) has described as ‘cognitive restructuring’ among CSRs. Ongoingtraining courses for customer skills for established CSRs featured trainersleading CSRs through examples of calls from irate customers. The pointthat the trainer sought to make was that although such calls may upsetthe CSRs, the CSRs had the power to change this. This power lay in thecontrol that CSRs had over how they viewed the customer anger andabuse. At one training course at INSCO, the trainer promoted the tech-nique of ‘removing yourself from the situation’. It was recommended thatCSRs should develop a mental and emotional distance between theirbody, ears and voice on the one hand, and their mind and emotions onthe other. CSRs were instructed to ‘relax’ and ‘not take the customercomplaint seriously’ and personally. The research uncovered some casesof CSRs adopting such approaches in practice on the job. Thismanagement-sponsored approach, however, ran into the contradictionsof prioritizing impersonality in a job in which personality was central.This contradiction was acknowledged by a supervisor who stated that: ‘Ithink that if a customer is abusive they are personalising things, the angeris directed at me.’

The second way in which management attempted to structure the wayin which CSRs coped with the pain from irate customers was throughestablishing communal rituals which celebrated the pleasures of thecustomer contact work. The message that management wished to conveywas that it was worth putting up with some pain and some stress in orderto glean the rewards from emotional labour. At OZ-BANK, these ritualsinvolved a manager reading out letters of praise from customers, regard-ing service received, in front of an audience of CSRs. After reading out aletter the manager would instigate applause directed at the staff memberpraised in the letter. Workers were keen to join in applause in recognitionof the work of a colleague. In addition, it appeared that the praised CSRfelt pride in receiving this praise. The CSR typically smiled and occasion-ally blushed, partly from pride. The pleasure that the praised CSRs feltand exhibited demonstrated to the other CSRs the benefits that couldaccrue from their work when carried out with commitment. Overall, theritual created a sense of shared aims and the benefits of pursuing theseaims.

Although the management attempts to structure the coping of CSRswas partly successful, their contradictions and limitations were such thatit was still the case that the major way in which CSRs at the three sitescoped with pain was through their own communities of coping. TheCSRs did not go to a manager or a supervisor for emotional supportbecause it was they who perpetuated the myth that customers always


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deserved empathy, and who put limits on how workers could react toabusive customers. This managerial role was clear from another servicetraining session at INSCO. In this session, on a number of occasions CSRsbrought up stories and examples of abusive and irate customers. Thetrainer’s response was to either ignore the stories, or to lead the groupback to considering the importance of displaying customer empathy.When she was forced to confront the issue, her main recommendationwas to act out of empathy: ‘don’t tell them the rules and the guidelines.Instead try to put yourself in their shoes. Try to turn the situationaround.’

In practice, the CSRs frequently turned to colleagues to repeat theirexperiences and to seek support. Management rhetoric of ‘teamwork’ andpolicies to create social bonds among the staff, such as the sponsoring ofsocial evenings and sports events, contributed to CSRs looking to eachother for support.2 Crucially, colleagues were more proximate, wentthrough the same situation daily and so could be more understandingand supportive. One worker at INSCO said that:

Sometimes the customer is rude, they will say ‘fuck off’ if you’ve giventhem a high quote. These comments are rare but they stick. They affect usall; they rebound round the whole team. One person will tell the personnext to them, and the word soon goes around the team . . . I once had threein a day, and I was like ‘put me back on the phone and I’ll kill.

A CSR at USA-BANK noted that: ‘We discuss the calls. It’s good to getit off your chest. “That guy was such a jerk” sort of thing.’ CSRs at OZ-BANK similarly noted the existence of communities of coping. One said,‘I cope by talking to other CSRs about it. We have a bit of a chuckle.’Another worker at this site mirrored this sentiment by saying that shedoes ‘not take it personally. I chat to others about it.’ The spontaneoussharing of experiences about abusive customers was observed on anumber of occasions. One example involved a worker talking to another,with some belligerence, about how he had to suspend the customer’scredit card. ‘He was a liar,’ he said, ‘I found him really rather obnoxious.’The colleague nodded in understanding.

The strong sense of mutual support between workers at OZ-BANK wasnoted on a number of occasions. Comments from workers included: ‘I’venever seen a group co-operate the way people do here’; ‘colleagues arevery helpful’; ‘we try to cover for each other’. Another worker talked ofthe ‘close-knit unity of the office’ when referring to relations betweencolleagues. Workers and managers alike related these supportive collegialrelations to the communities of coping needed in face of so many iratecustomers. One worker said that, ‘everyone feels as if they’re in the sameboat and understands what everyone else is going through’. Another saidthat ‘people are great—there’s a great camaraderie. We need it with thejob being so stressful.’ A manager said that ‘everyone knows how awful itis, and they end up making a joke of it’. Another manager said that


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relations between staff were very good compared to other workplaces hehad been in, and related this to there being ‘lots more unhappy customershere’. This picture was mirrored at USA-BANK where a manager notedthat CSRs were close because of the ‘shared experience of being under thegun’.

The evidence also suggests that gender played an important role in thecommunities of coping. This is congruent with Hochschild’s observationthat the job of a service worker is different for a woman compared to aman. A number of CSRs suggested that it was male customers who weremore likely to be the abusers. One female CSR suggested that iratecustomers were more likely to be ‘male Asians’, another that ‘she dislikesthe angry customer who is very demanding. They are more likely to bemale.’ Another noted that the irate customers who talked down to CSRswere often ‘businessmen’. A number of CSRs suggested that female CSRswere more likely to be on the receiving end of anger and abuse. One maleCSR stated that ‘some customers tend to speak down to female reps. Acouple of customers have talked down to me—but it’s mainly a problemfor the ladies. My colleagues have told me’. Another male CSR noted that‘I’m occasionally talked down to. Although I think it’s better for mebecause I’m male and sound older.’ One female supervisor at OZ-BANKreported that, ‘it’s a struggle for me, as a woman, to assert my authority’.3

A female manager, also at OZ-BANK, suggested that this problem ‘raisedthe question of whether there should be females in the supervisor role’.4

Further, an analysis of those reporting abuse as significant to researchersshowed that a higher proportion of the female CSRs interviewed reportedit as a serious issue than the proportion of male CSRs interviewed. Giventhat females both made up the majority of the workforce and were morelikely to suffer abuse, it was not surprising that communities of copingwere female dominated. This social cohesion may have contributed tothe strength and importance of the communities of coping.

An interchange between workers and a manager at a customer servicetraining session at INSCO highlighted a number of important themes inthe dynamics of communities of coping: the meaningful pain which cameabout from customer abuse, the instinctive support offered by CSRs tocope with this pain, and the suspicion with which this communal copingwas viewed by management. A newly hired worker who had had pre-vious customer service experience began:

[First CSR:] Diffusing customer conflict is a big one. It’s very hard not totake it personally. Bad ones will always upset you. You’ve got to learn to letgo, which is very hard with a problem customer. It’s very easy to say youshould. Is there any debrief with a manager?

[Manager:] Yes there is support from your peers.

[Second CSR:] At the next call you’re not going to say ‘Good morning.’There’s a knock on effect.


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At this point the manager retreated from her acknowledgement andimplicit support for communities of coping, by in turn stressing the needfor workers to take individual responsibility, by implicitly criticizingpeer support, and by suggesting that workers should consult an appro-priate figure in the hierarchy of the firm. At the same time, the CSRs wereexpressing the lived reality of these communities of coping on the officefloor:

[Manager:] We’re angry because we let them [irate customers] have aneffect. We own our own emotions. [She recounts a story of how thespreading of a story of an abusive customer to fellow workers led to thefellow workers being upset as well.]

[First trainee CSR:] Is there lee-way to get off-line about abuse, or are youexpected to keep flowing?

[Manager:] There’s no pat answer . . . But we shouldn’t gossip aboutcustomers.

[Third trainee CSR:] But if I’ve been told off, I want to talk about it. [Sherecounts the story of finding a colleague crying after an abusive customercall, and giving that colleague a shoulder to cry on.]

[Manager:] Somebody might need to talk to a manager, go to team leader, orwhoever it is you report to.

Having dealt with the meaning of irate customers and the copingmodes common to three sites, I now turn to consider the case of TELCO,which was qualitatively different. It was still the case that CSRs receiveda significant number of calls from abusive and irate customers. However,the meaning of these calls for CSRs was significantly different at this site.The calls tended not to occasion meaningful pain for CSRs. This wasbecause of the shared culture of customer antipathy on the office floor.CSRs were conditioned to antipathetic relations with customers, and sowhen customers did become angry and abusive this was unlikely to ‘killthe day’ and more likely to be seen as part of the furniture. This was adifferent sort of community of coping, and one that involved supervisorsas well. Whereas the communities of coping at the other three sites wereforms of post-event coping, the antipathetic culture was a communal pre-emptive way of coping.

The existence of this shared office-floor culture of customer antipathyrequires an explanation. While at TELCO there was an expectation ofempathetic emotional labour, the key initial socialization route into thecentre lay through debt-recovery work. As Hochschild (1983) has noted,debt-recovery work frequently involves emotional labour, but the pri-mary emotions are cynicism and antipathy, rather than empathy, towardthe customer.5

After completing their induction training, newly hired workers wereplaced for a few months in a specialist team which followed up on casesof bad debt. This first work experience of customer contact, therefore,


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tended to promote antipathy to customers. The supervisor of the special-ist credit management team noted that:

We tend to see customers differently . . . We get a less positive view of thecustomer. You get to know the bad customers because you handle thereports on them . . . A few mouth off at you . . . I can’t be bothered withthem.

A CSR mirrored this picture:

When working [in the specialist team] you see that customers tend to be . . .more deceitful. You can tell from the way they are talking, calling you‘sweetheart, darling.’ But then they hesitate on what their middle name is,and maybe they can’t tell you their [car] license number. By then I knowit’s full-on bodgy [Australian slang for ‘dodgy’].

As a manager admitted, this first taste of customer contact meant that ‘alot of CSRs only remember the baddies’ among the customers. At amanagement meeting observed, one manager noted that ‘the CSRsbecome very sceptical’. This informed the existence of a strong culturecritical of customers. This culture was unique to TELCO among theresearch sites. A selection of comments from interviews and observationsgives a feeling of this culture.

‘DFP’—Dumb Fucking Pensioners—is a nickname that is used for custom-ers. Though the customers don’t have to be old to get called that. (CSR)

Customers are the biggest scammers. They’ll try anything. (CSR)

I call some customers ‘Consistent Malingerers’—they keep getting exten-sions and keep trying. They know they’re in the wrong and try to blufftheir way out of it. (CSR)

CSRs also enjoyed making fun of customers communally. One observa-tion noted a CSR saying loudly, ‘Oh God, [referring to the Customer onhold] she’s so stupid . . . Oh, you wouldn’t believe some of the dumboswe get. Unbelievable. They’re loopy.’ Two other CSRs laughed in agree-ment. In one training session observed, the trainer was trying to get theCSRs to understand the concept of an ‘open question’. One CSR spokeup: ‘a good example of an open question is “Who’s that brat in thebackground? Tell him to shut up.” ’ Two other CSRs supported this,laughing and saying, ‘I’d love to say that sometimes.’ After taking a callfrom a customer, one CSR was observed to say to another CSR, ‘Stupidbitch [referring to the customer]. They always go for the sympathy vote—don’t they,’ and then proceeded to explain the situation of the call to twoother CSRs who nodded in agreement.

This culture was so much part of life in the centre that its vocabularywas even used by supervisors and middle managers. One manager saidthat she tried to make CSRs realize that ‘only 1% of customers are scumand trying to rip us off’. A supervisor noted that the biggest problem inthe centre was that CSRs spent too much of their time ‘talking toscumbags who didn’t pay their bills’. Another supervisor was observed to


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say to a CSR, ‘it’s good that you did that. And it’s a nice reminder to usthat not all of our customers are scumbags. You know that’s what we tendto assume all the time. Just a reminder that it’s not always the case’. Atone team meeting, a supervisor tried to instil in CSRs the importance ofmaking on-line case notes on calls where necessary. She focused theirattention on this by emphasizing customer antipathy, pointing out: ‘youknow customers lie to us and that sometimes CSRs take the easy-route.Well, yesterday in one case there were no notes on screen, so we had totake the customer’s word for it.’ Indeed, team meetings, which thesupervisors led, were forums in which the culture of customer antipathywas shared. CSRs readily recounted stories of the latest tricks of ‘schem-ing’ customers to an eager audience. The supervisors did not try tochallenge or interrupt these stories. The culture of cynicism towardcustomers was so pronounced that it was even aired to senior manage-ment. One management role was that of Regional Complaints Managerwhose task it was to follow up, in a supportive way, customer complaintsabout service from the firm. This manager was introduced at a teammeeting. Immediately, a CSR spoke up, turning the idea of a customercomplaints manager on its head: ‘I’ve got a complaint about a customer Iwant to raise.’ The whole group of CSRs laughed or smiled at thiscomment, and in this context even the senior manager was forced toconcede a smile.

The shared culture of customer antipathy underlay the relative lack ofpain and disorientation among TELCO CSRs stemming from abusivecustomers. There was a resigned rather than a pained air in a CSR’s wordsthat ‘most customers have been mucked up by TELCO at some point andwe cop the flak’. So irate customers were part of workplace relations, butthe workforce responses and the consequences of these were different atTELCO than at the other sites. There was even some evidence of workersgetting back at irate customers. One CSR was observed laughing at on-line notes on a customer who was known to swear constantly at CSRs.She said to the researcher: ‘I wish he wasn’t disconnected, I’d give himcrankies [that is, crank phone calls].’ There were other examples:

A few mouth off at you. I just let ’em go on and then go to what I was goingto say or I’ll threaten to disconnect. (CSR)

This morning I had a lunatic from hell, I got so cranky with him. (CSR)

The limits on getting back at individual customers were fewer atTELCO than at the other sites. This was partly because of the antipatheticculture that was partly shared by lower management, and also because atthis site, as an outcome of the partnership union agreement, CSRs wereinformed when they were to be monitored. This meant that they could beconfident that outside these times management would not detect themgetting back at customers.

Overall, therefore, at USA-BANK, OZ-BANK and INSCO where cus-tomer abuse often caused pain, communities of coping were a funda-


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mental way of coping with this pain that made the job bearable. AtTELCO, the workforce response again was communal, but this took theform of a culture of customer antipathy partly shared between CSRs andlower management. This was a community of antipathy rather than acommunity of coping with pain. It did not so much provide the vitalshoulder to cry on in face of customer abuse, rather, it constituted ashared forum to perpetuate cynicism regarding customers, thereby creat-ing a barrier to the creation of distress in the first place.

Implications of the Communities of CopingWhile managers in all the sites were aware of the emotional labourdemands of the CSR’s job, they showed little awareness of the implica-tions of the collective nature of this emotional labour in the form ofcommunities of coping. Indeed, in three of the sites, they pursuedpolicies which stalled, in large part the data suggest, because they ran upagainst the invisible, informal, but dense and important, communities ofcoping among the CSRs.

Overall, in the sites, while the labour process was highly individu-alized, management did not make use of the main HRM levers that canfoster individual competitiveness. Career paths were limited, pay wasonly marginally adjusted for individual performance within commonbands, and contracts of employment were long-term. However, at OZ-BANK and INSCO management did try to foster an element of individualcompetitiveness through the public display of performance figures. Theidea was that CSRs should begin informally competing against eachother. But these policies did not have the anticipated consequences. AtOZ-BANK, management made two efforts at instilling individual com-petition in the centre, both of which were quickly abandoned because ofthe workforce’s negative reaction. The first attempt involved the publicdisplay of each individual’s past month’s performance figures. Only onesuch public posting occurred. Management desisted because, as onemanager stated, ‘there was lot of discontent on the floor’. The secondattempt involved a competition being run by management with rewardsfor the worker who was able to handle the most calls during a week. In aninterview one worker commented that this sort of competition ‘reducedthe spirit of co-operation on the floor’. It was abandoned when a delega-tion of workers approached the senior centre manager and requested thatit be discontinued. At INSCO a number of supervisors had aimed toincrease individual competition within their respective teams by makingeach individual’s performance results known to the others. In interviewsa number of workers were critical of the level of competitiveness beingfostered, one stressing that ‘team members are compared too much witheach other’, another that ‘there’s too much competition’. Supervisors andmanagers were becoming increasingly aware that the competitivenesswas becoming problematic. This negative workforce reaction led todivisions within management over the fostering of competitiveness. The


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minutes of the management meeting read: ‘there was considerable debateregarding the display of figures, some members of the team were anxiousto foster competitive environment’. With the debate unresolved, theprevious practice of no public display of figures was readopted.

TELCO was the other site at which a management initiative appearedto stall because of the nature of communal coping among the CSRs. Atthis site, managers believed they had succeeded in driving greater indi-vidual competitiveness through the public display of performance fig-ures. However, their aim of making TELCO an organization delivering acustomer-oriented service was seriously hampered by the culture ofcynicism toward customers on the office floor.6 Unable to conceive of theproblem as relating to the nature of the informal, lived and shared cultureamong CSRs, management sought to make the firm more customer-oriented by creating formal positions of customer advocacy. The positionof Regional Complaints Manager has already been referred to. Within thecentre itself, there was also a Customer Care and Advocacy Officer. Thisofficer referred to her position as an ‘institutionalisation of consumeradvocacy within’ the firm. She stated that her aim was to develop anapproach of ‘what can I do to make you happy?’ within the firm. Thiscreation of a formal parallel structure to address an issue of informalshared culture, not surprisingly, was failing, with a number of CSRsexpressing ignorance of this officer, or expressing their desire to avoidcontact with this officer. The customer-care officer had talked to CSRsabout resolving customer complaints, but CSRs perceived her positionmerely in terms of another layer of bureaucracy within the firm. One CSRnoted that ‘filling out a customer care and advocacy form is a pain. I’ll doanything to avoid it. At the last team meeting the customer care womanwent through the whole damn form. It takes too long. It’s a waste oftime.’

In sum, communities of coping, as well as being important socialprocess in their own right, also had important implications for the widersocial relations of the workplace. Managers in the firms did not see theimportant implications of these communities of coping and, therefore,were hampered in their attempts to alter workplace behaviours.

Concluding DiscussionThe introduction argued that Hochschild’s idea of collective emotionallabour was a neglected, but potentially important, concept. It was arguedthat an analysis which considers the fragility of the process of consump-tion in front-line work and which has space for both pleasures and painsin emotional labour points to the potential importance of communalcoping in response to irate and abusive customers in front-line servicework. Although informal communities of coping have been noted inpassing in previous research, no study has directly focused its attentionon communities of coping, their origins and their consequences in


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service workplaces. Drawing on research undertaken in four call centresin Australia and the USA, this study has begun to rectify this gap in ourknowledge. Noting that the emotional labour of CSRs appeared to occurin jobs involving a highly individualized labour process, the articleshowed that CSRs were recruited on the basis of their customer empathy,and that many CSRs gained meaning and pleasure from interacting withcustomers. These pleasures set the context for the pain that was experi-enced in three of the sites when CSRs were confronted by irate andabusive customers. In three sites, the main way in which CSRs got by wasthrough informal, but deeply important, collegial support, or commu-nities of coping. At the fourth centre, TELCO, communal coping existedin the form of a shared culture of cynicism toward customers. Thiseffectively tended to shield CSRs from experiencing pain when custom-ers were abusive.

This study has also underlined the ways in which communities ofcoping can inform resistance within service work. First, the actualexistence of these communities of coping ran counter to managementpolicies. Management preferred CSRs to deal with the pain from iratecustomers internally and individually and to share communally onlypositive feelings toward customers. In this sense, the existence of com-munities of coping in itself was an act of resistance. Further, the commu-nities of coping also contributed to other forms of resistance. At INSCOand OZ-BANK the communities of coping are likely to have informed theactive resistance of CSRs to the introduction of a culture of individualcompetitiveness. At TELCO the communities of coping involving thecreation of shared antipathy toward the customer worked directly againstmanagement attempts to introduce a service culture in the firm. Overall,the significant communities of coping that existed made workplacerelations less amenable to direct management control. The communitiesof coping may have contributed to maintaining the ‘fragile social order’ ofthe call centres, but in so doing they made this social order less open tomanagement intervention.

Before considering some wider implications of the analysis it is neces-sary to acknowledge the limitations of this present study. Two pointsneed to be raised. One concerns the implications of the communities ofcoping for management strategies. It was argued that communities ofcoping were likely to have informed a failure to introduce an ethos ofindividual competitiveness. However, other factors may have also con-tributed to this failure, not least the team rhetoric espoused by manage-ment itself. It is reasonable to argue, however, that the logic of thecommunities of coping works against the logic of an ethos of individualcompetitiveness. Further, other research undertaken in call centres sug-gests support for the argument developed. The existence of communitiesof coping in call centres may explain apparent limits in the application ofindividual performance-related pay. Marshall and Richardson (1996:1855) report that team-based performance evaluation developed in call


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centres after ‘initial attempts to link individual pay to performance . . .caused internal dissension’. Further, Fernie and Metcalf (1999) find thatperformance-related pay in UK call centres only enhanced productivitywhere it was constructed on a team basis, rather than on an exclusivelyindividualized basis. This suggests that the benefits of performance-related pay to management are limited to where it tends not to under-mine supportive relations among front-line workers. Sennett (1976: 43)has argued that ‘in qualitative research, “proof” . . . is a matter of thedemonstration of logical relationship; the qualitative researcher has laidon him the burden of plausibility’. In these terms, both primary datafeatured in this article and wider call centre research suggest the plausi-bility of the argument put forward.

The second caveat concerns the degree to which call centres may beuntypical of other front-line service workplaces. While the article mayhave made a convincing case for the importance of communities ofcoping in call centres, it may not be appropriate to extend its argumentsto other types of service work. Certainly, two distinctive aspects of call-centre work are relevant regarding the analysis of communities of coping.One is that because the service interaction is technologically mediatedthere is likely to be a greater propensity for customers to become abusivewhen they become disillusioned than when interaction occurs face-to-face. The other distinctive aspect of call-centre work also springs fromtechnological mediation. Call-centre workers are able to shield customersfrom interactions among themselves on the office floor. This allows theimmediate creation of communities of coping within the labour process.When the service interaction is face-to-face, it is likely to be much moredifficult for workers to create communities of coping during the labourprocess. In these other settings, ‘off-stage areas’ are more likely to besignificant arenas for the creation of communities of coping.7 It ispossible that the immediate communities of coping that arise during thelabour process, when emotions are at their sharpest, may constitute amore significant part of workplace relations than when the communalcoping occurs away from the labour process.

This study has shown the importance of communities of coping in fourservice workplaces. While the article has highlighted the importance ofworkplace context in the functioning of the communities of coping, thestudy can also be seen as highlighting more general tendencies in thesocial relations of service work, and in social mores more widely, thatmay inform communities of coping in other service workplaces. AsLeidner (1993) has argued, the social relations of front-line service workcan be conceptualized in terms of a customer-worker-management trian-gle in which dynamics often revolve around coalition forming betweenthe parties. In these terms, this study has highlighted a key point wherethe workforce is socially separated from both the customer and manage-ment. The societal-wide rise of the discourse of the sovereign customer—which gets translated in the service encounter as an attempt to promote


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an enchanting myth of customer sovereignty—means that the customer isa figure more likely to hand out abuse when enchantment turns todisillusionment. Further, management is pushed by the nature of com-petition to pander to this abusive ‘sovereign’ customer. Therefore,increasingly management instructs service workers thus: ‘he [the cus-tomer] can really talk to you how he wants. Your job is to deal with it’(Taylor and Tyler, 2001: 70). Here, then, in the social relations of servicework, the workforce are systematically left on their own, isolated fromthe abusive customer and from management, who place them in theposition of putting up with the abuse. In this situation, which will bereplicated in very many service workplaces, service workers are likely toturn to each other for support, creating in the process important, andpotentially uncontrollable, communities of coping.

If communities of coping are important within other service work-places, they may feature centrally in struggles over the nature of contem-porary service work. On the one hand, a managerial take on communitiesof coping could stress the obstacles for management control that suchinformal workgroup cultures represent. This would suggest the potentialfor management to seek increasingly to pre-empt the creation of commu-nities of coping through the use of ‘stress management’ techniques.Indeed, attempts at cognitive restructuring and stress management occur-red at the sites studied. Newton et al. (1995) refer to the ‘stress manage-ment’ discourse as involving conceptions of stress as individualized,ahistorical, and apolitical (see also Sturdy [2000] on customer servicetraining). Within this discourse, training programmes and counsellingservices in firms emphasize making the individual worker more ‘stressfit’, better able to cope with the causes of stress, and hence moreproductive. Newton et al. (1995) argue strongly that this way of individu-alizing stress means that there is less likelihood of seeing the organiza-tional and social causes of a collective sense of stress. Further, bysupporting implicit constraints on the voicing of negative emotions, thesetechniques mean that it is less likely that front-line workers will see theircommonality of feeling, and hence it will be less likely that front-lineworkers will challenge the root causes of the common feeling. Bycontrast, trade unions may see communities of coping as an importantform of nascent solidarity, deriving from the collective nature of thelabour process, from which unionism can grow. It may be that thecollective nature of emotional labour could constitute a key way forunions to break through the elusive ‘residual industry factor’ that appearsto bar their way in many service industries. Further, trade unions arelikely to approach the issue of coping with the pain of emotional labourin a more pro-active, political and social manner than the individualizedstress-management approaches advocated by management. They aremore likely to confront the source of the pain—the social structure of thecustomer-worker-management relationship—at its source. Work bySimms et al. (2000) and Eaton (1996) certainly suggests this as a real


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possibility. The collective nature of emotional labour, therefore, is likelyto underpin a number of important political battles within serviceorganizations in the coming years.

NotesThanks to Karen Shire, May Tam, Steve Frenkel and Leigh Donoghue who werepart of the research project that collected the data used in this article. Thanks alsoto this journal’s anonymous reviewers and the participants at EGOS and Work,Employment and Society conferences where earlier drafts of this article werediscussed.

1 Coping here refers to ‘the way employees get through their working day’(Noon and Blyton, 1997: 140), particularly regarding how they deal with, andsurvive, the pain which abuse from customers can bring. Communities ofcoping can be seen as an important collective ‘survival strategy’ (Noon andBlyton, 1997: Ch. 8) for service workers.

2 Here management is caught on the horns of the dilemma of encouraging aform of workforce cohesion which can then inform autonomous, and poten-tially oppositional, collective solidarity (see Noon and Blyton, 1997: 150).

3 This is not suggested as a universal tendency for female supervisors. Somefemale supervisors will have greater ability at asserting authority than somemale supervisors. The point, however, is that the attitude of irate customerappears to be systematically different in relation to female supervisors/CSRsthan in relation to male supervisors/CSRs.

4 This quotation highlights the way in which service organizations can come tointernalize discriminatory customer prejudices. See Korczynski (2002, Ch. 9)and Trentham and Larwood (1998) for a discussion of this.

5 Another possible interpretation is that the cynical culture at TELCO can beseen as typical for service workers exposed to the ‘sovereign customer’, whilethe other three sites, in which there was a predominant culture of customerempathy, were the ‘outliers’. For this explanation to hold, however, it wouldbe necessary to identify something specifically distinctive about the organiza-tion of the work at INSCO, USA-BANK and OZ-BANK. I have been unable toidentify what this might be, and given this, I hold to my explanation relatingto the distinctive mode of socialization at TELCO—an explanation, moreover,which was acknowledged by actors within the site, as the quotations in thetext show.

6 It is difficult to offer an unequivocal explanation of why management was ablepublicly to display performance figures at TELCO without encountering thesort of significant resistance that occurred at OZ-BANK and INSCO. Onerelevant factor may be the different nature of communal coping at TELCO.This communal coping was pre-emptive, socially creating a cynical staretoward the customers, while the communal coping at the other sites wasreactive, socially creating a shoulder to cry on. The latter form of coping hasembedded within it a greater depth of lateral cooperation and support than theformer. This may have informed the different ways in which CSRs at the sitesreacted to the fostering of individual competitiveness.


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7 The research in the four call centres, which also covered off-stage areas,indicated that off-stage areas were not important places for communities ofcoping to flourish.

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Marek Korczynski is based at Loughborough University Business School. He haswritten extensively on service work. He is co-author of the book On the FrontLine (Cornell University Press, 1999) and is sole author of Human ResourceManagement in Service Work (Macmillan/Palgrave, 2002). Address: Loughbor-ough University Business School, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. [email:[email protected]]


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Collective Emotional Work

Documents

service workplace

service industries

frontline service workers

agreat deal of service

informal communities

harmof emotional labour

collectiveemotional

important role of communities