Computers,Customer Service Operatives and Cyborgs: Intra-actions in Call Centres

Abstract

Organizational practice theorists have convincingly argued that the social and material, subjects and objects, are inextricable and co-emerge as the outcomes of practices or networks. My article engages with the debate in this field by explaining how, within these assumptions, discrete categories or actors are brought into being. The ethnographic field-work from call centres initially shows how customer service operatives and computers are entangled and inseparable in carrying out the practice of customer service calls. The findings then show how meaningful boundaries around actors are established through temporal delineations, or cuts, within practices. My study thus exposes the multiplicity of how employees make sense of surrounding technology. This contributes to organization studies by explaining the dynamics and fluidity that underlie the categories and actors which are taken for granted in contemporary workplaces. This also contributes to our appreciation of a labour process beyond dualisms.