The Work Experience in a Call Centre : At the Frontier of Commitment and Distance

Principally based on qualitative data, this article aims to show how customer service representatives (CSRs) in a call centre in Montreal are able to find some spaces of autonomy enabling them to be actively committed in the role associated with their work. Results presented suggest that their work activities are articulated around commitment and distance concepts in a dual perspective. In fact, because their work occurs at the frontier of the organization and market, they can mobilize resources in that zone to reappropriate constraints that press on them by applying either an instrumental commitment towards the organization and social distance towards customers or a commitment towards customers and a social distance towards their employer, depending on behaviours of clients online. These strategies generate beneficial temporary effects for them by rehabilitating their subjectivity in a way that protects them from unpleasant clients and by actualizing the will to be socially affirmed in their role of CSR. In sum, this play of commitment and distance leads to an edification of CSRs’ commitment towards their occupation, actualizing the values that stimulate them in their work. Results presented in this article differ from previous studies on call centres because, on one hand, it shows that it is possible for these kinds of workers to develop a professional commitment based on dual articulation of commitment and distance and, on the other hand, it moves away from the empowerment and social domination theoretical perspectives to improve knowledge about duality angle by showing that the reappropriation of constraints by CSRs remains possible, even though their space of autonomy is thin and fragile