Peculiaridades de las relaciones interraciales en Sancti Spíritus hasta 1898

The literature also makes reference to the how individuals remain passive or engage in acts of confrontation against EPM. Spitzmüller and Stanton (2006:245) note that, although the prevalence of employee monitoring and surveillance technologies is

increasing, very little research has explored the question of whether employees simply accept these systems (compliance) or enact strategies for resisting them. The absence of the worker and the role of resistance in the sociology of work and organisations was first highlighted by Thompson and Ackroyd (1995), who accepted that, while workplace opposition had changed, the worker had to be brought back into the employment relationship. They examined a wide range of workplace studies and redefined resistance as misbehaviour (Mulholland, 2004:710).

Similarly to society, EPM may lead individuals either to comply or resist in the workplace. Employees may hold certain beliefs and attitudes about organisational monitoring and surveillance, and intentions to comply or resist may relate to attitudes as well as social norms about these behaviours. Whether employees then enact compliance or resistance behaviours may depend upon intentions and control (Spitzmüller and Stanton, 2006:247). In a call centre environment, a worker performing a monitored task and the social processes surrounding the task provide a basis for integrating psychological and sociological research on work performance monitoring and surveillance. Compliance and resistance are among the most important foci of this subject (Ball and Margulis, 2011:113).

In particular, compliance with and resistance to employee monitoring are influenced by employee attitudes from both psychological and sociological perspectives. Psychological research suggests that employees’ attitudes towards monitoring determine the likelihood of resistance or compliance. Spitzmüller and Stanton (2006), for example, demonstrate the power of personal beliefs about monitoring in determining compliance or resistance when individuals have sufficient control over their immediate environment

to act as they see fit. Of particular importance is whether employees feel their supervisor values their tasks (Ball and Margulis, 2011:116). Spitzmüller and Stanton (2006) have proposed a framework based on the theory of planned behaviour and ethical decision making to predict employees’ intentions for compliance or resistance with monitoring system technology (MST). Once a social system has entrenched the need to avoid irregular behaviours in the minds of individuals, they will operate in such a way as to satisfy the expectations of the system. However, caution is required when discussing compliance and resistance. Mason et al. (2002:556) argue that the resistance/compliance binary is too blunt an analytic instrument to capture the richness of social relations. With regard to compliance, there is an assumption that employees working under EPM are forced to comply with agreed standards, laws and instructions, and obey the norms prescribed by the EPM system. Workers are measured according to their compliance with these norms (Ball, 2007:579). Weller (2012:59) argues that contemporary developments in tools and technologies specifically designed to monitor, control and rationalise human activities lead to the experience of normalised conformity. Faced with uncertainty with respect to whether they are being watched, people begin to watch themselves. They behave as if they are being watched and are careful not to attract the anger of the imagined observer. Individuals thus conform to the explicit, and even implicit, rules of the organisation or department because they imagine they are being watched (Simon, 2005:5).

Norris and Armstrong (1999:92) suggest that the idea of the panopticon illustrates how the primary mechanism for inducing conformity is mental rather than physical. In the panopticon, because the certainty of detention and therefore intervention is so high,

inmates soon learn the futility of resistance and the necessity of conformity. In the panopticon metaphor, however, there is little explanation of why or how people may “resist” (Newton, 1994:893). The apparent passivity of Foucault’s subjects, who seem to internalise behavioural repertoires, neglects any possible active role (Lyon, 2007:86). Accepting the view that the electronic panopticon totally dominates the workforce removes the possibility of collective organisation and resistance. This position coincides with a recent tendency in labour process theory, in which a preoccupation with individual subjectivity has obscured the importance of collective, trade union organisation as a more developed form of resistance (Taylor and Bain, 1999:133). Bain and Taylor (2000:16) strongly reject the crude transfer of the panopticon metaphor to the capitalist workplace. They suggest that worker resistance, union recruitment and serious challenge to managerial power, which occurred in their case study, may happen anywhere (Bain and Taylor, 2000:16).

Harper’s (1995) study of employee compliance with organisational policies found that individuals’ group membership, social norms within groups, workgroup identification and participation in the implementation of the monitoring system are precursors to compliance with a monitoring policy (Spitzmüller and Stanton, 2006:246). Worker compliance with monitoring seems to be linked to whether the organisation has an ethical climate that encourages diversity and tolerance, and whether the employee demonstrates strong commitment to the organisation (Ball and Margulis, 2011:115). EPM may lead individuals to be silent in the workplace. When monitored, individuals may well seek to break circuits of knowledge, information and threat by not giving up information in an age where it is a highly valued commodity (Ball, 2010:99). People

may act as passive subjects in order to avoid reprimand, and agents’ silence appears to confirm that they are passive subjects (Bain and Taylor, 2000:6). In an EPM context, employees will comply with agreed standards and conform to the rules of the technological structure in order to avoid punishment.

In terms of conformity, employees working under EPM are forced to exercise what Norris and Armstrong (1999:6) call “anticipatory conformity”. This form of conformity appears both in EPM and in social settings (Norris, 1997). Through anticipatory conformity, individuals force themselves to comply with the social order and strive to become part of a cultural group (Norris, 1997). Zuboff (1989:345, cited in Bryant, 1995) claims that anticipatory conformity is experienced when individuals co-operate fully in order to reduce “the risk of unwanted discovery”. Ball (2010:93) suggests that the form monitoring takes conveys messages about the importance of quality over quantity and the importance of working as a team. This may produce anticipatory conformity, where employees behave in a docile and accepting way, and automatically reduce the amount of commitment and motivation they display.

Resistance, however, is also apparent in a call centre environment. Drawing on evidence from a telecommunications call centre, Bain and Taylor (2000:2) analyse the significance of emerging forms of employee resistance. Valsecchi (2006:124) postulates that the call centre sector exhibits high labour turnover and absenteeism, and a segmented and diverse workforce, often working under different contracts of employment. Such a workforce may create problems in terms of commitment to the workplace, and issues of control and resistance. Workers’ resistance to and negotiation with managerial prescriptions are quite common in this environment (Valsecchi,

2006:124); in many call centres electronic monitoring induces control but also resistance (Bain and Taylor, 2000). The company dictates the length of operators’ work days and the length and ocurrence of their breaks, and controls adherence to these strict rhythms through electronic monitoring (Valsecchi, 2006:132). In a study by Townsend (2005:47), a number of call centre employees individually and cooperatively resisted the controls of the electronic surveillance system. However, this did not occur in all teams in the case study. One team was faced with a labour process that directed their resistance toward the management of the call centre, rather than at management via the machine. Winiecki and Wigman’s (2007:118) ethnographic study of call centre work indicates that organisational “truth” claims about workers are produced in a constellation of architectural, technological and managerial apparatus. Workers orient to and reify the power of these claims, even when resisting (Winiecki and Wigman, 2007:118).

Mulholland (2004:709) examined workplace conflict in an Irish call centre, criticising managerial and post-structural accounts of resistance for failing to see that workplace conflict continues to be located in structural issues, such as the employment relationship, which make pay, productivity and work intensification a source of conflict (Mulholland, 2004:709). In a call centre environment, agent, manager and organisation become defensive and a common outcome is a destructive crisis of trust that has troublesome implications for the capacity to learn (Houlihan, 2000:228).

Bain and Taylor (2000) found that invasive monitoring led employees to identify and exploit the weaknesses of monitoring systems. Deutsch-Salamon and Robinson (2002) found misbehaviour (e.g. property and production losses) to be more prevalent when electronically-monitored employees did not trust management. By comparison, Grant

and Sumanth (2009) found that the performance of fundraisers working in call centres and their motivation to benefit others was moderated by the perceived trustworthiness of their managers. A perceived lack of fairness in monitoring, therefore, may cause undesirable negative employee reactions such as withdrawal, resignation or some other form of diminished organisational citizenship (Johnston and Cheng, 2002:6). Sewell and Barker (2006) cite four studies involving reverse surveillance as a form of resistance. Reverse surveillance involves using information collected from monitoring to turn the tables on management, such as forcing management to adhere to the same performance standards as imposed on subordinates (Ball and Margulis, 2011:116). Agents may deliberately redirect calls to other service operators, enter misleading activity codes into the system or simply hang up on offensive customers (Deery and Kinnie, 2002:10). Mulholland (2004:719) claims that workers use traditional patterns of resistance such as work avoidance, which they collectively describe as “smokin’ an’ leavin’”. Smoking is an established custom and practice, providing an opportunity for an extra break, regardless of whether or not people smoke, ensuring that working patterns are broken up by regular intervals of “idle time” (Mulholland, 2004:719).

Holman (2005:124) argues that research on call centres tends to portray CSRs as passive figures simply responding to work conditions. In contrast, studies inspired by labour process theory have illustrated CSRs’ active consent to, compliance with and resistance to managers’ efforts to control their work. However, despite managers’ best efforts, CSRs may not consent to managerial control practices. They may have different ideas about how a call centre should be run and are likely to resist practices viewed as damaging (Holman, 2005:124). Bain and Taylor (2000:2) provide evidence on employee

resistance in a telecommunications call centre, where call centre agents disregarded the organisation’s scripted conversational rules, searched for weaknesses in the firm’s control systems and constructed free spaces for themselves “which provided an amnesty from normal emotional labours”.

Studies of call centres demonstrate that intense surveillance increases resistance, sabotage and non-compliance with management (Ball, 2010:94). Research into the “dark side” of organisational behaviour has determined that employee sabotage is usually a reaction by disgruntled employees to perceived mistreatment (Skarlicki, van Jaarsveld and Walker, 2008:1335). They work their way around surveillance by manipulative measures such as dialling through call lists, leaving lines open after the customer has hung up, pretending to talk on the phone, providing a minimal response to customer queries and misleading customers (Ball, 2010:94).