The literature refers to a connection between EPM and emotional labour. Research has shown that emotions play a key role in everyday business operations. Fineman (2007:1) claims that “all organizations are emotional arenas where feelings shape events and events shape feelings”. Emotions “underpin, consciously or unconsciously, the coalitions, conflicts and negotiations that emerge ... They are part of the ‘warp and weft’ of work experiences and practices”.
Although in the literature on emotions there is widespread agreement that emotions are important, what exactly constitutes emotion remains confusing (Oatley and Jenkins, 2001:xxii). Plutchik (1994:xiii) asserts that:
some of the bases for the confusions involved in studying emotions have been: ambiguities in the language of emotion, reluctance of many psychologists to study so subjective an experience, ethical limitations on laboratory research on
emotions, existence of different historical traditions (theories) and lack of well-articulated theories in the field.
Gray and Watson (2001:22) define emotions as having three components: (1) innate, biologically hard-wired systems that (2) promote the survival of the organism by (3) facilitating efficient, adaptive responses or reactions to changing environmental circumstances. They suggest that emotions can be understood by examining them in terms of duration, object, intensity, frequency, function and type (Gray and Watson, 2001:25). Stanley and Burrows (2001) state that emotion can be explained by examining the stages of an emotional response. They claim that emotion is experienced in the following way:
Detection of an eliciting event, change in basal arousal (orienting and preparing to respond), appraisal of the significance of the event (interpretation), emotional response consistent with the interpretation, subjective experience of the emotion, change in motivation, motivated behaviour and secondary appraisal of the significance of the response (Stanley and Burrows, 2001:7).
Nevertheless, the experience of emotions is complicated, and a number of important issues must be taken into account when defining affect. For example, the social environment in which individuals live and work plays a key role in how they feel emotionally. This social environment may determine their bodily reactions to events (EPM), as well as conscious and unconscious emotional thoughts (Grosz, 1994; Harré, 1986; Lupton, 1998; Wetherell, Taylor and Yates, 2001). The experience of emotions is
not a rational process, but is unpredictable and may change at any moment. Emotion may thus contain both conscious and unconscious elements, based on the socio-cultural environment of individuals and their interactions since early childhood.
Surveillance is both a bodily experience and an emotional event (Ball, 2005). Surveillance as an emotional experience evokes a variety of feelings (Koskela, 2002). Emotional events have been found to be based partly on sensorimotor processes (Frese and Zapf, 1994; Hacker, 1998), which are usually automatic, without conscious attention. When an emotion is felt, the expression of this emotion occurs automatically, and may be moderated by social competence (Zapf et al., 2010:380). A particular requirement for customer service representatives in call centres is an emotional understanding of clients’ needs, necessitating a considerable level of empathy (Dormann and Zijlstra, 2010:306).
There is evidence to suggest that EPM may affect individuals’ emotions in a variety of ways. Stanton and Weiss (2000:424) claim that monitoring and surveillance may affect employees’ feelings about work and the workplace – attitudes, emotions, beliefs, norms, etc. – and may also modify on-the-job employee behaviour, including productivity, citizenship and unproductive behaviour. The emotional experience of being under surveillance may be ambivalent. Koskela (2003:300) argues that a surveillance camera may provide a feeling of security, but may suddenly become a sign of danger.
Ball (2001) and Ball and Wilson (2000) have proposed a relationship between monitoring-related outcomes and how the monitoring system is configured, which helps to set the parameters for the empirical work of this thesis. More specifically, both studies have examined CBPM. Ball (2001) explores CBPM in the workplace as an issue
dominated by questions of ethics, raising three key implications. First, it is important for any empirical investigation of the ethics of CBPM practice to take into consideration not only its compliance with former “best practice” guidelines, but also social relations which infiltrate the context of its application. Second, this requires a specific epistemological treatment of CBPM as something with measurable and identifiable effects, as well as having a socially constructed meaning. Third, current arguments against which this debate is set, which regard contrasting epistemologies and ontologies as incompatible, should be addressed and an alternative introduced (Ball, 2001:211). Ball and Wilson (2000) examine CBPM in two UK financial services organisations, critiquing how this area has been theorised by both traditional and critical organisation theorists. In examining subject positions in interpretive repertoires, the paper demonstrates how power, control and resistance are constituted at an individual level and are specifically linked to the use (and abuse) of CBPM technology (Ball and Wilson, 2000:539).
The emotions experienced by individuals in a call centre environment depend on characteristics and organisational features of call centre work, choices and strategies available to manage the work, the effects of this type of work on employees, and the responses and reactions of call centre staff to their work experiences (Deery and Kinnie, 2002:3). Work in call centres is linked with various forms of emotion work, for example the requirement to display continuously positive emotions in interactions with customers and to handle negative emotions such as boredom or monotony that often result from simple, scripted communication processes (Wegge et al., 2006:237). Discrete emotions such as anger, envy, guilt, disgust and anxiety are triggered by specific events, and the
consequences of these emotions may differ substantially (Payne and Cooper, 2001, cited in Wegge et al., 2006:237). A study of the emotional aspects of service interactions in call centres found that CSRs expressed positive emotions such as happiness and enthusiasm on a fairly regular basis, but seldom expressed negative emotions such as anger or anxiety (Zapf et al, 2003, cited in Holman, 2005:115). In another study of 2,091 call centre representatives working in 85 call centres in the UK, central assumptions of affective events theory (AET) were tested (Wegge et al., 2006:237). AET predicts that specific features of work (e.g. autonomy) have an impact on the arousal of emotions and moods at work that, in turn, co-determine the job satisfaction of employees (Wegge et al., 2006:237). The fact that individuals sometimes appear to do little to counter surveillance does not mean that surveillance means nothing to them (Ball, 2009:641). Working under EPM may lead individuals to experience both negative and positive emotions.