call centre

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

The rejection of work therefore appears to be a common phenomenon in call centres and is a theme that we will return to throughout the book. The authors of Call Centers for Dummies admit that ‘not everyone thinks that call center changes and evolution are positive’.63 They locate this in part due to ‘the impact of call centers on everyone’s daily lives, and partly because some call centers had bad management and used bad business practices’. The workers 21 Working the Phones in call centres are completely absent from their analysis; instead they focus on how call centres ‘have raised the ire of consumers and caught the attention of legislators’, something they blame on ‘overly aggressive business practices’.

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Meanwhile, The Wolf of Wall Street captures the top-seller type of dynamic that call centres try to promote: if you sell hard enough you will be successful. Nevertheless, they both illustrate a number of key points and provide the first glimpses of what we will later explore. where did call centres come from? Call Centers for Dummies claims to be ‘a road map that can help you lead and manage a call centre’.20 The authors ‘make some assumptions’ about who is reading the book and suggests that they might be ‘a hotshot MBA tracking through your career, and you find yourself running a call center’,21 which is perhaps ironic considering the title of the book.

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Call Centers for Dummies claims to be ‘a road map that can help you lead and manage a call centre’.20 The authors ‘make some assumptions’ about who is reading the book and suggests that they might be ‘a hotshot MBA tracking through your career, and you find yourself running a call center’,21 which is perhaps ironic considering the title of the book. The authors themselves are quite vague about the history of call centres, writing, ‘although we can’t really tell you when the first call center opened, we imagine that call centers started around the time that the telephone became a common household device . . . the evolution of call centers just makes sense’.22 11 Working the Phones This common sense point about the development of call centres is useful; however, as with many phenomena, it is important to go beyond the conclusion that something happened because it ‘just makes sense’. A logical starting point is the invention of the telephone.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

There’s a high churn rate among call-centre workers, and they burn out far quicker than Dutch bus drivers. Deep feels that this is because ‘your mentality changes’ when you work in a call centre. ‘You try to think like an American, but you’re not really an American, you’re an Indian. And sometimes you make the wrong decisions… You’re earning good, you’re looking good, you’re admired — that’s outside. But on the inside, you have a void.’ Ironically, many Indian telecommuters not only have to face the stress of virtual travel but also have to endure the discomforts of commuting in the flesh. Although call centres may ease congestion in the West, they increase it in the places they are built.

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This is all very taxing: it’s as if they’d been teleported to the same locations as the people they are servicing down the phone and online. While call-centre workers, according to Deep, are trained ‘to think like Westerners, to talk like them, and to spend all day talking to them. The culture seep[s] through, but not all of the culture. Most of the people who work on the floor have never been to America or Great Britain… There are enormous gaps in their mental picture that they simply fill with their imagination and the movies.’ Sometimes, such measures aren’t enough. When Eve Butler, a seventy-six-year-old Welsh woman, was put through to an Indian call centre in January 2013 instead of to BT’s Welsh Language Bureau, the operator she spoke to was forced to admit that he couldn’t connect her to a Welsh-speaking service because the language, and indeed the country, were mysteries to him.

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At home in India, meanwhile, Roy worked to persuade the government that telecommuting was a good idea, and that he should be allowed to build facilities to accommodate it. At times he had to overcome surreal obstacles: I went to meet bureaucrats after they sat on our application for months. A government official said he could approve a call center, but could not approve a center to handle ‘incoming and outgoing calls’. So we had to print definitions of a call center from the Internet and take them to him to show him that’s what a call center did. In keeping with the Jack Nilles vision of telecommuting – that it might employ people who were excluded from the labour market either because they couldn’t get to it or weren’t expected to be there – Roy pushed for the right to employ women on his so-called ‘graveyard shifts’ that ran from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

That’s why many describe twenty-first-century workplaces as being governed by Taylorism 2.0, or Digital Taylorism.39 Any work composed of repetitive tasks and of sufficient scale is a prime target for Digital Taylorism, and right at ground zero sit three million US call centre workers. At first blush, a phone call between two people expressing the vast possibilities of human language hardly seems like a repetitive event, but if you’ve ever been herded through narrow conversational paths by seemingly robotic call centre workers, you’ve experienced the effects of Digital Taylorism. Calls are measured down to the second and every event that impacts the company’s bottom line is recorded, whether that’s issuing a costly refund or upselling an oblivious customer to a more expensive subscription service.

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In doing so, they’ll only be replicating what’s typical in the industry today, except at wider scale: Noble Systems’ call centre gamification platform supposedly “appeals to today’s Millennial and Generation Z employee teams and uses both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors to promote and reinforce desired behaviors and gain greater buy-in” (as a millennial, I’m not so sure on that); and in 2021, several news sites reported that Teleperformance began surveilling thousands of its call centre employees working at home due to COVID-19 via webcam, with its built-in gamification platform delivering “the reward and recognition of successful behaviours and outcomes.”44 It’s tempting to assume that Digital Taylorism will be limited to lower-paid workers who don’t have the option to walk out the door.

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“News: Noble Gamification Wins 2018 CUSTOMER Contact Center Technology Award,” Contact Center World, October 15, 2018, www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/noble-gamification-wins-2018-customer-contact-center-technology-award-2.aspx; Peter Walker, “Call Centre Staff to Be Monitored via Webcam for Home-Working ‘Infractions,’” Guardian, March 26, 2021, www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/26/teleperformance-call-centre-staff-monitored-via-webcam-home-working-infractions; “Digital Platforms,” Teleperformance, accessed November 26, 2021, https://pt.www.teleperformance.com/en-us/solutions/digital-platforms. 45. Andy Silvester, “Exclusive: Barclays Installs Big Brother-Style Spyware on Employees’ Computers,” City A.M., February 19, 2020, www.cityam.com/exclusive-barclays-installs-big-brother-style-spyware-on-employees-computers. 46.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

Branch networks are the foundations whilst electronic distribution is the cream on the cake. This is why retail banks talk about multichannel strategies where they try to integrate their call centre channel with their internet channel; they attempt to deliver mobile banking interoperable with the call centre channel; they mess about with CRM to ensure consistency across branch and internet channels. My problem is this: banks only have one channel. They do not have multichannels, call centre channels, internet channels, mobile channels and so forth. They just have an electronic channel that underscores and provides the foundation for all end points: mobile, telephone, internet and branch.

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Over time, another channel appeared, the direct sales representative. These sales folk resided in branches and were served by the branch system. Then, a new channel popped up, the call centre. The call centre was like one massive remote branch and required a new structure to operate. But the underlying data could be delivered through the branch-based systems, so the new structure was primarily designed to sit on top of those systems, offering scripts into the various products the bank offered. The call centre people struggled with this – sometimes operating six or more windows of screens at any one time to get a competitive picture of the customer’s needs – but they lived with it.

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For 21 years the bank has grown and evolved to suit those people who want to use them, who are typically higher net worth, internet-savvy, educated professionals. Today, the bank sits firmly within the HSBC empire as a model of how to do remote, bank without branches servicing. This is illustrated by the fact that the core call centre technologies are about to go through a refresh to be the platform for all of one HSBC’s global call centre platforms. But it’s still a bank about people and human interaction. For example, Matt retold a story last week of one call centre operator who’s bag was lost on a train, together with her ticket, so the keen young service guy dived down to the train station with cash in hand to pay for her train ticket. That’s service.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

You might think by hiding phone numbers on your website you save costs by reducing call centre load. Research shows, however, that if you can direct customers to the correct call centre number quickly, you reduce traffic and costs—rather than leave customers to experiment by calling many different numbers. On every product or transaction page on your website, list the specific call centre number for that type of product/service. This can direct customers to an Interactive Voice Response menu specifically designed for that query, which will reduce call centre load and ensure CSR (customer service representatives) are appropriately equipped to answer specific questions.

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They might wire money to a third party, visit an ATM to withdraw cash, go online to check if their salary has been deposited, pay a utility bill, use their credit card to purchase some goods from a retailer, fill out a personal loan application online, ring up the call centre to see what their credit card balance is, or report a lost card. If they are sophisticated customers or clients, they may also trade some stocks, transfer some cash from their Euro forex account to their US dollar account, put a lump sum in a mutual fund, or sign up for a home insurance policy online. In the early days of the Internet and call centre, it was not uncommon to find that the call centre and internet banking were 24 hours behind the in-bank systems because the “batch” processes that updated the alternate channel databases/logs ran overnight.

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Even better, why not put the same list on the homepage! Compile this list of these “top” service enquiries by checking call centre data for the most frequent call types over the last six months. By simply putting the answers of these frequent issues on the site, you can reduce call centre traffic by 10–20 per cent. Keep in mind you would actually have to provide a solution on the site, and not just some FAQs. There may have to be some process intelligence. But get this right and those customers already going to your website to solve this problem will not ring your call centre. Thus, immediate load reduction . . . Remind customers when they withdraw cash from an ATM that their credit card payment is due.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth
Published 1 Mar 2018

Then it would have been within our power to resist had the company tried to snatch anything back. The situation in some call centres is, of course, worse than anything I experienced at Admiral. In order to coax firms to keep their call centres in Wales – rather than relocate offshore to places like India – companies have trumpeted the purported ‘flexibility’ of the workforce (see: part-time, casual, poorly paid). Cardiff houses many of Wales’s biggest call centres, and a lady called June, who worked at another outsourcing call centre, relayed to me just how stressful this sort of environment could sometimes be. ‘[The staff] get stressed because the targets for sales and all that ...

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Yet as a youth worker I would meet in Ebbw Vale told me: ‘If you’ve studied and you’ve got a degree, do you really wanna be working in a call centre?’ Probably not, and you will notice that the celebrities and commentators who bleat on endlessly about graft and hard work rarely send their own children to toil away fruitlessly in call centres and scrabble around pulling vegetables out of the ground in the sodden fields of Kent. In Wales I was working as a ‘Renewals Consultant’. It was up to me to persuade customers who had found a cheaper car insurance quote elsewhere to stick with Admiral. There are around 5,000 call centres in the UK, employing around a million people.7 As well as Swansea, Admiral has offices in Cardiff and Newport and is famously a ‘good’ company to work for.

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I had got through the interview process at local car insurance company Admiral, and had been offered a position renewing customers’ policies in one of its call centres. The company required immediate ‘proof of address’ in the local area. While none of the ‘professional’ jobs I have done have ever required this, at Admiral – as at Amazon and Carewatch – it was considered urgent. Thus I had to get a deposit down on a place right away – spending more money than I had intended to in the process – and chase up my bank for the ellusive statement with my new address on it. Brynmill is a relatively affluent suburb adorned mostly with dirty white stuccoed terraces. Living there whilst working from eight till five in a call centre you soon come to realise just what vastly different worlds students and locals in university towns and cities often inhabit.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

For an outline of Marx’s theory of centralization, see Thier, A People’s Guide to Capitalism. 132. Peter Walker, “Call Centre Staff to Be Monitored via Webcam for Home-Working ‘Infractions,’ ” The Guardian, March 26, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/26/teleperformance-call-centre-staff-monitored-via-webcam-home-working-infractions. 133. Thodoris Chondrogiannos and Nikolas Leontopoulos, “How a Global Call Centre Giant (Mis)managed the Pandemic,” Investigate Europe, May 7, 2020, https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2020/how-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-call-centre-companies-mismanaged-the-pandemic-crisis/. 134. Olivia Solon, “Big Tech Call Center Workers Face Pressure to Accept Home Surveillance,” NBC News, August 8, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-workers-face-pressure-accept-home-surveillance-n1276227. 135.

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But it’s also worth pointing out that even in the rich world there’s a sizable gap between the wages and job quality of those employed to manage other people’s labor and those employed to do as they’re told. Over the course of the pandemic, demand for call center workers rose, but some were forced to work from home, potentially compromising bosses’ ability to surveil their workers. Teleperformance, one of the largest call center operators in the world, responded by introducing rigid new home surveillance technologies that would allow bosses to “check whether [workers] are eating, looking at their phones or leaving their desks while working from home.”132 In Colombia, Teleperformance workers raised concerns about conditions in the call centers during the pandemic, as they were not given adequate personal protective equipment and many were forced to share headsets.133 The company responded by allowing workers to work from home if they accepted the installation of Teleperformance cameras on their laptops to monitor their activities all day long.

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Olivia Solon, “Big Tech Call Center Workers Face Pressure to Accept Home Surveillance,” NBC News, August 8, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-workers-face-pressure-accept-home-surveillance-n1276227. 135. Frank W. Elwell, “Harry Braverman and the Working Class,” Rogers State University, accessed July 9, 2023, http://faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Braverman/Presentation/Braverman.pdf. 136. Ibid. 137. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). 138. The challenge of more efficiently controlling the worker’s labor “presents itself as the challenge of management.”

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

If you think shop workers have it bad, consider now the call centre worker. There are now nearly a million people working in call centres, and the number is going up every year. To put that in perspective, there were a million men down the pits at the peak of mining in the 1940s. If the miner was one of the iconic jobs of post-war Britain, then today, surely, the call centre worker is as good a symbol of the working class as any. 'Call centres are a very regimented environment,' says John McInally, a trade unionist leading efforts by the PCS to unionize call centre workers. 'It's rows of desks with people sitting with headphones.

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That's one reason why the sickness rate in call centres is nearly twice the national average. The other is deep alienation from the work. In One call centre McInally dealt with in Northern England, sickness rates had reached nearly 30 per cent. 'That's a sign oflowmorale,' he says-as is the fact that annual staff turnover is around a quarter of the workforce. And, like so much of the new working class, the salaries of call centre workers are poor. A trainee can expect £12,500, while the higher-grade operators are on an average of just £16,000. Twenty-eight-year-old Carl Leishman has been a call centre worker in County Durham for eight years.

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John McInally has been leading valiant attempts by the pes union to organize call centre workers. He believes that there are real grounds for optimism, because of one key similarity between call centres and old- style factories: large numbers of workers concentrated in one place. But he has no illusions about the obstacles that are in the way, not least because of how regimented the work is. 'You could have four hundred people in a room, or a couple of rooms, who may see each other every day but never speak to each other,' he says. Just as factory workers were stuck at their looms in Victorian times, call centre workers are stuck at their desks.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

No dream job Part of the problem is that call-centre work tends not to be much fun – although Indians enjoy much better pay, relative to other local jobs, than British or American call-centre employees. At Wipro Spectramind, two “fun day” employees try to jolly the place up as rows of cubiclefarm workers use a piece of software called “retention buddy 1.3” to dissuade Americans from cancelling their internet subscriptions. Sanjay Kumar, the boss of vCustomer, one of the few remaining independent Indian call-centre companies, says the industry’s growth potential may be limited. He thinks the total pool of call-centre workers is only about 2m, and awkwardly scattered across India – although that still leaves a lot of room for expansion from the current 300,000 or so.

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More awkwardly still, the very industries said to be badly hurt by the migration of jobs overseas report a shortage of workers at home. Most of the jobs created in India are either in call-centres or at it firms. But call-centre companies in both Britain and America suffer from rising staff turnover and struggle to recruit more people. Britain’s Call-Centre Association, a trade lobby, thinks that employment in the industry in Britain will rise in the next few years; in the United States, call-centre employment is expected to decline slightly. As it spending recovers from recession, labour markets in America I 144 A WORLD OF WORK and Europe are becoming tighter in this industry too.

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The pioneers were ge, American Express and British Airways, who all arrived in the late 1990s. These companies were joined by home-grown call-centre operators such as 24x7, vCustomer, Spectramind and Daksh. Spectramind has since been bought by Wipro, and Daksh by ibm. These Indian firms also face competition from specialist American call-centre companies which, like the global it firms, have been adjusting to the cheap Indian competition by taking themselves to India. By far the most successful of these foreign firms has been America’s Convergys, which with a total of around 60,000 employees is the biggest call-centre operator in the world. By the end of 2005, says the company’s local boss, Jaswinder Ghumman, Convergys hoped to employ 20,000 people in India.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

It was impressive how much we believed that games could have an impact on the world. What was missing from the project’s focus was the effect that gamification was already having in the real world. When I worked in a call center as part of an inquiry for my last book, I saw firsthand the use of gamification at work. The call center was filled with ways to collect metrics and measure worker performance. At the simplest level, the large screen over the call center floor compared each worker’s performance in real time by ranking them from best seller to worst. While this never convinced me to try my hardest to reach the top of the leader board, it certainly motivated me to try a little harder so as not to stay in last place for the entire shift.

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I was one of the unlucky ones to be working the night shifts. That’s 8pm–8am, six days a week, testing Grand Theft Auto. It was horrendous. I didn’t see daylight for months. This was perceived as a requirement and if you had issues with it, you were told “Well, you can go stack shelves at Tesco instead or answer phones at a call centre.” You were treated as disposable.30 Many of these forms of work “below the line” are gendered in various ways. For example, in the increasingly important area of publicity and marketing, in which publishers compete in ever more crowded marketplaces for videogames, the sector is “solidly pink-collar,” with public relations workers over 85 percent female.

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Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Boston: Brill, 2009), 314. 15Lebowitz, Following Marx, 310, 314. 16Karl Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” New International 4, no. 12 (1938): 379. 17Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” 379. 18Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 58. 19Jamie Woodcock, “The Workers’ Inquiry from Trotskyism to Operaismo: A Political Methodology for Investigating the Workplace,” Ephemera 14, no. 3 (2014): 493–513. 20Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres (London: Pluto, 2017). 21“Interview with Vittorio Rieser,” Generation Online, October 3, 2001, www.generation-online.org/t/vittorio.htm. 22Notes from Below editors, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition,” Notes from Below 1 (January 29, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition. 23Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture Journal 5, no. 1 (2005). 24Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 32. 25Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour.” 26Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 27. 27Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 50. 28Ergin Bulut, “Glamor Above, Precarity Below: Immaterial Labor in the Video Game Industry,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 32, no. 3 (2015): 203. 29Bulut, “Glamor Above, Precarity Below,” 203. 30Ian G.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

The advent of the assembly line meant that production could then be sped up on this basis, trying to take control away from workers. Managers in call centres were able to use technological methods of surveillance to electronically measure the work process in great detail (Woodcock, 2017). Many work platforms follow on from these traditions, albeit without the physical supervision found in either factories or call centres. Some platform infrastructures allow the real-time location tracking and timing of every worker. This develops the forms of surveillance from the call centre, deploying them beyond the walls of a workplace (Woodcock, forthcoming). Some cloud platforms, in contrast, can monitor every digital activity performed by a worker on-platform.

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For example, a worker at Deliveroo explained that they preferred it as: you’re not selling anything, you’re not selling yourself so there’s no emotional labour in it and I think that’s why it’s been like a job that I’ve stuck at longer than other shit jobs because I find it a lot easier to not do that sort of selling yourself side of things. The alternative kinds of work that they described included service work based in a restaurant or working the phones in a call centre. This, despite the fact they still described Deliveroo as a ‘shit job’, made it comparatively better than the conditions in high-pressure call centres (Woodcock, 2017). Similarly, another worker explained that they ‘wanted to work outside and with a bicycle, because it’s my passion working with a bicycle’. For younger workers, the gig economy offers the potential – and it is important to stress that this is a potential, as we discuss further later in the book – for different ways of working.

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This means that management are more likely to act unilaterally, without the checks of collective bargaining or negotiation. Globalization and outsourcing The final precondition that has deeply shaped the gig economy in its current form is a combination of political economy and technology: the effects of globalization and outsourcing. This is a development and intensification of the outsourcing of call centres from high-income countries to low- and middle-income countries, for example, from the UK to India (Taylor and Bain, 2005). This laid the organizational basis for wider business process outsourcing that has become today’s online outsourcing. However, globalization has not only meant the shifting of work and trade to different parts of the world, but also brought about a generalization of what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) have termed the ‘Californian Ideology’, referring to the encouragement of deregulated markets and powerful transnational corporations.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

Forrester argued that companies which wait too long to offer good e-commerce channels risk losing market share to more digitally-minded competitors. Call centres We are still at the very early stages of introducing artificial intelligence to call centres. For many of us, dealing with call centres is one of the least agreeable aspects of modern life. It normally involves a good deal of waiting around, listening to uninspiring hold music, followed by some profoundly unintelligent automated routing, and finally a conversation with a bored person the other side of the world who is reading from a script written by a sadist. One of the leaders in introducing genuine AI to call centres is Swedbank, one of Sweden's biggest banks, with 9.5m customers and 160,000 employees.

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Online shopping is perhaps the ultimate prosumer experience. Consumer reviews replace the retailer’s sales force, and its algorithms do the up-selling. Call centres Of course, automation and prosumption is not always to the benefit of consumers. In markets where switching costs or partial monopolies dilute the standards-raising effect of competition, companies can save money for themselves in ways which actually make life worse for their customers. We are all familiar with call centres where (for instance) utility companies and banks have automated their customer service operations, obliging frustrated customers to plough through various levels of artificial un-intelligence in order to get their problem resolved.

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The customer would be much better off if a human picked up the call immediately, but that would cost the companies a lot more money, and they have no incentive to incur that cost. Things are improving, however, as the AI used in call centres advances. Just as most people choose to withdraw cash from ATMs rather than venture into the bank and wait in line for a human cashier, many call centre operations are now getting good enough at handling or triaging problems that we may soon prefer to deal with the automated system than with a human. Food service The automation of service in fast food outlets seems to have been just around the corner for decades.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs
Published 8 Apr 2015

‘I’m not from a religious background, but the whole process of serving somebody … it’s good for everyone,’ R said. ‘You’re giving them service but at the same time, they’re feeling welcomed.’ T, 32, call centre special adviser, Lincoln Behind a branch of a fast-food chain in Lincoln, there is a featureless yellow brick call centre open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country. Bad weather causes a surge in the number of calls: a dense, chattering sound. A terrorist attack is loud. But less dramatic worries are quieter and more frequent: anger at a lost connection, sorrow for a family member passed away, simple loneliness.

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I first met Reilly in June 2004 when we worked together in the Saga motor insurance call centre in Folkestone. He had just finished a degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent. We learned to log prangs and crashes, to enunciate, explain and navigate computer systems. Reilly took it all just seriously enough; he and his friend Nick made me laugh a lot more than I expected to in a minimum wage job. I left at the end of the summer to study for a master’s in English Literature; Reilly stayed. He had wanted to write novels when he was little; at 13 he wanted be a journalist at the New Musical Express. After a year in the call centre he took four weeks’ leave to do work experience at the local paper.

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Now it’s autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters CONTENTS IN DOVER MAKING: potter, shoemaker, robot SELLING: fishmonger, creative director, councillor, homesteader, legal aid lawyer SERVING: sex worker, baristas, call centre adviser, special adviser LEADING: company director, stay-at-home mum, hereditary lord ENTERTAINING: dancer, footballer, giggle doctor THINKING: scientist, question writer, professor CARING: care worker, cleaner, crofter REPAIRING: rabbi, army major, nurse STARTING: apprentice, intern, technologist, unemployed, on workfare AT SCHOOL References Acknowledgements IN DOVER IN THE COLD BACK ROOM of a charity shop, a group of volunteers are working.

Generation A
by Douglas Coupland
Published 2 Jan 2009

I spent a few years subsisting by cleaning up debris and rebuilding structures for NGOs like UNICEF and UNESCO. Unlike many young men my age, I refused to be lured to Dubai, and after the cleanup was complete, I was fortunate to find a job sweeping and cleaning at a call centre for Abercrombie & Fitch in a warehouse building at Bandaranaike Airport. I knew this was only temporary, as my love of American-produced global culture and my knowledge of the inner life of Craigs would one day allow me to become an actual call centre phone staffer, and yes, after some years my wish came true. I quickly rose through the ranks and was placed in charge of the Abercrombie & Fitch American-Canadian Central Time Zone Call Division.

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I could make a list of other such examples, but I will not. Nobody in the call centre witnessed my bee stinging me. I looked at it, and it was like seeing a long-lost friend—the happiness it brought me! I quite forgot young Leslie from the New York Times on the other end of the line. She probably interpreted my silence as artistic temperament, but she finally asked, “Werner? Werner, are you there?” I told her that my name wasn’t actually Werner, it was Harj, and that I was sorry I had led her on, and that I was actually working in an Abercrombie & Fitch call centre in Trincomalee, the capital of Sri Lanka. “Don’t dick with me.

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“Wow.” Then the three of them leaned against the front desk with casual American elegance and asked what I was up to. I said, “I have been working in a company call centre in Sri Lanka for many years now, and it has always been my dream to visit the headquarters of our esteemed company.” The first Craig said, “Seriously? I mean, it’s nice here, dude, but it’s not a destination.” The second Craig asked me what it was like to work in a call centre. “In Sri Lanka,” I said, “I enjoyed providing a completely customer-centric operation by consistently enhancing customer service as I tried to gain a better understanding of our customers’ shopping patterns and preferences across Abercrombie & Fitch’s multiple shopping channels.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

This is not the Indian English of Hobson–Jobson and the bazaar or the standardised American and British English of the universities, but the emerging supranational lingua franca that enables a call centre in Bangalore to answer impossible queries, or sell new products, as far afield as Cheltenham in the UK, Cedar Rapids in the United States or Co. Cork, Eire. Many major cities in India now have call centres, with a dynamic effect on the local economy (call centre employees enjoy a salary as much as five times the national average). The road to Electronics City is symbolic of old India, but the Infosys campus, barely five miles from the centre of the city, is an oasis of Globish.

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Five Point Someone features soft drugs, binge drinking, and an affair between a student and his professor’s daughter. One Night @ the Call Centre is a romantic comedy set in a call centre office where bored young Indians try to resolve the mindless enquiries of midwestern American technophobes. Bhagat says that his novel reflects a generational divide in India. His model society is China, not the modernising China of Deng Xiaoping, but the radicalising China of Mao Zedong. ‘India needs a cultural revolution to change mindsets,’ Bhagat told the Guardian. ‘In China it was bloody, but India needs to learn that the old ways are not always the best ways.’ One Night @ the Call Centre has already sold about 2 million copies.

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In Bangalore, I climbed a rickety outside staircase to the offices of ‘Easy English’ (advertising ‘Spoken English, Call Centre Training, Placements’) to learn about the programme on offer to the would–be student. ‘Easy English’ turned out to be a husband–and–wife team, operating out of four rooms (and a tiny kitchen), with a clientele of barely a dozen students who were paying 1,500 rupees a month, a substantial commitment, to acquire enough English to apply to one of the call centres. How long, I wondered, had ‘Easy English’ been in business here? ‘Six months.’ The proliferation of such training rooms happens at the end of the Globish food chain.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

If you ever had a problem, like a puncture or a crash, you could ring Deliveroo’s call centre. One recurring issue was inadvertent calzone: if someone ordered a single pizza, it had a lot of space to bang about in your bag, and when climbing or descending a hill could easily get folded. You’d arrive and take the box out your backpack, only to find tomato sauce soaking through the cardboard. The call centre workers responded to this by reordering the pizza (at the company’s expense) and telling you to offer the pizza to the customer. Sometimes, however, the call centre workers would tell you to give it to the homeless. I suspected that some call centre workers were going off script in an effort to help people out, or maybe the company just changed its tune in order to get some good publicity.

…

Everyone had something specific they wanted changed: from the amount of time you wasted ‘on hold’ to the call centre when a delivery went wrong, to the state of the kit, to the triple orders which were bad for the customer, to the lack of discounts at local bike shops, to the rates of pay. The demands to solve those problems varied wildly. Some workers wanted a wearable video camera to be a standard part of the kit so that if an accident took place we’d all have a record of it; others wanted insurance deals, an £8 guarantee for the first hour you logged on, a £12 guarantee for all the time you were logged on, more call centre staff, and on and on. The attitudes towards management were all over the place.

…

Uphadya, are discussing overcoming the vertical isolation of software engineers by organizing ‘technoscientific’ points of production.28 This organization could be structured industrially (organizing all workers in one industry, rather than all workers in one job role), and so recompose different layers of the working class into one united front against the black box and the bosses.29 Together, couriers and tech workers would have much more leverage than either group on their own. The disconnect of these two workforces is a key point that allows Deliveroo to systematically exploit workers on the ground and systematically control workers in its HQ. But industrial-scale organization at Deliveroo could go even further than that: workers in the Deliveroo customer service call centres, cleaning the Deliveroo offices, and guarding the Deliveroo sites all have the same interests as us. Even beyond just Deliveroo, workers in the food service industry at large have the same interests as us: the chefs, waiting staff, and agricultural workers on whom the whole industry relies all also deserve better pay and conditions.

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life
by The Reluctant Carer
Published 22 Jun 2022

Since that admission, which also raised the spectre of Mum alone in the house when Dad is hospitalized, we have taken what we deem to be appropriate measures. Chief among these is an ‘alert-call’ system: an emergency button worn about the old person’s person, which, when pressed, signals a call centre who then contact the house through a dedicated microphone and speaker unit and ask if they’re all right. If the caller is too unwell to answer or too far away, the call centre agents contact the emergency services. This costs just a few pounds a month and seems an excellent innovation. Yet nothing here is straightforward. To set up the system I had to check its range and figured that the furthest my parents could ever go without leaving altogether would be the far end of the garden.

…

He is bent double trying to fix the satellite receiver and has a phone to his ear. I take the phone and help him up. The person on the line is trying to sell him an expanded TV package. I explain that he is no longer listening, that I am his son. ‘Put Daddy back on the phone,’ says the man in the call centre. I freeze at this. My dad has never been known as ‘Daddy’, and we are not about to start now. As I ferry him back to his seat, I figure out what has gone down, and it is in these kinds of mindless crises that I really come into my own. With mum’s deafness it is essential that the TV has subtitles, or it must be at a volume that could destroy a passing bird.

…

I press the buttons that reinstate the subtitles. I have done this before; I will do it again. It’s part of the elderly care territory. You become their short-term memory. A portable hard drive. Meanwhile: ‘Where is Daddy?’ ‘Please don’t say “Daddy”,’ I ask. ‘Daddy wants the expanded package,’ insists the call-centre caller. ‘I’m an idiot,’ says Dad, ruefully. I promise him he’s not. He seems unconvinced. ‘Turn this up!’ yells Mum, even though the subtitles are back on. It’s an advert. ‘Where is Daddy!?’ He’s really going for it now, this desperate, distant salesman. ‘Daddy doesn’t want to talk to you any more,’ I say.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 9 Sep 2008

Jogeshwar, once a remote area of Salsette and the site of a famous cave, was a large and congested population centre about ten miles from central Mumbai. Mr Randeria said that 400 families a day – an average of four people per family – migrated to Mumbai. Swiping his security card from door to door, leading me into the call centre, he said, ‘We are the call centre for’ – he named an American retailer he made me swear I would not reveal – ‘at levels one to four. If you have a problem with your electric drill, we will sort it out.’ He showed me the rooms where advanced classes in English language were taught (including American intonation), and the technical rooms where employees learned the inner workings of the products, so they could answer a flummoxed buyer’s question or offer advice.

…

I wondered why, until I went there and found that at the time I visited the call centres, the entry-level employees (most of them university graduates) were earning less than $2,500 a year. Bangalore’s prosperity rests on these people – their need for work, their high educational attainments, their skills, their good character, their prudent austerity, their punctuality, their humble status and most of all their willingness to work for low pay. ‘Cannot proceed,’ the security man at the gate in Tech Park said to my taxi driver. So I made some inquiries and got permission to visit another call centre, this one in yet another gated compound of big company offices, Electronics City Phase 2.

…

As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10. ‘What’s that for?’ ‘Baksheesh, sar.’ A bribe. But he had kept his word. No one succeeds in India without exploiting someone else, defrauding him, sitting on his head, twisting his arm, getting him to work for 12 cents an hour. The news is all about the winners – big business, call centres, manufacturing, textiles, all the rest of it. But for there to be big winners in India, there have to be bigger losers. It is the system. Who shares in the wealth? In the Punjab, I heard of a powerful Indian lawyer who earned $1.5 million a year and still paid his driver $20 a week and got his shoes shined for 25 cents.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

In many modern workplaces, computer technologies are not used to enhance the worker’s capacities, but to enforce new extremes of work intensification and control. Studies of today’s classic example of bad work – the call centre – document a number of practices that are now commonplace. Auto-diallers connect both inbound and outbound calls straight to employees’ headsets, with no breaks permitted between calls. Monitoring software collects data on each worker’s productivity, automatically reporting tardy or under-performing workers to their managers, so they can be singled out for coaching, disciplinary action or embarrassment. One study describes the modern call centre as an ‘electronic panopticon’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 2000), whereas another refers to the ‘assembly line in the head’ of the call centre worker, who always knows that the completion of one task will immediately be followed by the uptake of another (Taylor and Bain, 1999).

…

From great structures like churches and bridges to cultural artefacts like novels and video games – all of these things are the product of work. The trouble with defining work in these terms, however – as a form of creative activity – is that it becomes difficult to know what we should call work that is not creative but menial and routine. Workers who complain about their jobs in call centres, on supermarket checkouts, or at computers, inputting data day after day, are more likely to view their work as a means of self-preservation rather than self-expression. For all of us whose survival depends on submission to the daily grind, ‘work’ conjures a less romantic set of images. It calls to mind the sense of dread associated with words like ‘chore’, ‘travail’ or ‘burden’.

…

One study describes the modern call centre as an ‘electronic panopticon’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 2000), whereas another refers to the ‘assembly line in the head’ of the call centre worker, who always knows that the completion of one task will immediately be followed by the uptake of another (Taylor and Bain, 1999). In 2013, a public controversy emerged around the working conditions of warehouse staff (or ‘pickers’) for the online megastore Amazon, where handheld computers are used to hold low-wage workers to unreasonably strict time limits as they trawl the vast warehouses, scanning and gathering orders. An undercover reporter writes: ‘We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves’ (BBC News, 2013).

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

Aneesh, Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); J. K. Tina Basi, Women, Identity and India’s Call Centre Industry (London: Routledge, 2009); Mahuya Pal and Patrice Buzzanell, “The Indian Call Center Experience: A Case Study in Changing Discourses of Identity, Identification, and Career in a Global Context,” Journal of Business Communication 45, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 31–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021943607309348; Sumita Raghuram, “Identities on Call: Impact of Impression Management on Indian Call Center Agents,” Human Relations 66, no. 11 (November 1, 2013): 1471–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726713481069.

…

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Poster, Winifred R. “Hidden Sides of the Credit Economy: Emotions, Outsourcing, and Indian Call Centers.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 54, no. 3 (June 2013): 205–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715213501823. Prassl, Jeremias. Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2018. Raghuram, Sumita. “Identities on Call: Impact of Impression Management on Indian Call Center Agents.” Human Relations 66, no. 11 (November 1, 2013): 1471–96. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726713481069. Reich, Robert.

…

New York: ACM, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453. Barowy, Daniel W., Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger, and Andrew McGregor. “AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation.” Communications of the ACM 59, no. 6 (June 2016): 102–109. https://doi.org/10.1145/2927928. Basi, J. K. Tina. Women, Identity and India’s Call Centre Industry. London: Routledge, 2009. Battistoni, Alyssa. “The False Promise of Universal Basic Income.” Dissent, Spring 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-universal-basic-income-andy-stern-ruger-bregman. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure
by Shawn Micallef
Published 10 Jun 2014

Middle-class consumption is a complicated thing, but crucial to understanding how this class self-identifies. When I moved to Toronto in 2000, the economy was booming. I was only a recent grad student with little job experience, however, so I started temping at a call centre. A giant call centre is not unlike a factory floor, and for a little while, at least, Toronto felt a bit more like Windsor (in fact, one of the ways Windsor has replaced its manufacturing sector is with much lower-paying call centres, a shift from an industrial economy to a service-oriented one). After four months of searching, however, I finally got a proper, permanent job as a fundraising researcher at a large non-profit organization.

…

It is curious why we do not speak more of the service class as the working class. Though not as physical as working in the Ford foundry, the punch-in/punch-out life is much the same, as is the lack of agency. Having worked in both sectors, from the factory floor at Hiram Walker to the mall record store (and even my first Toronto job temping at a call centre), I see much in common with the relationship to work (being told what to do) and a wider class sensibility (feeling as if somebody else controls your destiny). As for lifestyle, Florida argues the creative class is not just a blending of bourgeois and bohemian values, as outlined in David Brook’s 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, an early look at what would inform Florida’s creative class, but transcends those two categories completely.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

Re-engineering meant that organizations no longer needed to be the great employers of the middle classes, cluttering up their middle ranks with careful, thrifty, sensible and educated types to communicate between the different corporate layers. This was also the defining shift in the class system — the economy, like the corporations, is now run by a tiny ruling elite, with a handful of well-paid managers who do their bidding, and a vast and detachable underclass of drones who man the software and call centres. The middle classes have largely migrated to the public sector, the creative world and the entrepreneurial world of small business. When the Independent on Sunday can talk about the ‘casualisation of the middle classes in full swing’, that means many things, but most of all perhaps it has meant the end of the traditional middle-class occupational pension.[2] Here is the shift in a nutshell.

…

They are looking for a place where their child will find others like them, somewhere where they can know the teachers, where they won’t be bullied or threatened because they know things. Somewhere without X-ray machines for knives, with some respect for culture, history and music — and which won’t just train their children to be an online or call-centre drone. And about these things the league tables will tell them absolutely nothing. So the core of the great panic is not actually snobbery. It is a search for shared values and it is a fear, as much as anything else, of violence, of knives, security guards and hyper-masculine aggression.[27] ‘Stick the name of the school into Google along with words such as “vandalism”, “knives”, “arson” and “metal detector”,’ advised Andrew Pawson with unnecessary relish, but he has pinpointed the fear accurately.

…

We are now in a post-Fordist world. The robots have taken over the factories — the masses don’t work there any more — but we are definitely not in a ‘post-Taylor’ one. You can see his ideas, breaking every task down into units, measuring how long they take and setting targets for workers to meet, in call centres, NHS hospitals, probation offices and the battery of statistics by which public services are now run all over the Western world. Taylor died of flu in 1915, broken and embittered by his treatment at the hands of congressmen inquiring into his methods. Ironically, he died winding his watch, the symbol of his legacy.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Nevertheless, those who are dependent on others for allocating them to tasks over which they have little control are at greater risk of falling into the precariat. Another group linked to the precariat is the growing army in call centres. These are ubiquitous, a sinister symbol of globalisation, electronic life and alienated labour. In 2008, the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 presented a television documentary called ‘Phone Rage’, highlighting the mutual misunderstandings between young call-centre staff and angry customers. According to the programme, on average, people in the United Kingdom spent a full day each year talking to call centres, and the amount of time was rising. Then there are interns, a peculiarly modern phenomenon whereby recent graduates, current students or even pre-students work for a while for little or no pay, doing petty office jobs.

…

Ackerman, Bruce 180 Adecco 33, 49 agency 167–70 Agrarian Justice (Paine) 173 Aguiar, Mark 128 Alemanno, Gianni 149 Alexander, Douglas 145 alienation 19–24 alternative medicine 70 altruism 181 anger 19–24, 168 anomie 19–24, 64 Ant Tribe 73 anxiety 19–24, 155, 178 Anzalone, John 152 apprenticeships 10b, 23, 60, 70, 72–3, 131 architecture of choice 133, 139, 140, 142 Arendt, Hannah 117, 163–4 Arizona law SB1070 93, 97–8 associational freedom 167–70 associations, occupational 169–70 asylum seekers 92–3, 94, 96, 149, 158 Atos Origin 166–7 atypical labour 32, 41 Australia 39, 90, 103 Austria 150 Axelrod, David 152 baby boomers 66–7, 74 bag lady syndrome 63, 84 banausoi 13, 117 basic income 171–8, 181 Bauerlein, Mark 69 BBVA 50 Beck, Glen 151 Belgium 39 benefits 11–12, 33, 174 and the disabled 87 health care 51 unemployment 45–8, 99, 104 and wages 41–2 women and 62 Bentham, Jeremy 132–3 Berlusconi, Silvio 69, 183 on immigrants 4, 97, 148–9 BIEN (Basic Income European Network/ Basic Income Earth Network) 172 Birthright Lottery, The (Schachar) 177 Blair, Tony 135, 158, 179 Blinder, Alan 163 boredom 19, 141 Bosson, Eric 97 brain 18, 85 Brazil 182 breadwinners 41, 59, 62, 64 British Airways 50 Brown, Gordon 103 Bryceson, D.B. 21 Buffett, Warren 78 call centres 16, 169 Cameron, David 139, 169, 179 Can They do That? (Maltby) 138 Canada 79, 114 capital funds 176–7 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) 156 care work 61, 86, 125–6 careers, leisure 129 cash transfers 177 see also conditional cash transfers (CCTs) CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 Cerasa, Claudio 149 Channel 4, call centre programme (UK) 16 charities 53 children, care for 125 China 28 and contractualisation 37 criminalisation 88 deliberative democracy 181 education 73 immigrants to Italy 4–5 invasion of privacy 135 migrants 96, 106–9, 109–10 old agers 83 191 192 INDEX China 28 (Continued) Shenzhen 133, 137 and time 115 wages 43 youth 76 see also Chindia China Plus One 28 Chindia 26, 27–9, 83 see also China Chrysler Group LLC 43 circulants 90, 92 Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission (US) 152–3 civil rights 14, 94 class, social 6–8, 66–7 Coase, Ronald 29 Cohen, Daniel 57, 66, 69 collaborative bargaining 168 collective attention deficit syndrome 127 commodification of companies 29–31 of education 67–72 and globalisation 26 labour 161–2 of management 40 of politics 148–53 re- 41–2 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 140 see also cash transfers conditionality 140, 175 and basic income 172–3 and workfare 143–5, 166–7 connectivity, and youth 127 contract status 35, 36, 37, 44, 51, 61 contractors, independent/ dependent 15–16 contractualisation 37 counselling for stress 126 Crawford, Matthew 70 credit 44 crime 5, 129–30 criminalisation 14, 145, 146 crystallised intelligence 85 cultural rights 14 de Tocqueville, Alexis 145 de-industrialisation 5, 37–8 debt, and youth 73–4 Delfanti, Alessandro 78 deliberative democracy 180–1, 182 denizens 14, 93–102, 105, 113, 117, 157–8 Denmark 150 dependent/independent contractors 15–16 deskilling 17, 33, 40, 124 developing countries 12, 27, 60, 65, 105–9 disabled people 86–7, 89, 170 discrimination age 84–5 disability 81 gender 60, 123 genetic profiling 136–7 and migrants 99, 101–2 disengagement, political 24 distance working 38, 53 dole (UK) 45 Duncan Smith, Iain 143 Durkeim, Emile 20 economic security 157, 171, 173–6 The Economist 17–18, 33, 52, 137 economy, shadow 56–7 education 10, 67–73, 135–6, 159–60 Ehrenreich, Barbara 21, 170–1 elites 7, 22, 24, 40, 50 criminality 152 and democracy 181 ethics 165 Italian 148 and the Tea Party (US) 151 empathy 22–3, 137 employment agencies 33 employment security 10b, 11, 17, 36, 51, 117 Endarkenment 70 Enlightenment 24, 70 enterprise benefits 11, 12 environmental issues 167 environmental refugees 93 Esping-Andersen, G. 41 ethics 23–4, 121–2, 165 ethnic minorities 86 EuroMayDay 1, 2, 3, 167 European Union (EU) 2, 39, 146, 147 and migrants 97, 103, 105 and pensions 80 see also individual countries export processing zones 105–6 Facebook 127, 134, 135 failed occupationality 21 INDEX family 27, 44, 60, 65, 126 fear, used for control 32 fictitious decommodification 41 financial capital 171, 176–7 financial sector jobs 39–40 financial shock 2008-9 see Great Recession Financial Times 44, 55, 121, 155 firing workers 31–2 Fishkin, James 180 Fletcher, Bill 170–1 flexibility 18 labour 23–4, 31–6, 53, 60, 61, 65 labour market 6, 120–1, 170 Ford Motor Company 42, 43 Foucault, Michel 88, 133 Foxconn 28–9, 43, 105, 137 see also Shenzhen France criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 education 69 leisure 129 migrants 95, 97, 101–2, 114 neo-fascism 149 and old agers 85 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 Telecom 11 youth 65–6 fraternity 12, 22, 155 freedom 155, 167–70, 172 freelance see temporary employment freeter unions 9 Friedman, Milton 39, 156 functional flexibility 36–8, 52 furloughs 36, 50 gays 63–4 General Motors (GM) 42, 43, 54 genetic profiling 136 Germany 9 de-industrialisation 38 disengagement with jobs 24 migrants 91, 95, 100–1, 114 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 temporary employment 15, 35 wages 40 and women 62 youth and apprenticeships 72–3 193 Glen Beck’s Common Sense (Beck) 151 Global Transformation 26, 27–31, 91, 115 globalisation 5–7, 27–31, 116, 148 and commodification 26 and criminalisation 87–8 and temporary employment 34 Google Street View 134 Gorz, Andre 7 grants, leisure 180–2 Great Recession 4, 49–51, 63, 176 and education 71 and migrants 102 and old agers 82 and pensions 80 and youth 77–8 Greece 52, 56, 117, 181 grinners/groaners 59, 83–4 Habermas, Jürgen 179 Haidt, J. 23 Hamburg (Germany) 3 happiness 140–1, 162 Hardt, M. 130 Hayek, Friedrich 39 health 51, 70, 120, 126 Hitachi 84 Hobsbawm, Eric 3 hormones 136 hot desking 53 Howker, Ed 65 Human Rights Watch 106 Hungary 149 Hurst, Erik 128 Hyatt Hotels 32 IBM 38, 137 identity 9 digital 134–5 work-based 12, 15–16, 23, 158–9, 163 Ignatieff, Michael 88 illegal migrants 96–8 In Praise of Idleness (Russell) 141, 161 income security 10b, 30, 40, 44 independent/dependent contractors 15–16 India 50, 83, 112, 140 see also Chindia individuality 3, 19, 122 informal status 6–7, 57, 60, 96, 119 inshored/offshored labour 30, 36, 37 194 INDEX International Herald Tribune 21 internet 18, 127, 139, 180, 181 surveillance 134–5, 138 interns 16, 36, 75–6 invasion of privacy 133–5, 167 Ireland 52–3, 77 isolation of workers 38 Italy education 69 neo-fascism 148–9 pensions 79 Prato 4–5 and the public sector 52, 53 shadow economy 56 and temporary employment 34 youth 64 Japan 2, 30 and Chinese migrants 110 commodification of companies 30 and migrants 102, 103 multiple job holding 119–20 neo-fascism 152 pensions 80 salariat 17 subsidies 84 and temporary employment 15, 32–3, 34–5, 41 and youth 66, 74, 76, 77 job security 10b, 11, 36–8 Kellaway, Lucy 83–4 Keynes, John Maynard 161 Kierkegaard, Søren 155 Klein, Naomi 148 knowledge 32, 117, 124–5, 171 labour 13, 115, 161–2 labour brokers 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 labour flexibility 23–4, 31–45 labour intensification 119–20 labour market flexibility 6 labour security 10–11, 10b, 31 Laos 112 lay-offs see furloughs Lee Changshik 21 legal knowledge 124–5 legal processing 50 Legal Services Act of 2007 (UK) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 13, 128–30 see also play lesbians 63–4 Liberal Republic, The 181 Lloyds Banking Group 50–1 localism 181–2 long-term migrants 100–2 loyalty 53, 58, 74–5 McDonald’s 33 McNealy, Scott 69 Malik, Shiv 65 Maltby, Lewis 138 Manafort, Paul 152 management, commodification of 40 Mandelson, Peter, Baron 68 Maroni, Roberto 97 marriage 64–5, 92 Martin, Paul 141 Marx, Karl 161 masculinity, role models for youth 63–5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 68–9 Mayhew, Les 81 Mead, Lawrence 143 mergers, triangular 30 Mexico 91 Middle East 109 migrants 2, 13–14, 25, 90–3, 145–6 and basic income 172 and conditionality 144 denizens 93–102, 157–8 government organised 109–13 internal 105–9 and queuing systems 103–5 and recession 102–3 Mill, John Stuart 160 Morris, William 160, 161 Morrison, Catriona 127 multinational corporations 28, 92 multitasking 19, 126–7 National Broadband Plan 134 near-sourcing/shoring 36 Negri, A. 130 neo-fascism 25, 147–53, 159, 175, 183 Netherlands 39, 79, 114, 149–50 New Thought Movement 21 New York Times 69, 119 News from Nowhere (Morris) 161 Niemöller, Martin 182 INDEX non-refoulement 93 Nudge (Sunstein/Thaler) 138–9 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 numerical flexibility 31–6 Obama, Barack 73, 138–9, 147, 148 Observer, The 20 occupations associations of 169–70 dismantling of 38–40 freedom in 162–4 obsolescence in 124 offshored/inshored labour 30, 36, 37 old agers 59, 79– 86, 89 old-age dependency ratio 80–1 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 27 origins of the precariat 1–5 outsourcing 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 49 Paine, Thomas 173 panopticon society 132–40, 142–3 Parent Motivators (UK) 139–40 part-time employment 15, 35–6, 51, 61, 82 Pasona 33 paternalism 17, 29, 137, 153, 178, 182 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 pensions 42, 51, 52, 76–7, 79–81, 84–6 PepsiCo 137 personal deportment skills 123 Philippines 109 Phoenix, University of 71 Pigou, Arthur 117, 125 play 13, 115, 117, 128, 141 pleasure 141 Polanyi, K. 163, 169 political engagement/disengagement 24, 147 Portugal 52, 56 positive thinking 21, 86 Prato (Italy) 4–5 precariat (definition) 6, 7–13 precariato 9 precariatisation 16–18 precarity traps 48–9, 73–5, 114, 129, 144, 178 pride 22 prisoners 112, 146 privacy, invasion of 133–5, 167 private benefits 11 productivity, and old age 85 proficians 7–8, 15, 164 proletariat 7 protectionism 27, 54 public sector 51–4 qualifications 95 queuing systems 103–5 racism 97–8, 101, 114, 149 Randstad 49 re-commodification 41–2 recession see Great Recession refugees 92, 93, 96 regulation 23, 26, 39–40, 84, 171 Reimagining Socialism (Ehrenreich/ Fletcher) 170–1 remote working 38, 53 rentier economies 27, 176 representation security 10b, 31 retirement 42, 80–3 rights 14, 94, 145, 163, 164–5, 169 see also denizens risk management 178 Robin Hood gang 3 role models for youth 63–5 Roma 97, 149 Rossington, John 100 Rothman, David 88 Russell, Bertrand 141, 161 Russell, Lucie 64 Russia 88, 115 salariat 7, 8, 14, 17, 32 Santelli, Rick 150 Sarkozy, Nicolas 69, 97, 149 Sarrazin, Thilo 101 Schachar, Ayelet 177 Schneider, Friedrich 56 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 71 seasonal migrants 98–100 security, economic 157, 171, 173–6 self-employment 15–16, 66, 82 self-esteem 21 self-exploitation 20, 122–3 self-production 11 self-regulation 23, 39 self-service 125 services 37–8, 63 195 196 INDEX Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure (Martin) 141 sex services 63 sexism, reverse 123 shadow economy 56–7, 91 Shenzhen (China) 133, 137 see also Foxconn Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford) 70 short-time compensation schemes 55–6 side-jobs 119–20 skill reproduction security 10b skills 157, 176 development of 30, 31, 40 personal deportment 123 tertiary 121–4 Skirbekk, Vegard 85 Smarsh 138 Smile or Die (Ehrenreich) 21 Smith, Adam 71 snowball theory 78 social class 6–8, 66–7 social factory 38, 118, 132 social income 11–12, 40–5, 51, 66 social insurance 22, 104 social memory 12, 23, 129 social mobility 23, 57–8, 175 social networking sites 137 see also Facebook social rights 14 social worth 21 sousveillance 134, 135 South Africa, and migrants 91, 98 South Korea 15, 55, 61, 75 space, public 171, 179–80 Spain BBVA 50 migrants 94 and migrants 102 pensions 79 and the public sector 53 shadow economy 55–6 temporary employment 35 Speenhamland system 55, 143 staffing agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 state benefits 11, 12 status 8, 21, 32–3, 94 status discord 10 status frustration 10, 21, 63, 67, 77, 78, 79, 89, 114, 123, 160 stress 19, 126, 141, 141–3 subsidies 44, 54–6, 83–6, 176 suicide, work-related 11, 29, 58, 105 Summers, Larry 148 Sun Microsystems 69 Sunstein, Cass 138–9 surveillance 132–6, 153, 167 see also sousveillance Suzuki, Kensuke 152 Sweden 68, 110–11, 135, 149 symbols 3 Taking of Rome, The (Cerasa) 149 taxes 26 and citizenship 177 France 85 and subsidies 54–5 Tobin 177 United States (US) 180–1 Tea Party movement 150–1 technology and the brain 18 internet 180, 181 surveillance 132–6 teleworking 38 temporary agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 temporary employment 14–15, 49 associations for 170 Japan 9 and numerical flexibility 32–6 and old agers 82 and the public sector 51 and youth 65 tertiarisation 37–8 tertiary skill 121–4 tertiary time 116, 119 tertiary workplace 116 Tesco Law (UK) 40 Thailand, migrants 106 Thaler, Richard 138–9 therapy state 141–3, 153 Thompson, E.P. 115 time 115–16, 163, 171, 178 labour intensification 119–20 tertiary 116, 119 use of 38 work-for-labour 120–1 titles of jobs 17–18 Tobin taxes 177 Tomkins, Richard 70 towns, company 137 INDEX toy-factory incident 108–9 trade unions 1, 2, 5, 10b, 26, 31, 168 and migration 91 public sector 51 and youth 77–8 see also yellow unions training 121–4 triangular mergers 30 triangulation 34 Trumka, Richard 78 trust relationships 8–9, 22 Twitter 127 Ukraine 152 undocumented migrants 96–8 unemployment 145 benefits 45–8, 99, 104 insurance for 175 voluntary 122 youth after recession 77 uniforms, to distinguish employment status 32–3 unions freeter 9 yellow 33 see also trade United Kingdom (UK) 102–3 benefit system 173 Channel 4 call centre programme 16 company loyalty 74–5 conditionality 143–5, 166–7 criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 disabled people 170 and education 67, 70, 71 financial shock (2008-9) 49–51, 71 labour intensification 119 Legal Services Act (2007) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 129 migrants 91, 95, 99, 103–5, 114, 146 neo-fascism 150 paternalism 139–40 pensions 43, 80 and the public sector 53 public spaces 179 and regulation of occupational bodies 39 shadow economy 56 and social mobility 56–8 and subsidies 55 197 temporary employment 15, 34, 35 as a therapy state 142 women 61–2, 162 workplace discipline 138 youth 64, 76 United States (US) care for children 125 criminalisation 88 education 69, 70–1, 73, 135–6 ethnic minorities 86 financial shock (2008-9) 49–50 migrants 90–1, 93, 94, 97, 103, 114 neo-fascism 150–1, 152–3 old agers 82–3, 85 pensions 42, 52, 80 public sector 52 regulation of occupational bodies 39 social mobility in 57–8 subsidies 55, 56 taxes 180–1 temporary employment 34, 35 volunteer work 163 wages and benefits 42 women 62, 63 youth 75, 77 universalism 155, 157, 162, 180 University of the People 69 University of Phoenix 71 unpaid furloughs 36 unpaid leave 50 uptitling 17–18 utilitarianism 88, 132, 141, 154 value of support 11 Vietnam 28, 111–12 voluntary unemployment 122 volunteer work 86, 163–4 voting 146, 147, 181 Wacquant, L. 132 wages 8, 11 and benefits 41–2 family 60 flexibility 40–5, 66 individualised 60 and migrants 103 and temporary workers 32, 33 Vietnam 28 see also basic income Waiting for Superman (documentary) 69 Wall Street Journal 35, 163 198 INDEX Walmart 33, 107 Wandering Tribe 73 Weber, Max 7 welfare claimants 245 welfare systems 44 Wen Jiabao 105 Whitehead, Alfred North 160 Williams, Rob 62 wiretapping 135 women 60–5 and care work 125–6 CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 labour commodification 161 and migration 92 multiple jobholding 119–20 reverse sexism 123 work 115, 117, 160–1 and identity 158–9 and labour 13 right to 145, 163, 164–5 security 10b work-for-labour 120–1, 178 work-for-reproduction 124–7 work–life balance 118 worker cooperatives 168–70 workfare 143–5, 166–7 working class 7, 8 workplace 116, 122, 130, 131 discipline 136–8 tertiary 116 Yanukovich, Victor 152 yellow unions 33 youth 59, 65–7, 89, 156 commodification of education 67–72 connectivity 127 and criminality 129–30 generational tension 76–7 and old agers 85 precarity traps 73–5 prospects for the future 78–9 and role models 63–5 streaming education 72–3 zero-hour contracts 36 

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Challenges to be overcome would include transparency, overtendering, accountability once contracts were negotiated, and governance of rules on distribution of income, labour opportunities and internal promotions. Problems would also arise in jurisdiction and relations with other services. How would a service deal with labour-saving technical change? On launching the idea in February 2010, Cameron cited examples such as call centres, social work, community health and nursing teams, hospital pathology departments, and rehabilitation and education services in prisons. This list prompts several questions. How large should the group be that is designated as a ‘worker cooperative’? If all National Health Service hospitals in a local authority area were selected as a group, problems would arise in determining what share of income would go to groups with widely different earnings and technical skills.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked.

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Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it – or remove it entirely – then regard the savings as profit. Is this, too, explained by argumentative thinking, where we would rather win an argument than be right? I rang a company’s call centre the other day, and the experience was exemplary: helpful, knowledgeable and charming. The firm was a client of ours, so I asked them what they did to make their telephone operators so good. The response was unexpected: ‘To be perfectly honest, we probably overpay them.’ The call centre was 20 miles from a large city; local staff, rather than travelling for an hour each day to find reasonably paid work, stayed for decades and became highly proficient.

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However, modern capitalism dictates that it will only be a matter of time before some beady-eyed consultants pitch up at a board meeting with a PowerPoint presentation entitled ‘Rightsizing Customer Service Costs Through Offshoring and Resource Management’, or something similar. Within months, either the entire operation will be moved abroad, or the once-happy call centre staff will be forced on to zero-hour contracts. Soon nobody will phone to place orders because they won’t be able to understand a word they are saying, but that won’t matter when the company presents its quarterly earnings to analysts and one chart contains the bullet point: ‘Labour cost reduction through call centre relocation/downsizing’. Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Open-plan and lonely A space with no dividing walls or cubicles, workers sitting at long rows of desks, pecking away at their keyboards, all breathing in the same recycled air: welcome to the open-plan office. In recent times most of the concern about open-plan offices has centred, understandably, on their biohazardous nature. A study conducted by Korea’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracked a coronavirus outbreak at a call centre in Seoul in February 2020, showed how within just over two weeks of the first worker becoming infected more than ninety others who worked on the same open-plan office floor also tested positive for Covid-19.13 But it’s not just our physical health that this design choice endangers. One of the reasons so many office workers feel alienated from each other is because they spend their days in large, open-plan layouts.

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Even simple measures like providing a cosy room or outdoor space with a long communal table, or team leaders ordering takeout food in a conference room or organising group trips to a nearby lunch spot can make a difference.57 More than anything, clear messaging from management to staff that a proper lunch break is not only permissible but actively encouraged will create conditions by which the long, primal tradition of eating together becomes a regular part of working life again. Just taking a break at the same time as other employees, whether for lunch or at another time, can make a big difference, for both morale and productivity. When MIT professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland conducted a detailed study of a US bank’s call centre, he found that the most productive teams were those who talked to each other the most outside of formal meetings, with face-to-face interactions being the most valuable. So he advised the centre’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee-break schedule to ensure that everyone on a team could take their break at the same time and thereby have an opportunity to socialise with their teammates away from their workstations.

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Not only did the employees feel happier but the average handling time per call – a key metric of success in that sector – fell by one-fifth amongst lower performing teams and around 8% overall. Interspersed with their social chat it turned out employees also shared effective work-related tips and hacks. As a result, the bank is now implementing this more aligned break schedule across all ten of its call centres, a shift in strategy that will impact 25,000 employees and is expected to result in $15 million of productivity gains as well as improved employee morale. Already where this simple change in approach has been tried, employee satisfaction has risen in some cases by more than 10%.58 Creating opportunities for informal socialising whilst social distancing is still required is of course a real challenge.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

Its simplicity makes it a tempting crutch for any politician who is feeling freaked out by the complexities of running a country full of real sentient people and is looking for a way to reduce their anxiety. There is information in GDP but no simple link to good and bad. Learning from call centre metrics disasters Twenty years ago, when call centres were a newish phenomenon, I spent some time training some of their managers in Sheffield. Their biggest problem was that staff kept leaving. After just a few years they were getting to the point where they had burned a hole through the population of the city; everyone who might possibly apply for a job with them had already worked for them, hated it and left.

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For many, this might sound too obvious to be worth writing down, but all too often the values behind ideas are not made explicit even though the implications are usually enormous for economics, food policy, climate policy and just about everything else you can think of for thriving in the Anthropocene. To be very clear, the same principle of inherent equal value of all human beings is universal. It applies to all world leaders, purveyors of both real and fake news, tireless aid workers, left wingers, right wingers, billionaires, paupers, your own kids, other people’s kids and even the call centre employee who rings you when you are having dinner with your family to try to persuade you to sue for an accident that never even happened. A person’s inherent worth is independent of their circumstances or the choices they have made in their lives or have had made for them. As far as other life forms go, they too deserve a place – because of their own sentient experience, not just for the practical reason that humans need them for food and medicine.

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Nor are jobs the only ways of meeting the criteria. Useful things can be done by people without pay being necessary or appropriate. Fulfilling activities don’t require payment either and money can be distributed through a myriad of payment and tax mechanisms. Here are some examples. If you work in a call centre, cold calling people to try to persuade them to sue someone else 152 6 PEOPLE AND WORK for an accident they probably never even had, you probably hate your job, not least because you understand that its net impact on the world is negative. You and the rest of the world would be better off if we asked you not to go to work and paid you the same money anyway.

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place
by James Hammond
Published 30 Apr 2008

More direct mail is going straight in the waste-paper basket than ever before, and if traditional selling was only ever a ‘numbers game’, without a brand for support, its days are definitely numbered. Even the rise of technology-based customer care approaches, such as the once-hailed customer relationship management (CRM) systems, call centres and the like, have done little to aid business development. (Let’s face it. When you’re number 23 in a callwaiting queue and have been held there for 20 minutes, occasionally spoken to by some distorted, pre-recorded, unemotional voice telling you that ‘your call is important to us’, you get the feeling that someone somewhere has 4 Branding your business completely lost the plot, and has thrown any concept of building a strong brand out of the window.)

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And keep the conversation centred around the brand, not yourself. Include your company name as close to the beginning of the conversation as you can, then utilise appropriate key words or phrases from your Brand Lexicon often. This will give the caller memory cues to keep the brand alive throughout the discussions. For example, if you contact Disney’s call centre, the conversation they’ll have with you will be replete with multiple uses of words like ‘magic’ and phrases such as ‘the magic of Disney’ and ‘magical kingdom’. Chances are, you won’t get off the phone without the word ‘magic’ still in your memory, albeit short-term. But put this together with the other experiences of ‘Disney magic’ you’ll encounter at their parks and that place in long-term memory is almost assured. 118 Making sense of the senses Fifteen customer service no-nos By Monte Enbysk, lead editor for the microsoft.com network.

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Your employees refuse or forget to use the words ‘please’, ‘thank you’ or ‘you’re welcome’. (Please use these words generously, thank you.) 9. Your employees hold side conversations with friends or each other while talking to customers on the phone, or they make personal calls on cell phones in your call centre. (Don’t do either of these.) 10. Your employees seem incapable of offering more than oneword answers. (One-word answers come across as rude and uncaring.) 11. Your employees do provide more than one-word answers, but a lot of the words are grounded in company or industry jargon that many customers don’t understand.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

Herbert Morrison’s famous rejection of Britain playing a role in the embryonic European Union (a rejection shared by most of the giants of that monumental government) on the grounds that the ‘Durham miners wouldn’t wear it’ stands as a reminder of the political power of manufacturing.18 The fact that a town ‘made’ something and was famous for making something gave real pride to the people who worked in manufacturing, and to everyone who lived in that town. That kind of pride can’t come from call centres or distribution hubs; pride and rootedness doesn’t come from towns becoming dormitories for nearby cities. Connection with a manufacturing base emphasised dignity and skill and also provided employment that went well through the supply chain and well beyond the site of the industry itself. This helps explain the sheer economic and social devastation that followed the closure of industry in places like Consett.

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This has combined with a rolling back of the gains in working conditions and a diminution in the bargaining power of labour versus capital. Working-class jobs have less esteem, fewer rights, less security and fewer avenues for progression than was the case many years ago. As alluded to earlier, in many towns, the great industrial giants of the past have been replaced with call centres, distribution hubs and a number of other jobs where there is precious little dignity and precious little community pride. Many jobs are low paid and precarious, with over three-quarters of all workers feeling more anxiety and insecurity in their work than they did a generation ago. James Bloodworth has told of how many workers in distribution centres are treated with utmost suspicion, are given tags to monitor their movement and are reluctant to even have toilet breaks for fear of missing their ‘targets’.

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This requires reindustrialisation, strategic government investment, town centre revival and, just as importantly, steps being taken to make sure that all workers are treated well. Even once millions of new, skilled jobs have been created as part of an industrial strategy, the economy will still need ‘elementary workers’, such as cleaners, call-centre staff, distribution centre staff, security guards and delivery workers, who deserve to be treated with decency and respect. Treating workers well shouldn’t be regarded as exceptional behaviour, or something for businesses to boast about; it should be regarded as the norm. It is inexcusable and unnecessary that some workers are stuck in the kind of insecure, unpredictable jobs that mean they can’t spend sufficient time with their families, in their communities or playing an active role in civic life.

Halting State
by Charles Stross
Published 9 Jul 2011

You’re right about it sounding like a swoop and squat, and that medical claim is a classic. Medical confidentiality is a great blind for snipers, but we can poke a hole in it if there’s a fraud investigation in train. Now, Nationwide still have some human folks on the web in the Customer Retention and Abuse groups, and what you need to do is to get this escalated off the call-centre ladder until a human being sees it, then you need to hammer away.” “But how do I…?” You start checking off points on your fingertips. “You start by getting Sally to offer them her car’s black-box log. Once you know exactly where she was when the incident happened—the black-box GPS will tell you that—you tell them to serve a FOIA disclosure notice on the Highways Agency for their nearby camera footage—if they won’t listen at first, I’ll talk you through doing that yourself.

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It’s a puzzler, but at least they’re not insisting you clear customs and immigration: Thank Brussels for something. The taxi ride to your hotel rubs in the fact that you’ve come to another country. It’s the old-fashioned kind of black cab, with a real human being behind the wheel instead of a webcam and a drone jockey in a call centre. Your driver manages to detour past a weird building, all non-Euclidean swoops and curves (he proudly declares it to be a parliament, even though it looks like it just arrived from Mars, then confides that it cost a science-fictional amount, confirming the Martian origins of its budget oversight process).

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Then your tourist map twitches and rearranges itself in front of your eyes as the overloaded Galileo service catches up with you. “This is the, uh, Niddrie Malmaison. I wanted the West End one?” “Oh, reet. Ahcannaebemissingthe—” You blink at the subsequent stream of consonants interspersed with vowels that sound subtly wrong. Maybe you’d have been better off waiting for a call-centre–controlled limo. But evidently no reply is expected: The driver hits the pause button on his meter and engages the mysterious fifth wheel that allows taxis everywhere to turn on the spot. And you’re off again, into a bizarre grey maze of steep streets and steeper buildings, with or without battlements.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

In the twentieth century, developing countries lacking natural resources made economic progress mainly by selling the cheap labour of their unskilled workers. Today millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts and selling them to customers in the United States, while people in Bangalore earn their keep in call centres dealing with the complaints of American customers.26 Yet with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labour would become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the US, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon, and print it in New York.

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The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centres in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer services in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice are tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call-centre operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code – so how will they survive? If AI and 3-D printers indeed take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech-giants in California.

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Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in hi-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse. Of course, some emerging economies – including India and Bangladesh – might advance fast enough to join the winning team. Given enough time, the children or grandchildren of textile workers and call-centre operators might well become the engineers and entrepreneurs who build and own the computers and 3-D printers. But the time to make such a transition is running out. In the past, cheap unskilled labour has served as a secure bridge across the global economic divide, and even if a country advanced slowly, it could expect to reach safety eventually.

Animals
by Emma Jane Unsworth
Published 2 May 2014

Bacon, my novel-in-progress, was the story of a priest who fell in love with a talking pig (I could already see the movie trailer: Gene Hackman in a dog collar, the back of a pig’s head in the foreground as they desperately embraced: ‘God help me, I love you!’). I’d been halfway through the thing for a few years now and needed to crack on if I was ever going to escape the call centre. I’d reduced my hours there to the minimum but I still spent every second pondering quiet desktop suicide. The previous week I’d been losing the will to live ten minutes into my shift when my boss came over and asked whether I had flu. ‘It’s just a cold,’ I said, stoically. He looked at the pile of congealed tissues on my desk.

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The book was proving hard enough without the added worry of where it might or might not fit in the world, especially when I was yanked every day into a heinous, staticky place, a grey carpeted box of lies concerning credit cards. All that got me through was telling myself I was buying as well as biding my time, a dangling carrot for most people who worked in the call centre. There were musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists – all of us detesting every second in our headsets; all of us dreading the time someone would turn round and say: I’VE GOT MY BREAK! I’M OUT! SEE YOU LATER, LOSERS! GCSE English class. Tuesday afternoon. Me – thirteen, ginger, unstylishly myopic – navigating my way through Yeats’ ‘When You Are Old’ with rabid intent.

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She picked her tea up from by her sandals and pointed to a mug down by the side of my chair. I picked up the tea and took a sip. Scaldy-hot. I took another sip. ‘So when did you leave the Red Room, then?’ I said when I could. ‘Not long after you. Four months, maybe five. Those 3 a.m. finishes! They’re a killer. What have you been up to since?’ ‘I work in a call centre.’ A pause, then: ‘See, much better hours, you know what I mean. Neil’s an accountant so we get something like a normal life at the evenings and weekends.’ ‘Well, my shifts are pretty unpredictable. It’s a twenty-four-hour service. Credit cards.’ I didn’t know why but it was almost as though part of me was enjoying making out I did the worst thing in the world.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

Translated into the jobs they were doing, this meant many things. Remember, these were professionals working in call centres in retail and hospitality. Such jobs often have a set of scripts that are used to deal with consumer enquiries. It is easy to stick to a script. It represents the default. But every now and again, you meet a situation that isn’t covered by the script, or where a fresh approach might work better. Do you just stick to what you have always done? Or do you find a new way of solving a problem, or selling an idea, or pleasing the customer? Those call centre workers who could step outside convention performed significantly better.

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The start, however, has been highly promising, and gives researchers a chance to overcome the contradictions that have bedevilled the field. Above all, it articulates a vital truth that science itself can dispose us to forget – diversity matters. IV In the spring of 2010, Michael Housman, a labour economist, was working on a project to figure out why some call centre workers perform better than others. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find an answer. Nothing seemed to compute. He told me: I was working as Chief Analytics Officer for a firm that sells software to employers to help them recruit and retain staff. We had data on 50,000 people who had taken a 45-minute online job assessment and who were subsequently hired.

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A different approach would be to adopt personalisation. This doesn’t consist of comparing different diets across the whole population, but adopts flexibility at the level of the individual. And, as Segal showed, this approach can lower the blood sugar response, leaving an individual with a significantly healthier diet. Now think of the call centre workers. Many organisations test different scripts, compare the results, perform statistical tests, and come to what seems like a scientific conclusion about which script is the best overall. But this often misses the benefits of flexibility. The Housman experiment shows that when workers sensibly deviate from a script, they often perform better.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

This has been encouraged and facilitated by a broader agenda of flexible employment systems, the growth of subcontracting and the degradation of important employment rights and benefits that once regulated this practice (see Kreitzman, 1999; Aubenas, 2011). Cleaners, warehouse workers, caterers, security personnel, truck drivers, call-centre agents and many others now do their work in the middle of the night when the rest of us are asleep. Of course, Marx noted long ago that the attempt to render labour productive after the sun goes down represents a strong predisposition of the capitalist mode of production: The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, acts only as a palliative.

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We are not referring to a distinctive class or social category, although the destitute prefigures its form. For the impossibility lodged in every centre of this wrong whole is viral too. Its inflections are to be seen in the homeless, in the tearful bankers falling to earth from their high-rise prisons, in academics sacrificing themselves to the ‘bad deal’ they call a mortgage, in the call-centre employees who cannot go on, etc. The official silence concerning these unmanageable moments constantly throbs everywhere in the large cities of the capitalist order, a low and compulsive hum that troubles those who have learnt to listen to its message. A Negative Optics of Revolt After Deleuze, the planet of work is no figurative prison or straitjacket, but a set of impossible geometric lines that we must render obsolete so that their perpetual postponements and qualifications can be halted for good.

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In the presence of a gruelling and often humiliating clash between managers and a disempowered employee, organizational bystanders frequently lose their nerve and volunteer important insights about the political alliances and factions that may be frustrating managerial objectives. A fourth reason for all this conflict is perhaps most central. An incident of disagreement, however minor and insignificant, offers management useful ammunition for justifiably abandoning employees in the future should the need arise. Many industries, especially call centres, customer services and retail, rely upon orchestrated conflict to eject workers on a regular basis, knowing that newcomers are less wise to the historical struggles within the firm and more pliant, until they too become a ‘problem’ and are themselves replaced. Indeed, these ‘green field’ strategies, in which a relentless cycle of hiring–firing–hiring is pursued, require a very combative approach by management, because most of the time employees simply want to be left alone to get on with the job.

David Mitchell: Back Story
by David Mitchell
Published 10 Oct 2012

This wasn’t as unusual in 2002 as it is now. Nowadays I’d assume it was a survey or someone trying to sell me something. If I answered it, I’d expect that suspicious pause after I said hello which tells you that it’s from some poor sod in a call centre – a cold-call centre, in fact. Possibly a cold cold-call centre if it’s in the North-East, or a humid cold-call centre if it’s the subcontinent. The pause, I reckon, is because they’ve dialled a dozen, or a hundred, or maybe a thousand numbers at once, and it takes a beat for them to notice which ones have been answered. And of course it’s an infuriating pause because, not only is someone about to waste your time, you’re also expected to wait a few seconds until it’s convenient for them to start wasting it.

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The battle, in my case, is to get off the phone politely and without having hung up on anyone. I feel that an element of my humanity will have been lost if I actually hang up while they’re still speaking. I try, by adopting a firm and patronising voice, to put an end to the call in good order. Of course it never works. The techniques drilled into the staff of a cold-call centre presumably include never stopping talking and never saying, ‘Okay, thanks, goodbye.’ I’m a slightly obsessive ‘goodbye’ sayer – I come away from parties with an unsettled feeling because I haven’t formally taken my leave of all the people I chatted to. I know that’s fine and people don’t expect it, but it feels like I’ve left lots of loose ends hanging.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

, pp. 93–6. Global employment in the IT and call center sectors also seems set to decline as cloud-based computing obviates the need for firms to develop and monitor their own websites and online databases; large Indian IT firms are already shedding jobs. See Simon Mundy, “India’s Tech Workers Scramble for Jobs as Industry Automates,” Financial Times, May 27, 2017. 49 Nathaniel Meyersohn, “Grocery Stores Turn to Robots during the Coronavirus,” CNN Business, April 7, 2020. See also John Reed, Mercedes Ruehl, and Benjamin Parkin, “Coronavirus: will call centre workers lose their ‘voice’ to AI?,” Financial Times, April 22, 2020.

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See also South Africa expansion of nonstandard employment in, 54 unemployment benefits in, 122n27 universal basic income (UBI) and, 72 agents of change, 95–9 agriculture overcapacity in, 37–8 production and, 23–4 role of technology in, 41 AI (artificial intelligence), 7, 40, 116n35 Algeria, waves of strikes in, 96 apparel industry, 42–3 Argentina employment rates in, 53 piquetero movement, 98 waves of strikes in, 96 Aristotle, 83, 84 artificial intelligence (AI), 7, 40, 116n35 Asia capital accumulation in, 43 deindustrialization in, 21 employment landscape in, 50 expansion of nonstandard employment in, 54 job security in, 52–3 asymptomatic stagnation, 123–4n40 Australia, waves of strikes in, 96 Austria, out-of-work income maintenance/support in, 119–20n6 automation discourse about, ix–x, xi–xiii, 1–2 fears of, 5–8 labor undemand, 8–13 periodicity of, 8 principle propositions of, 2 solutions for, 65–6 automation technologies, 5–6 Autor, David, 9, 61 Babbage, Charles, 133–4n13 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 7–8 Babeuf, François-Noël, 85 Bangladesh, sewbots in, 43 Bank of Japan, 37 Banks, Iain M., 130n40 Culture series, 3, 130n40, 132n4 Bastani, Aaron, 5 Baumol, William, 57, 59–60, 123–4n40, 124n41 Bell, Daniel, 57 Bellamy, Edward, 1 Looking Backward, 86–7 Belle Epoque, 38–9 Beveridge, William, 69–70 Biagi law (2013), 52 Boggs, James, 8, 13 Brazil deindustrialization in, 108n22 employment rates in, 53 labor productivity growth in, 34 service sector employment in, 56, 97 Brecht, Bertolt, 81 Brenner, Robert, x, 24–5, 109n28, 110n32 Bretton Woods, 25 British National Health Service, 69–70 Brynjolfsson, Erik of labor-productivity growth, 17 The Second Machine Age, 2–3, 45 Cabet, Étienne on post-scarcity, 83, 84–5 Travels in Icaria, 84–5 call center sector, 118n48 Capital (Marx), 8, 47–8 capital disinvestment, 71 “A Capitalist Road to Communism” (van Parijs and van der Veen), 76, 95 capitalists, employment and, 128n19 capital productivity, 26 capital stock, 112n4 capital strike, 78–9 Carpenter, John They Live, x–xi, xi–xii Chile, waves of strikes in, 96 China deindustrialization in, 23 employment rates in, 28, 53, 54 labor productivity growth in, 33–4 nonming gong, 54 output growth in, 28 reindustrialization in, 22 robots in, 107n16 sewbots in, 43 waves of strikes in, 96 work relocation to, 42–3 Clarke, Arthur C., 119n2 Clinton, Bill, 4 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 85 Corkery, Michael, 103n15 cost disease, 60 counter-cyclical spending, era of, 67 creative destruction, 40 Culture series (Banks), 3, 130n40 currency, rise in value of European and Japanese, 36–7 Davis, Mike, 62 deindustrialization global growth of, 108n22 Rowthorn on, 107–8n21 Denmark, unemployment rates in, 47 deus ex machina, 83 Dewey, John, 85 digital technologies, ix–x disaggregation, of manufacturing-output growth rates, 19 dollar, value of, 110n32 domestic industry, 123n33 Du Bois, W.E.B., 85–6 economic bubbles, deflation of, 35–6 economic growth, 68 economic inequality, 120n11 economic stagnation, 112–3n6 edict of Eden, 1 education level, unemployment rates and, 49 Egypt, deindustrialization in, 108n22 electronics assembly, 42–3 employment about, 19 capitalists and, 128n19 nonstandard, 54–5 self-employment, 104n26 service sector, 56–7, 59–60, 105n1 underemployment, 11, 122–3n31 Endnotes collective, xii Engels, Friedrich Communist Manifesto, 85 Etzler, John Adolphus, 133–4n13 The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour, 7–8 Europe deindustrialization in, 21 job security in, 52–3 women’s labor force in, 52 European Central Bank, 37 Faberman, R.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

What seems sure is that the world that our grandchildren will work in will have very different organisations and very different life options than the ones I knew. Whether they will be better or nicer is another question. 4 THE WORKPLACE What? Where? Who? and How? WE HAVE TO contemplate a day when most factories – if they are still called that – are largely staffed by robots and call centres by talking computers, when cars, lorries and trains are increasingly driverless, when cooking is fully automated, the menu of your choice brought by robot to your table, when most shopping is online and entertainment on tap in your lounge or bedroom. Much of our lives will be organised by algorithms and computer-controlled systems.

…

But there is more to the job than the specified core, there is the dough around the jam, the empty space for new initiatives. Efficiency dislikes empty space so is tempted to prescribe what should happen in it, thereby pulling more into the core. In the extreme all the doughnut is core, every action is foreseen and prescribed, as is the case in many call centres where the operator is totally constrained by what they read on their screen. The next stage is to do away with the operator and leave it to the computer, thereby giving complete control to the centre but also ensuring that no unexpected or creative initiatives will be forthcoming. Efficiency will have killed individual creativity and initiative.

…

That may be expensive in the short term but, ultimately, trust is always cheaper than control. In a doughnut culture people are judged on the results, not on their methods, on their effectiveness rather than their efficiency. Efficiency should be the servant not the master. The new technologies can now work both ways. Technology can be used, as in some of those call centres, to eliminate discretion and increase control, or, by monitoring only results and by more disclosure of necessary data, it can facilitate individual initiative. Some business organisations take the doughnut model to extremes, effectively licensing individual units to run their own businesses, or to start new ones, for which they would need corporate approval if investment were needed.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

Your other source of intelligence should be data. There are various sources worth exploring. The web traffic data from your existing websites is a good place to start, not least to help identify how many of the thousands of web pages maintained by your organisation are visited by almost nobody. Data from call centres is also rich with insight about what your users are failing to find out from your websites. Gathering any unfiltered information you can get on user complaints is extremely powerful too, not least because it ensures that those with access to louder megaphones aren’t given a falsely high priority.

…

That e-petitions didn’t experience a familiar kind of public IT failure on a grand scale was itself enough for it to stand out as a success. To get a sense of just how visible a service will be, you will ideally need access to data. The web traffic logs on existing websites should give you some indication, as will call centre data. However, for completely greenfield services, there may be no historical numbers to work from. In these cases, you will have to calibrate potential visibility with a combination of your instincts and the amount of political attention the new idea is getting. Plan for worst-case scenarios, and run exercises that put the service through its paces.

…

Their goal should be to place this project in the same canon as those great designs; not by pastiche or homage, but by using the principles of good design adopted by the organisation’s pioneers. If they do this well enough, digital teams can unlock design patterns their organisation has never faced before. In the UK’s Ministry of Justice, a team redesigned the lasting power of attorney service following GDS’s design principles. Soon after a beta version was launched, the department’s call centre began getting more contacts. This was a puzzle and potentially a worry – the new service was supposed to reduce the number of people ringing up, not increase it. It turned out the spike in calls had been caused by users who wanted to praise the team on how smooth they found their experience. A positive feedback button was duly added to the online service.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

Representatives of authority were themselves subject to the system, and could also be held accountable. These days, we live in a world where power is anonymous and cannot be localised, and therefore no longer exercises any moral authority. Much more importantly, it can also no longer be called to account. It is epitomised by the call centre with its endless menu options (‘Hi, I’m Vanessa, how can I help you?’) that never puts us through to the person who is responsible, for the very good reason that they don’t exist. The seat of power has been abandoned. There are no fathers anymore because the system has done away with symbolic authority figures.

…

Journalist Kaat Schaubroeck sums it up perfectly in the title of her book: Een verpletterend gevoel van verantwoordelijkheid: waarom ouders zich altijd schuldig voelen (A Crushing Sense of Responsibility: why parents always feel guilty). When they seek help for their children, whose disorders are also caused by the system, they find themselves at the mercy of the social-services call centre, which sends them from pillar to post. And this is the second explanation for the increasing demand for discipline: neo-liberal policies create a need for it by sweeping away symbolic authority and trust in such authority. As a result, everyone mistrusts everyone else, leading to yet more monitoring and measurement, and, despite all the slogans about deregulation and the ‘free’ market, to an endless proliferation of rules, regulations, and contracts.

…

Günter Wallraff is a journalist who occasionally goes undercover to find out exactly what it means, say, to be a member of an ethnic minority. He did the same thing as a worker right at the bottom of the social ladder, taking on jobs such as a baker in the Lidl supermarket chain and an operator in a call centre. He published his account in a book entitled Heerlijke nieuwe wereld (Brave New World). Besides the starvation wage (7.66 euros an hour before tax), Wallraff said that the hardest thing to bear was the loss of dignity, the feeling of no longer belonging. The system creates an underclass who regard themselves as failures, are ashamed, and seek to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.

HWFG: Here We F**king Go
by Chris McQueer
Published 8 Nov 2018

It was mental. Sammy the Crime Scene Cleaner Efter mah escapades in the sausage factory, ah went oan the brew fur a while. Ye ever been oan the brew? It’s a fuckin nightmare. Honestly, yer better aff workin. Cunt’s are oan yer case 24/7. Need tae apply fur aboot a million joabs every single day. Call centres, offices, shops, fuckin door tae door sales an aw that – everyhing. ‘Ahm clearly no qualified tae work in a jail,’ ah says tae mah designated advisor. ‘Ah mean, ahm no the biggest maist intimidatin cunt, um ah?’ ‘That’s beside the point,’ mah advisor says. ‘You have to apply or you’ll be sanctioned and lose your job seeker’s allowance.’

…

To impress Holly, Zack had claimed he was on the hunt for a job. After she came back from lunch, Beverly was stunned to see he was putting together a CV. Written in comic sans, using his email ZackFTQ1888@hotmail.com and only half a page long, but at least it was a start. Beverly stopped his email from sending when he fired his CV off to a local call centre and fixed it up herself. By the end of her shift, Zack had a first date, a first driving lesson and his first interview all lined up. An excellent day’s work, she thought. AND he’d only had two wanks. He would be fine without her after Friday, she reckoned. * * * On Thursday, Beverly could hardly believe her time with Zack was almost over.

…

Normally, she would set an alarm to wake him up but today she cancelled the alarm he’d set himself for 1:30pm. She then turned his phone on silent so he couldn’t hear when the instructor tried to phone him. Time to fuck up his employment hopes now. She drafted a short email in which she told the call centre’s recruitment manager that he had a voice like “a wee jessie” and to “shove the job up his arse” after picking up some Scots from watching Still Game. The she turned her attentions to poor Holly. She could do much better than Zack anyway. Your dug’s fuckin ugly she wrote and hit send. Eh fuck you then, cheeky arsehole Holly replied, then blocked him.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

The silicon chip gets smaller; the add-on devices that once cluttered our workspaces – modems, hard drives, floppy disks – become smaller, scarcer, and then disappear. Proprietary software gets built by corporate IT departments and is then replaced by off-the-peg versions at one-tenth of the price. And soon, too, the IT departments disappear, to be replaced by call centres in Mumbai. The PC becomes the laptop. The laptop shrinks and gets more powerful but is superseded by the smartphone and the tablet. At first, this new technology was mapped on to the old structures of capitalism. In the 1990s, the folklore in IT was that the most expensive software – the enterprise resource package – ‘moulds like putty, sets like concrete’.

…

They have access to banking and insurance, are likely to own a TV, and usually live in small family groups, not the multigenerational families of the slum, or the solitude of the dormitory. Three-quarters of them work in service industries. The growth of service sector jobs in the developing world reflects both the natural evolution of the job mix under modern capitalism and a second round of offshoring, focused on call centres, IT departments and back-office functions. In short, the graph shows the limits of what offshoring can achieve. That growing wedge of $13-a-day workers is nudging into the income bracket of the poorest American workers. This means that the days of easy wins for firms offshoring their production are drawing to a close.

…

‘Capturing positive externalities,’ writes Moulier-Boutang, ‘becomes the number one problem of value.’48 In cognitive capitalism, the nature of work is transformed. Manual labour and industry don’t stop, but their place in the landscape changes. Because profit increasingly comes from capturing the free value generated by consumer behaviour, and because a society focused on mass consumption has to be constantly fed coffee, smiled at, serviced by call centres, the ‘factory’ in cognitive capitalism is the whole of society. For these theorists, ‘society as a factory’ is a crucial concept – vital to understanding not just the nature of exploitation but resistance. For a pair of Nike trainers to be worth $179.99 requires 465,000 workers in 107 factories across Vietnam, China and Indonesia to produce to the same exact standard.

How to Write Your Will: The Complete Guide to Structuring Your Will, Inheritance Tax Planning, Probate and Administering an Estate
by Marlene Garsia
Published 1 Jan 2008

The appropriate authorities in both England and Scotland have been extremely helpful, as they would be to any person seeking their assistance. There are significant changes under way not only with new laws but a change in the probate system and updating of excepted estates. Capital Taxes Office have introduced a call centre processing system although the initial contact is still to be made with your local Probate Registry. A proposed simplification in dealing with the Registries has been introduced. As an executor or proposed administrator you have to present yourself to the Registrar and swear that the information given is correct; in future ‘a statement of truth’ will replace the oath, although personal attendance will still be necessary.

…

The second part of the book deals with probate, what steps should be taken and when, in order to prove a will. If the sad task of winding up the estate of a close relative or friend is placed under your agreed control, you may need to seek advice. The best place to start is at the Personal Applications Department of your nearest Probate Registry or at one of its sub-registries. The new call centre on 0845 3020900 can be used for IHT queries and for forms, and also a website at www.courtservice.gov.uk. The Registrar and his colleagues in the Personal Applications Department in your area deal on a daily basis with all sorts of queries raised regarding probate. However, they cannot give legal advice.

…

In the proposal the current Registries and Sub-Registries were to be closed, leaving some six or so Probate Registries nationwide. To this end an 144 ■ How to Write Your Will amalgamation of telephone numbers/helpline numbers between the Capital Taxes Office and Probate is already in place and working. However, the call centre staff are only trained to deal with standard queries, and if it does not fall into this category your call will have to be transferred to another office. Happily, these proposals to reduce the number of offices have been abandoned and the nationwide network is to remain for the time being. Other positive proposals, such as a joint helpline, will also remain.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

Research suggests that the colleagues we are most likely to email are the ones we regularly interact with face to face.15 Without the serendipitous encounters the office creates, communication along the informal linkages within an organization dries up. Highly routine office work may be somewhat shielded from these negative effects. One study of 16,000 call-centre workers in China, for example, noted a 4 per cent increase in calls per minute for workers operating at home.16 The authors of the study attributed this increase in productivity to a quieter environment at home compared with the office, though workers with children or other dependants may dispute that hypothesis.

…

Many poor countries blessed with attractive scenery or a warm climate will continue to benefit from tourists. But the jobs this sector creates tend to be relatively low paid, and many poor countries do not have the beaches of Thailand or the wildlife of Tanzania. Another option is to provide cheap call centres or clerical services such as payroll. Many of these highly routinized activities, however, are already being automated, with recent developments in generative artificial intelligence increasing the risk of replacement. A new consensus on migration could be one part of the solution. While many of the poorest countries of the world will continue to experience rapid population growth in the decades ahead, many rich countries – and some middle-income countries like China – are experiencing rapid ageing and will see their populations contract in the coming decades.

…

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 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Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

Selling some of his shares to the public by listing on the stock market looked like the best route to maximize their value, and another deal he’d done at a bargain price had paved the way to do it. Shortly after he rescued Wirecard, Bauer had scooped up the bones of a second company on its way to the glue factory. InfoGenie was an almost defunct operator of call centres from Berlin that was beset by accounting problems. It was a near-worthless penny stock, but it had gone through the expense and so-called scrutiny of an initial public offering on Frankfurt’s Neuer Markt in October 2000, a final piece of trash foisted on to the public in the dying days of the dotcom boom.

…

Wirecard anyway soon laid on a trip to Asia for a selection of investment bank analysts to see for themselves, bypassing most of the locations visited by J-Cap. In Jakarta the offices were thronged with staff and the analysts were treated to presentations from every layer of the Indonesian business, from call centres and IT all the way up to the top management: catnip for overworked analysts. There was plenty of time for taking photos, to pepper the glowing reports laying out what they learned for clients back home. They stopped in friendly Singapore, home to Wirecard’s Asian headquarters, then it was on to Chennai to discover more about the go-getting operations of Hermes (now relocated to modern, well-ventilated quarters).

…

Can I please speak to the person who’s written it?’ Earl persisted and eventually Perring gave in. There was another contributor who’d shared his work with Perring. This fourth man had found signs online of historic miscoding for US poker transactions by Wirecard in violation of the American ban, such as instructions for call centre operators. It was one of the Wise Men. He hadn’t employed Perring, the two of them had just been quietly comparing notes for months. Once Earl was introduced it took him about thirty seconds to grasp the point.fn1 In May 2016, Roddy went to a full-day Wirecard presentation for investors in London.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Unless governments adopt policies that handle this disruption better, it will potentially affect even greater numbers of people than deindustrialisation. And to the extent that researchers can predict it, it is the places most left behind by the previous wave of automation that are most exposed to the next one. That is because lower-skilled routine jobs—for example in retail, warehousing, and customer service such as call centres—are both more threatened by technological innovation and disproportionately found in places that previously lost industry or mining jobs, places like the north of England or the US states of Indiana and Ohio. In contrast, the places with a high proportion of knowledge economy jobs—think Oxford or New York—are not just doing better already but are also more secure because such jobs tend to be harder to automate.25 In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out.

…

Much of the increase in US income inequality over the last decades has come not from inequality between the low and high paid within each company—between, say, the janitor and the CEO, though that has increased, too—but from a growing difference between what a janitor at a successful company is paid and what a janitor at an unsuccessful one is paid.26 In Europe and Japan, in contrast, concentration has not increased as much, perhaps because competition regulators have been more active.27 But everywhere, the rate at which newcomers enter markets to challenge established companies seems to be falling, which also reduces competitive pressures and therefore makes pro-competitive policy all the more important.28 Second, location can be a factor affecting market power. In small places, a supermarket chain, call centre, or delivery warehouse may offer the only jobs available to people with low formal skills. It is then hard to challenge poor working conditions. In the United States, employers have reduced competition for staff further by introducing “noncompete” clauses in employment contracts, making it harder for workers to take another job even when one exists.29 Third, the digital revolution threatens to worsen the imbalance of power further, inside production relationships, within labour markets, and against consumers.

…

But the broad definition of connectivity is crucial.19 Without the “software” of economic connectivity—the education, skills, and social aptitude to participate in the most modern economic activities—reducing “hard” distance may achieve little. Extending the area from which poorly paid workers can commute into cities to do low-productivity service work (or providing such work remotely, for example through call centres) does nothing to restore a sense of economic belonging. A striking illustration of how physical distance overlaps with psychological and social distance is that even in the era of ubiquitous social networks, people’s networks of online “friends” thins out fast with how far away they live.20 This matters for access to a knowledge economy where high-value services rely on cognitively and socially specific communication.

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography
by Sarah Millican
Published 16 Apr 2018

While it sounds sad, those cries were very good for me and helped me get back behind my desk to work. I was worried that staying too long on frontline would desensitise me to emotions, so I was very glad to be headhunted to be part of a new team that would be working out the back of Felling Jobcentre, six Metro stops away. It was a call centre where the only thing I’d be doing was job searches. I was one of a team of about ten. We all worked in the same room, which had a small kitchenette off it where one of the girls pinned passive-aggressive poems about cleaning the microwave, and the tea club biscuit-tin lid was never on. Because we were in such a small room with our own loos and everything, we didn’t have to go far to get anything.

…

It was on that computer system that I spotted my next job: sound engineer. When I went for the interview and they told me it was for audiobooks, I was thrilled because I was going to be surrounded by books again. They’d had only male interviewees so far who’d thought it was a music role. I got the job, and on the day I left the call centre my friend Angela got a call from my warehouse man. She had put him in for a fair few jobs over the months, and he’d rung to pass a message on to me that he’d got himself one, which was the best leaving present I could have asked for. Producing audiobooks was like being a kid, but instead of your parent reading to you it’s a professional actor who can do all the voices.

…

I pride myself on the fact that I only missed half a day at work the whole time, but I know in my heart that I cried at my desk A LOT so I’m not sure how much actual work got done. At this point I was back working for the civil service. I’d left audiobooks because of the antisocial hours and this job, working in the call centre, was more money. I sat opposite an adorable bloke called Paul, and one day he asked how he could help me while I was snuffling behind my monitor. I told him I liked pictures of animals in clothes, so every time I was upset my email would ping and there would be a Yorkshire terrier in a ball gown.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

In May 2020, Honeywell of Charlotte, North Carolina, won a deal to supply 70 million face masks. Hologic of Marlborough, Massachusetts, won a £150 million contract for testing kits, and another £68 million was given to Thermo Fisher of Waltham, Massachusetts. When the ‘Test and Trace’ scheme required call centres, these were operated by Sitel of Miami, Florida. Testing kits were largely delivered by Amazon and ID checks were made by the consumer credit company TransUnion, of Chicago, Illinois. Brake Bros, owned by Sysco of Texas, shared a £205 million untendered contract to deliver food boxes to vulnerable people who were isolating during the pandemic.4 The company also received a £600 million government loan at 0.5 per cent annual interest under the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) – a particularly valuable benefit in light of the inflation that followed the crisis in Britain.5 The fact that call centres, deliveries and credit checks were deemed beyond the cost-effective capacity of UK-owned companies says much about the British government’s attitude to domestic businesses, but all these deals are dwarfed by the cash paid by Her Majesty’s Government for vaccines.

…

Brake Bros, owned by Sysco of Texas, shared a £205 million untendered contract to deliver food boxes to vulnerable people who were isolating during the pandemic.4 The company also received a £600 million government loan at 0.5 per cent annual interest under the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) – a particularly valuable benefit in light of the inflation that followed the crisis in Britain.5 The fact that call centres, deliveries and credit checks were deemed beyond the cost-effective capacity of UK-owned companies says much about the British government’s attitude to domestic businesses, but all these deals are dwarfed by the cash paid by Her Majesty’s Government for vaccines. By the end of 2022, the UK had ordered 654 million jabs, of which more than two-thirds were bought from Pfizer and Moderna, despite those costing more than the Oxford vaccine (AstraZeneca).

…

In work, but also in poverty In parallel with this continuing loss of high-street outlets, and the extraction of national artworks and talented people, the position of the broader population has become more perilous. Journalist James Bloodworth went undercover for six months to experience what it is like to be one of the 2 million people who earn the minimum wage.26 He worked sequentially as a carer, as an Uber driver, in a call centre and as a stock-picker in one of Amazon’s warehouses. In every case he experienced a precarious lifestyle of zero-hours contracts at the minimum wage with insecure work, no work if he was ill, long days and tough conditions, and he described the misery of many he met who did not have any margin for error or any leeway to cope with unforeseen events.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

ONLINE SERVICES AND ECALL It is already possible to send and receive e-mails or to listen to music from the Internet in cars. In the future, it will be possible to download videos in HD quality into cars as well. Along with improving quality and network capacity, it will be possible to use even more digital entertainment and communication services. eCall (emergency call) notifies an emergency call centre when an accident occurs. As of 2018, this emergency call system must be installed in all new vehicles in the European Union. A device installed in the vehicle automatically reports an accident using a standardised telephone number. General Motors has offered a similar system for its vehicles called OnStar in The Connected Car 137 numerous countries for several years.

…

The Connected Car 139 K e y T a ke a w a y s Vehicle connectivity will take place permanently via mobile-phone networks or with the help of ad-hoc networks. Ad-hoc networks will be used for V-to-V, V-to-I and V-to-X communications. Established online services allow the occupants to use the phone, send e-mails and play music from the Internet. eCall is a service to notify an emergency call centre of an accident and will be mandatory in new vehicles in all European countries as of 2018. With connected driving, information from other vehicles or from the infrastructure will be integrated into the real-world model of an autonomous vehicle. Connected mobility means that services for mobility encompassing all modes of transport will be offered in the future. 

…

These data are primarily required for the driver assistance systems, and also so that more and more information and communication services can be provided to the customer in the vehicle [83]. Fundamentally, there are three categories of data that are generated in the vehicle: (1) Data are created by statutory regulations such as the automatic emergency call. In the case of an accident, data on the time, place and driving direction is sent to the emergency call centre. (2) Data result from technical processes such as the recognition of the environment with sensors and subsequent processing of that data. As a rule, these data are of a temporary nature, unless they are entered into the map producer’s database. And (3), data also come from the provision of services for which a contractual agreement exists.

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
by Richard Susskind
Published 10 Jan 2013

An illustration here is the US-based international law firm Orrick, which has a global operations centre based in Wheeling, West Virginia. Off-shoring is the transfer of legal work to countries in which labour and property costs are lower. Many large banks have off-shored some of their legal activities in this way—for example, to India and Malaysia—to places where they have already moved other functions, such as their call centres or their finance functions. On this model, the off-shored legal resource remains part of the bank. Outsourcing, in contrast, entails the conduct of legal work by a third party provider. This is often referred to as ‘legal process outsourcing’ or ‘LPO’. Routine legal tasks, such as document review, are handed to these specialist support companies, which, again, are usually in low-cost locations.

…

The problem with this is that it is proving too costly for routine and repetitive legal tasks to be discharged within firms and legal departments. And so, different approaches to sourcing such work are now gaining some traction: outsourcing to third party providers in low-cost countries; off-shoring legal work to locations where businesses have already transferred other functions, such as call centres; encouraging law firms to subcontract to practices in less costly regions; or using contract lawyers who charge about half the price of traditional law firms. These are all instances of what I call, in Chapter 2, the ‘efficiency strategy’—cutting the costs of legal service. Yet another possibility is co-sourcing, which can involve a group of in-house departments coming together and sharing the cost of some common legal service, perhaps by setting up shared services centres.

Tuscany Road Trips
by Duncan Garwood , Paula Hardy , Robert Landon and Nicola Williams
Published 2 Jun 2016

International Calls A To call Italy from abroad, call the international access number (011 in the USA, 00 from most other countries), Italy’s country code (39) and then the area code of the location you want, including the leading 0. A The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres and international calling cards. A Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones. A Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge (collect) call at home-country rates.

Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Carolyn McCarthy and Kevin Raub
Published 19 Oct 2015

Also has an ATM at the airport (in the departure area). Farmacia Cruz Verde (Av Atamu Tekena; 9am-7:30pm Mon-Sat) Large and well-stocked pharmacy. Hospital Hanga Roa ( 210-0215; Av Simon Paoa s/n) Mana@net (Av Atamu Tekena s/n; per hr CH$1200; 9am-10pm) Internet cafe and call centre. Omotohi Cybercafé (Av Te Pito o Te Henua s/n; per hr CH$1000; 9am-10pm) Internet and wi-fi access, and call centre. Police ( 133) Post office (Av Te Pito o Te Henua s/n; 9am-1pm & 2.30-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-12:30pm Sat) Puna Vai (Av Hotu Matua; 8:30am-1pm & 3-8pm Mon-Sat, 9am-1pm Sun) This petrol station also doubles as an exchange office. Much more convenient than the bank (no queues, better rates, longer opening hours, no commission on traveler’s cheques).

…

Tipping & Bargaining Tipping and bargaining are not traditionally part of Polynesian culture. Telephone Easter Island’s international telephone code is the same as Chile’s ( 56), and the area code ( 32) covers the whole island. International calls (dial 00) start at around US$0.50 per minute. You’ll find several private call centres in town. Entel offers GSM cell-phone service, and prepaid SIM cards are available for purchase. TRANSPORTATION Getting There & Away Air The only airline serving Easter Island is LAN ( 210-0920; www.lan.com; Av Atamu Tekena s/n; 9am-4.30pm Mon-Fri, to 12.30pm Sat). It has daily flights to/from Santiago, one weekly flight to/from Pape’ete (Tahiti) and twice weekly flights to/from Lima (Peru).

…

Santos Pecadores COCKTAIL BAR (www.santospecadores.cl; Av Vicente Méndez 275; 8:30pm-late Tue-Sat; ) Chillanejos with plenty of dash and cash pour into this chichi red-walled bar northeast of the city center for sushi, ceviche and lots and lots of cocktails. DJs keep things going till late at weekends. Information Look for internet cafes, call centers, laundromats and other travelers’ services along pedestrianized Arauco. BancoEstado ( 455-291; Constitución 500; 9am-2pm Mon-Fri) One of many ATMs on this street. Hospital Herminda Martín ( 208-221; Francisco Ramírez 10) Public hospital on the corner of Av Argentina. Post office ( 800-267-736; Av Libertad 501; 8:30am-6:30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-12:45pm Sat) Sernatur ( 223-272; www.chile.travel/en.html; 18 de Septiembre 455; 8:30am-1:30pm & 3-6pm Mon-Fri) Friendly staff provide city maps and information on accommodations and transport.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

In order to do so, MoUs were signed with registrars, enrolment agencies were brought on board, operators were trained, a biometric device ecosystem was created, enrolment and de-duplication software was continuously upgraded and fine-tuned to function at scale, servers were procured, letters were printed and dispatched, and a multilingual call centre was set up to handle queries and grievances. It took a significant amount of time and effort right from the first enrolment to scale each of these processes to achieve the target of generating one million Aadhaar numbers a day, but when Nandan tendered his resignation as chairman of the UIDAI on 13 March 2014, he could do so with the knowledge that the UIDAI had succeeded in its goal of delivering over 600 million Aadhaar numbers in less than five years of its existence.

…

It was technology and data analytics that powered this leap, allowing us to choose the media and the message likely to have the greatest impact and then monitoring the results in real time. The campaign rolls out Once people knew who Nandan was, what he had achieved so far and what he hoped to do for Bangalore South, we now had to tackle the challenging task of persuading people to vote for him. Volunteers called the residents of Bangalore South through call centres, familiarizing them with Nandan’s biography and emphasizing the local connect, starting with the fact that he was born in Bangalore South. In the later stages of the campaign, the live calls were complemented by automated phone calls that played a pre-recorded message from Nandan urging people to cast their vote in his favour.

…

Funds can be raised on the basis of the party’s brand, and technology helps to log and utilize even the smallest of donations, as the AAP’s fundraising campaign demonstrated so ably. The platform will also offer a set of technology-based tools that candidates can access: digitized voter lists, voter look-up services for party workers, social media engagement, call centre management, 3D hologram rallies, and so on. All these technological innovations were deployed in the 2014 elections, and should soon enter the mainstream of Indian politics. The trend of political parties increasingly providing a set of tools, or an integrated launch platform to their candidates, will only accelerate in future elections.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

As one of the largest dealers of Asian Paints located in South Mumbai told us, ‘I order products from Asian Paints five to ten times in a day and receive supplies three to four times daily. Until 1995–96, we used to call the depot to place our orders. Then they started their call centres in 2002–03. Now they incentivize us to order online rather than through the call centres, by giving us between Rs 500 and Rs 10,000 extra per month depending on the size of our online orders. Even if others copy this in a few years, they will have frequent stock-outs, and hence won’t meet our requirements.’ Asian Paints’s management told us, ‘Over the period 2000–15, IT has become a go-to resource for everyone in the company rather than being just a low-priority support function.

…

Until then, branch managers flew blindly, targeting anyone from a non-resident Indian to a senior citizen. Kaul stressed on discipline by insisting that branch managers provide clear strategies to attract customers. For example, a low-cost sales force was used to attract low-income customers who were serviced via call centres (only inbound calls), while high-end, priority customers were given dedicated relationship managers. However, Kaul’s bigger wins were getting the salary accounts of government departments, public sector employees, armed forces, etc. Having missed the private sector salary accounts to HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, Kaul managed to get the salary accounts from Mumbai Police, Delhi Police and teachers in Ahmedabad’s public schools.

Rome
by Lonely Planet

On Sunday his partner wants to go to the Caravaggio exhibition at the Quirinale, but that’ll be packed, and he’d rather drive out to the Castelli Romani for lunch at Lago di Albano. Paolo Virzì’s 2008 film Tutta la vita davanti won critical praise for its bittersweet portrayal of a philosophy graduate who dreams of a job in research but ends up working the phones in a Roman call centre. Work Employment in the capital is largely based on Italy’s bloated state bureaucracy. Every morning armies of suited civil servants pour into town and disappear into vast ministerial buildings to keep the machinery of government ticking over. Other important employers include the tourist sector, banking, finance and culture – Italy’s historic film industry is largely based in Rome and there are hundreds of museums and galleries across town.

…

Italian law legislates against this, but sexual discrimination clearly remains an issue in many work places. Rome’s under 40s are another workplace minority with many young Romans forced to accept short-term contracts for jobs for which they are hugely overqualified such as working in a telephone call centre. These jobs typically offer no job security, no pension benefits and no prospects. Home Life & the Family Romans, like most Italians, live in apartments. These are often small – 75 to 100sq m is typical – and expensive. House prices in central Rome are among the highest in the country and many first time buyers are forced to move out of town or to distant suburbs outside of the GRA (the grande raccordo anulare ), the busy ring road that marks the city’s outer limit.

…

Telecom Italia (www.187.it, in Italian) sells prepaid wi-fi cards for €3 (one hour), €5 (five hours), €15 (24 hours) and €40 (seven days). International Calls To call abroad from Italy dial 00, then the relevant country and area codes, followed by the telephone number. Try to avoid making international calls from a hotel, as you’ll be stung by high rates. It’s cheaper to call from a private call centre or from a public payphone with an international calling card. These are available at newsstands and tobacconists, and are often good value. Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172 444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172 610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge call at home-country rates.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

In the short term it is not artificial intelligence the West should worry about. It is what Baldwin calls remote intelligence. In some respects it has already arrived. Over the last twenty years, India and the Philippines reaped the rewards of the telecoms revolution to create lower-skilled service sector jobs at call centres, and on technology helpdesks. Those jobs are now under threat. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, ‘Software is eating the world’. How many times have you talked to a computer recently, rather than someone with an Indian accent? A lot more than a few years ago, I would guess. Automated voice software is supplanting humans.

…

So too are rapid leaps in language-translation software (India should beware: China’s relative lack of English will no longer be such a disadvantage). In the West we spend half our time fretting about low-skilled immigrants. We should be worrying at least as much about high-skilled offshoring. Some types of medical surgeon and architect will be as vulnerable to remote intelligence as plant engineers or call-centre operators. Ironically, some of the lowest-paid jobs – in barbershops and nail salons – will be among the safest. No matter how dexterous your virtual service provider, it is hard to imagine how she could cut your hair. In the near future, technology will shift many more lucrative Western service jobs to the developing world.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

Interactions like booking an airline ticket or changing a hotel reservation, resolving a problem with your bank, booking your car for a service or finding out the results of a paternity test could all be adequately handled by machine intelligences in the very near term. In many instances, they already are. A human won’t effectively differentiate the experience enough to justify the cost of a human-based call centre representative. In fact, my guess is that it won’t be long before you’ll have to agree to a charge if you want to speak to a “real” human. Many airlines and hotels already levy a phone service charge if you call instead of change a booking online. It’s pretty clear that human concierge services will become a premium level service only for the most valuable customer relationships in the future.

…

If she is lucky and can get an H1 Visa to work in the United States, she will probably need to leave her husband and children behind. Amazingly, the right robots might enable her to have the best of both worlds… What if Maria could stay in Manila and still work with patients in the United States? Imagine Maria in a call centre or even working from home. She is at her computer monitoring ten robot companions in an assisted care facility in Los Angeles. Each patient has a personal dedicated companion robot sitting by his or her bedside, running standard artificial general intelligence (AGI) software in a semi-autonomous mode.

…

At any time, be it in response to the sensors input, a patient request or emergency, or just daily health checks, a nurse or doctor can remote presence in and begin communicating through voice and video with the patient in an extremely efficient manner. Trained nurses or emergency response operators in a call centre could “remote in” immediately and begin assessing the situation of the patient more accurately than they do over the phone today asking questions as paramedics are dispatched. Some claim the elderly do not want to interact with robots, but the number of videos on YouTube that show older people happy with their carebots is increasing exponentially.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

A more experienced driver probably would not have followed that prompt, because doing so would accumulate a lot of unpaid “deadhead” miles—the expense of driving without a passenger—with a slim chance of a ride request. I meet Tanisha, a woman in her twenties, on a bright day in Dallas, Texas, as I make my way over to nearby Fort Worth. She left her job at a call center in Dallas to work for Lyft and Uber in order to get away from the stifling, heavily managed environment of call center work.33 She was motivated by Uber’s siren call to be her own boss. “It is good extra money on the side. Part-time-wise, the most I made was two hundred dollars in one week. . . . At that time, I was doing at least four to five hours for three or four days,” she offers.

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Andrew Cherlin discusses marital churn in American society by situating it in the context of a growing dichotomy between individualism and neoliberal autonomy, and marriage as a formal, long-standing commitment, in The Marriage-Go-Round (New York: Vintage, 2010). 4. Kirstie S. Ball and Stephen T. Margulis, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres: A Framework for Investigation,” New Technology, Work and Employment 26, no. 2 (2011): 113–126, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468–005X.2011.00263.x/abstract. 5. Global News Staff, “Uber Can Now Legally Operate in Quebec,” Global News, October 22, 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/3019867/uber-can-now-legally-operate-in-quebec/. 6.

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For example, drivers’ primary (and often exclusive) point of communication with Uber is by email, although toward the end of 2017, drivers gained in-person driver hubs (physical locations where drivers can receive in-person support) and a telephone number to call in some cities. Drivers don’t have a dedicated human manager who responds to their inquiries. Instead, they have community support representatives (CSRs), located at the email equivalent of a call center, often located abroad, such as in the Philippines,8 and managed by third-party companies, like Zendesk.9 Effectively, Uber offshores and automates its main communications with drivers. Drivers receive automated replies to most of their inquiries, which often appear to be based on keywords in the text of their emails.

The Rough Guide to Chile
by Melissa Graham and Andrew Benson
Published 11 May 2003

February is also an easy time to get around in Santiago, as the city appears half-abandoned. Phones Using phonecards is a very practical way to phone abroad, and it’s worth stocking up on them in major cities, as you can’t always buy them in small towns and villages. Alternatively there are dozens of call centres or centros de llamadas in most cities, and some of them Major holidays | Travel Essentials offer cheap rates. Another convenient option is to take along an international calling card. Generally billed to your home phone account or credit card, these are very handy and easy to use, but are usually two or three times more expensive than buying a Chilean phonecard or using a centro de llamadas.

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Free films and cultural guides. Internet Centro de Llamadas, Pedro Montt 2368 (CH$600 per hr); Internet Cerro Alegre, Urriola 678, Cerro Alegre (CH$400 per hr). Post office Prat 856. Telephone offices Entel, Pedro Montt 1940 and Condell 149, opposite the Municipalidad; Telefónica, Plaza Victoria and Sotomayor 55. Also cheap call centres around the bus station. The coastal resorts south of Valparaíso are among the busiest and most developed in the Litoral Central. A trail of seaside towns, full of busy hotels, cabañas and marisquerías, are linked by numerous micros and colectivos. Most sit on long, overcrowded beaches – in the summer, that is; in the winter they are forlorn and abandoned, often lost in marine fog.

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Upstairs, a small museum (same hours) shows off a few Tehuelche artefacts and fossils of giant molluscs and other marine animals, reminders that thousands of years ago this area was covered by the sea. Practicalities | Across Lago General Carrera to Chile Chico Small supermarkets, internet cafés and call centres are found along O’Higgins. There is a single ATM at Banco Estado at O’Higgins and Baquedano; it only accepts MasterCard. Accommodation includes the friendly Hotel Plaza on the corner of O’Higgins and Balmaceda, with clean, basic rooms (T 67/411215; 3 ) and the Belgian-Chilean Hostería de la Patagonia at Chacra 3-A (T 67/411337; 4 ), a charming house with comfortable en-suite rooms, good home-cooked food, and outdoor excursions on offer, tucked away in a large garden on the eastern edge of town.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

What drove him was that his social mission was something meaningful that mattered to him a lot. It was authentic. It was, as Carlo said of Homeboy, real. Koum connected with it at a very deep and emotional level. Koum’s stand became WhatsApp’s brand. People knew they could rely on it. They knew they wouldn’t get a call in the night from a call centre in India pretending to be offering a Windows upgrade, or from the secret police. In an era of escalating disruption and ever-increasing change, if you hang on to what you do you get left behind. Why, though, creates a context in which innovation can occur. The bigger the why, the more meaningful and real it is for those involved – the bigger the impact.

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Even though she is disgruntled with it and a far better alternative seems to be available, she can’t bring herself to switch. You can see the lawyer in her battle with that. If you look at Jay as a customer, her behaviour doesn’t make sense. We live in incredibly impatient and intolerant times. Consumers’ expectations have gone through the roof while their tolerance levels have tanked. Ask anyone who works in a call centre what it is like to deal with customers and you will hear some pretty grim tales. Trust and loyalty have hit an all-time low. Bright, savvy customers like Jay know how to get a good deal. If she were thinking and acting like a normal customer, Apple would be toast. But she isn’t. Jay’s behaviour mirrors that of the Manchester United supporters on the terraces at Old Trafford.

Unnatural Causes
by Richard Shepherd
Published 19 Sep 2018

Identification was, and is, the first priority for the pathologists in any mass disaster – there were many worried relatives, desperate for reliable information. The number of a call centre had been given out through the media for friends and relatives to phone, but it had no queuing system so callers found it to be constantly engaged. One can only wonder at the anger and frustration that caused. But the lesson was learned and call centres were organized and designed differently after that. There were thirty-five deaths but over the ensuing day the call centre took 8,000 calls, and there were many more to hospitals and even mortuaries. If injuries were slight the police gave information over the phone.

Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies
by Christopher Grey
Published 22 Mar 2012

However, it is possible to see many resonances, at least, between BP and other organizations, including those of the present day. For example, the management of the Typex room, described in Chapter 5, with its intensive monitoring of individual output levels does not seem very far removed from current systems for managing call centres (Bain et al., 2002). Again, the enclosed, secretive community of BP might bear some comparison with the self-contained ‘Googleplex’ campus of the Google corporation (Stiernstedt and Jakobsson, 2009). Another instance would be the parallels between the ‘instinctive’ ability of an intelligence analyst or cryptanalyst to spot tiny hints – as discussed in Chapter 6 – and Weick and Roberts’ (1993) observation of the way that flight crews need to be alert to small things which might have large consequences.

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This experiment is in large part a matter of the adoption of a certain style of analysis, as indicated earlier, especially in terms of the manner of the use of organization theory. It is also a matter of methodology, in that it uses a historical case and, finally, of extending the normal range of the kinds of organizations considered by organization studies. This range is normally quite limited, with banks, consultancy firms, airlines, manufacturing companies, call centres and so on featuring prominently and repetitively (Rehn, 2008). Breaking with this established repertoire may also be a way of reviving organization studies. Of course, some may feel that this is an entirely misplaced exercise, that organization studies is proceeding perfectly well and is in no need of any such reviving.

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New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bakken, T. and Hernes, T. 2006. ‘Organization is both a noun and a verb: Weick meets Whitehead’, Organization Studies 27: 1599–616. Bain, P., Watson, A., Mulvey, G., Taylor, P. and Gall, G. 2002. ‘Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management’, New Technology, Work and Employment 17: 170–85 Barley, S. 2010. ‘Building an institutional field to corral a government: A case to set an agenda for organization studies’, Organization Studies 31: 777–805 Barley, S. and Kunda, G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76–95 Batey, M. 2010.

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce
by Amanda Kirby and Theo Smith
Published 2 Aug 2021

They looked at existing people doing the job and then measured skills, attitudes and qualifications and asked the line managers to ‘blind’ mark their skills using a defined matrix. They also looked at other factors that may have been important for the person in the job such as whether performance was better in those with a short commute. What they realized was that qualifications were not a key factor for the specific call centre job. They also interestingly found out that having too much empathy in an outbound call centre work wasn’t very good. This may be because that person worries too much about the customer at the end of the phone and takes their clients home with them at the end of the day, worrying if they have upset them in some way or not. There is good research evidence of gender bias in the words we use for job descriptions and how this can impact on whether someone applies for the job.

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Explain the ‘rules’ of each setting, what is expected and be explicit, including ones that are less obvious such as team meetings, social activities and meeting with line managers. Phone calls. These can be challenging if you need to remember information, follow oral instructions, and especially if someone is speaking too fast or not clearly, or there is background noise. Some people, for example in a call centre, may have to manage dual tasking such as listening, seeking out information online and writing down information accurately. Face-to-face meetings. Think about the setting and the other person’s pace of conversation. Supporting someone with numeracy challenges Seeing a list of numbers or an Excel sheet can for some people result in real feelings of anxiety.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

The market is segmented and a different value is delivered to each segment. 11.3.2 Channels In order to engage the customers and deliver the created value to them, appropriate channels must be created and kept open. Through these channels a business can create awareness and market its products and services, sell and deliver these products and services, as well as provide after-sales services. Channels will include stores, websites and call centres. Taking a car company for example, the value is delivered to the customer through various marketing activities, making the cars available for a test drive, selling the car, and eventually providing after-sales services and scheduled maintenance. To achieve this, the car manufacturer may use different media as awareness channels - car showrooms for exhibiting the cars and arranging for test drives, and service centres for the maintenance of the cars sold. 11.3.3 Revenue and Cost Money is the lifeline of any entrepreneurial undertaking.

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People involved in creating and delivering the value need to be qualified, trained, well compensated and motivated to do their best and ensure that the intended value is consistently created and delivered. Method Methods and processes represent the recipe used to create and deliver the value. They refer to the way a patient is examined at a hospital, a haircut is executed at a saloon, a phone call is handled at a call centre, a car is assembled at a factory, a washing machine is repaired at a workshop, and an exam paper corrected at a school. These methods should be well documented, clear, efficient, effective and consistent. A good method should have no bottleneck and should also be free of non-value-adding steps.

The Little Black Book of Decision Making
by Michael Nicholas
Published 21 Jun 2017

Consequently, we might decide on a course of action that we know, rationally, makes no sense, but we make these poor choices nonetheless because of how they feel. For example, we might take that extra cookie when we are trying to lose weight, delay getting started on a project when we are already well aware that the timescales for completing it are inadequate, or get angry with a call centre operator at the bank because we forgot to pay our credit card bill on time and they refused to waive the fine. Here's another example: I'm pretty sure that almost all human beings get angry from time to time, but how rational is it to allow a discussion to get heated just because we don't like its direction?

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We have a seemingly unlimited capability to create a “tiger” out of practically anything: Someone takes your parking space or bumps into you with their shopping trolley. A text message from the boss asking you to come to her office. People who look different. Sitting in rush hour traffic or a delayed train! A look of disapproval (especially from someone like your spouse). Call centres. A meal in a restaurant that you don't approve of. You get the picture … all of these things have a fear hiding in the background and, like the child with the toy hammer, this gives them the potential power to squeeze out everything else. Once something has triggered us, we effectively become like an amped-up animal, only able to concentrate on the three things that are of the greatest importance for survival: To ensure our physical safety, the body must take priority – it needs to be protected.

Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success
by Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge
Published 15 Dec 2011

The crew had bucket-loads of techniques that are easy to understand and easy to apply. Over the last ten years Ben and I have coached thousands of individuals and we’ve found the techniques described in this book invaluable for helping ourselves and our clients unlock our potential and live happier, more successful lives. Our clients come from all walks of life – call centre staff, sales reps, leadership teams, mums, athletes, team managers, accountants, shop assistants. Whatever your challenges, whatever your goals, there are strategies here that will give you a big boost. How this book works We’ve divided the book up into eleven chapters. Each chapter is divided into two halves: A narrative bit.

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Ben: “They may not have been in the boat actually pulling the oars, but Shambles, [Chris Shambrook the psychologist] and Harry and Martin, the coaches, were crucial to making the boat go faster.” Have you ever got hacked off because your colleagues don’t appreciate how much time it takes to do something? I was on a project years ago to set up a call centre. The telecoms guy was breezily asked if he could pop a few more phones in than originally planned and the poor man pretty much spontaneously combusted. None of us had appreciated the complexity involved in setting up more capacity on the system. It’s useful to have team conversations about what each person does and how it helps to achieve the team goal, so everyone has clarity about their contribution and respect for the work involved. 1c.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

By the end of the twentieth century, however, many of these jobs and the communities that were forged around them were long gone. Working-class people are now far more likely to work in supermarkets, call centres, shop floors and offices, and though that is truer today than ever, it was a process that was well underway by the 1990s. Unionization in the service sector is low: in retail only around 12 per cent are union members.7 Turnover levels are high: overall, 15 per cent of workers shift jobs each year, but in call centres, for example, the rate is over a quarter.8 The rise of zero-hour contracts from the 1990s onwards, along with increased numbers of temporary and agency workers, and reluctant part-time workers, has produced a more precarious, individualized workforce, particularly among younger workers.

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Tony Benn, The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, 1995), p. 388 3. https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/joe-murphy-jeremy-corbyn-will-hang-on-as-leader-but-the-battle-is-far-from-over-a3350531.html 4. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab74feb.htm 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/16/tony-benn-1980-interview-loss-thatcher-surrender-defeat-labour 6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (O Books, 2009), p. 2 7. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/805268/trade-union-membership-2018-statistical-bulletin.pdf 8. http://corporate.centralus.co.uk/articles/call-centre-turnover/ 9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-22073434/tony-blair-my-job-was-to-build-on-some-thatcher-policies 10. https://wwws.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/02/labourconference.labour6 11. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2475301/Labour-membership-falls-to-historic-low.html 12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4422086.stm 13. http://www.johnmcdonnell.org.uk/2007/02/new-labour-privatises-probation-and.html 14. https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/boroughs/islington-poverty-and-inequality-indicators/ 15. https://www.ft.com/content/363af3be-1236-11e8-940e-08320fc2a277 16. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/feb/16/homeownership-among-young-adults-collapsed-institute-fiscal-studies 17. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/20/youth-services-suffer-70-funding-cut-in-less-than-a-decade 18. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2289017.stm 19. https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/09/277888.html 20. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562023/Tories-vow-to-match-Labour-spending.html 21. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/15/george-osborne-speech-full-text 22. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/18/nick-clegg-liberal-democrats-spending 24. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/4248254/MP-suspended-for-picking-up-mace-during-Heathrow-debate.html 25. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/apr/21/g20-protest-video-police 26. https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/03/474954.html 27. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/07/polling-queues-hundreds-unable-vote 28. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/12/20/uk-uncut-vindicated-commons-report-backs-protest-group 29. https://www.ft.com/content/b189980a-19a5-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21 30. https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/10342/Value-of-university-staff-pay-has-plummeted-in-last-decade-employers-own-research-reveals 31. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/21/england-universities-in-deficit-figures-financial-pressure 32. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46459694 33. https://www.newstatesman.com/newspapers/2010/12/police-malik-caught-students; https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/dec/15/jody-mcintyre-protester-dragged-from-wheelchair; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11967098 34. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmhansrd/cm101213/debtext/101213-0001.htm 35. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/journalist-shiv-malik-injured-by-police-baton/ 36. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8213287/Len-McCluskey-head-of-Britains-biggest-union-praises-magnificent-student-protest-movement.html CHAPTER 2 1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/ed-miliband-labour-leadership-change 2. https://labourlist.org/2010/08/the-growth-deniers-ed-balls-full-speech/ 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/sep/27/ed-miliband-speech-labour-conference 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11153166 5. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/11/25/conservative-blame-spending-cuts/ 6. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/30/chris-leslie-interview-labour-shadow-chancellor-election 7. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/04/03/three-years-in-hell-fintan-otoole-on-the-disastrous-corbyn-effect/ 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

Such changes can have a major impact on how we communicate with and respond to AI assistants, both in terms of our levels of comfort (and thereby how often we use them) and our efficiency while doing so. People are regularly attracted to those who are similar to themselves. As an illustration of how this could prove useful, Chicago’s Mattersight Corporation has created technology that analyses the speech patterns of people phoning up call centres. It then uses this information to put callers through to employees who are skilled at dealing with their specific personality type. According to Mattersight, a person patched through to an individual with whom they share similarity attraction is likely to have an average call length of five minutes, with a successful resolution rate of 92 per cent.

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To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 2, 228, 242–4 2045 Initiative 217 accountability issues 240–4, 246–8 Active Citizen 120–2 Adams, Douglas 249 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 19–20, 33 Affectiva 131 Age of Industry 6 Age of Information 6 agriculture 150–1, 183 AI Winters 27, 33 airlines, driverless 144 algebra 20 algorithms 16–17, 59, 67, 85, 87, 88, 145, 158–9, 168, 173, 175–6, 183–4, 186, 215, 226, 232, 236 evolutionary 182–3, 186–8 facial recognition 10–11, 61–3 genetic 184, 232, 237, 257 see also back-propagation AliveCor 87 AlphaGo (AI Go player) 255 Amazon 153, 154, 198, 236 Amy (AI assistant) 116 ANALOGY program 20 Analytical Engine 185 Android 59, 114, 125 animation 168–9 Antabi, Bandar 77–9 antennae 182, 183–5 Apple 6, 35, 56, 65, 90–1, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 118–19, 126–8, 131–2, 148–9, 158, 181, 236, 238–9, 242 Apple iPhone 108, 113, 181 Apple Music 158–9 Apple Watch 66, 199 architecture 186 Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI) 153, 157 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 226, 230–4, 239–40, 254 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 2 authentic 31 development problems 23–9, 32–3 Good Old-Fashioned (Symbolic) 22, 27, 29, 34, 36, 37, 39, 45, 49–52, 54, 60, 225 history of 5–34 Logical Artificial Intelligence 246–7 naming of 19 Narrow/Weak 225–6, 231 new 35–63 strong 232 artificial stupidity 234–7 ‘artisan economy’ 159–61 Asimov, Isaac 227, 245, 248 Athlone Industries 242 Atteberry, Kevan J. 112 Automated Land Vehicle in a Neural Network (ALVINN) 54–5 automation 141, 144–5, 150, 159 avatars 117, 193–4, 196–7, 201–2 Babbage, Charles 185 back-propagation 50–3, 57, 63 Bainbridge, William Sims 200–1, 202, 207 banking 88 BeClose smart sensor system 86 Bell Communications 201 big business 31, 94–6 biometrics 77–82, 199 black boxes 237–40 Bletchley Park 14–15, 227 BMW 128 body, machine analogy 15 Bostrom, Nick 235, 237–8 BP 94–95 brain 22, 38, 207–16, 219 Brain Preservation Foundation 219 Brain Research Through Advanced Innovative Neurotechnologies 215–16 brain-like algorithms 226 brain-machine interfaces 211–12 Breakout (video game) 35, 36 Brin, Sergey 6–7, 34, 220, 231 Bringsjord, Selmer 246–7 Caenorhabditis elegans 209–10, 233 calculus 20 call centres 127 Campbell, Joseph 25–6 ‘capitalisation effect’ 151 cars, self-driving 53–56, 90, 143, 149–50, 247–8 catering 62, 189–92 chatterbots 102–8, 129 Chef Watson 189–92 chemistry 30 chess 1, 26, 28, 35, 137, 138–9, 152–3, 177, 225 Cheyer, Adam 109–10 ‘Chinese Room, the’ 24–6 cities 89–91, 96 ‘clever programming’ 31 Clippy (AI assistant) 111–12 clocks, self-regulating 71–2 cognicity 68–9 Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises (CALO) 112 cognitive psychology 12–13 Componium 174, 176 computer logic 8, 10–11 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) 96–7 Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) 168, 175, 177 computers, history of 12–17 connectionists 53–6 connectomes 209–10 consciousness 220–1, 232–3, 249–51 contact lenses, smart 92 Cook, Diane 84–6 Cook, Tim 91, 179–80 Cortana (AI assistant) 114, 118–19 creativity 163–92, 228 crime 96–7 curiosity 186 Cyber-Human Systems 200 cybernetics 71–4 Dartmouth conference 1956 17–18, 19, 253 data 56–7, 199 ownership 156–7 unlabelled 57 death 193–8, 200–1, 206 Deep Blue 137, 138–9, 177 Deep Knowledge Ventures 145 Deep Learning 11–12, 56–63, 96–7, 164, 225 Deep QA 138 DeepMind 35–7, 223, 224, 245–6, 255 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 33, 112 Defense Department 19, 27–8 DENDRAL (expert system) 29–31 Descartes, René 249–50 Dextro 61 DiGiorgio, Rocco 234–5 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 31 Digital Reasoning 208–9 ‘Digital Sweatshops’ 154 Dipmeter Advisor (expert system) 31 ‘do engines’ 110, 116 Dungeons and Dragons Online (video game) 197 e-discovery firms 145 eDemocracy 120–1 education 160–2 elderly people 84–6, 88, 130–1, 160 electricity 68–9 Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) 12, 13, 92 ELIZA programme 129–30 Elmer and Elsie (robots) 74–5 email filters 88 employment 139–50, 150–62, 163, 225, 238–9, 255 eNeighbor 86 engineering 182, 183–5 Enigma machine 14–15 Eterni.me 193–7 ethical issues 244–8 Etsy 161 Eurequa 186 Eve (robot scientist) 187–8 event-driven programming 79–81 executives 145 expert systems 29–33, 47–8, 197–8, 238 Facebook 7, 61–2, 63, 107, 153, 156, 238, 254–5 facial recognition 10–11, 61–3, 131 Federov, Nikolai Fedorovich 204–5 feedback systems 71–4 financial markets 53, 224, 236–7 Fitbit 94–95 Flickr 57 Floridi, Luciano 104–5 food industry 141 Ford 6, 230 Foxbots 149 Foxconn 148–9 fraud detection 88 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 211 Furbies 123–5 games theory 100 Gates, Bill 32, 231 generalisation 226 genetic algorithms 184, 232, 237, 257 geometry 20 glial cells 213 Go (game) 255 Good, Irving John 227–8 Google 6–7, 34, 58–60, 67, 90–2, 118, 126, 131, 155–7, 182, 213, 238–9 ‘Big Dog’ 255–6 and DeepMind 35, 245–6, 255 PageRank algorithm 220 Platonic objects 164, 165 Project Wing initiative 144 and self-driving cars 56, 90, 143 Google Books 180–1 Google Brain 61, 63 Google Deep Dream 163–6, 167–8, 184, 186, 257 Google Now 114–16, 125, 132 Google Photos 164 Google Translate 11 Google X (lab) 61 Government Code and Cypher School 14 Grain Marketing Adviser (expert system) 31 Grímsson, Gunnar 120–2 Grothaus, Michael 69, 93 guilds 146 Halo (video game) 114 handwriting recognition 7–8 Hank (AI assistant) 111 Hawking, Stephen 224 Hayworth, Ken 217–21 health-tracking technology 87–8, 92–5 Healthsense 86 Her (film, 2013) 122 Herd, Andy 256–7 Herron, Ron 89–90 High, Rob 190–1 Hinton, Geoff 48–9, 53, 56, 57–61, 63, 233–4 hive minds 207 holograms 217 HomeChat app 132 homes, smart 81–8, 132 Hopfield, John 46–7, 201 Hopfield Nets 46–8 Human Brain Project 215–16 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) 153, 154 hypotheses 187–8 IBM 7–11, 136–8, 162, 177, 189–92 ‘IF THEN’ rules 29–31 ‘If-This-Then-That’ rules 79–81 image generation 163–6, 167–8 image recognition 164 imagination 178 immortality 204–7, 217, 220–1 virtual 193–8, 201–4 inferences 97 Infinium Robotics 141 information processing 208 ‘information theory’ 16 Instagram 238 insurance 94–5 Intellicorp 33 intelligence 208 ambient 74 ‘intelligence explosion’ 228 top-down view 22, 25, 246 see also Artificial Intelligence internal combustion engine 140–1, 150–1 Internet 10, 56 disappearance 91 ‘Internet of Things’ 69, 70, 83, 249, 254 invention 174, 178, 179, 182–5, 187–9 Jawbone 78–9, 92–3, 254 Jennings, Ken 133–6, 138–9, 162, 189 Jeopardy!

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
by Frankie Boyle
Published 23 Oct 2013

The meeting will take place at the Taliban’s new office in Doha – I like the fact they’re opening new branches, so long as it doesn’t get like Starbucks where you’ve got a Taliban on every high street. I wonder why they need an office – perhaps they’re branching out and are going to start dealing with both insurgencies and van hire. I bet it’ll be another call centre – we’ll be plagued by the Taliban ringing up to ask if we need replacement windows or do we want to wait until after the car bombing? There was outrage when burnt Korans were found at a NATO base in Afghanistan. They’d only been partially burnt. That’s because the book on how to maintain a bonfire had been burnt the week before, on a bonfire of books about codes of conduct in sensitive areas.

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Life isn’t necessarily getting better. For every new kid who’s now able to plug himself into the internet, there’s a little cloud of black smoke going up somewhere. In the 70s we were told to prepare ourselves for a new world of technologically supported leisure and extended free time. What we got was call centres. The world is becoming an increasingly soulless place. We’ve replaced genuine human emotions with the communal buzz of the electronically connected hive mind, with its indistinguish-able identikit opinions about films and TV programmes we probably won’t have time to see anyway. We’ve substituted genuine wonder at the mystery and beauty of nature with a belief that trees and butterflies and human consciousness are machine-like.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

Our latest blue-sky idea involved automating away employee handbooks by storing worker directives as rules that could be interpreted by a machine, and we thought call centres might be a good place to start. (In other words, we were trying to codify the labour process in a large sector of the economy, in which none of us had worked, in order to automate away jobs and take some of the cost savings ourselves.) This wasn’t exactly the socially-driven mission I had envisioned back in May, but the technical problem captivated me; I could worry about the ethics later. Yet it was unclear where to go from the initial ideation step. We didn’t have contacts in this space, and I’d never talked to a call centre worker outside business hours — I had no clue what their work was like.

Branded Beauty
by Mark Tungate
Published 11 Feb 2012

Seabra was an early adopter of ‘sustainable’ practices, taking care to ensure that none of the company’s suppliers used child labour and investing a percentage of profits in social projects. Refillable packaging was launched as early as 1983. Sales staff are paid an average of 16 times higher than minimum wage, are given shares in the company and receive regular training in the latest skincare advances. Natura remains responsive to consumers, with a call centre to deal with enquiries from consultants and customers. Seabra has not been afraid to rely on his instincts: he launched a line of products for infants (Mamãe e Bebê, or Mother and Baby) against the advice of his researchers. Like Shiseido, he believes cosmetics are vital for boosting well-being and self-esteem.

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Arnaud explains, ‘When you meet someone you like, if your strategy is good enough, the validation comes with a kiss. After that, anything can happen.’) This attracted an impressive list of clients, ranging from Louis Vuitton and Vogue to L’Oréal and Christian Dior Cosmetics. They both know branding backwards. Isabelle worked for a string of well-known agencies. Arnaud ran a call centre before running off to New York to play electronic music and set up an agency called Reflex. Then he came back to Paris to work for another agency, before meeting Isabelle at a dinner. They call Jak ‘a strategy, design, creation and curiosity agency’. The seed of Absolution lies in the word ‘creation’.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

The scale of what has been called the ‘hollowing out of the middle’ is shown in figure 3.4 which charts the change in employment by 1999 in jobs ranked by their position in the 1979 wage distribution. This shows a growth in the number of jobs at the top tail of the distribution—business executives, senior managers, consultants, data processors, software engineers; a smaller rise in the number of low paid jobs in the lower tail—cleaners, hairdressers, shop assistants and call centre workers; and sharp falls in the number of jobs paying middle wages in 1979—machine setters, foundry labourers, plant and rail signal operatives and a range of routine clerical jobs that have become automated.112 In the immediate post-war decades—across mature economies—there used to be more of a continuum in jobs, wages and opportunities with more intermediate, middleskill, middle-paying work that filled the gap between semi-and unskilled blue-collar and higher paying professional jobs.

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Having tasted the towering rewards that followed from the introduction of stock options in the booming share market of the 1990s, most executives were only too happy to fall into line. Matthew Barratt, who became chief executive of Barclays Bank in early 2000, announced the wholesale closure of high street branches and the transfer of former face-to-face customer services to call centres. While this was deeply unpopular with staff and customers, its potential to cut costs and improve profit margins ‘went down a storm’ in the City.183 The other retail banks soon joined in the aggressive pursuit of shareholder value, shedding staff in an ongoing cost-cutting drive. The number of bank branches halved in the 20 years to 2009.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat
Published 29 Sep 2021

And the god, puzzled by our greed, still granted our wish. We created artificial intelligence. Armed with this unfathomable power, we cast our greedy eyes to every corner of our life. With the lightest touch, we added AI to our shopping sites, gaming engines, cars and design apps. We added it to our call centres, banks and our phones. Above all, we added it to our surveillance systems, law enforcement systems and our weapons and war machines. Those who had money made more money and those who were lazy became lazier. It all seemed to be amazing, all-of-us thought, and it was, had it not been for one minor, overlooked detail.

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This could help reverse the elephant-poaching activities that conservationists are warning could lead to the iconic animals disappearing in our lifetime if the tide doesn’t turn.3 Good, so those machines are learning that we love elephants and should attempt to save them and that those who harm elephants are in the minority and are not approved by most of humanity. That’s another very good thing to teach them. Let’s keep going. We are also already telling the machines that we are interested in our own human health and longevity. Emergency call centres in Denmark use AI to detect if the caller is suffering a heart attack. Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco, UCSF, used a deep neural network called Cardiogram to identify, with 85 per cent accuracy, people with prediabetes. They did this by analysing a user’s heart rate and step counts through sensors commonly found in wearable fitness devices.

Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy
by Tina Campanella
Published 14 Apr 2017

So after her A levels, Sarah did a course in film and television production as a way of keeping up her creative interests – but with no thought of putting herself in front of the camera. She tried to get into television production in nearby Newcastle, but there were few jobs, so she was unsuccessful. Then followed a stream of unfulfilling roles in jobs that couldn’t even begin to challenge the clever comic-to-be. She worked in a call centre, and then as a producer for audio books. She is still amused by the title of one Mills and Boon book she recorded in the course of her work: Once Upon A Mattress. ‘It seemed to happen that we always read sex scenes on a Sunday morning,’ she has explained. ‘Which seemed so wrong in so many ways.’

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She worked day and night until she achieved critical acclaim, and she has approached each milestone since with the same work ethic. For Sarah, every award and every positive review was never enough. It simply spurred her on to do bigger and better things. And if it all ended – this magnificent, glittering career she has made for herself? ‘I’m very good in a call centre, so if this all goes to pot I’ll just try and get back into that,’ she says. ‘With this soft Geordie accent I could probably get a job in the complaints department. I’m pretty good at calming people down.’ Even then it was doubtful you’d ever hear Sarah’s voice on the line again, and things were only going to get better for her, personally and professionally, in 2013.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

The very act of owning up to its mistakes allowed Domino’s to cut through the din and reboot its relationship with customers. PR experts agree that the best way for a company to handle a mistake is to apologize and explain what it will do to put things right. This accords with my own experience. The other day a payment into my bank account went astray. After 20 minutes of evasion from the call centre, my voice began to rise as my blood reached boiling point. And then a manager came on the line and said: “Mr Honoré, I’m very sorry. We made a mistake with this payment.” As she explained how the money would be retrieved, my fury drained away and we ended up bantering about the weather and our summer holidays.

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When asked on retirement what advice he would give to budding entrepreneurs, Conrad Hilton, founder of the eponymous hotel chain, told them to sweat the small stuff with a memorable one-liner: “Don’t forget to tuck the shower curtain in the bath.” When Sir Richard Branson visits any of the 300 businesses in his Virgin empire, he makes a note of every small failing that catches his eye, from a dirty carpet in an airplane cabin to an employee using the wrong tone of voice in a call centre. “[The] only difference between merely satisfactory delivery and great delivery is attention to detail,” he wrote recently. “Delivery is not just limited to the company’s first day: employees across the business should be focusing on getting it right all day, every day.” Even the hell-raising hard rockers of Van Halen understood that.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

However, software, data analysis, and new management practices make close observation much easier, with the result that the activities of workers who once had to be trusted can now be observed in detail, compared, and assessed. Amazon’s ability to monitor how many packages its warehouse staff ships per hour, how many calls call centre workers handle per hour, and how much time customer service reps spend between calls is grounded in intangibles—the software and business processes used to measure and reward employees’ performance. Similar technologies and practices increase inequality among white-collar workers. For example, Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard showed how better systems for monitoring performance and hours billed allowed law firms to differentiate between their highest performers and the rest.10 The stars ended up being paid more, while the laggards got left behind or were fired.

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in 2013 by banning working from home, reversing an earlier move to more home working and requiring employees to come into the office or quit the company, and in the summer of 2021 Tom Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he wanted his home-working staff back in the office in the autumn. Perhaps it is not surprising that the productivity effects of working from home are decidedly mixed, according to a survey by Isabel Sawhill and Katherine Guyot.36 In one experiment at a large Chinese travel agency, call centre employees were randomly assigned to work from home. Those working from home increased their performance by 13 percent, partly due to more calls per minute but mostly because they simply took fewer breaks and fewer days off. After the experiment ended, however, the workers who remained at home were less likely to be promoted.37 In a different study, of a knowledge-intensive IT services consulting company, working from home during COVID reduced productivity.38 These examples show how much productivity varies across jobs in different sectors.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

As a youngster growing up at the time when some of the British Empire had yet to be dismantled, I remember a popular racist myth that people were poor in certain countries because they were lazy or unintelligent, while the British were enterprising and industrious, and hence richer. This of course is nonsense. If you think of virtually any occupation that is found in a wide range of countries – teacher, labourer, engineer, doctor, retailer, call centre operator – in most cases their pay is higher in rich countries than in middling or poor countries, though this has nothing to do with how hard they work or how intelligent they are. Again, rich countries have a higher level of technological development, and their workers tend to use more of this technology than do their counterparts in poorer countries, so things can be produced more easily, quickly and cheaply, even though wages and salaries are relatively high.

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When a rich country like the US trades with a poor one like Bangladesh, not just the rich, but everyone in the rich country benefits from getting cheap goods, provided by cheap labour. Most of Europe has benefitted from this unequal exchange for over two centuries, from cotton and cocoa to jeans, electronic goods and call centre services. For any given traded product, the workers in the poor country have to work much longer to be able to afford it than do their counterparts in rich countries. Even if they’re working in state-of-the-art factories producing tablet computers, as some Chinese suppliers of western firms are, their pay is still low.

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When we think about how much money people should get, we are actually considering how big their claims on the labour of others should be, relative to those of others. In the modern global economy, though we rarely think of it, each of us relies on thousands of other workers to produce the goods and services we consume, be they garment workers in the Philippines, assemblers of electronic goods in China, banana growers in St Lucia or call centre workers in India – or, indeed, shop assistants, dentists, garage mechanics and bar staff in our local town. As we saw in Part Two, the inequalities at the international level derive mainly from inequalities in the level of development of ‘the forces of production’; workers in countries like India or Thailand get much less for supplying westerners with goods than western producers get from selling stuff to them, because they have had different economic histories, usually with colonial domination and unequal exchanges going back centuries.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

If the latter is excluded, manufacturing’s share of employment in the developing world is lower than it was in the 1980s.53 Manufacturing’s share of the economy peaked in South Korea in 1988 and in Indonesia in 2002.54 There is an inevitable trade-off between wage levels and employment in some of these sectors. As real wages rise, manufacturers either shift location to a country with lower costs, or automate the tasks done by workers. One day, those ladies in the heart of Malaysia will be replaced by a machine. The service sector too will be subject to automation, as call-centre workers are replaced by chatbots and analysts are replaced by artificial intelligence programmes that can conduct research both more quickly and more accurately. Over the next 30 years, we will have to invent a whole new set of tasks to keep us employed. But we have done it before: baristas, personal trainers and social media managers were all virtually unknown 30 years ago

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Since then, German unemployment has been well below the European average, although that may be down to the country’s success in exporting capital goods to China and the emerging markets, rather than the reforms themselves.11 Attempts to make the labour market flexible led to a long argument about whether it was better to reduce unemployment, even if the only jobs available had lower wages and reduced rights. In the US, such jobs were found in the fast-food sector or in call centres. The problem was tied up with the general decline in manufacturing employment (see Chapter 7), which meant that most new jobs were created in the service sector. One significant component of economic growth in this period was the addition of women to the workforce. In 1948, just over 30% of American adult women worked, but by 2000, the proportion was 60%.

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The roots of the Indian recovery had emerged in the 1980s when Infosys and Wipro, two technology companies, moved to Bangalore. The Bengal province proved attractive to international companies, thanks to a well-educated, English-speaking workforce. A swathe of operations were outsourced to Bangalore, including call centres, insurance processing, tax and audit preparation and IT maintenance.27 The Tata group was another symbol of India’s revival. It had been founded back in 1868 under British rule and opened a steel plant in Jamshedpur in 1912, becoming the largest steel plant in the empire by the Second World War.

Laziness Does Not Exist
by Devon Price
Published 5 Jan 2021

Milkman, David A. Hofmann, and Bradley R. Staats, “The Impact of Time at Work and Time Off from Work on Rule Compliance: The Case of Hand Hygiene in Health Care,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 3 (2015): 846–62. 47. Stephen Deery, Roderick Iverson, and Janet Walsh, “Work Relationships in Telephone Call Centres: Understanding Emotional Exhaustion and Employee Withdrawal,” Journal of Management Studies 39, no. 4 (June 2002): 471–96. 48. Ken J. Gilhooly, George Georgiou, and Ultan Devery, “Incubation and Creativity: Do Something Different,” Thinking & Reasoning 19, no. 2 (2013): 137–49. 49. Renzo Bianchi, Eric Laurent, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Lucas M.

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We become more irritable and are easily distracted by things like random background noise.43 We get sloppier and more prone to errors, whether they’re as simple and low-stakes as making more typos44 or as catastrophic as a doctor making a mistake in the middle of surgery.45 Tiredness even makes us more apathetic about doing our jobs in the right way. A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found when health care workers (such as doctors and nurses) are exhausted from working long shifts, they lose the motivation to follow basic hygiene rules and cut back on how often they wash their hands.46 A survey of 450 call-center employees found that the more tired and overwhelmed an employee became, the more they tended to withdraw emotionally from their jobs, and the less likely they were to show up for work.47 Work fatigue also kills creativity. In the previous chapter, I described how creative insight requires a period of incubation, a restful break that allows the creative mind to unconsciously come up with new ideas and solutions.48 The flip side of the incubation phenomenon is also true: when people don’t get access to breaks and “lazy” time, they think in more conventional, uncreative ways, and are more likely to get stuck.

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Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 37 (September 2009): 15583–87. 44. Lori Sideman Goldberg and Alicia A. Grandey, “Display Rules versus Display Autonomy: Emotion Regulation, Emotional Exhaustion, and Task Performance in a Call Center Simulation,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 301–18. 45. Jelle T. Prins, F. M. M. A. van der Heijden, Josette Hoekstra-Weebers, A. B. Bakker, Harry B. M. van de Wiel, B. Jacobs, and S. M. Gazendam-Donofrio, “Burnout, Engagement and Resident Physicians’ Self-Reported Errors,” Psychology Health and Medicine 14, no. 6 (December 2009): 654–66. 46.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Mainstream left-of-centre parties were caught in a different trap post-2008. If they tried to challenge the post-crash consensus that favoured deep spending cuts, they were deemed to be irresponsible and reckless, in proposing spending when borrowing was ‘out of control’. But whereas before 2008, and certainly in the early to mid-1990s, the consensus on the so-called centre ground had been a cosy and electorally fruitful terrain, this new consensus around support for spending cuts was as politically dangerous for the mainstream left as challenging it was. The new orthodoxy, known vaguely as ‘austerity’, appeared to victims of the crash in poorer areas as collusion – almost a conspiracy to continue supporting those who had been responsible for the crash, and punishing those who had not.

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Merkel’s CDU party suffered severe setbacks in regional elections, triggering doubts about whether she would, or should, survive much longer. She continued to do so, but with less authority, forced to twist and turn even more than usual in an attempt to appease her right flank, as well as the so-called centre ground. At least Merkel had the fortune, or misfortune, to remain in power. In Australia recent prime ministers would ache for such longevity. Australia was recently served by five prime ministers in five years, a symptom and cause of instability in a tough political culture, where leaders were obliged to seem stronger than they were.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Even in India, the centre of service and high-tech outsourcing, only a small portion of the labour force works in the information and communication technology sector.115 More importantly, the potential of service jobs is constrained by the newest wave of automation, which is likely to eliminate the low-skilled, low-wage service jobs that have traditionally been outsourced – clerical work, call-centre work or data entry, for example.116 As this non-routine cognitive labour is increasingly automated, what may occur is a premature shift away from a service-based economy – on top of premature deindustrialisation. What this means is that the maintenance of large portions of humanity within slums and informal, non-capitalist economies is likely to be consolidated by emerging technological trends.

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The International Labour Organization currently estimates that 5.9 per cent of the working population (201 million people) are unemployed – but this relies on a very stringent definition of unemployment. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), at ilo.org, p. 16. If one works for an hour mowing a lawn, makes a few dollars selling homemade wares on a street, or has a doctorate and works in a call centre, the ILO counts this as employment. In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s population is not employed.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

The uneven geographical development that results is as infinitely varied as it is volatile: a deindustrialised city in northern China; a shrinking city in what was once East Germany; the booming industrial cities in the Pearl River delta; an IT concentration in Bangalore; a Special Economic Zone in India where dispossessed peasants revolt; indigenous populations under pressure in Amazonia or New Guinea; the affluent neighbourhoods in Greenwich, Connecticut (until recently, at least, hedge fund capital of the world); the conflict-ridden oil fields in the Ogoni region of Nigeria; the autonomous zones carved out by a militant movement such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; the vast soy bean production zones in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina; the rural regions of Darfur or the Congo where civil wars relentlessly rage; the staid middle-class suburbs of London, Los Angeles or Munich; the shanty towns of South Africa; the garment factories of Sri Lanka or the call centres of Barbados and Bangalore ‘manned’ entirely by women; the new megacities in the Gulf States with their star-architect-designed buildings – all of this (and of course much more) when taken together constitutes a world of geographical difference that has been made by human action. At first blush, this world would appear to be so geographically diverse as to escape principled understanding, let alone rationalised control.

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The civil wars in Africa, in many ways sad legacies of European colonial practices, reflect the long history of corporate and state-led struggles to control Africa’s valued resources, with China these days an increasingly important player. The factory in northern China or Ohio closes down in part because the factories in the Pearl River delta open up. The call centre in Barbados or Bangalore services customers in Ohio and London and the shirts or skirts worn in Paris have labels from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, just as the shoes that were once made in Italy now come from Vietnam. The Gulf States build spectacular buildings on the back of an oil trade that depends in part on the profligate use of energy to service a predominantly suburban lifestyle in the United States.

How to Be Idle
by Tom Hodgkinson
Published 1 Jan 2004

They impose their beliefs on others by force of law, coercion and newspapers, and justify their actions by saying that they have created jobs, or cut costs, or increased spending or made profits for their shareholders. ' Something must be done ! ' is their motto. And they do things, like building skyscrapers, call-centres, dams and motorways, but they also love to interfere with the plans of others - denying planning permission to increase the window size of an old barn by an inch, for example. What is worse is that the botherers, not content with doing things themselves, are constantly trying to force us poor idlers to do things as well.

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We hired a nanny and the fun and help she brought to the household meant that we could easily put up with being skint. Q: You say you ' re an idler but you must have put a lot of work into this book. A: Well, I only worked for three or four hours a day on it. So it wasn ' t really like doing eight hours in a call centre. Also, I was working at home, so when you cut out the commuting hours, too, I calculate that I was doing six hours less work a day than the average job-worker. And as it was something I had chosen to do, a hobby, really, it did not feel like work. Of course, there were moments of despair, but by and large I felt lucky and privileged to be reading and writing about a subject I loved.

Egypt
by Matthew Firestone
Published 13 Oct 2010

POST As well as the main post office, postboxes are also outside Ghazala Supermarket and next to Red Sea Relax Terrace Restaurant, both in Masbat. Main post office (Dahab City; 8.30am-2.30pm) TELEPHONE In addition to the Telephone centrale and cardphones, you will find numerous call centres along the beachfront in Assalah where you can dial internationally for a few pounds a minute. Phonecards are sold at the Ghazala Supermarket in Masbat and at most small shops. Call centre (Masbat; per min E£7; 10am-3pm & 6-9pm Sat-Thu, 3-9pm Fri) Telephone centrale (Dahab City; 24hr) Dangers & Annoyances Although Dahab is one of the most relaxed destinations in Egypt, be advised that there is the potential for a future terrorist attack.

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DHL (Map; 485 1911; 9 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-5pm Sat-Thu) Express Mail Service (EMS; 8.30am-3pm Sat-Thu) At all post offices. Main post office (Map; Sharia al-Bursa al-Qadima; 9am-9pm Sat-Thu) Telephone Menatel cardphones can be found all over the city, although the policy of placing them on street corners can make it hard to hear and be heard. Private call centres are everywhere, and are a much more convenient option. You can also buy an inexpensive cash line for your mobile; to work with a local SIM, your phone must be quad-band and unlocked. Telephone centrale (Map; Sharia Saad Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Vodafone (Map; 68 Sharia Safiyya Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Inside Radio Shack; sells cash (prepaid) SIM cards for E£20.

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Western Union (Map; 364 0466; Rosetta Hotel, Na’ama Bay; 8.30am-2pm & 6-10pm Sat-Thu, 3-10pm Fri) POST Main post office (Map; Bank St, Hadaba; 8.30am-2.30pm Sat-Thu) TELEPHONE There are several cardphones in Na’ama Bay and at least two on the beachfront promenade. Cards can be bought everywhere, but watch out for overcharging by shopkeepers. There are also several call centres where you can dial internationally for E£4 to E£7 per minute. Telephone centrale (Map; Bank St, Hadaba; 24hr). Dangers & Annoyances In July 2005, three terrorist bombs exploded in Sharm el-Sheikh, killing 88 people and injuring over 200. The worst damage was in the Sharm Old Market area and near Ghazala Gardens hotel in Na’ama Bay.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

If so, then despite all the flashy, trashy merchandising your impression of the product is negative. It’s an impression of low demand and poor sales. Why the hell would you want to buy it if nobody else does? Now ask yourself this. What comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘If operators are busy, please call again’? A buzzing call centre full of overstretched staff struggling to keep pace with demand? Now that’s more like it! If everyone else is getting in on the action – then you’re sure as hell not going to miss out! 18Exactly the same principle works on eBay. Analysis of online auctions reveals something primal, profound and fundamentally potty about consumer behaviour: if you want to flog that Rembrandt you found in the attic, start at $10!

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Preaching, lecturing, pleading and bullying are about as useful in the showroom as a snooze button on a smoke alarm. Instead, just like Pat Reynolds, the successful salesperson treads carefully. Just look, for a moment, at the way Reynolds operates. For all his bravado and roguish streetwise charm, he’s a serious player. Not everyone who works in a call centre learns to fly on the proceeds. Nor do they roll off a gleaming garage forecourt in a top-of-the-range convertible. He makes an awful lot of money where an awful lot of people simply go under. And how? By reverting to first principles. To a time when persuasion had yet to hit on language. By releasing from the depths of human evolution one of the most powerful genies of influence known to man: the principle of reciprocity. 10Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, has shown precisely how powerful the pull of reciprocity is, how rightful its place in the arsenal of the elite persuader, in a study that (on the surface, at least) looked at individual differences in altruism.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

According to this standard reading of the scheme of ‘social grades’, the middle includes everyone in ‘white-collar’ work, from clerical workers to professionals, supervisors, and senior managers. This, surely, is an illusory levelling, as if to say that everyone who works in a call centre, from the receptionist to the chief executive, is ‘middle class’. But the world evoked in this conception of class isn’t really the modern world, where there even are such things as call centres. It is a world in which workers use their hands and leave the brain-work to their social betters. Therefore, as long as you don’t use your hands, or if you have a degree, you can be patronisingly called ‘middle class’ even when you’re working precarious shifts for minimum wage.

Italy
by Damien Simonis
Published 31 Jul 2010

The Comune di Roma (city council) runs a free multilingual tourist information line ( 06 06 08; www.060608.it; 9am-9pm), providing information on culture, shows, hotels, transport etc; you can also book theatre, concert, exhibition and museum tickets on this number. If you need practical information, the city’s free 06 06 06 number is incredibly useful. By calling it you reach a Comune di Roma call centre that’s been set up to answer practical questions about anything to do with Comune-related services. The centre is staffed 24 hours and there are English-, French-, Arabic-, German-, Spanish-, Italian- and Chinese-speaking staff available from 4pm to 7pm. They can answer any question along the lines of :Where’s the nearest hospital?

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It covers admission to most of Turin’s monuments and museums, a ride up the Mole Antonelliana panoramic lift, a return trip on the Sassi-Superga cable car, and all public transport costs including GTT boats on the Po river and the Turismo Bus Torino (Click here). It also offers discounts for some guided tours and theatres. You can buy the card at the tourist office. * * * POST Post office (Via Alfieri 10; 8.30am-7pm Mon-Fri, to 1pm Sat) TOURIST INFORMATION The tourist board’s call centre ( 011 53 51 81; www.turismotorino.org; 9.30am-9.30pm) can provide updated information and assistance for visitors. Circolo Culturale Maurice ( 011 521 11 16; www.mauriceglbt.org, in Italian; Via della Basilica 3-5) Gay and lesbian information. Tourist office ( 011 53 51 81; 9.30am-7pm) At Stazione Porta Nuova; offers a free accommodation and restaurant booking service.

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To get here take tram 15 from Piazza Vittorio Veneto to the Sassi-Superga stop on Corso Casale, then walk 20m to Stazione Sassi ( 011 576 47 33; Strada Comunale di Superga 4), from where an original 1934 tram (one-way/return Mon-Fri Sat & Sun €2/4 €3.50/5.50; from Sassi 9am-noon & 2-8pm Mon, Wed, Thu & Fri, 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-8.30pm Sat & Sun, 30min later from Superga, closed Tue) rattles the 3.1km up the hillside in 18 minutes. Tours Guided walking tours (€6.50-8) following changing themes, such as Literary Turin, Tasty Turin and so on, depart on Saturday at 6pm. General city tours leave at 10am on Saturdays. Tours generally last around 1½ hours. Contact the tourist board call centre Click here to confirm departure points, and to ask about various factory tours that are also available. Turismo Bus Torino (1-day ticket adult/child €5/3; 10am-6pm Sat & Sun Jan-Jun & mid-Sep—mid-Dec, 10am-6pm daily Jul—mid-Sep & holiday-festival periods) is a hop-on, hop-off bus service with an on-board staff member providing information, and serves over a dozen different points around central Turin.

The Mathematics of Banking and Finance
by Dennis W. Cox and Michael A. A. Cox
Published 30 Apr 2006

It may then be classified into categories or groups. Each individual event is normally referred to as an observation. In this context observations may be grouped into multiples of a single unit, for example: r The number of transactions in a queue r The number of orders received r The number of calls taken in a call centre. Since discrete data can only take integer values, this is the simplest type of data that a firm may want to present pictorially. Consider the following example: A company has obtained the following data on the number of repairs required annually on the 550 personal computers (PCs) registered on their fixed asset ledger.

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What this means is that in at least 81.8% of the samples there would be between six and 12 errors, on the assumption that the distribution is normal (8, 4) so has a mean of eight and a variance of four. 8.2.2 A second example of normal probabilities A company assumes that the quality criteria for a call centre is normally distributed with a failure mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 0.03. In this context failure represents not achieving the required quality standard. (a) What is the proportion of samples that will have a failure rate exceeding 10.075? x −μ Using z = , the required probability is: σ   10.075 − 10 Prob(x > 10.075) = Prob z > 0.03 = Prob(z > 2.5) = Prob(z < −2.5) (by symmetry) = 0.006 This therefore gives 0.6% as the proportion.

Manage Your Home Build & Renovation Project: How to Create Your Dream Home on Time, in Budget and Without Stress
by David Cambridge
Published 14 May 2013

FURTHER RESOURCES The Planning Portal – The Government site providing advice and information relating to the planning process. http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/planning/ Department for Communities and Local Government – www.communities.gov.uk Federation of Master Builders – www.fmb.org.uk Gas Safe Register – www.gassaferegister.co.uk Health & Safety Executive – www.hse.gov.uk National House Building Council (NHBC) – www.nhbc.co.uk National Self Build & Renovation Centre – www.buildstore.co.uk Royal institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) – www.rics.org Royal institute of British Architects (RIBA) – www.architecture.com About the Author David has been in the construction industry since he left school some 30 years ago. Originally he trained as an engineer but moved into project and building management. He has been involved in a large range of construction projects including museums, galleries, hospitals, data centres, offices and call centres as well as residential works. Now the owner of The Residential Project Manager Limited, David spends most of his time helping home owners and property developers to deliver a mixture of loft conversions, extensions, refurbishments and new builds. Having been in the commercial industry for a long time he now enjoys helping local people deliver their dreams.

Pocket Berlin
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 15 Mar 2023

A Local SIM cards can be used in unlocked European and Australian phones, and are sold at supermarkets, convenience stores and electronics shops for as little as €5. A US multiband phones also work in Germany. Tourist Information Visit Berlin (www.visitberlin.de), the Berlin tourist board, operates four walk-in offices and a call centre (%030-2500 2333) whose multilingual staff field general questions and make hotel and ticket bookings. The four offices are at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Humboldt Forum, Brandenburger Tor and Hauptbahnhof (www.visitberlin.de) Visas A EU nationals need only their national identity card or passport to enter Germany.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

There is, obviously, a lot of monopoly pricing going on in the US case relative to that of Belgium (almost certainly due to different state regulatory policies). Personal services of this sort have remained partially immune from spatial competition in spite of the rise of medical tourism and the outsourcing of many services to call centres like those in India. These protected markets may crumble, however, in the face of the application of artificial intelligence. Capital is, we can conclude, in love with monopoly. It prefers the certainties, the quiet life and the possibility of leisurely and cautious changes that go with a monopolistic style of working and living outside of the rough and tumble of competition.

…

N., Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 1969 Wolff, R., Moore, B., and Marcuse, H., A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 Wright, M., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

As recently as April 2007, on the eve of the ABN Amro bid, the bank’s shares had been worth more than 600p. The collapse represented a terrible, calamitous destruction of wealth. Hundreds of thousands of retirement nest eggs had vanished. In the weeks after the collapse Alan Dickinson and several of his colleagues toured the branches and call centres, offering bewildered and mutinous staff a chance to take it out on someone from the management. One RBS cashier, close to retirement, explained quietly to Dickinson that year after year over the decades she had invested in RBS stock every time it was offered to her. Not long ago her carefully husbanded investment had been worth almost £250,000, and now a mere fraction of that was left.

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Big financial failures can have massive collateral damage, which is why we need a strong banking system and effective regulation.’ A total of 41,000 of the bank’s employees, in the UK and abroad, have been laid off since 2008. It has not been easy for many of those who kept their jobs either. The vast majority of the bank’s staff are not traders, or leverage finance merchants, they are people working hard in branches, call centres and back offices for modest remuneration. Perhaps it will come as some consolation to former staff that Goodwin lost at least £7m. That includes his losses on the shares which he held on to until the crash and the loss of the pay-off he was legally entitled to demand but gave up. George Mathewson was also hit, to the tune of more than £5m it is suggested.

Nepal Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Australian Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (www.smartraveller.gov.au) Canadian Consular Affairs (www.voyage.gc.ca) New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (www.safetravel.govt.nz) UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (www.fco.gov.uk/travel) US Department of State (http://travel.state.gov/travel) Telephone The phone system in Nepal works pretty well (as long as the electricity is working) and making local, STD and international calls is easy. Reverse-charge (collect) calls can only be made to the UK, USA, Canada and Japan. Private call centres offer the cheapest and most convenient way to make a call. Look for signs advertising STD/ISD services. Many hotels offer international direct-dial facilities but always check their charges before making a call. Private call centres charge around Rs 10 to 40 per minute to most countries. Internet phone calls are cheaper, costing around Rs 10 per minute (calls to mobile phones are often more expensive), but these are only available in Kathmandu and Pokhara.

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Most internet cafes offer internet phone calls through Skype (www.skype.com) for a couple of rupees per minute on top of their normal internet rates. Local phone calls cost around Rs 5 per minute, with long-distance domestic calls costing around Rs 10 per minute. Out in rural areas you may find yourself using someone’s mobile phone at a public call centre. Mobile Phones Ncell ( 9809005000; www.ncell.com.np) is the most popular and convenient provider. To get a SIM card take a copy of your passport and one photo to an Ncell office. A SIM card costs Rs 99, with local calls around Rs 2 per minute and incoming calls free. International calls cost from Rs 2 (the US) to Rs 15 (UK) per minute.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

While there has tended to be more unemployment due to automation in sectors in which men dominate such as manufacturing, construction and installation, the increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence and the ability to digitize tasks in service industries indicate that a wide range of jobs are at risk, from positions at call centres in emerging markets (the source of livelihoods for large numbers of young female workers who are the first in their families to work) to retail and administrative roles in developed economies (a key employer for lower-middle class women). Losing a job has negative effects in many circumstances, but the cumulative effect of significant losses across whole job categories that have traditionally given women access to the labour market is a critical concern.

Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection of New Essays
by David Thorne
Published 3 Dec 2014

She looked like a gothic Teletubbie. “Is your girlfriend a Goth?” I’d asked Simon the first time I saw the photo. “No dickhead, she’s a wicken.” “A what?” “She practices Wicca. It’s a modern religion based on pagan rituals.” “Right, so she’s an unemployed Art’s graduate then.” “No, she works in a call centre.” “Did you stop for a photo opportunity on the way to a forest-clearing candle dance?” “No, it was my Grandpa’s funeral.” Apparently Cathy had written and read a poem for the service. Simon showed me the folded A4 program they gave out to those attending. Below a photo of an old man holding a shovel, the poem read; Cry not.

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin
by Lonely Planet and Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 31 Aug 2012

› Don’t be late for meetings and dinner invitations. › Don’t talk about WWII with a victor’s mentality. › Don’t assume you can pay by credit card, especially when eating out. Tourist Information The local tourist board, Visit Berlin (www.visitberlin.de), operates three walk-in offices (listed following) and a call centre ( 250 025; 9am-7pm Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October extended hours may apply. Brandenburg Gate ( 10am-7pm; U-/S-Bahn Brandenburger Tor) In the south wing. Hauptbahnhof ( 8am-10pm; U-/S-Bahn Hauptbahnhof) Near the Europaplatz north exit.

Coal Black Mornings
by Brett Anderson
Published 1 Mar 2018

The line about the ‘ashtray eyes and boot-lace ties’ was a reference to Ian Dury’s ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, a song we used to play until the grooves wore out, and the picture it paints of two young people fumbling around the beginnings of feeling set against the back-drop of an unfamiliar city’s coal-black winter still manages to stir something in me and takes me back to a sweet forgotten corner of my youth. Looking for work one day in the local job centre, I saw advertised amongst the sea of vacancies at call centres and thinly disguised positions as sex workers a job as a DJ in a local nightspot. It was a place called the Cyprus Tavern, a sticky-floored, subterranean cellar bar on Princess Street, which was at the time home to frightening packs of football fans and herds of belligerent single young men pointedly looking for trouble.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

In this context, attempts by local authorities to regenerate areas devastated by the loss of manufacturing industries, and the jobs they brought, were too often based on business models that looked towards multinational corporations or large chain retailers to benevolently bestow inward investment. Frequently this “investment” would consist of call centres or distribution warehouses offering poor and insecure working conditions and wages just above the poverty line, failing to offer any deep and sustainable improvement to these areas. In other cases, planning was led by property developers who prioritised their own profits over the social or economic benefits their project could bring to an area, and frequently over-promised on what they could deliver, which did little to instil public confidence in these models.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

Cognitive intelligence has already produced adequate natural language translators. Intelligent agents, such as Apple’s Siri, will understand more and more about what people say, and might even become capable of producing useful replies. It would not be that difficult to produce responses that are no worse than the average third world telephone call centre. Medical expert systems will check diagnoses and medications, and a taxation expert might even be able to gain a basic understanding of the otherwise impenetrable tax laws. One of the last jobs that an AI will probably be able to do effectively is write complex computer programs. That is because that is one of the most cognitively difficult things that we do as humans.

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Today the results are mixed, but this is also a huge, ongoing area of research, so it will not be long before automated systems can perform the basic functions provided by telephone consultants. And just as with Siri, people will learn how to phrase their questions so that a semi-intelligent automated system can understand them. They will never be as good as talking to an expert, but they could easily become as ineffective as talking to someone in a third world call centre. In combination, these technologies will change the world. Vast amounts of data will be available that describe every aspect of our lives. That may or may not be advantageous to ordinary citizens. That said, it is very unlikely that semi-intelligent computers will be able to perform the high-level thinking that is performed by professionals such as engineers, lawyers or senior bureaucrats.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

While ensuring that people’s anger was directed at immigrants – rather than, say, the City, poverty-paying employers or tax-avoiders – UKIP supported policies that could only benefit the wealthy. Until 2014, the party proposed a flat income tax, which would not only slash the amount of tax that the wealthy pay, but would leave call-centre workers in the same tax bracket as billionaires. Although they eventually U-turned over the policy, UKIP still advocated cutting the top rate of tax. The party wants the abolition of employers’ National Insurance contributions, which would hand bosses a breathtaking £50 billion. They advocate the cutting of 2 million public-sector jobs, which would decimate entire communities.

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Democracy in the workplace would also shift the balance of power away from bosses. In Germany, workers elect representatives who promote their interests on company boards, or ‘co-determination’ as it is called. If it is good enough for German workers, it is surely good enough for British workers, and would give them a voice in their supermarkets, call centres, offices and other places of work, instead of treating them as chattels to be exploited. It would need to be complemented by other policies to stop workers being reduced to hire-and-fire fodder to be disposed of at will by employers, such as scrapping zero-hour contracts. An official policy of building full employment is also critical, which has the advantage of best guaranteeing the negotiating power of labour.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time
by George Berkowski
Published 3 Sep 2014

Once again, that is integrated into the OS, and took significant effort on Apple’s part to make it a reality (think negotiations with every individual mobile network operator). The last serious attempt at a voicemail startup was Spinvox. Despite blowing through $100 million of venture capital,11 everything ended in tears when it was discovered that its speech-to-text technology was little more than overworked call-centre employees transcribing the audio messages themselves.12,13 Voicemail as we know it is probably not a great opportunity, but the broader messaging arena is where the action is proving to be. OTHER MISCELLANEOUS USES, 10 TIMES PER DAY: This catch-all category represents a good 6 per cent of all interactions with mobile phones.

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In the world of fast-moving technology your advantage is not the hardware (that’s owned by Apple or Samsung or someone else): rather it is the software you create, the experience and emotion that the software delivers, and the supporting experiences, such as customer service. All of this is created and delivered by people. Not just engineers, designers and product people, but also people in call centres, the support teams answering emails and the people within the marketing, operational and administrative roles. Making sure that each and every one of these people is excited to get up and come to work every day is what great CEOs of great companies do. And they accomplish that with culture. Culture at Scale You need to be deliberate in creating – and then preserving – your culture, even in the early days.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Growing up in Easton, everyone was socioeconomically the same. Of the same class, I suppose. What I saw that night in that pub was different. It was rich, privileged people dipping their toe in an area they knew nothing about, before retreating to pristine Clifton, and it just hit me differently.’ Henry had also worked as an Uber driver and in a Bristol call centre. He told of customers getting into his car and saying, ‘So, that’s the famous Bristol accent I’ve heard so much about!’ and of callers who couldn’t believe that his was real when he spoke. When we met, Henry was earning approximately £16,000 a year and could not afford to move out of his mum’s Victorian two-bedroom house – a rare and stable long-term social tenancy which she had had since 2010 – in Speedwell, near Whitehall.

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This shift had led the soon-to-become Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to declare as early as 1997 that ‘we are all middle class now’, and indeed it was a notion that underpinned New Labour’s ‘big tent’ philosophy. It was a nice idea, but it just wasn’t true. As we can see now, we clearly still have a working class – construction workers, supermarket workers, cleaners, farm labourers, carers, hospital porters, Uber drivers, call centre workers, Amazon workers and Deliveroo riders – some of whom are economic migrants and the majority of whom are on zero-hours contracts. These low-income workers are, as a result, the people most likely to live in poor-quality, overcrowded, unstable and sometimes illegal housing. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) said that at the end of 2020 there was about a million workers on zero-hours contracts.

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy
by Richard Shotton
Published 12 Feb 2018

Think like a consumer Another solution is more insight work. Most of us agree with this in principle, but in practice it happens too rarely as it’s perceived as devilishly expensive. But insights spring from simple techniques as well as complex ones whether that’s interviewing consumers in their homes, spending a day listening in at a call centre, or working in-store for a week. The ideal solution is to create a bespoke technique for the problem in hand. For example, when working on a brief for a male incontinence brand I wanted to help the agency team involved understand the target audience. We had no budget for this so we used a technique we call method planning.

Canary Islands Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Boxes & Cigars CIGARS (Calle Tomás Miller 80) If it’s cigars you’re after, this place has a dazzling range on offer, with the boxes just about as attractive as the smokes. Information Internet Access Due to the large number of immigrants in Las Palmas, the city is awash with internet cafes, generally located within locutorios (telephone call centres), which also offer cheap international calls. Wi-fi is increasingly available at midrange and top-end hotels, and occasionally at public spaces and in town centres. Money For the highest concentration of banks with 24-hour ATM machines head for Calle José Franchy Roca, just south of Parque Santa Catalina.

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Phone Codes »Mobile phone numbers start with 6 »International access code 00 »Canary Islands country code 34 (same as Spain) »Island area codes Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura 928; »Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro 922 »National toll-free number 900 Phonecards You can buy phonecards at tobacco stands, newsstands and at the locutorios (private call centres). In any case, there is an endless variety of phonecards, each with its own pricing scheme. The best card for you will depend on where you plan to call. Time The Canary Islands are on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UTC), plus an hour in summer for daylight-saving time. The islands keep the same time as the UK, Ireland and Portugal and are always an hour behind mainland Spain and most of Europe.

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

Further, there is no incentive for a merchant to defraud his or her customers, because the merchant would almost instantly be out of business. Customers can call Safaricom’s customer service number (234), where Safaricom has a record of all transactions (of the roughly 300 Safaricom employees dedicated to M-PESA, the vast majority work at the call centre, according to Betty Mwangi). There is, recent events indicate, more danger that scam artists will defraud merchants (who have more money on their phones than customers) by posing as authorities than merchants will defraud customers. Building a nation-wide network of trusted agents who are all independent operators requires a complex balancing act that never quite reaches a steadystate equilibrium.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

This is the third shift of the Nowhere Office, the impact this moment is having on both raw productivity and the more nuanced issue of ‘purpose’ itself. The Pitch of Frenzy It is notoriously hard to quantify productivity, hence the way economists refer to the ‘productivity puzzle’. Clearly what counts as productive in a call centre is different to measuring the outcome of creativity in an advertising agency. The inherent time delay between the start of a project and its completion is often where the problem of being able to measure meaningfully what is ‘productive’ lies. I’m thinking for instance of the gap between someone writing a legal or policy paper and its eventual outcome in court or in a new law.

Becoming Data Literate: Building a great business, culture and leadership through data and analytics
by David Reed
Published 31 Aug 2021

This saw a top level of seven customer clusters defined, underpinned by micro-level segments to support a wide range of use and business cases. These were made available via a microsite and also embedded into a reporting layer which now sees regular MI reports created based around the clusters. Communication went further to drive adoption across the organisation. “We worked with front-line call centre colleagues to give each of the seven segments a memorable name and signature colour, present on all the segmentation collateral at the different worksites. We then identified 100 customers who were representative of each segment and filmed interviews with them to bring the customers to life. These videos and imagery then were presented in collaboration with 150 ‘super users’ across five sites as part of the rollout,” says Spencer.

Lonely Planet Eastern Europe
by Lonely Planet , Mark Baker , Tamara Sheward , Anita Isalska , Hugh McNaughtan , Lorna Parkes , Greg Bloom , Marc Di Duca , Peter Dragicevich , Tom Masters , Leonid Ragozin , Tim Richards and Simon Richmond
Published 30 Sep 2017

Pirogov Hospital ( GOOGLE MAP ; %emergency 02-915 4411; www.pirogov.bg; bul General Totleben 21; j4, 5) Sofia’s main public hospital for emergencies. 8Getting There & Away Air Sofia Airport ( GOOGLE MAP ; %info 24hr 02-937 2211; www.sofia-airport.bg; off bul Brussels; W; g84, mSofia Airport) is 10km east of the city centre. The only domestic flights within Bulgaria are between Sofia and the Black Sea coast. Bulgaria Air ( GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 02-402 0400; www.air.bg; ul Ivan Vazov 2; h9.30am-noon & 12.30pm-5.30pm Mon-Fri; mSerdika) flies daily to Varna, with two or three daily flights between July and September; the airline also flies to Burgas. Bus Sofia's central bus station (Tsentralna Avtogara; GOOGLE MAP ; %info 0900 63 099; www.centralnaavtogara.bg; bul Maria Luisa 100; h24hr; W; mCentral Railway Station) is beside the train station and accessed by the same metro stop.

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Seneca Anticafe ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0720-331 100; www.senecanticafe.ro; Str Arhitect Ion Mincu 1; per hr 8 lei; h9am-10pm; W; j24, 42, 45) Coffee and internet access. 8Getting There & Away Air All international and domestic flights use Henri Coandă International Airport (OTP, Otopeni; GOOGLE MAP ; %arrivals 021-204 1220, departures 021-204 1210; www.bucharestairports.ro; Şos Bucureşti-Ploieşti; g783), often referred to by its previous name, Otopeni. Henri Coandă is 17km north of Bucharest on the road to Braşov. The airport is a modern facility, with restaurants, newsagents, currency exchange offices and ATMs. It's also the hub for national carrier Tarom ( GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 021-204 6464, office 021-316 0220; www.tarom.ro; Spl Independenţei 17, City Centre; h9am-5pm Mon-Fri; mPiaţa Unirii). Tarom has a comprehensive network of internal flights to major Romanian cities as well as to capitals and big cities around Europe and the Middle East. Bus It’s possible to get just about anywhere in the country by bus from Bucharest, but figuring out where your bus or maxitaxi departs from can be tricky.

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Bus Long-haul bus services remain a popular way of travelling from Romania to Western Europe as well as to parts of southeastern Europe and Turkey. Bus travel is comparable in price to train travel, but can be faster and require fewer connections. Bus services to and from Western Europe are dominated by two companies: Eurolines (www.eurolines.ro) and Atlassib ( GOOGLE MAP ; %021-222 8971, call centre 080-10 100 100; www.atlassib.ro; Str Gheorghe Duca 4; mGara de Nord). Both maintain vast networks from cities throughout Europe to destinations all around Romania. Check the companies' websites for the latest schedules, prices and departure points. For sample prices, a one-way ticket from Vienna to Bucharest costs roughly €70.

Machine Translation
by Thierry Poibeau
Published 14 Sep 2017

In France, the interest was clear from the late 1950s on, and two centers were then created by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Paris and Grenoble. The interest in machine translation was simultaneous with the first computers intended for university centers in France, and was, therefore, the real beginning of computer science in the country. The two centers were called Centre d’Études sur la Traduction Automatique, or CETA: CETAP was located in Paris, and CETAG in Grenoble. The Parisian center encountered financial problems from very early on and had to bear the consequences of the criticism of machine translation that was emerging in the United States. In fact, the center closed a few years later and some researchers, such as Maurice Gross, turned to computational linguistics, stressing the need to first develop rich linguistic resources that offer a broad and systematic description of language.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

During the 1990s and 2000s, the richest 10 per cent – a group of business leaders, corporate professionals, financiers, press barons and aristocrats – enjoyed far bigger rises in their income than any other group. In 1998 they possessed more than a quarter of Britain’s income. By 2008 they owned one-third of it. Meanwhile, the least wealthy half of society – millions of pensioners, manual workers, call centre and care home staff, nurses, teaching assistants, cleaners and office workers, as well as those who couldn’t find work or were sick – lived on less than one-quarter of the national income.2 Rising inequality made people unhealthy and unhappy. In their meticulously researched The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett reveal that as economic inequality increased, so too did anxiety disorders and depression.

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All were in salaried, non-manual positions with impressive titles: they were consultants, administrators and sales executives. Thirty years earlier, 55 per cent of workers had been employed in manual jobs; by the millennium, more than 70 per cent of workers were employed in non-manual work, commonly in sales positions in cafés and call centres, or as data inputters in offices.28 They dressed in smart suits, sported sharp haircuts and most owned at least one car. None was a senior professional (defined by the Census as doctors, academics, politicians, financiers and barristers), but none was unemployed either. Half of them had grown up in council or privately rented houses or flats, but only one of them now lived in rented accommodation.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

This is done for any number of reasons: to maximize profitability (withdrawing services from ‘failed’ or unprofitable consumers; profiling neighbourhoods as geo-demographic groups); to customize or personalize services (tailored amazon.com Web pages); to allow premium users to by-pass congestion (road-priced highways; differential call-centre queueing based on records of customers’ profitability; the ‘prioritized’ switching of Internet packages); to support new means of individualized risk management.26 Because these new trends of digitized consumption and tracking straddle the inside and the outside of the nation-state, they interlock with and facilitate broader shifts towards securocratic war.

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The bombing of Moscow metro cars by Chechen terrorists in February 2004 and the gassing of Tokyo’s underground railways by the Aum Shinrikyo group in March 1995 also exploited everyday mobility systems to murderous effect. In India, meanwhile, as part of a recent spate of urban atrocities, terrorists have sometimes deliberately targeted the electricity systems that supply the high-tech enclaves which house the city’s well-known global software and call-centre industries.15 Such attacks have raised widespread anxiety about the vulnerabilities of all manner of basic infrastructures that, by definition, pervade the everyday life of every modern urbanite (Figure 8.1). The mailings of anthrax spores, for example, were acts perpetrated through the US postal system in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and killed five people.

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany
by Lonely Planet , Virginia Maxwell and Nicola Williams
Published 1 Dec 2013

As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at newsstands and tabacchi. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom Italia payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished. Direct international calls can also easily be made from public telephones with a phonecard.

Florence & Tuscany
by Lonely Planet

As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at news-stands and tobacconists. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished. Direct international calls can also easily be made from public telephones with a phonecard.

Canary Islands Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

FOLLOW THE SHOPPING BASKETS For the freshest and cheapest produce, including everything you might need for a picnic, check out the covered markets: the best are located between Calles Barcelona and Néstor de la Torre and on the corner of Calles Mendizabal and Juan de Quesada in Vegueta. 8Information Internet Access Although internet cafes are not as abundant as they once were, you'll still find access in the city's locutorios (telephone call centres), which also offer cheap international calls. Wi-fi is widespread – most hotels, cafes and restaurants offer access and there is even a plan to launch wi-fi hotspots on the beach. Money For the highest concentration of banks with 24-hour ATM machines head for Calle José Franchy Roca, just south of Parque Santa Catalina.

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Phone Codes Mobile phone numbers Start with 6 International access code 00 Canary Islands country code 34 (same as Spain) Island area codes Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura 928; Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro 922 National toll-free number 900 Phonecards You can buy phonecards at tobacco stands, newsstands and at the locutorios (private call centres). In any case, there is an endless variety of phonecards, each with its own pricing scheme. The best card for you will depend on where you plan to call. Time The Canary Islands are on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UTC), plus an hour in summer for daylight-saving time. The islands keep the same time as the UK, Ireland and Portugal and are always an hour behind mainland Spain and most of Europe.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough
by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss
Published 31 May 2005

CHAPTER 5 1 Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘Household debt: what the data show’, Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin, RBA, Sydney, March 2003, Table 1. 2 National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, ‘Household debt in Australia—walking the tightrope’, AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report, issue 9, NATSEM, Canberra, November 2004, Table 8. 3 Inspector-General in Bankruptcy, Annual Report, 2003–2004, Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia, Canberra, 2004. 4 Dun and Bradstreet, ‘D&B expands call centre capacity with Datacom to meet growth in debt business’, 9 July 2002, <www.dnb.com/about/media/press/> [11 January 2005]. 5 Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia, Annual reports, various issues, ITSA, Canberra. 6 Paul Brennan (Citigroup), cited in Matt Wade, ‘Exports a chink in Howard’s economic armour’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2004. 201 AFFLUENZA 7 Don Harding, Matt Hammill, Anne Leahy and Peter Summers, ING – Melbourne Institute Household Saving Report, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, June quarter 2001, pp. 6–7. 8 National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, op. cit., Figure 12.

Top 10 Venice
by Gillian Price
Published 21 Feb 2011

Venice ( Pocket Another useful free three-monthly bilingual magazine that lists exhibitions, not to mention bars and eateries all around town. ) Websites As well as the Tourist Board sites (see directory), www.meeting For entertainment in Venice See pp66–7 venice.it and www.a guestinvenice.com in Italian and English are excellent sources of information and have an incredible number and array of useful links for in-depth exploration. Tourist Offices Venice www.turismovenezia.it • 041 529 8711 (call centre) Ferrovia S Lucia (railway station) • 041 529 8727 Piazza S Marco 71/f • 041 529 8740 Venice Pavilion • Giardinetti Reali, S Marco 2 • 041 522 5150 Piazzale Roma, Garage Comunale • 041 529 8746 Airport • 041 541 5887 Gran Viale 6, Lido • 041 526 5721 (summer only) Padua Piazzale della Stazione • 049 875 2077 • www. turismopadova.it Vicenza Piazza Matteotti 12 • 044 432 0854 • www.vicenzae.org Verona Via degli Alpini 9 • 045 806 8680 • www. tourism.verona.it Getting Around Venice Directions Boat Fares City !

Player One
by Douglas Coupland
Published 30 Jun 2011

The only other sounds I can hear around me down inside Daffy Duck’s hole, other than nature sounds, are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to wherever it is I am. Do prayers create electrical fields? Is that how they cross the universe? Who’s to say? I have no idea how cellphones connected me to call centres in Mumbai, but they still did it. Poor humanity, praying and cursing and praying and cursing. What is to become of us as a species? A part of me doesn’t worry about us. If we can breed wolves into wiener dogs in ten generations, what might we do with a billion years? Never mind what God might do with a billion years.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

While in the long run Portugal would gain, it would cause short-term misery for the generation of clothmakers who would struggle to retrain as vintners. The debate became live in the UK in the decade before the global financial crisis as the growing trend of ‘offshoring’ back-office jobs such as call centres and data entry personnel created fears that jobs were being lost to emerging markets such as India. Similarly in the United States, presidential candidate Ross Perot warned voters that signing up to the North American Free Trade Agreement would be marked by a ‘giant sucking sound’ of manufacturing jobs being lost to Mexico.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

They were ordered weeks ago by Steve, who had looked forward to surprising his wife on Valentine’s Day. Nearly a week after the onset of my symptoms, I am sufficiently concerned about the prospect of infecting my patients on my return to work – those in a hospice being exceptionally vulnerable – that I endeavour to be tested for Covid. The 111 call centre worker I speak to is clear, however: ‘You don’t meet the criteria for testing.’ ‘I know,’ I respond, fully aware that the only people eligible for tests currently are those who have been to Wuhan or Lombardy themselves and are also symptomatic. ‘But I’m a doctor working in a hospice. My patients couldn’t be frailer.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance
by Simon Fairlie
Published 14 Jun 2010

Urban populations have swelled to previously unimaginable proportions as a result of India’s failure to control its population, which has doubled since Harris was writing in 1973, and its green revolution, which benefits commercial farmers able to afford fertilizers and tractors at the expense of small farmers. Meanwhile the foreign exchange pouring into the computer and call centre industries has led to the rise of an Americanized middle class whose allegiance to cow worship, even from those who remain nominally Hindu, is slim. ‘Junk food is fashionable. Eating meat is regarded as progressive. Modernization is equated with changing from being vegetarian to non-vegetarian, even while the rest of the world attempts to reverse this trend.’41 Abattoirs meeting modern standards of hygiene are constructed on the edge of the new conurbations.

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A non-vegetarian Muslim Bangladeshi eats less meat per capita than a partly vegetarian Indian because Bangladeshis are poorer.57 In other words, members of India’s Hindu elite are rejecting its 2,000 year old dietary obligations, and choosing a western diet, just as they are choosing to wear western clothes, listen to western music, speak a western language, and adopt a western name when they work in the call centre. The worry is that the beef that was once reserved for India’s poor is being replaced by goat meat for its wealthy. Although Marvin Harris is observing from a western meat-eating perspective, and Maneka Gandhi, 25 years later, from an Indian vegetarian perspective, their views and conclusions are similar.

Croatia
by Anja Mutic and Vesna Maric
Published 1 Apr 2013

Information There are several ATMs in town, and many money changers in the port area. Bol Tours ( 635 693; www.boltours.com; Vladimira Nazora 18) Books excursions, rents cars and finds private accommodation. Interactiv ( 091 57 25 855; Rudina 6; per hr 30KN; May-Oct) A dozen fast computers and a call centre. Most cafes have wi-fi and there are several hotspots around town (for a fee). More ( 642 050; www.more-bol.com; Vladimira Nazora 28) Private accommodation, scooter rental, island tours and excursions. Tourist Office ( 635 638; www.bol.hr; Porat Bolskih Pomoraca bb; 8.30am-10pm Jul & Aug, 8.30am-2pm & 4-9pm May, Jun & Sep) Inside a Gothic 15th-century townhouse; a good source of information on town events and distributes plenty of brochures.

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Fontana Tours ( 742 133; www.happyhvar.com; Riva 18) Finds private accommodation, runs excursions, books boat taxis around the island and handles rentals. It has a romantic and isolated two-person apartment on Palmižana (600KN per night). Francesco (Burak bb; per hr 30KN; 8.30am-midnight) Internet cafe and call centre right behind the post office. Left luggage (35KN per day) and laundry service (50KN per load). Pelegrini Tours ( 742 743; www.pelegrini-hvar.hr; Riva bb) Private accommodation, boat tickets to Italy with Blue Line, excursions (its daily trips to the Pakleni Islands are popular) and bike, scooter and boat rental.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Accountants calibrate and audit the value of rentiers’ assets, rendering it legible, fungible and accessible to management and to the investment community. At the other end of the workforce spectrum, the 99 per cent perform the daily drudgery of sweating, or servicing, the assets that their bosses have heroically secured – manning call centres, fulfilling cleaning contracts, repairing network infrastructures, and so on. A striking example of this polarization is British American Tobacco, the London Stock Exchange–listed UK cigarette and tobacco manufacturer and intellectual property rentier whose market-leading brands include Dunhill, Lucky Strike and Rothmans (see Table 0.1).

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The geography of private-sector outsourcing is an important consideration. Much of the discussion of outsourcing in the media, and indeed also by scholars, has focused on the contracting out of operations to lower-cost overseas territories.12 As Weber notes, prototypical cases include the moving of apparel-making jobs to China and call-centre operations to India.13 But while these are perhaps the best-known examples of corporations contracting out, and are clearly enormously important for all manner of reasons, cross-border outsourcing represents the exception rather than the norm, at least where its enactment by UK companies is concerned.

Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond
by Tom Cox
Published 1 Jan 2011

I can’t think of any obvious reason my cats have decided to make their weekly Party Night coincide with that of the human population of East Mendleham. Each one of the furry schemers in my house has his or her clandestine double life, but I find it hard to believe that any of these would extend to a nine-to-five job working in a call centre, and its concomitant end-of-week stress-relief session. It’s not as if it gets to Friday afternoon and the six of them think, ‘You know what? I’m really pooped from five days of sleeping on the sofa, repeatedly cleaning my bottom and having my every whim catered for. What I really need to do is unwind.’

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

A government that wanted to improve public health would promote the employment of more conductors on buses and trains – not least in order to encourage people to use them instead of cars. It would promote more face-to-face interactions at post offices, rather than more impersonal, labour-saving and apparently efficient work through demoralising call centres. We would see more teachers, smaller class sizes in schools, and fewer executives paid millions of pounds a year. All this in the past created the dual benefits of increased and sustainable employment and increased social capital. In the words of John Kay, writing in the Financial Times, ‘policy to give the low-paid more money rather than benefits is worthy of debate and only a rabid ideologue could fail to appreciate that pay is not purely a question of productivity; it is also a question of bargaining.’78 Left in the control of the 1 per cent, the not-so-free market can destroy jobs and livelihoods faster than it creates them.

Plot 29: A Memoir
by Allan Jenkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

Past our picnic spot, the murder of black crows, the shrieking parakeets, down by the reeded lakes where there may or may not be a heron. We turn by the tennis courts, the lido and running track. Last, back over the bridge and home. FEBRUARY 2. I am sitting at my desk, feeling disturbed. This is an open-plan newspaper office, with close seating like a call centre. I have been in a side room for a personal call to Barnardo’s ‘Making Connections’ team. I want to make my case for reducing the waiting time to see my records. Fourteen months seems a lifetime away. I am not 80, I don’t have a serious illness, so I need to know how they quantify abuse. Do I need proof and if so what kind?

Confessions of a GP
by Benjamin Daniels
Published 4 Aug 2010

There were no anti-AIDS drugs (antiretrovirals, ARVs) and even our malaria medication supply was low because of a robbery at the hospital pharmacy (an inside job). Meanwhile, 30 miles outside of town, Rachel, a 22-year-old from Glasgow with no letters after her name, really was saving lives. Rachel had dropped out of her sociology degree and had been working in a call centre before deciding to come and do some voluntary work in Mozambique. She had raised some sponsorship from back home and was touring the rural villages with a troop of local women. All she had at her disposal was a basketful of free condoms and a few hundred subsidised mosquito nets. Accompanied by information and education in the form of songs and posters, her campaign was a raging success.

No Shame: The Hilarious and Candid Memoir From One of Our Best-Loved Comedians
by Tom Allen
Published 12 Nov 2020

In arts centres built in the 1990s, they look like The Brittas Empire; if from the 1970s, they feel like the set of Crossroads. At the Palladium, it’s different because they make it nice for people like Joan Collins. They painted it all grey and for some reason put in lots of desks for chorus dancers to sit and do their make-up at. It’s very swish, but with all the desks, it can look a bit like a call centre. There are also lots more people than a lot of theatres because it’s such a huge venue and needs a lot of staff to make sure idiots like me don’t take a wrong turn and end up like the Phantom of the Opera suspended from the chandelier. Flo and I stood in the darkness of the huge wings at the side of the stage, ropes seemed to be going in different directions to hold up all the curtains – curtains much bigger than my mum’s tie-backs could ever hope to hold.

Tails I Lose: The Compulsive Gambler Who Lost His Shirt for Good
by Justyn Rees
Published 25 Jun 2014

A quick glance at my watch told me there was no time left and, in any case, I would run the risk of waking Emma. I pulled at my collar and huddled closer to the wall as I dialled the number of my bank. A quick automated check of my balance told me my salary had just been deposited. Good. Then I entered the number sequence that would take me through to the bank’s call centre. It seemed to take forever. They probably didn’t get many calls at this time of night. “Good morning,” I said when I finally got through. “I’d like to make a transfer between my accounts, please.” I was paid by automated transfer on the same day of each month and the money always hit my account at 2 a.m.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

Greg Thomson, Unison’s head of strategic organisation, told me that since it crossed the Channel, EDF had gone against prevailing management orthodoxy by reinstating a final salary pension scheme for workers. Unison was given seats with the CGT in an EDF/union body, a ‘European Works Council’, and enough leverage over EDF management to get union recognition for previously non-union workers at a call centre in Sunderland. ‘When London Electricity was privatised, we adopted a policy of returning it to public ownership, and I’m pleased to think I delivered on that,’ Thomson said. ‘Obviously to the wrong nation, but you can’t be too picky.’ Yet EDF’s foreign adventures make Unison’s French counterparts suspicious.

The Money Machine: How the City Works
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Jul 2009

But it was also because British banks had moved to the originate and distribute model. When the credit crunch hit, some of those banks were particularly vulnerable. The Northern Rock Collapse Building up a base of retail deposits takes time and resources. Either you need a big base of branches (with lots of costly property and staff), a call centre to handle consumer enquiries or you need to offer a high return to attract the rate tarts who surf the internet. The originate and distribute model seemed to offer a quicker and easier route to gain market share. Instead of waiting for deposits to build up, a bank could go out and make the mortgage loans it desired and then sell those loans in the financial markets.

Explore Everything
by Bradley Garrett
Published 7 Oct 2013

The organisation of urban explorer groups, again, mirrors that of computer hackers, which in turn, as journalists Arthur and Halliday wrote about the now-defunct hacker group Lulzsec, ‘mirror those of street gangs, where the talk is of respect, attacks, who can be trusted, who the enemies are (usually law enforcement and rival gangs), whose ground belongs to who, and who has accomplished what’.52 Explorers I met from the UK, United States, Sweden, France, Australia, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands include a number of people with various jobs – a social housing worker, a manager at Asda, a bus driver, a church leader, an exotic dancer, a cleaner, film and music students, an owner of a construction company, a few professional freelance photographers, a joiner, a banker, a call centre worker, a lighting engineer, a special constable, a dentist, a geography teacher and, unsurprisingly, a number of people working in software, IT and web design, who might also be considered hackers in the virtual sense. Obviously, in order to have the opportunity for these sorts of engagements with the city, one must be secure enough financially and have enough free time that investing the hours necessary to research and explore sites can be accomplished.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

The promise of freedom, finally, rings equally hollow, with platforms’ busi- ness models making it difficult for workers to assert their fundamental rights, including the freedom to form a union and bargain collectively. Most operators are unsurprisingly hostile to any efforts at organizing genuinely independent worker representation. When unionization was on the cards in Seattle, Uber’s call-centre representatives were instructed to ring up drivers and ‘share some thoughts’ about how ‘collective bargaining and unioniza- tion do not fit the characteristics of how most partners use the Uber platform’.69 * * * 66 Lost in the Crowd As former New York Times correspondent Steven Greenhouse notes: In many ways, digital on-demand workers face far more obstacles to organiz- ing and being heard than workers in the traditional economy.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Browse around the web and there are plenty of chatbots to play with, and tools to build your own. Eliza, the world’s first chatbot, appeared back in 1966. She didn’t do much; just commiserated with you – ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ – or repeated your statement as a question: ‘Why do you want to leave your husband?’ Eliza was limited but her bland meaninglessness seems to be the template for call centres the world over. How many times have you wondered if you are communicating with a bot and it turns out to be a human? Possibly we will need a Reverse Turing Test to pull humans up to the level of enabled empathetic bots. While most chatbots are narrow AI – an algorithm designed to do one thing only, like order the pizza or run through your ‘choices’ before being transferred to a human – some chatbots seem smarter.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 29 Jul 2019

‘The disinformation architect’, concludes Ong, ‘denies responsibility or commitment to the broader public by narrating a personal project of self-empowerment instead.’ Below the architects came the ‘influencers’, online comedians who, in between posting the latest jokes, made fun of opposing politicians for a fee. Down in the slums of the disinformation architecture were what Ong called the ‘community-level fake account operators’: call centres full of people working twenty-four-hour shifts, paid by the hour, with one person manning dozens of social media personas. They could be either someone who needed a little extra cash (students or nurses, for example) or campaign staff. Ong interviewed one operator, Rina, who had been forced into the work when she joined a mayoral campaign.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

Even recreation will be changed out of all recognition: sports clothing and equipment will improve dramatically; musical instruments will be 3-D printed at low cost and high quality; and virtual reality will transform the experience of playing computer games. These new technologies also enable a wide range of services to be automated – from care of the elderly16 to manning the telephones in call-centres.17 In Japan, there is already a hotel staffed almost entirely by robots.18 Perhaps even more importantly, new business models become possible. Smart cities, for example, which aim, in the words of the Smart Cities Council, to improve: 1. Liveability: Cities that provide clean, healthy living conditions without pollution and congestion.

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts
by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey
Published 8 Dec 2020

Because the Maker system is smart contract–based, it does not require users to submit personal Know Your Customer (KYC) information to participate. The only thing required to interact with it is a private key and access to some ether. USDC An ERC-20 stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC) is supported by two of the largest and best-known companies in cryptocurrency: Coinbase and Circle. USDC is part of a larger consortium called Centre, whose members collaborate on the stablecoin’s governance and use cases. Grant Thorton, LLP, is the auditor for USDC. The firm provides monthly attestations that there are enough reserves to back the USDC stablecoin. The system requires users acquiring or redeeming USDC from the issuer to submit personal information for KYC checks.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

Richard’s specialism was ASCII (pronounced ‘Askey’, as in Arthur), a method of encoding alphabetical characters into binary which allowed him to insert instructions into the Horizon operating system. Subpostmasters would only reach third tier support when their Horizon issues had been deemed unsolvable by the second tier team. Second tier operators were based in various call centres around the country. They had reasonable technical knowledge, but they were some way from the third tier cadre in terms of ability and access. When it came to Horizon, third tier support were extremely capable, and to all intents and purposes, a law unto themselves. They had one mission – to keep the Horizon network going by any means necessary.

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The final case study was a Subpostmaster called Jim Withers, who ran the Cromer Post Office in Norfolk. Tweedie described Withers raiding his savings and selling his car, shovelling money into Horizon to try to balance his discrepancies. Jim told the Mail, ‘I rang the helpline and they said, “Don’t worry, it will sort itself out”… One time, the woman at the call centre told us what to do, we did it and it doubled the loss! The woman said, “Don’t worry about it” again and put the phone down.’ Jim was ruined. He lost his home, his business and was living in rented accommodation. Tweedie spells it out. ‘The scandal surrounding Horizon quite likely represents one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in the UK this century… Yet, the Post Office – one of the last bastions of nationalisation – has used millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to pursue people through the courts and silence criticism via an army of expensive lawyers, while continuing to deny to parliament that there was ever anything amiss.’

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

Just as we insist that learner drivers are accompanied by an experienced driver, companies are working to create similar backup advisors for driverless cars. In the event that a driverless car encounters a situation it cannot safely navigate, it will be able to call on the services of a remote contact centre for support. The operator in the call centre can temporarily access all the car’s sensor data and make a decision about how best to proceed. New instructions can then be sent to the car - and the driverless car’s software can learn from its experience, and then share that experience with all other driverless cars. For example, if the car was confused by an unmapped construction zone temporarily requiring cars to “illegally” cross solid lines to navigate an obstacle, the remote operator could “reassure” the driverless car that it was ok to do so.

Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition
by Claire Wallerstein
Published 1 Mar 2011

The Costa Rican economy is changing rapidly, with agriculture being downgraded and clothing factories declining in the face of cheaper competition from Asia. The country is now trying to re-model itself as a suitable location for high technology industries, foreign In 1988, Intel opened a huge companies’ operation centres for microprocessor plant in the human resources, call centres, country (the country’s GDP figures are now given both conferences and conventions. ‘with’ and ‘without’ Intel), while As an investor, it’s important Procter and Gamble has set up to think extremely carefully about its services and payroll division here to cover all its operations the sort of business you want to from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. set up, especially if your scope Lucent Technologies, Panasonic, is small.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain
by Lisa McKenzie
Published 14 Jan 2015

The men talked about the hopelessness of ever getting a job that offered economic stability and respect among their friends and family; they knew that getting a low-skilled, low-paid job would not give them a valued identity they needed to live on this estate, or even the means to live as ‘a proper family’, which was usually more of an aspiration for the future than a reality in the present. When I spoke to Dread about working and getting a job, his reaction was typical of many of the men on the estate: “There’s no jobs here for anyone, what can I do now, I used to work for the council as a gardener, I liked that but that’s gone now, I’m not doing no gay job in a call centre.” Robert MacDonald et al (2005) have used the term ‘displaced masculinities’ to describe the disengagement and difficulties young working-class men encounter in the transition from youth to adulthood, with the absence of ‘masculine employment’ offering status and respect. In this neighbourhood, status and respect are important resources, and to look for employment that may diminish local respect and status carries far too much risk and too much loss.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Google is the most striking example of a company that has taken elements of We-Think-style work into the corporate world and created an extremely potent mutant: a money-making machine that espouses open-source values. Of course it is ridiculous to imagine that most work could be like this in future. Call centres and retail outlets will be experience and service factories: highly regimented, delivering a high-quality, low-cost service. Trading floors in banks are financial-services factories. Even young scientists complain that lab work is highly repetitive and boring. Yet large organisations will increasingly feel the gravitational pull of open and participative ways of working.

CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition)
by Susan L. Wilson
Published 20 Dec 2011

MANAGING YOUR MONEY: BANKS For a listing of Egyptian banks, addresses and phone numbers go to: http://www.egyptdailynews.com/egypt%20banks.htm Some Egyptian banks have Internet sites, for example: „ Banque Misr Website: http://www.banquemisr.com.eg/index.asp „ Alwatany Bank of Egypt Website: http://www.alwatany.net/ „ Banque du Caire Website: http://www.bdc.com.eg/English/ Emergency Numbers (Cairo) „ „ „ American Express (24 hour customer service) Tel: (02) 2480-1530 Visa Card (Lost Cards) Tel: (toll free in Cairo) 510-0200-866-654-0128 (outside Cairo) 02-510-0200-866-654-0128 Western Union Money Transfer Tel: (02) 2755-5165 (Heliopolis); (02) 2796-2151 (Garden City) Website: http://www.westernunion.com/ (Click “Find A Location”) Resource Guide 311 TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS Train information/reservations Tel: (02) 2575-3555 Country and City Codes The country code for Egypt is 20 Selected City Codes Cairo Alexandria Aswan Luxor Hurghada 2 3 97 95 65 Telephone Service „ „ „ Mobinil (Their mobile numbers always start with ‘012’) Nile City Bldg. 2005C, Cornishe El-Nil, Ramlet-Boulaq Customer Service: 16110 (from any line); 110 (from a Mobinil line) Website: http://www.mobinil.com/home.aspx Vodafone Egypt (formerly Click GSM. Their mobile numbers always start with ‘010’) Vodafone C2 Bldg., Cairo Telemarketing: (02) 2529-4444 (Sun to Thurs 9am to 5pm) Customer Service: 16888 (from any line) Telecom Egypt (Landline service) Call centre: 111 (24 hours daily) Important Telephone Numbers „ International Operator 120 For Telephone Complaints „ HQ (Troubleshooting) 188 312 CultureShock! Egypt INTERNET CAFÉS AND SERVICE PROVIDERS „ „ „ „ Internet Egypt 2 Midan Simon Bolivar, Ground Floor, Garden City, Cairo Tel: 19665; fax: (02) 2794-9611 Email: inquiries@internetegypt.com Website: http://www.internetegypt.com/Contact_us.htm At Internet Egypt, you can get free through DSL service (at a reasonable rate) and it has four cybercafés throughout Cairo.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Economics increasingly resembles a zero-sum game, in which more for one group means less for another. And those with the political power are using it to monopolise the shrinking gains from growth for themselves. As long as the foundations of our finance-led growth model remain the same, then these contradictions will continue to escalate. In this febrile political climate, the so-called centre — committed to propping up the status quo — cannot hold. When the liberal establishment decries the rise of “populism”, they are demonstrating once again that they lack any understanding of the current political moment. The disdain directed at those who attempt to create political change outside of the “civilised” institutions of liberal democracy involves a total failure to understand that those institutions no longer work — something that is quite easy to forget when you are situated comfortably inside them.

The Knife's Edge
by Stephen Westaby
Published 14 May 2019

The same ridiculous process began once again, with the same inane questions. I made it clear that I did not want an ambulance to bring my mother to hospital. The conversation was going nowhere. Our situation was deteriorating and I sensed that there was no help to be had. ‘I will get our medical officer [the one sitting in the call centre directing traffic] to call you on this number,’ the frustrated woman eventually told me. After further delay the doctor called, and I left him in no doubt about the nature of the situation and what I believed should happen. Even he took some persuading, but he agreed to send the single GP covering the whole region.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

Home owners become trapped by negative equity, and struggle to move to the booming cities where homes are much more expensive. The fall in the price of commercial property indeed attracts some activities, but they are the stuff that forms the underbelly of the national economy: warehouses that serve the local region; low-productivity manufacturers that can only survive if their premises are very cheap; call centres that rely upon cheap premises and low-waged, casual labour. As the city fills up with such activities, property prices and wages partially recover, but the city has stumbled into a cul-de-sac. These activities are low skilled, and so the workforce is no longer participating in the ever-rising productivity of complex specialization.1 The superstar firms in the metropolis remain at the technology frontier and so the metropolitan population benefits from rising incomes, but neither the technology nor the incomes trickle down to the broken cities.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You
by Misha Glenny
Published 3 Oct 2011

He followed the scareware back to its source in East Asia and found that the administrator of IM’s servers had left some ports wide open, so Kolberg was at liberty to wander into the server and peruse it at will. What he uncovered was quite breathtaking. Innovative Marketing was making so much money that it had established three call centres – one for English speakers, one for German and one for French – to assist baffled customers who were trying to install their non-functioning products. Kolberg worked out from trawling through the receipts he also found on the server that the scareware scam had generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the management, in one of the most theatrical examples of Internet crime.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

For example, as of 2017, Google counted a total of 61,814 employees worldwide, far smaller than the number of General Motors employees, which stood at 180,000 as of December 2017, down from 600,000 in 1979, despite being a fraction of Google in terms of annual turnover. The bulk of new jobs that have been created by the digital revolution and its transformation of the world of work tend instead to be lowly qualified and lowly paid jobs. This trend is epitomised by the rapid growth of causalised workers such as call centre workers, riders for delivery companies such as Deliveroo, Uber drivers or warehouse workers as those of Amazon104 among many other typical profiles of the so-called ‘gig economy’.105 These figures can be considered as part of the ‘precariat’, an emerging class which, in his General Theory of the Precariat, Italian activist and theorist Alex Foti describes as ‘the underpaid, underemployed, underprotected, overeducated, and overexploited’.106 What is more, many fear the job-destroying avalanche of the incoming second automation revolution, with robots predicted to eliminate many manual jobs such as drivers substituted by self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence threatening to destroy clerical jobs, such as those in the legal and accounting sectors.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

On the consumer side it was literally phone calls to our “customer care” line that used to come through to my personal mobile in the early years because we didn’t have any customer care, and it was things like “My food’s late” or “They forgot my popadoms” or “I thought it came with fries”. So we’d then have to call the restaurants ourselves to sort it out. ‘It was painful and difficult in those early years as a bootstrapped business, and as soon as we had the capital we started employing a call centre, thank the Lord. But operations for us, particularly in the early days, was gritty at a very local level, dealing with real issues from real customers in real time, and the same for restaurant owners. We used to have restaurants’ money, because obviously often it’d be paid by credit card over the web.

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow
Published 5 Nov 2019

It is not the same as ‘the centre’. But aggressive, fascistic groups aren’t a peculiarity entirely disconnected from the normal state of affairs and they don’t just begin to be a threat when they do well electorally.65 Moreover, it’s not just the far right that produces anti-immigration politics. People in the so-called centre believe that if they take on some of the far right’s arguments, they can control them and make them reasonable. They embrace cheap, jingoistic or unthinking nationalism, which already decorates tabloid front pages, with the claim it will somehow help to address social anxieties. By assuming that they don’t reproduce racist politics – by believing that it is only the far right who do this – they would rather issue condemnations than reflect on how their own politics might reinforce or contain within it xenophobic and racist attitudes.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

In long-established organisations, staff may be able to make their intentions known to each other in a way that leaves newcomers mystified, whereas in a start-up, anything that isn’t explicitly articulated will not be heard. Individuals shift between high- and low-context modes: with family or friends, you probably do a lot of high-context communication, but when talking to someone in a call centre, you go low-context. Low-context cultures are better suited to societies undergoing change, with high levels of diversity and innovation. But they can also feel impersonal, brittle and unpredictable, and contain greater potential for strife. Most of us, wherever we are in the world, are living increasingly low-context lives, as more and more of us flock to cities, do business with strangers and converse over smartphones.

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money
by Owen Walker
Published 4 Mar 2021

Born in Pembury, Kent, the son of a bricklayer, he grew up just outside Tonbridge, attending the local secondary school and playing for East Peckham & Paddock Wood rugby club into his twenties. Newman began his career straight after leaving school, starting out at Cornhill Insurance before working in local branches of Bank of Ireland. In his mid-twenties, he joined Invesco’s London-based sales department, and was soon running its customer services team, overseeing the call centre and complaints-handling staff. In order to improve his communication skills when dealing with clients, Newman hired a linguistics coach, who became a mentor to him over the years. Newman’s big break came in 2000, when Invesco merged with Perpetual and he landed the job as head of retail sales.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

As banks rip away that patchy human interface and replace it with a uniform digital one (however superficially personalised), that diversity becomes uniformity. This effect is enhanced when separate banks begin to share background systems, such as common credit scoring systems. This re-skinning is occurring on all fronts. One of the biggest areas for banks to automate is customer helplines. Customers already hate the robotic way that humans in call centres are forced to interact, so it comes as little surprise that big institutions are happy to invest in robotic systems mimicking humans. The problem, though, is that while we may go through the motions of interacting with some chatbot mimicking a human in low-stress scenarios, in situations of high emotion (such as calling up the bank to inform them that your parent, who is their customer, has died) the chatbot’s fake emotion rings hollow.

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It
by Huib Modderkolk
Published 1 Sep 2021

The software optimised the timing and logged the effects. Employees who were up and active on social media early in the morning got the notification first thing, night owls got it later in the day. All to make campaigns look as authentic as possible. Carlos: ‘A company like Telefonica has fifteen hundred people working in its call centre alone. If a third do it, that’s more than enough people to get a topic trending at any given moment.’ The two Spaniards noticed this strategy was most effective on Twitter. It was less group-oriented than Facebook, which worked better with their campaigns. ‘Twitter feeds off controversy,’ explains Julio.

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen
by Peter Apps
Published 10 Nov 2022

Some residents had mould and mushrooms growing in kitchens due to persistent leaks and poor ventilation.6 For residents, trying to complain – or even report repairs – was a thankless task. In the early 2010s, an office on the estate where residents had previously reported problems was closed and replaced with a call centre. Residents describe being addressed in an ‘abrupt and rude’ manner when they reported complaints and felt the organisation was ‘incapable of getting bookings finalised or contractors to arrive on the right day if at all’. Those who complained were forced to go through a three-stage process which rumbled on for months.

Stephen Fry in America
by Stephen Fry
Published 1 Jan 2008

The important fact for our purposes is that there is a whole separate network within the main Highway System, the Eisenhower Interstate System–the equivalent of our motorway network but more, so much more. The Eisenhower Interstate System You might blanch at the prospect of me enlarging any further on this subject, but–as they say in call centres–bear with me, it really is jolly interesting. It concerns, after all, the greatest public-works project in the history of our species. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration released the budget and set in motion the creation of an enormous network of major roads, connecting all the great metropolitan areas of America.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

Changing trends in behaviour across the social and economic spectrum are also witnessing changes, with a report from the Mental Health Foundation finding that 64 per cent believe people are getting angrier, as the idea of ‘rage’ is linked to more everyday occurrences.76 Shopping rage, trolley rage, call-centre rage, PC rage, pavement rage and, of course, road rage all reflect a mix of increasing individualism and a growing sense of entitlement and frustration in a busy world where time is at a premium, bringing with it a reduced tolerance when things go wrong. When it comes to young people, their sense of entitlement and sensitivity to status and issues of ‘respect’ create a combustible mix.

Fearsome Particles
by Trevor Cole
Published 2 Jan 2006

We have to figure out, vis-à-vis our regular window screens, do we charge more for a window filter because it filters out stuff, or do we charge less because it won’t let you see outside?” Across from him, Sandy emitted a long, loud sigh. “Well, you know, hey, it’s an issue. So, okay …” He drew his pen down the list on his pad. “… acceptance … pricing … Next one, customer service. I think we should plan on establishing a toll-free customer service number, and staffing up with call-centre people, to take the calls from customers who’ve had the filters installed and want to know how the hell they’re supposed to see outside.” Sandy had begun to agitate in her swivelling chair like the vanes of a washing machine. “Thank you, Mr. Negativity!” “Once we solve those issues” – Trick made his face and voice sunshine bright – “I think we got a winner!”

Social Class in the 21st Century
by Mike Savage
Published 5 Nov 2015

The percentage of people who know a chief executive also increases steadily across the income spectrum, starting at about 20 per cent for those earning the least, and rising to over 80 per cent of those earning the most: high-income people know chief executives at four times the rate of low-income GBCS respondents. The percentages of people who say they know a sales/shop assistant or factory worker, conversely, decline across the income spectrum: the richest people are as unlikely to know a factory worker (or a catering assistant or call-centre worker or people in a few other positions not mentioned above) as the poorest are to know an aristocrat, despite the fact that there are far more low-income workers than aristocrats in the UK. What we are seeing here is a kind of ‘outlier’ effect. Rather than the key differences lying in the middle of the social structure, between middle and working class, the most arresting differences are at the extremes.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 1 Jan 2011

While predictions (and often rumours) about the future of Apple and its products tend to dominate the public (media) discussions on the company, during one of these media frenzies, journalist David Segal, in his New York Times article of 23 June 2012, discussed the company’s great expansion in the retail segment of its business and the prospect of those new jobs. Apple’s demand in the labour market has shown a greater increase in the retail and other services segments of its business as Apple set up more stores, data and call centres around the country. Even with online retailers such as Amazon threatening to disrupt the retail industry, forcing companies to close stores or to focus on online sales, Apple has been eager to increase its stores and focus on complete consumer satisfaction via person-to-person sales in order to boost sales.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

THE POLITICAL CHALLENGE OF PROSPERITY This should be a good problem for mankind to have. An abundance of labour is arguably the point, to the extent that there is one, of technological progress. It is the beginning of the end of the need to work hard to stay alive. A system in which people actively seek out labour they would strongly prefer not to do – manning call centres to handle the complaints of unhappy customers, or carrying packages around a boiling warehouse, for example – is not one society ought to aim to preserve any longer than technologically necessary. If society can find ways to automate such unpleasant tasks, or to share the work more broadly so that individual workers devote fewer of their waking hours to hard, unpleasant labour, that surely represents human progress.

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Steve Coogan
Published 1 Sep 2011

And I opened all subsequent shows with the same shout. And you know what, it became something of a calling card, voted years later 84th in Channel 4’s 100 Best Catchphrases. And if people to this day shout it out at me, in the street, or when I’m trying to pay for my shopping, or if I ring up a call centre to renew car insurance, or in a doctor’s waiting room if I’m having trouble digesting food, it doesn’t bother me. I’m fine with it. I like it. It makes me feel good and glad. Why wouldn’t it? So if people think it does bother me or that they’re getting one over on me, or that it might be a good way of riling me, they could literally not be further from the truth.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

For example, Yatango Mobile, an Australian telecoms company, offers phone credit to customers who provide technical support. Launched in February 2013 as a “social telco”, the company is only open to Facebook users and offers up to $5 phone credit for customers who recruit friends on the social network. Furthermore, it has no call centres; all technical support is handed over to members in exchange for call credit. Yatango customers earn 10 cents in phone credit for every technical support question they answer on Yotango’s online self-service forum. CASE STUDY 5 giffgaff: the mobile network run by you In 2008, Gav Thompson, head of brand strategy at O2, a UK mobile telecoms provider, attended a conference on social media in San Francisco.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

People were left to represent themselves in cases of debt, unfair dismissal, clinical negligence, immigration and schooling. Among the victims were parents left to struggle alone in the family courts. Coram, the children’s charity, was grant-aided to offer parents advice – but only in the form of a single telephone conversation, not face-to-face and certainly not in court. We listened in at its Colchester call centre. Staff were under intense pressure, the phones ringing non-stop. A thousand calls a day went unanswered. One mother was panicking. The court had given her Iranian ex-husband visiting rights, and she feared he would steal their children because he had possession of their passports. Here was an emergency where previously legal aid would have paid for a solicitor to take urgent action; now, she risked losing her children for ever.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

She must be brilliant, as bringing standards to banking is a tough job. Apparently, there’s a Conservative MPs’ Scruples Committee as well. Darren Henley is a former managing director of Classic FM, which is like Radio 3 with all the problematic programmes filleted out, the perfect playlist to keep people calm while they wait on hold for hours for someone in a call centre to answer their phone. “Just one Cornetto! Give it to me! Delicious ice cream. From Italy.” Andrew Fisher is the executive chairman of Shazam, a smartphone app which identifies unknown songs, and with which he has made the world a much duller place, bereft of mystery; crushing the richness of human experience for economic gain, giving you what you want, right here, right now.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

As the London Review of Books reported: Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to ‘one large group’: they called one another, or their friends called friends of their friends; this set of people was dismissed. A further 400,000 subscriptions could be attributed to a few large ‘nodes’, with numbers belonging to call centres, shops and information services. The remaining groups ranged in size from two to 142 subscribers. Members of these groups only ever called each other – clear evidence of antisocial behaviour – and, in one extreme case, a group was identified in which all the subscribers only ever called a single number at the centre of the web.

Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
by Stephen Westaby
Published 9 Feb 2017

I was tired and irritable so I let rip. Who on earth were they to question our efforts to save a twenty-year-old? So bloody what if we weren’t a transplant centre. She didn’t need a transplant. Her own heart just needed a rest from the battering it had received over the last twenty-four hours. Why was this so-called ‘centre of excellence’ unable to save a kid who’d collapsed within a mile of the hospital? It certainly wasn’t through lack of effort by the medical staff. Just as I was about to lose it altogether I heard that the equipment had arrived. Our patient was already on her way round to theatre, so I went to meet the company representative who’d made an enormous effort to come and help us.

Sex Power Money
by Sara Pascoe
Published 26 Aug 2019

When I first heard about the SWOP stall, I absolutely understood why they were there: so that students selling sex to support themselves would know of a qualified resource that could help them. And just as importantly, as a symbol of acceptance, that what they’re doing is not shameful or wrong, that it is a profession alongside working in a call centre or a shop. But I guess why people worry is because if you take the stigma away, if you say, ‘Selling sex is a job just like hairdressing,’ then more people might be encouraged to do it. Is that why we are not averse to whorephobia? Do we think it’s doing a useful job, keeping too many people from selling their bodies to make ends meet?

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

Then there are the payment infrastructures such as Visa, Mastercard, the clearing houses, and Swift, the international transfer giant (though it is still bank-owned). Banks also increasingly outsource their payment services to third-party providers; most have already hived off their card acquiring and processing activities, and many are now doing the same for issuing cards. It’s the same story for customer service, including call centres. The banks have to pay for all this and invest in their own IT and in shared infrastructures, reducing the amount they actually pocket from payments. Sluggish growth and low interest rates do not generally make for happy banks. Combine that with the aforementioned fees and investments, heavy regulation, excess capacity, unionised workforces and tough employment laws, and a bank can find itself in a bind.

The Rough Guide to Seoul
by Rough Guides
Published 26 Sep 2018

Tourist information The Korean tourist authorities churn out a commendable number of English-language maps, pamphlets and books, most of which are handed out at information booths – you’ll be able to find one in every city, usually outside the train or bus stations. Not all of these are staffed with an English-speaker, but you’ll be able to get 24-hour assistance and advice on the dedicated tourist information line – dial 1330 and you’ll be put through to helpful call-centre staff who speak a number of languages and can advise on transport, sights, accommodation, theatre ticket prices and much more. If calling from a mobile phone or abroad, you’ll also need to put in a regional prefix – to reach Seoul, for example, dial 02 1330. The official Korean tourist website (english.visitkorea.or.kr) is quite useful, and most cities and provinces have sites of their own.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

Catering businesses (canteens, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.) were now employing more than food and drink retailers, each more than 1 million.12 The United Kingdom had become a land of servers, waiters and cooks, not of shopkeepers but of shop-workers. Then there were the service industries as they are more usually thought of – the retail banks, the estate agencies, the call centres. By 2000 armies of proletarianized office workers and call-centre operatives were making a mockery of the earlier notion that white-collar work was superior in status to a manual manufacturing job. Finally, there were the public sector and publicly financed service jobs. They were far more important than a politically driven picture of the recent past would suggest.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

There are certainly some services that have high productivity and considerable scope for further productivity growth – banking and other financial services, management consulting, technical consulting and IT support come to mind. But most other services have low productivity and, more importantly, have little scope for productivity growth due to their very nature (how much more ‘efficient’ can a hairdresser, a nurse or a call centre telephonist become without diluting the quality of their services?). Moreover, the most important sources of demand for those high-productivity services are manufacturing firms. So, without a strong manufacturing sector, it is impossible to develop high-productivity services. This is why no country has become rich solely on the basis of its service sector.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

One of the earlier adopters of work at home was the US airline jetBlue which, when it started service in 2000, set up all of its telephone reservations agents as home-based employees in the Salt Lake City Utah region. At the time I remember founder David Neeleman proudly telling me that this initiative created several hundred new job openings for stay-at-home mothers who would be unable to work from a call centre but could do a great job while the kids were at school or the baby was sleeping. Apparently the turnover with this group has been negligible. I know a lot of ‘I’d go crazy if I had to stay around the house all week’ types who find the very idea of working from home to be quite abhorrent. In my own case I have always found working from home – as I have done all my life – reduces the stress levels I know I’d suffer if I were working from an office and bringing work home in the evenings and weekends.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

The demand for low-skilled, and mainly low paid, jobs has in fact been increasing in recent decades, stimulated by a host of factors: Britain’s flexible labour market, privatisation, the contracting out of so many jobs by big companies, the disappearance of a high wage floor in some sectors once sustained by unions and wages councils, the introduction of a more comprehensive tax credit income supplement system in 1999, the high demand for part-time work from working mothers, and, since 2004, the inflow of large numbers of eastern Europeans with a generally high work ethic and low wage expectations. Estimates of the number of low-skill jobs, depending on the definition of low skill, range from 8 million to 13 million (25 per cent to 40 per cent of all jobs)—including, among others, retail, cleaning, hospitality, care, driving/delivery jobs, assembly line work and routine clerical and call centre work. (Some of these will be subject to automation and the onward march of the robots, even in areas like social care, but many of them will not be. And someone still has to clean the robots.) This miscalculation was part of a bigger story of the casual way in which Britain, the first industrial nation, drifted into becoming a post-industrial one.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945
by Pat Thane
Published 18 Apr 2010

Work — 1945 to 1970s: full employment (for men); high but falling levels of industrial employment; increasing female employment, a large proportion of it part-time — mid-1970s to present: decline of heavy industry; increased service employment, on a spectrum ranging from low-paid (such as fast-food and call-centre industries) to high-paid work (such as financial services) — early 1980s to mid-1990s: high unemployment, particularly among men, older workers and some minority ethnic groups — 1980s to present: increased hours of work and of reported stress at work, but not the extreme shift away from the ‘job for life’ towards short-term contracts often assumed, except in a few sectors;1 steadily expanding range of employment open to women (although much of it still part-time) and members of some minority ethnic groups, but still with inadequate pay, promotion and training opportunities; unemployment rising again in 2008–9.

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies
by Nick Frost
Published 7 Oct 2015

A cabbie maybe? I liked driving but couldn’t afford a car, I didn’t have a pot to piss in. What could I do? Me and Dion thought about starting a garden-clearing business called Busy Bees. It never came to fruition. I needed to do something so I took the first job that I saw. I spent a week working in a call centre off Great Portland Street. Telesales. It was not for me at all. It was full of Wolf of Wall Street wannabees. Guys with headsets on selling, selling, selling. At points they’d stop yabbering to use the telesales professional’s greatest tool . . . Silence. Let the other fucker speak first. Take away every opportunity the guy on the other end of the phone has to say no until the only thing he can say is, yes.

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine
by Trisha Greenhalgh
Published 18 Nov 2010

MacLure [30] has written an excellent philosophical article claiming that with its overemphasis on protocols and procedures, a conventional systematic review degrades the status of interpretive scholarly activities such as reading, writing and talking, and replaces them with a series of auditable technical tasks. This change, she claims, is partly driven by the new managerialism in research and results in ‘the call-centre version of research synthesis’. I once wrote a short commentary called Why are Cochrane Reviews so boring?, arguing that an overly technocratic approach to data extraction and synthesis strips the meaning from a review [20]. But whilst this may be true and MacLure may have a point, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

There are certainly some services that have high productivity and considerable scope for further productivity growth – banking and other financial services, management consulting, technical consulting and IT support come to mind. But most other services have low productivity and, more importantly, have little scope for productivity growth due to their very nature (how much more ‘efficient’ can a hairdresser, a nurse or a call centre telephonist become without diluting the quality of their services?). Moreover, the most important sources of demand for those high-productivity services are manufacturing firms. So, without a strong manufacturing sector, it is impossible to develop high-productivity services. This is why no country has become rich solely on the basis of its service sector.

The Miracle Pill
by Peter Walker
Published 21 Jan 2021

This is a common observation – that encouraging people to get up more in an office doesn’t just make them healthier, it also improves communication around the office. One of the key principles of the BeUpstanding project is that staff get to decide what methods work best for them. One of Healy’s favourite examples came in a call centre where she helped implement a programme to reduce sitting time. It was, she recalls, ‘a very high-stress environment’ where abusive calls were relatively regular. ‘One of the strategies that their team chose was that if someone got an abusive call, they would stand up and shake it off,’ Healy says.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

While I think the most pessimistic predictions in the report are unlikely to be realized in the medium term, I firmly believe that AI and the associated technologies of advanced automation and robotics will make many people redundant in the near future. If your job involves looking at data on a form and then making a decision (such as whether to give a loan or not), then I’m afraid to say AI is likely to make you redundant. If your job involves talking a customer through a well-defined script (as is the case in many call-centre jobs), then I’m sorry that AI will probably make you redundant. If your job involves nothing more than routine driving in a constrained, well-mapped urban area, then it’s probable AI will make you redundant. Just don’t ask me when. For most of us, however, the main effect of the new technology will be on the nature of work that we all do.

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis
by Kevin Rodgers
Published 13 Jul 2016

After another few formal presentations and a hurried lunch, we split into groups of 15 or so to discuss various questions that Hal had set us. The group I was in was sent to a plushly furnished meeting room to consider ‘how to expand the reach of sales’. Various ideas were thrown around. One very loud French salesman lobbied for the idea of a call centre in a cheap location where smaller clients could be directed. Another, from our Singapore office, suggested hiring a lot of salespeople in Singapore and have them cover the rest of the Asian region by means of frequent flights: ‘It’s got to be cheaper than opening up offices, right?’ Maybe, I thought, but the cost of replacing the jet-dazed salespeople’s burned-out husks every two years might not run cheap.

Spain
by Lonely Planet Publications and Damien Simonis
Published 14 May 1997

The streets of Spain’s cities have taken on new hues. Madrid in the 1980s had a largely uniform feel but today it hums to the sounds of many languages, whose speakers have brought new tastes to the dining table. Kebab stands and Peruvian restaurants abound. You’ll find, for example, Argentines staffing call centres, Filipinos waiting in restaurants or Eastern Europeans working in bars. Hordes of retired and wealthy EU citizens are catered for by co-nationals on the holiday coasts. The image of illegal immigrants crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, and the more dangerous Atlantic route (to the Canary Islands) from Mauritania and even Senegal, in barely seaworthy boats has been a daily reminder of a litany of suffering.

…

POST Main post office (944 22 05 48; Alameda de Urquijo 19) TOURIST INFORMATION Tourist office (944 79 57 60; www.bilbao.net/bilbaoturismo) Main Office (Plaza del Ensanche 11; 9am-2pm & 4-7.30pm Mon-Fri); Airport (944 71 03 01; 7.30am-11pm Mon-Fri, 8.30am-11pm Sat & Sun); Guggenheim (Avenida Abandoibarra 2; 10am-7pm Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm Sun Jul-Sep, 11am-6pm Tue-Fri, 11am-7pm Sat, 11am-3pm Sun Oct-May); Teatro Arriaga (Plaza Arriaga; 9.30am-2pm & 4-7.30pm daily Jun-Sep, 11am-2pm & 5-7.30pm Mon-Fri, 9.30am-2pm & 5-7.30pm Sat, 9.30am-2pm Sun Oct-May) Bilbao’s friendly tourist-office staffers are extremely helpful, well informed and above all enthusiastic about their city. At all offices ask for the free bimonthly Bilbao Guía, with its entertainment listings plus tips on restaurants, bars and nightlife. There is also a call centre (944 71 03 01; 8.30am-11pm), which is on duty everyday and is equally helpful. Sights MUSEO GUGGENHEIM Opened in September 1997, Bilbao’s Museo Guggenheim (944 35 90 80; www.guggenheim-bilbao.es; Avenida Abandoibarra 2; adult/under 12yr/student €12.50/free/7.50; 10am-8pm daily Jul & Aug, 10am-8pm Tue-Sun Sep-Jun) lifted modern architecture and Bilbao into the 21st century – with sensation.

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The second-largest and northernmost of the Balearics, Menorca also has a wetter climate and is usually a few degrees cooler than the other islands. Particularly in the low season, the ‘windy island’ is relentlessly buffeted by tramuntana winds from the north. Check out the tourist information website www.e-menorca.org and the island’s official accommodation website, www.visitmenorca.com. Within Spain, you can also try the call centre (902 92 90 15; 10am-6pm). For activities, have a look at Menorca Activa (www.menorcaactiva.com). Orientation The capital, Maó (Castilian: Mahón), is at the eastern end of the island. Ferries from the mainland and Palma de Mallorca arrive at Maó’s busy port, and Menorca’s airport is 7km southwest of the city.

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Jan 2019

Most outdoor activities are concentrated in the few backpacker-friendly destinations, namely Mérida, Caripe, Ciudad Bolívar and Santa Elena de Uairén. Communications Venezuela is relatively technologically savvy, and call centres and internet cafés are found in all major towns; except in the most remote outposts, you should have no trouble finding a reasonable internet connection. Movistar and CANTV (and its cellphone subsidiary Movilnet) are the most visible telecommunications providers. All have call centres and outlets in most towns and cities. Pre-paid SIM cards can be topped up by street vendors or in your provider’s store. Calls are inexpensive, and data plans are available on every network, including texts, local and international calls.

…

The three major mobile phone networks are Movistar, Claro and Tigo, and it’s inexpensive to purchase a local mobile phone: a basic handset will set you back around C$50,000–60,000; if you have an unlocked phone, a SIM card will set your back around C$12,000 with around C$5000 worth of credit, and top-up credits sold in every corner shop. However, it’s cheapest to make domestic long-distance calls using the mobile phones in corner stores that buy minutes in bulk (look for the word “minutos”). Call centres (telecentros) allow you to make inexpensive calls both to local numbers and abroad, though Skype and WhatsApp are the cheapest way to go, given the proliferation of free wi-fi. For postal services, packages are best sent via private companies such as Avianca (aviancaexpress.com) and Deprisa (deprisa.com).

…

Travellers’ cheques are serious hassle to use. Opening hours and holidays Most shops and public offices are open Monday to Saturday 9am to 5pm or 6pm, but family-owned businesses open at the owner’s discretion. Most banks are open 8 or 9am to 4pm Monday to Friday and until noon weekends in shopping malls. Call centres open 8am to 10pm. Restaurant and bar opening hours vary and museums are usually open weekends and closed Mondays. On weekends and public holidays government offices and some shops are closed. The majority of national holidays mark famous historical events as well as Catholic festivals. Ecuadorians love to party with lots of food, drink and late nights, so it’s a great experience.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Though it sank in the recession he was doing well enough to push the joint Hatt household income above the median. He worked with his father and his 24-year-old son Christopher in a business founded in 1954, three generations of Hatts working together. Christopher still lived at home, as did their youngest, twenty-year-old Catherine. She worked locally, at a financial services call centre handling requests for loans. Another daughter, Emma, worked as an assistant at a private nursing home in Rye, and was expecting a baby. During the decade Barbara had moved up from the shop floor, having started as a checkout assistant. ‘I said to myself, I’m better than this, I need something else.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Free-market economists have argued that there should be no restrictions on capital movements as they allow money to be invested in the most profitable projects worldwide, and thus help the economy operate more efficiently. But it seems clear that countries are much better off if they attract what is known as foreign direct investment (factories, call centres and the like) rather than bank deposits. By its nature, such direct investment is far more likely to be long-lasting; having made all the effort of setting up a factory, a company is likely to think carefully before closing it down. EXCHANGE-RATE CHOICES Earlier chapters have recounted the long struggle by countries to maintain fixed exchange rates and the crises that occurred when they failed to do so.

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed
by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)
Published 15 Nov 2012

However, they will still incur the costs of administering these accounts (staff wages etc.) and providing services associated with them (cheque books, ATM cards, payment system infrastructure, cash handling etc.). Consequently the banks providing these accounts will need to charge fees to customers to cover their costs and make a profit. Table 6.1: Yearly costs of providing a current account Cheque Book £10 (per book) Debit Card £2 Branch £5 Call Centre £8 Staff £15 Banking IT systems £4 Customer Due Diligence (on account opening) £8 MasterCard/Visa £2 Link (cash machine network) £2 BACS and other payment systems £5 Other IT infrastructure £2 Total £63 Source: Tusmor, a consultancy firm that has been involved in setting up new banks in the UK (http://www.tusmor.com/) How much would the account fees actually be?

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

The watchword was decentralisation: the hundreds of activities once housed in a single corporation could be hived off to smaller and more specialised companies, and co-ordinated by the market using supply chains and networks of astonishing complexity and length.22 Of course, some complained that it went too far—that the costs saved by moving customer care to a call centre in Bangalore or Manila were really just offloaded on to the enraged customers on the other end of the line. But overall, few could deny that in industry after industry the result for the consumer was a phenomenal reduction in costs and improvement in choice. Finance was no stranger to these tectonic shifts in industrial organisation.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Investment Banks and the Rise of the New Financial System Banks that we do not see: investment banks So far I have talked about the banks we see: the ones with branches on every high street. These are banks like HSBC or NatWest that actively advertise themselves on TV, on billboards and on websites. They remind us how nice they are to their depositors (a free railcard for students! Only UK call centres!). They tell us how willing they are to give us a loan, should we wish to, say, take an impulsive foreign holiday or fulfil our life-long dream of opening a muffin shop. These banks are known as commercial banks or deposit banks.* But then there are banks we do not see. These are known as investment banks.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

When the Xerox 914 turned into a runaway success the Haloid Company renamed itself after its new product, just as Eastman had done. After the copier, Xerox targeted the duplicating process: not quite as fast as printing, but cheaper and simpler. Now it is promoting itself as a publisher of technical manuals, and as a manager of call centres, rather than simply a supplier of photocopying machines. One day paper may no longer be involved, but Xerox plans to continue finding ways of doing the things that photocopying once did for its customers, whatever the media or the means. Kodak did have products aimed at business, but most of its effort concentrated on the domestic consumer; Xerox dominated the workplace.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives. London: Harper Collins. Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Callaghan, George, and Paul Thompson. 2002. “ ‘We Recruit Attitude’: The Selection and Shaping of Routine Call Centre Labour.” Journal of Management Studies 39 (2): 233–54. Campaign for Wages for Housework. 2000. “Wages for Housework.” In Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, 258. New York: Basic. Carver, Terrell. 1998. The Postmodern Marx.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

If their product or service is deficient, a good company or institution usually wants to hear about it because: 1) It’s the right thing to do 2) You can only learn from your mistakes if you know about them 3) It’s better – especially in an age of social media – to have a satisfied customer than one who will use all available means to slag you off. The world of customer service has to some extent moved on from directly-employed human beings on the end of a telephone to impersonal globalised call centres; from email to text messages; from live chat to social media; from remote desktop support to AI and predictive intelligence tools. Companies which are honest about mistakes, as well as finding a way of talking authentically to their customers, are likely to be valued and trusted more. Many media companies invest heavily in keeping at least some of their customers happy – especially if they are subscribers or can easily switch elsewhere.

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Paul Clammer and Paula Hardy
Published 1 Jul 2014

In the arrivals hall you’ll find currency exchange, an information desk and phone providers where you can equip yourself with a Moroccan SIM card. Royal Air Maroc (RAM; 0524 43 62 05, call centre 0890 00 08 00; www.royalairmaroc.com; 197 Ave Mohammed V; 8.30am-12.20pm & 2.30-7pm) has several flights daily to and from Casablanca (round trip from Dh525, 40 minutes), where you can pick up domestic and international connections. Reconfirm your flight with its 24-hour call centre, and leave extra time for connections in Casablanca. Flights from New York connect to Marrakesh via Casablanca. Bus CTM bus station ( 0524 43 44 02; www.ctm.ma; Rue Abou Bakr Seddiq; 6am-10pm) , southwest of the train station (about 15 minutes on foot), is CTM’s main bus station, from where most services arrive and depart.

Egypt Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The major options: AvisCAR RENTAL (%0100 107 7400; www.avisegypt.com; Airport) BudgetCAR RENTAL (%2265 2395; www.budget.com; Terminal 1, Cairo Airport) EuropcarCAR RENTAL (%0106 661 1027; www.europcar.com/car-EGYPT.html; Terminal 1, Cairo Airport) HertzCAR RENTAL (%0180 000 822; www.hertzegypt.com; Airport) 24hr call centre; also has a branch Downtown ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %2575 8914; www.hertzegypt.com; Ramses Hilton, Corniche el-Nil). Metro The metro is blissfully efficient, inexpensive and, outside rush hours (7am to 9am and 3pm to 6pm), not too crowded. Given the impossible car traffic in Cairo, if you can make even a portion of your journey on the metro, you’ll save time and aggravation.

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Martin RandallCULTURAL TOUR (www.martinrandall.com) UK-based experts in cultural tours. On the GoTOUR (www.egyptonthego.com) PADI diving-course holidays. Wind, Sand & StarsTOURS (www.windsandstars.co.uk) A Sinai specialist with desert excursions and retreats. Getting Around Air EgyptAir (MS; %national call centre 0900 70000; www.egyptair.com.eg; h8am-8pm) is the only domestic carrier, and fares can be surprisingly cheap, though they vary considerably depending on season. Domestic one-way fares can be less than US$100. Bicycle Cycle tourism is rare, due to long distances plus intense heat. Winter can be manageable, but even in spring and autumn it’s necessary to make an early-morning start and finish by early afternoon.

Lonely Planet Central Asia (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Stephen Lioy , Anna Kaminski , Bradley Mayhew and Jenny Walker
Published 1 Jun 2018

Money ATMs and licensed money changers are widespread across the city, most centrally on Rudaki around the Shotemur junction. Post DHL Office ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %372 22 1999; Druzhba Narodov 62, Dushanbe; h9am-6pm Mon-Fri, to noon Sat) 8Getting There & Away Minibus Departures on Asian Express and other bus services leave from Dushanbe's efficient modern bus station ( GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 1616; www.asiangroup.tj; Sino 110) to destinations in southwestern Tajikistan. The terminal is 3km west of Dushanbe's centre, a two-minute walk north (across rail tracks and through a market) from marshrutka 16, or slightly further, but more obviously, just west of the road running south from the Russian Embassy (marshrutka 25).

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China Southern ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.csair.com; Tursunzoda 45, Paitakht Business Centre; h9am-5pm Mon-Fri) FlyDubai ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %446 10 0123; www.flydubai.com; Bekhzod 1) Iran Aseman ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %372 21 9703; Shotemur 22, Hotel Tojikiston; h8am-5pm Mon-Fri, to 2pm Sat) Flights to Tehran on Monday and to Mashhad (Iran) on Thursday. AKam Air (www.kamair.com) Flights to Kabul on Thursday. Somon Air ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 446 40 4040; www.somonair.com; Nissor Muhammed 3; h8am-6pm) Tajik Air ( GOOGLE MAP ; %487 01 5042; www.tajikair.tj/en; Titov 32/1; h7am-11am & noon-7pm) Turkish Airlines ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %487 01 7571; www.turkishairlines.com; Istaravshan 13; h9am-5pm Mon-Fri, to 2pm Sat) Ural Airlines ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %372 21 4520; www.uralairlines.com/en; Bukhoro 78, Gulistan Tur Hotel; h8am-5pm) Land Import tax (US$40 to US$70) and other fees are levied on cars entering Tajikistan at land borders.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

First, as countries grow, they argued, their citizens can afford to start caring about the environment and so begin to demand higher standards; second, the nation’s industries can afford to start using cleaner technologies; and third, those industries will shift from manufacturing to services, swapping smoke stacks for call centres. They might sound credible at first but these explanations for the curve’s rise then fall don’t stand up to scrutiny. First, citizens do not have to wait for GDP growth to deliver them the desire and power to demand clean air and water. That’s what Mariano Torras and James K. Boyce concluded when they matched up the very same cross-country data used to create the Environmental Kuznets Curve with measures of citizen power.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

But by the 2010s a new spring had arrived, and DeepMind was in the vanguard. Public conversation around AI has been dominated by the risks and rewards of job automation. And yes, this is a significant question. Nonetheless, I have yet to meet an AI scientist motivated by the prospect of automating a call centre. Instead, they are motivated by the prospect of discovery and knowledge far beyond our present abilities. AI scientists are nerds; above all they care about science and ideas. Yet what AI will do to human knowledge, to our ability to comprehend and see and discover and create, has received coverage incommensurate with its potential impact.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

As I walked around Dharavi, I encountered the different faces of the slum as defined by UN-Habitat, but I also found other things that I was not expecting. Within the area given over to heavy trades I came across ingenuity and a recycling industry that, statistically at least, makes Mumbai the greenest mega-city in the world; in a community centre I found a group of young Muslim women learning English, hoping to gain good jobs in local call centres; every time I looked to the skyline I could spy a mobile-phone mast, while on the central 90Ft Road I found shops and stalls all along the thoroughfare selling the latest smartphones. This reminded me that the slum was part of the city, not apart. The literature of the slums often treats the squatter camps and temporary shelters as a separate place, detached from the rest.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

That may mean couriers are less attractive. Lifes2Good has a significant presence online. Individual packages are sent direct to the homes of British consumers. ‘It’s going to be messy where we ship stuff direct to people’s homes – individual parcels, where people log on to a website or ring through a call centre. We fulfil those orders from Ireland. We have a warehouse on site. We’ll ship them overnight to homes in the UK. The cost of that will go up because each shipment will be subject to import duty in the UK. It’s no longer going to another EU member state, which is very clear and very clean. It’s going to a non-EU state.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

But Jones liked the work: he had had some run-ins with the law as a younger man, and issues with both drugs and alcohol that made holding down a job difficult. In the year and a half he had been working for Marriott, however, he had been promoted and given a raise, and he was valued by his superiors. One day in early January, as Jones arrived at the Marriott call centre, a storm was brewing for the company on the other side of the world. An email sent to customers of Marriott’s customer loyalty programme in China included the seemingly innocuous question “What is your country of residence?” Respondents could select from a dropdown menu that included China, Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate potential answers, appearing, in the eyes of Chinese nationalist trolls seeking to take offence, to endorse those territories’ independence from China.3 As outrage built on Chinese social media platforms, egged on by state media, the Shanghai Cyberspace Administration ordered the hotel chain to shut down its Chinese-language website and app for a week in order to “thoroughly clear all erroneous information”, and executives were dragged in for a meeting with tourism officials.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

Younger people who grew up in diverse societies consider it normal; they have friends from all different backgrounds and often don’t even think of them as different. Ever more people go to university, which tends to make graduates less susceptible to populism and more open to outsiders.1 Low-paid service workers such as bar staff, carers and call-centre workers who now outnumber the traditional working classes also tend to be more positive about immigrants, perhaps because they have more social contact with them.2 Ever more voters are from an immigrant background, and most support continued openness. Mixed marriages and relationships are multiplying and mixed-race children proliferating.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 6 Oct 2011

Colonel Mordaunt commanded his bodyguard. * Without the Anglo-Indian community, it is fair to say, the railways, telephone exchanges and customs service of British India could not have functioned. Since independence they have found life harder, although their excellent command of colloquial English has ensured jobs in places like call centres. They have all sorts of unexpected talents. At an Anglo-Indian tea party in Chennai, one of the prominent members of the local community turned to me proudly and pointed out how well everyone danced. ‘It’s part of our heritage,’ he said, ‘natural rhythm. We got it from the British.’ * Like the great orientalist Sir William Jones, Stuart is buried among dozens of less culturally sympathetic colonists in South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
by Ben Goldacre
Published 22 Oct 2014

When you forget about numerical constraints, all kinds of things can start to look spooky: in a group of twenty-three people, there is a 50 per cent chance that two of them will share a birthday, because any pair of birthdays on any date is acceptable. When you forget about numerical context, things can look weird too: if Uri Geller gets a nation in front of the telly to tap their broken watches against the screen, and ring the call centre if the watch starts ticking again, then with viewing figures of a few million there will be more excited calls than the switchboard can handle. If you turned to your friend and said, ‘You know, a lot of funny things have happened to me, quite unexpectedly, over the course of a lifetime, but let me take a moment to specify right now the one thing that would seriously freak me out, over the next twelve hours, which would be if my dog trod on the trigger of my gun, and accidentally shot me in the face,’ and then your dog shot you in the calf, that would be weird.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

These figures are derived from the international comparisons made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).18 The International Labour Organization (ILO) provides slightly higher estimates, but the international pattern is the same.19 However, most people who work in financial services undertake mundane clerical tasks in bank branches, call centres and insurance offices. Four hundred thousand people work in ‘the City’, the geographical area round the Bank of England that is headquarters to most British financial institutions.20 Of these, 150,000 work for financial institutions. Cleaners, security guards and chefs in financial institutions may or may not be included depending on whether the institutions in which they work have outsourced these functions (mostly they have).

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles
by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer
Published 10 Mar 2016

The click of a key can send a letter, blueprints, manufacturing instructions, or money across the ocean in a second. Even professional services are being decentralized to distant sites; for instance, in some US hospitals, interpreting X-rays is now electronically outsourced to radiologists in India and Thailand.79 Call centres in India are pitching rug-cleaning services to households in Toronto or New York. Such are the realignments of consumer markets. The rapid circulation of information and capital is stimulating the movement of workers across national borders. Tasks that engaged numerous workers previously are increasingly being done by a few with the help of computers.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

Buurtzorg started out with one team of four nurses in Enschede, a Dutch city of 150,000 on the country’s eastern fringes. Today, it numbers more than eight hundred teams active nationwide. However, it’s not what the organisation is, but what it is not, that sets Buurtzorg apart. It has no managers, no call centre and no planners. There are no targets or bonuses. Overheads are negligible and so is time spent in meetings. Buurtzorg doesn’t have a flashy HQ in the capital, but occupies an uninspiring block in an ugly business park in outlying Almelo. Each team of twelve has maximum autonomy. Teams plan their own schedules and employ their own co-workers.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion
by Dean Burnett
Published 10 Jan 2023

The ability to control a room full of rowdy individuals, who may have zero interest in what you’re saying, is a valuable transferable skill in this case. ||| Multiple people have assured me that this is a real thing. ## Jobs requiring a significant degree of emotional suppression have been shown to make workers more prone to depression and anxiety. Retail and call centre jobs are the most frequently cited examples, as they regularly involve the need to remain civil while being harangued by belligerent customers. *** Most people consider me to be very Welsh, but Carys makes me look like someone who just visited Wales once for a weekend holiday. ††† The model that argues there are five sequential stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Fear, Bargaining, Acceptance.

The Rough Guide to Morocco (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 23 Mar 2019

By bus The gare routière is 2km south of the Ville Nouvelle on Pl Al Jamia al Arabia (0539 946928); a 15min walk from the centre or around 20dh in a petit taxi. With the exception of CTM, all long-distance buses operate from here including Supratours. The CTM Gare Voyageurs bus station (national call centre 0800 090030) is on Route de Tetouan (N2), approximately 5km south of the city centre. However CTM has a ticket office in the gare routière from where they will transfer you to their bus station on a free shuttle bus. Destinations Al Hoceima (1 CTM & over 5 others daily; 8–9hr); Asilah (No CTM services; over 10 others daily; 45min); Casablanca (4 CTM & over 10 others daily; 5hr 30min–6hr 30min); Chefchaouen (1 CTM & over 10 others daily, ask for a direct sans détour service; 3hr); Fez (3 CTM & 5 others daily; 6–8hr); Fnideq (for Ceuta; no CTM services; over 10 others daily; 2hr); Larache (3 CTM & over 10 others daily; 1hr 30min–2hr); Marrakesh (1 CTM & over 5 others daily; 9hr 30min); Meknes (2 CTM & 9 others daily; 4hr 30min–5hr 30min); Nador (2 CTM & over 5 others daily; 10–11hr); Rabat (4 CTM & over 10 others daily; 4–5hr); Tetouan (4 CTM & over 20 others daily; 1hr–1hr 30min).

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The airport largely caters for flights from Amsterdam and Brussels, plus charter flights from Charleroi in Belgium and Rotterdam in Holland during summer. Grands taxis are found directly outside the terminal building, charging 175dh/vehicle (1–6 passengers) for the 15min drive into Al Hoceima. Royal Air Maroc have an office on the corner of Av Hassan II and Av Mohammed V, national call centre 0522 489797, royalairmaroc.com (Mon–Fri 8.30am–12.15pm & 2.20–7pm, Sat 9am–noon & 3–6pm). Destination Casablanca (4 weekly; 2hr 30min). By bus The bus station is 2km south of the city centre; all of the bus companies have ticket booths here. Blue and yellow petits taxis are sometimes waiting outside the station, otherwise just hail one from the busy main road opposite; it‘s around 10dh into town.

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 27 Nov 2006

Such chambers are not necessarily the embodiment of elevated ideals. Politics in the raw mostly looks about as interesting as a reading from the telephone directory. There are endless procedural discussions, nit-picking points of order and for most of the day people sit in rooms, shuffle paper, talk on the phone and check their e-mails as if they were in a call centre. The struggle to make something out of this deeply unpromising material is the real story of the design of Miralles’s parliament. This is also the story, although one with a very different outcome, of London’s new City Hall. The London Assembly’s 500 staff and 26 members could easily have been accommodated in an anonymous office building with no public recognition or iconographic significance.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

We walked through the night, past vast Communist-built blocks that have been crowned with the neon hoardings of the conquering capitalists. My fellow holidaymakers are all men. As well as Alex and Mark there is a wealthy businessman who flew himself here in his own light aeroplane; a shorts-wearing university employee from America’s wheat-belt with a huge rectangular bottom; a tall Australian call-centre operative with a German name; a genuine German who flew MiGs for the East German airforce; a lorry driver from Maidstone; and a man in his sixties with a sharp public school accent who was born in colonial Kenya. All of them are immaculately ironed and tucked in. Three of them have moustaches. We drifted into pairs as we walked, and I fell into conversation with Alex, the Australian who enjoyed the purity of Dresden.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

In Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 blockbuster film that reintroduced Mumbai to the world, the protagonist, Jamal, and his brother, Salim, gasp at the prowess of neocapitalist India while looking out across a development of neoclassical high-rise towers. To a Western audience, the development looks like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas—only much, much bigger. “Can you believe it?” Salim asks. “This was our slum. We lived just there, huh? Now it is business, apartments, call centres. . . . Fuck USA, fuck China. India is at the centre of the world now.” The fantastical cluster of thirty-story columned high-rises, looking like ancient Greek temples stretched into modern skyscrapers, is no computer-generated image. It is an actual real estate development set on parkland abutting a British-built reservoir several miles north of the historic heart of the city.

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
by Satyajit Das
Published 15 Nov 2006

Clo notes Principal and interest Corporate loans Senior notes Investment Loan principal and interest Principal and interest Special Purpose Vehicle Sponsor bank Sales proceeds Assignment/ subparticipation of principal and interest Mezzanine notes Investment Return Equity Investment Servicing agreement Figure 9.2  Collateralized loan obligation (CLO) DAS_C10.QXD 5/3/07 284 7:59 PM Page 284 Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y Transferring the loans from the bank to the SPV proved hideously complicated. To do it properly, you had to get the borrower to agree; some banks were too scared even to try. Most did ‘participations’, which created huge legal and customer relations problems. One bank tried to do a securitization of its corporate loan book using participations: it had to set up a call centre to respond to queries from agitated clients who wanted to know if their loan was being sold. Many corporate loans are ‘revolvers’. The borrower can repay the loan and then later re-borrow the money – it’s the corporate equivalent of the credit card. The problem was that if the borrower repaid the money it flowed out to investors.

Ukraine
by Lonely Planet

But to do it yourself, you need to speak some Ukrainian/Russian and know the exact addresses of your departure point and destination – saying something like ‘drop me off at Maydan’ won’t get you anywhere. If you dial a taxi service number, they usually hang up and call you back immediately. Troyka ( 233 7733, 237 0047) is a reliable call centre working with several taxi companies. If you flag a car in the street – as many people still do – always agree on the price before getting inside, unless it is an official metered taxi. Taking standing taxis from outside hotels, as well as train and bus stations, inevitably incurs a much higher price.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

For example, 75 per cent of global exploration and mining projects are headquartered in Canada.1 As manufacturing jobs were outsourced to the Global South to find cheaper pools of labour, resource-extractive industries required an “in-sourcing” of cheap labour to work in the dangerous production of dirty energy and the economy around it. This led to a drastic surge in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Migrant workers are the flipside of outsourcing; they are essentially the same labour pool as those who are working in sweatshops, call centres, and factories across the Global South to fill the consumption needs of the Global North and the global elite. They work without health and safety protections, their pay is less than minimum wage, they are often forced to live in dangerous and isolated work camps, they are legally tied down and indentured to a single employer, and their legal immigration status is temporary and precarious.

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
by Philip Augar
Published 4 Jul 2018

A few weeks later, though, Barrett sprung a surprise by making him finance director, a role for which Varley’s skills and experience were well suited. His successor as head of retail, Stewart, was undoubtedly a very good banker. He had joined Woolwich as a branch manager, had worked his way up the organization and front-line staff loved him. He would talk to customers in branches and pick up the phone in call centres. He had turned Woolwich round and was expected to do the same at Barclays. But the Barclays retail bankers were ready for him. He was a practical man rather than a political operator and the Barclays machine wrapped him in red tape. Meetings were mysteriously difficult to arrange, were cancelled at the last minute or flooded with officials.

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet
Published 30 May 2012

International Calls Official telephone (call) centres are sometimes the only way to call overseas, though sometimes this can be done on the street too, through vendors offering use of their mobile phones. Generally, it costs about US$5 per minute to call Australia or Europe and US$6 per minute to phone North America. You’ll usually be asked to pay in US dollars. In March 2011 the authorities banned Skype and other internet-based call services at internet cafes, as the lower rates charged for such calls was impacting the revenue made at government call centres. To call Myanmar from abroad, dial your country’s international access code, then 95 (Myanmar’s country code), the area code (minus the ‘0’) and the five- or six-digit number.

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This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing a friend from home; you can often pair up with other travellers you meet on the way. Work Teaching English is the easiest way to support yourself in Southeast Asia. For short-term gigs, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Jakarta have language schools and a high turnover of staff. In the Philippines, English speakers are often needed as language trainers for call centres. In Indonesia and Thailand you may be able to find some dive-school work. Payaway (www.payaway.co.uk) provides a handy online list of language schools and volunteer groups looking for recruits for its Southeast Asian programs. Transitions Abroad (www.transitionsabroad.com) is a web portal that covers all aspects of overseas life, including landing a job in a variety of fields.

Germany Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Central branches with late hours include Charlottenburg (Europa Presse Center, Tauentzienstrasse 9; 8am-10.30pm Mon-Fri, to 10pm Sat, 11am-8pm Sun; Zoologischer Garten, Zoo logischer Garten) and Mitte (Grunerstrasse 20; 8am-9pm Mon-Sat; Alexanderplatz, Alexanderplatz). Tourist Information The city tourist board, Visit Berlin (2500 2333; www.visitberlin.de), operates four walk-in offices and a call centre with multilingual staff who field general questions and can make hotel and ticket bookings. Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburger Tor, Pariser Platz; 9.30am-7pm daily; Brandenburger Tor, Brandenburger Tor) Extended hours April to October. TICKETS & PASSES »One ticket is good on all forms of public transport.

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Central Berlin (defined as the area bounded by the S-Bahn circle line) is a restricted low-emission zone, which means all cars entering it need an Umweltplakette (emission sticker). See p783 for details. Public Transport Berlin’s public-transport system is run by BVG (194 49; www.bvg.de) and consists of the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional trains, buses and trams. Get trip planning and general information via the BVG call centre or online. Bus Buses are slow but useful for city sightseeing on the cheap. They run frequently between 4.30am and 12.30am. Night buses take over in the interim, running roughly every 30 minutes. MetroBuses, designated M19, M41 etc, operate 24/7. Buses 100 and 200 follow routes linking major sights.

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The tourist office has free brochures on various local cycling paths. The excellent 1:150,000-scale cycling map Radtouren rund um Speyer (Bicycle Touring Around Speyer; €2) is sold at the tourist office and bookshops. Information ATMs (Maximilianstrasse 47 & 49) Near the Altpörtel. City-Call-Center (Bahnhofstrasse 3; per hr €1; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat, noon-9pm Sun) Internet access half-a-block north of the Altpörtel. Post Office (Wormser Strasse 4) A block north of Maximilianstrasse 61. Tourist Office (142 392; www.speyer.de; Maximilianstrasse 13; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri year-round, 10am-3pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 10am-noon Sat Nov-Mar) Situated 200m west of the Dom, next to the historic Rathaus.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

At the time of writing, the British coal industry employs 5,700 people, about 1,600 of whom are members of the NUM, with just over 1,000 in the UDM.37 Where the pits used to be there are now country parks or urban developments such as leisure and retail centres. The thriving miners’ welfare club in Brampton village, where it all began, was vandalized but reinvented to become a social club for plumbers, caretakers, shop-fitters and call-centre staff, there being no miners left in the vicinity. In Shirebrook, on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, former strikers and strike-breakers still drank in separate pubs, twenty years later.38 CHAPTER 9 FEED THE WORLD Bob Geldof had been through the roller-coaster of show-business since moving to London from his native Ireland.

Barcelona
by Damien Simonis
Published 9 Dec 2010

They accept coins, tarjetas telefónicas (phonecards) issued by the national phone company Telefónica and, in some cases, credit cards. Tarjetas telefónicas come in €6 and €12 denominations and are sold at post offices and tobacconists. Public telephones inside bars and cafes, and phones in hotel rooms, are nearly always more expensive than street payphones. Locutorios (call centres) are another option. You’ll mostly find these scattered about the old town, especially in and around El Raval. Check rates before making calls. Increasingly, these double as internet centres. To call Barcelona from outside Spain, dial the international access code, followed by the code for Spain (34) and the full number (including Barcelona’s area code, 93, which is an integral part of the number).

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

That is what I thought, until one day I tried to have an unnecessary conversation on a mobile telephone while a man was using a leaf-blower nearby. Even if everybody lags his loft and switches to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and throws out his patio heaters and gets his power from more efficient power stations, and loses his job in a steel plant but gets a new one in a call centre, the falling energy intensity of the economy will be offset by the new opportunities wealth brings to use energy in new ways. Cheap light bulbs let people plug in more lights. Silicon chips use so little power that they are everywhere and in aggregate their effect mounts up. A search engine may not use as much energy as a steam engine, but lots of them soon add up.

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

In short, productivity gains in services are inherently slower than in manufacturing because there is greater dependence in the former on people and on enhancing human skills.2 The second reason why manufacturing is so important is another relative advantage that it has over the service sector. This is that manufactures are much more freely traded in the world than services. Most manufactures can be put in containers and shipped to anyone willing to pay for them. Trade in services faces more practical and political impediments. In practical terms, some services – like call centres or software – are sold at distance down phone and computer lines. But most services require goods or people to travel in two directions, adding time and cost. It is not typically viable, for instance, to send bicycles to India for repairs, or to fly heart-attack patients around the world before operating on them.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf
Published 24 Nov 2015

Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, for example, argued in 2003 ‘that the most important and most universal factor supporting world-wide disinflation has been the mutually reinforcing mix of deregulation and globalization, and the consequent significant reduction in monopoly pricing power’.56 An aspect of this was the fall in the dollar prices of many manufactured commodities and labour-intensive services (such as call centres). This, in turn, was partly due to the entry of low-cost producers into the world economy on prices and partly due to the rapid decline in the prices of anything incorporating information and communications technology. Moore’s law – the exponential fall in the cost of computing power first noticed by Gordon Moore of Intel in 1965 – continued to operate.57 In itself, the fall in prices should not affect overall inflation in the medium run.

Market Forces
by Richard K. Morgan
Published 4 Mar 2004

He’s a colleague, so watch what you say next, alright.’ ‘You know he’s working a Cono Sur portfolio at the moment? Running contacts through Carlos Caffarini out of Buenos Aires?’ ‘Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know it was Caffarini, but—‘ ‘It isn’t any more,’ said Lopez abruptly. ‘Last week Bryant canned Caffarini because there were call-centre strikes in Santiago, and he didn’t see it coming. Or maybe he didn’t think it was important enough to chase. Now he’s on a ventilator in intensive care until his health cover runs out, and some fucking seventeen-year-old is running the portfolio at a quarter the old retainer. They were only strikes, Chris.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
by Michael Chabon
Published 29 May 2017

Later, down again and at a checkpoint to the other side, the man who’d volunteered to guide us through lost his rag with the young soldiers who had decided to make us, for no discernible reason, wait. In the heat. And I got so polite inside myself. Willed him to stop being antagonistic with them. Forgot how fast I like to walk. Hate security in airports or the time lost in call centre queues while he, along with everyone he knows, spends his life waiting for that arbitrary Stop to be Go. Not ten minutes. Hours of the day. Years of life. Wasting in the delay. Inside, finally, and there was the sound. The press of people herded into too little room, and open eared I went through the streets.

The Rough Guide to Berlin
by Rough Guides

Tourist information Before you set off for Berlin, explore the German National Tourist Board website ( germany.travel), and that of the city tourist office ( visitberlin.de), which is more detailed, has a helpful accommodation service and maintains an excellent events section detailing most mainstream cultural happenings in the city. They run five tourist information centres, with one more planned at the ZOB bus station, plus a call centre (Mon–Fri 9am–7pm, Sat 10am–6pm, Sun 10am–2pm; 030 25 00 23 33), that provides information as well as accommodation bookings. They also produce a handy map (€1). Berlin has two essential listings magazines – Tip ( tip-berlin.de) and Zitty ( zitty.de) – which come out on alternate weeks. Zitty is marginally the better of the two, with day-by-day details of gigs, concerts, events, TV and radio, theatre and film, alongside intelligent articles on politics, style and the Berlin in-crowd, and useful classified ads.

Berlin
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 20 Oct 2010

Toilets in shopping centres, some cafés and restaurants and public venues are often attended by a cleaner who either charges a flat fee (say, €0.50) or expects a small tip. Return to beginning of chapter TOURIST INFORMATION The local tourist board, Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM; www.visitberlin.de), operates five walk-in offices (called Berlin Infostores) and a call centre ( 250 025; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October office hours are usually extended to 8pm. Berlin Infostore Alexa Shopping Mall (Map; ground fl, Grunerstrasse 20, near Alexanderplatz; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat; Alexanderplatz) Berlin Infostore Brandenburger Tor (Map; south wing; 10am-7pm; Unter den Linden) Berlin Infostore Hauptbahnhof (Map; Europaplatz north exit; 8am-10pm; Hauptbahnhof) Berlin Infostore Neues Kranzler Eck (Map; Kurfürstendamm 21; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat, to 6pm Sun; Kurfürstendamm) Berlin Infostore Pavillon am Reichstag (Map; Scheidemannstrasse; 10am-6pm; 100) Euraide (Map; www.euraide.de; Hauptbahnhof; 10am-7pm daily May-Aug, 11am-6pm Mon-Fri Sep-Apr; Hauptbahnhof) Inside the Reisezentrum on the lower level (B1), this helpful office is staffed with English speakers who can assist with all train-related issues (rail passes, tickets) and other travel-related topics.

The Rough Guide to Jamaica
by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

Post office West End Rd next to A FiWi Plaza; Mon–Fri 9am to 5pm. Telephones and communications Phone boxes opposite the main craft market and at Plaza de Negril; phonecards available from pharmacies or the post office. Phone booths available at Sunshine Village, by Catcha Falling Star hotel, and by the House of Dread bar. The Negril Calling Centre (9am–11pm) in Plaza de Negril offers relatively cheap calls, as does Bluewater Internet Centre. North and east of Negril After Negril’s glittering hedonism, the rest of western Jamaica can come as quite a surprise. Restaurants remain wholeheartedly traditional, with mannish water and eye-rollingly insouciant service replacing waffles and exhortations to “have a nice day”.

Migrant City: A New History of London
by Panikos Panayi
Published 4 Feb 2020

Jews who entered London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could obtain funding from the Board of Guardians from 1866.37 In recent decades some migrants have secured money from groups of friends and relatives, partly because of the fear of rejection based on racism if approaching banks. For example, in the case of one Somali business owner in North London, ‘more than 25 friends, acquaintances and relations had contributed a total of £7,000 (in the form of an interest-free loan) out of the £8,000 required to start and run a telephone call centre for the first six months of its existence’.38 A complexity of factors has therefore facilitated the growth of migrant small businesses in London’s history, a process which has its origins in the early modern period,39 with the Huguenots who settled in Spitalfields regarded as pioneers in this process.40 While some migrant groups appear more entrepreneurial than others, as supported by statistics, it seems that virtually all ethnic minorities have opened small businesses, providing a means of social mobility and helping in the assimilation process.41 THE IRISH As with much else in the migrant history of London the entrepreneurial activities of the Irish, together with Jews, differ from other twentieth-century arrivals because of the longevity of their presence in the capital.

Mauritius, Réunion & Seychelles Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

For most of those decades, the catch cry for economic policymakers in Mauritius has been diversification – away from sugar cane, then away from textile manufacturing in the face of competition from China, and so on. And it’s a challenge that the country has largely met. Moves towards what former prime minister Paul Bérenger described as a 'quantum leap' to transform Mauritius into a 'knowledge island’, canny forays into the world of international banking and establishing Mauritius as call-centre hub all helped. From 2010 until 2015, at a time when developed economies across the world were foundering, Mauritius maintained growth at a highly respectable 3% to 4%. With unemployment below 8% and GDP per capita rising to nearly US$20,000 in 2015, these are no abstract economic numbers but the outward signs of an economy that continues to bring significant benefits to its people.

The Rough Guide to Korea
by Rough Guides
Published 24 Sep 2018

Tourist information The Korean tourist authorities churn out a commendable number of English-language maps, pamphlets and books, most of which are handed out at information booths – you’ll be able to find one in every city, usually outside the train or bus stations. Not all of these are staffed with an English-speaker, but you’ll be able to get 24-hour assistance and advice on the dedicated tourist information line – dial 1330 and you’ll be put through to helpful call-centre staff who speak a number of languages and can advise on transport, sights, accommodation, theatre ticket prices and much more. If calling from a mobile phone or abroad, you’ll also need to put in a regional prefix – to reach Seoul, for example, dial 02 1330. The official Korean tourist website (english.visitkorea.or.kr) is quite useful, and most cities and provinces have sites of their own.

Lonely Planet Western Balkans
by Lonely Planet , Peter Dragicevich , Mark Baker , Stuart Butler , Anthony Ham , Jessica Lee , Vesna Maric , Kevin Raub and Brana Vladisavljevic
Published 1 Oct 2019

Adria Airways (%flight info 04-259 45 82, reservations 01-369 10 10; www.adria.si) The Slovenian carrier serves more than 30 European destinations on regularly scheduled flights; there are useful connections to other former Yugoslav capitals. Budget carriers include EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) and Wizz Air (%Slovenia call centre 090 100 206; www.wizzair.com). LAND Slovenia is well connected by road and rail with its four neighbours – Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. Bus and train timetables sometimes use Slovenian names for foreign cities. Bus Several long-haul coach companies operate in Slovenia, connecting the country to destinations around Europe.

The Rough Guide to Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide with Free eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 15 Mar 2023

When calling from a landline to a mobile, dial “09” and then the rest of the number (for mobile-to-mobile calls, the “09” is not necessary). Using phonecards is a practical way to phone abroad, and it’s worth stocking up on them in major cities, as you can’t always buy them elsewhere. Alternatively, there are dozens of call centres or centros de llamadas in most cities. Another convenient option is to take along an international calling card. The least expensive way to call home, however, is via Skype. The cheapest way to use your mobile (making sure it is unlocked first) is to pick up a local SIM card. You now need to register (for free) online – visit http://multibanda.cl for more information.

Scandinavia
by Andy Symington
Published 24 Feb 2012

Forex (www.forex.fi; 8am-9pm Mon-Fri, 9am-7pm Sat & Sun) At Pohjoisesplanadi 27 and at the train station; the best place to change cash or travellers cheques. Post & Telephone Main post office (www.posti.fi; Mannerheiminaukio 1; 7am-9pm Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm Sat & Sun) Between the bus and train stations. There are almost no phone booths in Finland, but there’s a call centre here. Tourist Information Helsinki City Tourist Office ( 3101 3300; www.visithelsinki.fi; Pohjoisesplanadi 19; 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) Busy multilingual office with booking desk. In summer, they send out uniformed ‘Helsinki Helpers’ – grab one on the street and ask away. A cut-down version of the city tourism website can be delivered to your mobile at www.helsinki.mobi.

Egypt Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Post DHL (9 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-5pm Sat-Thu) Main post office (Sharia al-Bursa al-Qadima; 9am-9pm Sat-Thu) Just east of Midan Orabi; several other branches are dotted around the city. Telephone Menatel cardphones can be found all over the city, although the policy of placing them on street corners can make it hard to hear and be heard. Private call centres are a more convenient option. You can also buy an inexpensive prepaid SIM card for your unlocked mobile phone. Telephone centrale (Sharia Saad Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Vodafone main office (13 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-11pm Sat-Thu, 1.30-11pm Fri); Radio Shack (68 Sharia Safiyya Zaghloul; 11am-midnight) Vodafone’s main office and the desk at Radio Shack sell cash (prepaid) SIM cards for E£20.

Great Britain
by David Else and Fionn Davenport
Published 2 Jan 2007

There’s culture, heritage and some of Britain’s most elegant streets, while the absolutely brilliant and alternative Ouseburn testifies to a nightlife beyond the alco-pop shots and high-octane cheesefest favoured by so many hen and stag parties. * * * DID YOU KNOW? The Northeast is the call-centre capital of England, mostly because the area desperately needed to attract jobs to the region following the demise of traditional industry. But another reason might have to do with the distinctive accent, which polls have shown to be the friendliest and most trustworthy of all English accents! * * * When you do come, take a moment to cherish the city’s greatest strength: the locals.

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Traveline ( 0871 200 2233; www.traveline.org.uk) is a very useful information service covering bus, coach, taxi and train services nationwide, with numerous links to help plan your journey. By phone, you get transferred automatically to an advisor in the region you’re phoning from; for details on another part of the country, you need to key in a code number ( 81 for London, 874 for Cumbria, etc) – for a full list, go to the Traveline home page and click on ‘call centre codes’. A final note: travelling between England, Scotland and Wales is easy. The bus and train systems are fully integrated and in most cases you won’t even know you’ve crossed the border. Passports are not required – although some Scots and Welsh may think they should be! Return to beginning of chapter AIR Britain’s domestic air companies include British Airways, BMI, bmibaby, easyJet and Ryanair.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

But under the more familiar distinctions, where the working class were defined as socio-economic groups C2, D and E, there were around twenty-two million members of this supposedly endangered sector of the population at the end of the 1990s. Even in the exciting new world of technology, most of the jobs created were low-paid and low-skilled; the rise of the call centre merely provided a modern twist on the sweatshop. The reality was still a country deeply divided by class: working hours were longer in Britain than in any of its EU partners, while chief executives’ pay was higher. Labour’s rhetoric in opposition about fat cats didn’t seem to have made much impact.

Central Europe Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Free & Toll Numbers 0800 numbers are free, 0810 and 0820 cost 0.10c and 0.20c respectively per minute, and 0900 numbers are exorbitant and best avoided. Mobile Numbers Austrian mobile ( Handy ) telephone numbers begin with 0650 or higher up to 0683. Public Telephones These take phone-cards or coins; €0.20 is the minimum for a local call. Call centres are also widespread, and many internet cafes are geared for Skype calls. Roaming The network works on GSM 1800 and is compatible with GSM 900 phones; it is not compatible with systems from the USA unless the mobile phone is at least a tri-band model. Roaming can get very expensive if your provider is outside the EU.

The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...)
by Dan Richardson and Daniel Jacobs
Published 1 Feb 2013

Airlines Austrian (also Lufthansa and Swiss), 6 Sharia Sheikh al-Marsafi, Zamalek 02 2269 0971; British Airways, City Star Complex, Sharia al-Forsan, Heliopolis 02 2480 0380; EgyptAir, 9 Sharia Talaat Harb 02 2392 7664, and 6 Sharia Adly 02 2390 0999, airport 02 2267 7010, call centre 0900 70000; Emirates, 18 Sharia Batal Ahmed Abdel Aziz, Mohandiseen 19899; Ethiopian Airlines, 3A Sharia Rafat Saleh Tawfik (off Farid Semeka Hegaz), Heliopolis 02 2621 4934; Etihad, World Trade Center, 1191 Corniche al-Nil, Bulaq 02 2578 1303; Kenya Airways, 11 Sharia Qasr al-Nil 02 2579 8529; Royal Jordanian, 6 Sharia Qasr al-Nil 02 2575 0614.

Germany
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 17 Oct 2010

The most convenient branches for visitors: Charlottenburg (Map; Joachimsthaler Strasse 7; 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 10am-8pm Sat) Mitte (Map; Rathausstrasse 5; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 8am-4pm Sat) Potsdamer Platz (Map; inside Potsdamer Platz Arkaden; 10am-10pm Mon-Sat) Return to beginning of chapter Tourist Information The city tourist board, Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM; www.visitberlin.de) operates four walk-in offices and a call centre ( 250 025; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and can make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October, all branches except Hauptbahnhof keep extended hours. Berlin Infostore Alexa Shopping Center (Map; ground fl, Grunerstrasse 20, near Alexanderplatz; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat) Berlin Infostore Brandenburger Tor (Map; south wing; 10am-6pm) Berlin Infostore Hauptbahnhof (Map; ground fl, enter from Europaplatz; 8am-10pm) Berlin Infostore Neues Kranzler Eck (Map; Kurfürstendamm 21; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm Sun) Euraide (Map; www.euraide.de; Hauptbahnhof; 10am-7pm daily May-Aug, 11am-6pm Mon-Fri Sep-Apr, closed 23 Dec-15 Feb) Inside the Reisezentrum on the lower level (B1), this independent office is staffed with fluent English speakers eager to assist you with all train-related issues (rail passes, tickets) and other travel-related topics.

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The Hauptbahnhof is about 1km north of the Altpörtel. Return to beginning of chapter Information For the price of a mobile phone call, you can get historical details on seven city sights by dialling 0911-810 940 043 and then the number marked on the attraction. ATMs (Maximilianstrasse 47 & 49) Near the Altpörtel. City-Call-Center (Bahnhofstrasse 3; per hr €1; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat, noon-9pm Sun) Internet access, half a block north of the Altpörtel. Post office (Wormser Strasse 4) Situated a block north of Maximilianstrasse 61. Tourist office ( 142 392; www.speyer.de; Maximilianstrasse 13; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri year-round, 10am-3pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 10am-noon Sat Nov-Mar) Next to the historic Rathaus, 200m west of the Dom.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head
Published 14 Aug 2003

The Omnitech survey shows a slow but steady trend toward the outsourcing of call centers. In 1991, about 90 percent of call centers were kept in house, but by 1996 this figure had fallen to 80 percent, and in 2002 the figure was estimated to fall by another 10 percent.11 A graph published in the April 1999 issue of Call Center Solutions, also shows a spectacular increase from 1997 onward in the percentage of call center transactions conducted by means other than the telephone—principally by E-mail and the Internet.12 83 84 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY Call Center Solutions (CCS) is a good place to begin our study, because it is the industry's leading trade journal, with the largest circulation and the most comprehensive coverage of the industry's new products.

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Sixty-four percent said that monitoring made it hard to get up for a break, even to go to the bathroom.14 Still another telling category of evidence supports the Radclyffe Group's findings about the "negative call center culture." Job turnover at call centers is exceptionally high as employees vote with their feet and leave the digital assembly lines in droves. At the sixty-two call centers surveyed in 1998 by the consultants Omnitech, the mean annual rate of employee turnover was 24 percent.15 Dina Vance of the consultancy FTR Inc., and a leading expert on the call center operations of the financial services industry, estimated the annual turnover rates at her industry's call centers to be around 39 percent.16 Mike McGrath, chief organizer for Local 1026 of the CWA in Tucson, puts annual turnover at some of the city's call centers even higher, at between 50 and 60 percent.17 Contributors to CCS often remind readers about the industry's very high rates of employee turnover.

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In all transactions with the customer, the agent must also work toward the "soft" objective of cementing the customer's loyalty to the company. In a survey of in-house corporate call centers carried out in March 1998 by IT consultancy Omnitech, 32 percent of call centers surveyed were devoted to banking, 27 percent to managed health care, 16 percent to retail brokering, and 14 percent to retail telecom—that is, the dealings between AT&T and Verizon, and their customers about billings or changes to service.10 In the call center industry there is also an important distinction to be drawn between those call centers that are kept in house by companies, and those that are outsourced to independent service bureaus.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

According to a 2010 USDA report, a food stamp (called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, after 2008) recipient added the call center number to her cell phone plan’s “friends and family” list because she spent so much time on the phone with them. Applicants who failed to successfully complete their phone interview were terminated for failing to cooperate in eligibility determination. Says Andree, “It was a terrible, terrible, terrible system.” Private call center workers were not adequately trained to deal with the severity of challenges faced by callers, nor were they provided with sufficient information about applicable regulations. Advocates report call center operators bursting into tears on the phone.

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The failure to cooperate notice had originally been sent to an outdated address, which delayed its delivery. Now Shelli, in a panic, phoned the call center. An ACS worker told her to try to correct her application online. When that failed, she and her boyfriend Jeff Stewart phoned the call center several more times, trying to identify the problem. “I started reading her letters to figure out what to do, and where to go, and who to call,” Jeff remembered, “but you couldn’t get anywhere on the phone. It was like you were talking to a computer instead of a person.” On July 11, call center operators connected Shelli with one of the few remaining state caseworkers in Marion, who told her that she had neglected to sign a required form but did not tell her which one.

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So she went to her local Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) office in Tipton, spoke to a caseworker, and asked to have the application put on hold. The Tipton caseworker told her that, because of recent changes at FSSA, application decisions were no longer made at the local level. She would have to speak with a call center operator in Marion, 40 miles away. Kim called the Marion office and was told that her application “would be taken care of.” Neither the Tipton caseworker nor the Marion call center operator told Kim that she had to sign paperwork declaring that she was stopping the application process. Nor did they tell her that her failed attempt to get health insurance for herself and her husband might impact her children’s coverage.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

In the few cases where claimed figures are available, even the very non-specific figures for password resets of US$100-200 per user per year seem to come from the same place that the BSA and RIAA get their piracy figures from (at that price Facebook and MySpace would be spending about 20 billion US dollars a year on password management). A far more believable figure for the cost of password resets comes from the large-scale Windows Live study mentioned earlier, which gives a figure of 1.5% of users forgetting their passwords per month [12]. Assuming that it takes a rather pessimistic five minutes on the phone to a call-centre in Asia with operating costs that are typically in the region of US$5 an hour, this comes to about 8 cents per user per year, a far cry from US$200 per year, and even that’s only for the few high-security systems that don’t use email-based password resets, which would drive the overall average cost even lower.

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Technically there’s a Terms of Service (ToS) agreement covering use of the data but there’s no way to monitor compliance with this (or to police the behaviour of Facebook applications in general [526]), and once the information has been leaked it’s too late to do anything about it. Application developers know about this, and are quite happy to exploit it (for some years Facebook’s unofficial policy on abuse was that they would only take action “when the violations were so egregious that [the Facebook] call center was getting flooded with complaints” [527]). For example one very popular Facebook application solicited personal comments on Facebook friends and then later offered to sell the information to the targets of the comments [528][529]. In other cases private data on Facebook users was released either through deliberate (and ToS-skirting) leaks to facilitate third-party advertising [530][531] or through vulnerabilities in the application [532], or just through general-purpose data-mining techniques that took advantage of weaknesses in Facebook’s privacy and security model [533][534] (there’s even a special conference, the Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, that covers this sort of thing).

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

I hear him ask, wearily, before the door closes behind me. I knew I wanted to work in a call center for the second part. Call-center jobs may be stereotypically outsourced to India or the Philippines, but the industry employs around five million US workers—that’s around one out of every twenty-five American jobs. And, like Amazon, call centers are one of very few sectors of the economy that have been expanding through the recession. The sector is profitable and growing, and its labor practices are likely to spread. Plus, when I started trying to figure out where I should get a job, the stuff I heard from call-center reps* was just as insane as what I’d heard from Amazon workers.

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MARSHALL: A little bit about Convergys for those of you that’ve never worked for us before. We’re the second-largest call-center company in the world. We generate over $3 billion of revenue every year. We have 130,000 employees! STEVE: We! Are! Huge! We are the biggest company in the US that does call-center customer service—the second biggest in the whole world. MARSHALL: Forty-seven different languages and thirty-one different countries—N huì shuō Zhōngwén ma? Sprechen sie Deutsch? Habla español? Parlez-vous français? We have call centers literally from Dublin, Ireland, to Beijing, China, and everywhere in between. STEVE: Right now, we have six hundred employees inside this building.

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We’re getting abused on both ends, from the customers and the companies, and people wonder why agents have depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. There’s a huge body of research1 directly linking repetitive, low-control, high-stress work with increased risk of mental-health issues—particularly depression and anxiety. Many of these studies were actually conducted in call centers because they’re such a perfect model of a low-control, high-stress workplace. One recent study2 concluded: Call center employees are expected to express positive emotions and suppress negative emotions like frustration, resentment and anger in their interactions with customers so as to create a desired state of mind in the customer. If not given a healthy expressive outlet, this emotional repression can profoundly affect a person psychologically.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh
Published 6 Jun 2010

Part of the problem was the high cost of living, and part of the problem was the culture. Working in a call center just wasn’t something that people in the Bay Area wanted to do. Toward the end of 2003, we started looking around at different options for expanding our call center. We initially considered outsourcing our call center overseas to India or the Philippines, but we remembered our hard lesson from working with eLogistics: Never outsource your core competency. If we were trying to build our brand to be about the very best customer service, we knew that we shouldn’t be outsourcing that department. Wherever we decided to open up our call center, we had to own and run it ourselves.

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Seeing every interaction through a branding lens instead of an expense-minimization lens means we run our call center very differently from most call centers. Most call centers measure their employees’ performance based on what’s known in the industry as “average handle time,” which focuses on how many phone calls each rep can take in a day. This translates into reps worrying about how quickly they can get a customer off the phone, which in our eyes is not delivering great customer service. Most call centers also have scripts and force their reps to try to upsell customers to generate additional revenue.

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After some research, we narrowed the list of possible locations down to Phoenix, Louisville, Portland, Des Moines, Sioux City, and Las Vegas. Our original plan was simply to open up a satellite call center, but as we thought more about it, we realized that if we did that, our actions wouldn’t really be matching our words. To build the Zappos brand into being about the very best customer service, we needed to make sure customer service was the entire company, not just a department. We needed to move our entire headquarters from San Francisco to wherever we wanted to build out our call center, which we had recently named our Customer Loyalty Team (or just CLT). A few of us discussed this at lunch one day and thought about the different options we had.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane
Published 11 Apr 2004

As he was NEW DIVISIONS OF LABOR 3 writing up the receipt for the repair, he apologized for having had to call for directions thirty minutes before he arrived. I carry maps but the work order didn’t even have your street address. It just had “HOUSE” and your phone number. The problem is that they’ve just switched our call center from India to Costa Rica. They’re still learning the procedures down there and they must be having trouble with addresses. The explanation was plausible—a call center that used operators who read scripts on computer screens moved to a source of even cheaper labor. In fact, however, the work order had not been taken by a human operator but by a computer using speech recognition software.

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Competition, in turn, highlighted two principles: • Computerization accelerates the pace of job change. • Rapid job change raises the value of verbal and quantitative literacy. In response to competitive pressure, Mary’s employer sought to lower costs by consolidating small customer-service offices into large call centers. As in other competitive strategies, computers made the consolidation feasible. Large call centers justify their existence by serving cus- 102 CHAPTER 6 tomers in multiple states, and this increases both the variety of questions Mary receives and the complexity of the work needed to find the answers. Mary’s training has taught her to be good at translating customers’ questions into searchable queries.

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While the software was not yet good enough to recognize the home address itself, it had captured enough information to print up a work order and append it to the technician’s schedule. In 1990 that work order would have been taken by an operator sitting somewhere in the United States. That operator’s job is now gone. Whether the job was displaced by a computer or a Costa Rican call center is unimportant for the moment. What is important is that the loss of the operator’s job is part of a much larger pattern. As recently as 1970, more than one-half of employed U.S. adults worked in two broad occupational categories: blue-collar jobs and clerical jobs (including the operator who would have written up the work order).

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

Twenty-seven are creative agencies of various kinds: digital agencies; marketing, advertising, and PR firms; video production companies; design studios. Nine are in consulting, insurance, or financial services. Eight are in manufacturing or maintenance, ranging from a Japanese maker of rice mills to an auto repair center. Six make health and beauty products. Three are nursing homes, and three are call centers. Restaurants, creative agencies, and software firms are heavily represented because all three are dealing with systemic problems with mental health, stress, and burnout. The restaurant industry is one that’s long struggled with low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions—and all too often, abusive behavior and sexism in the workplace.

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While almost two-thirds of the companies in this book are from these three industries, the remaining third are quite varied. They include manufacturers of rice-milling machines and bespoke pressed-metal parts, organic cosmetics companies, nursing homes, an auto repair shop, insurance and financial companies, hotels, online and print publishers, and call centers. Two—Japanese e-commerce company Zozo and Korean O2O company Woowa Brothers—have over a thousand employees; most are much smaller, with under a hundred employees. Some shorten working hours by closing an extra day; others have maintained or even extended their opening hours while shortening workers’ shifts.

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While they’re often motivated to move to shorter hours to attract new talent, many companies that successfully move to a four-day week are led by executive teams that already know how to work together. IIH Nordic cofounders Henrik Stenmann and Steen Rasmussen had previously worked together at digital marketing agency Deducta Search. The cofounders of Pursuit Marketing were all veterans of the Glasgow call-center world and worked together, and competed against each other, for years. Such teams are better able to deal with the challenges they’ll face when redesigning the workday, learning to work more intensively, and being more mindful about priorities and tasks. RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION External pressures also push companies to experiment with four-day weeks.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

A FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE VALUE To illustrate, let us tell you a story about Ning.74 A native of China, he accepted a position as a strategy advisor at a large Australian enterprise after receiving his MBA. His assignment—to improve the lackluster performance of the organization’s call centers—was a challenge, because despite his seemingly lofty title, he had no formal authority over the call-center manager or agents, nor did he have much knowledge about what motivated their behavior and how to change it. One thing he did know, though: Morale at call centers is always a major issue. “Nobody ever calls in to say, ‘Hey, your service is working wonders, I love it!’ Callers are almost always angry,” he told us.75 “These agents hear people yell at them 24/7.

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In just six months, their self-reported engagement, empowerment, autonomy, and satisfaction all went up by 27 percent. Management was equally thrilled, because the call-center’s productivity doubled! Ning’s approach was so successful that the company asked him to do his magic at every one of the country’s call centers. EARNING PEOPLE’S TRUST TO UNCOVER THEIR NEEDS Ning navigated his challenging circumstances beautifully. At first, he had the title but not the power to influence call-center employees. But by figuring out what they valued that he did have access to, and finding clever ways to deliver those resources, he gained the power he needed to create the change he aspired to.

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But we find the same dynamic across industries. This is what Ning got so right. To overcome the suspicion of the call-center personnel, he used what social psychologists tell us are the most potent sources of interpersonal liking: familiarity (by plopping himself on the call-center floor right next to the other agents), and similarity (by showing that he and the agents had a lot more in common than met the eye).79 And he did so genuinely with a real desire to improve their working conditions. Once his benevolence was established and the call-center agents felt that they could confide in Ning, he was relentless in demonstrating his ability to act on his intentions, his competence.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

She was a former broker, having sold financial services for nearly two decades, much of that time with Washington Mutual, a savings and loan that catered to working class and middle class consumers. She’d moved up through the ranks and ended up managing teams of virtual financial advisors working out of call centers. WaMu went down in the 2007–2008 financial meltdown, but when JPMorgan Chase took the bank over in 2008, they kept Ceci on. At Chase, Ceci ended up training the offshore staff in countries like the Philippines that the bank was using to replace the workers still on its own payroll in US-based call centers. Eventually, in the spring of 2015, it was finally Ceci’s turn to get laid off. Coincidentally this was exactly at the same time that Bernie Sanders launched his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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Through the campaign, so many amazing volunteers stepped up to bring their life skills and experience to play staff-equivalent roles on our team: videographers and graphic designers, social workers and restaurant workers, a director of a big-city human resources department, high school students, New Age healers and gritty retired steelworkers and disabled veterans, software developers, bankers, call center managers and, of course, nurses! We took a leap of faith and trusted the volunteers because we believed that was how the revolution should be built—and because we had no choice: Either we gave our supporters staff-equivalent positions, or we had no distributed campaign. Of course, there were moments when volunteers let us down—but if you’ve ever been a manager, you know that paid staff also sometimes let you down.

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What made this even more of a break with the current orthodoxies that insist your campaign can only be as big as you have money to pay people was that this work was accomplished in large part by volunteers managed by other volunteers—no other presidential primary in recent history had done this. Volunteers weren’t only asked to call voters, they were also asked to run huge parts of the campaign’s digital organizing technology infrastructure, including our virtual call center and our peer-to-peer texting program. Some of them even opened rogue volunteer offices! Not all movements have such clear objectives and deadlines as electing a candidate to office—where your goal is to identify, persuade, and turnout more voters than your opponent, with Election Day as the ultimate deadline.

Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities
by Thomas H. Davenport
Published 4 Feb 2014

Most of the executives we interviewed introduced big data tech­ nologies through an initial proof-of-concept approach to illustrate the high ­performance, lower cost of ownership, scale, and advanced business ­capabilities of big data solutions by applying them to current, often cumbersome, business processes. In some cases the proofs of concept showed the need for changes in other processes. At a major US airline, for example, analysis of call center speech-to-text data showed that customer interactions with call centers could be useful in predicting customer behavior, but also that call center processes needed some basic improvements that were more important than finer-grained predictive models. Other companies see the promise of big data to bring together disparate platform and processing functions that were previously fragmented and siloed.

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In that industry—as well as several others, including retail—the big ­challenge Chapter_03.indd 67 03/12/13 11:28 AM 68 big data @ work is to understand multichannel customer relationships. They are using customer “journeys” through the tangle of websites, call centers, tellers, and other branch personnel to better understand the paths that customers follow through the organization, and how those paths affect attrition or the purchase of particular financial services. The data sources on multichannel customer journeys are unstructured or semistructured. They include website clicks, transaction records, bankers’ notes, and voice recordings from call centers. The volumes are quite large—12 billion rows of data for one of the banks. The firms are beginning to understand common journeys, describing them with segment names, ensuring that the customer interactions are high quality, and correlating journeys with customer opportunities and problems.

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Banks The banking industry is already beginning to take advantage of the data it has on customer payments and financial activities, though there is plenty of room to grow with big data. Banking is now a multichannel activity, and some large banks are starting to understand the complex journeys customers make through call centers, branches, ATMs, and online websites to meet their financial needs. They are also beginning to customize marketing offers to customers. However, I have yet to find the bank that truly uses all of its customers’ ­financial data to make personalized and high-quality ­recommendations for financial products.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
by Lawrence Ingrassia
Published 28 Jan 2020

It’s something people cared more about than the clothes themselves,” recalls Aaron Bata, who worked at Bonobos’s call center and went on to run customer service for the direct-to-consumer mattress start-up Tuft & Needle. “Every single one of us in that room was vastly overqualified to be a customer service rep. On one side of me was a woman who had just graduated from Princeton. On the other side was someone who had just graduated from Barnard.” Until 2014, Warby Parker’s call center team worked at its corporate headquarters in New York, which at one point was in the historic Puck Building in Lower Manhattan, which probably made it the most expensive call center office space in the world.

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It was 2012, when the company was still small. But Mahoney had bought a pair of Warby Parker glasses and liked them, and he wanted to do something entrepreneurial. It was what most people would consider a lowly call center job. But Mahoney takes exception to that. “‘Call center’ is not at all how I would describe it,” he says. “We had a very customer-first mentality. That’s why I hate the ‘call center’ connotation. We had an expression: ‘to surprise and delight.’” He recalls a customer who lived in New York calling frantically on a Friday because the glasses she had ordered hadn’t been delivered on time, and she had been counting on wearing them to a wedding that weekend.

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In 2019, about 350 of the company’s 2,000 employees worked on the CX team, making it the second-largest department after the retail store staff. Many American companies have outsourced their call centers overseas, often to India or the Philippines. For the customer, this can mean talking to someone with a hard-to-decipher accent who speaks English as a second language, but it saves the company money. By contrast, Warby Parker viewed its call center workers as critical to creating a bond with customers, because they were the first personal point of contact. “You call Warby Parker, and we want somebody to answer within six seconds.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

It’s like a guy kicking off a first date by declaring, “I should tell you up front that I’m broke and depressed; my belly roll strongly suggests a future as a diabetic; and, like an infant, my moods tend to vary directly with my digestion. Shall we head out to dinner?” The call center’s “warts and all” hiring approach is called a “realistic job preview.” Max Simkoff, the CEO of Evolv, the company that built the realistic job preview described above, said that many hiring professionals don’t understand the power of setting expectations. In a typical call center, Simkoff said, “there are seats that turn over three or four times a year. So then the call-center people immediately react: ‘We’re hiring the wrong people. We need to revisit our competency model.’ And we say, ‘No, you’re actually not doing a good job of explaining the job situation to the people that you hire.’ ” Realistic job previews have been proven, by a large research literature, to reduce turnover.

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Because of this false sunniness, it can be difficult for both parties, employer and candidate alike, to get an accurate picture of the choice they’re making: “Can I tolerate this job?” “Can we tolerate this employee?” The cost of a mismatch is high. For entry-level jobs—call-center representatives, food-service workers, and so on—it’s not uncommon for annual turnover to be as high as 130%. This means that if a call center has 100 jobs, then the HR team would need to hire 130 people every single year to keep the positions filled. That constant rotation causes enormous waste for companies, who must recruit and train workers who end up leaving in a few weeks.

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Consider a Web site that was created in 2011 to allow people to apply for a call-center position. It exposes applicants to a set of cautions and warnings: “You will interact with frustrated and demanding customers every day. You will be expected to provide superb customer service and be friendly under stressful conditions.” After reading some sobering information about compensation—“You will receive pay only for the time you spend taking customer calls!”—applicants are required to listen to an audio clip labeled “Sample Challenging Call,” taken from an actual call: CALL-CENTER REP: My name is Jose. May I have your first and last name, please?

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner
Published 29 Aug 2012

In 2000, Conway’s eLoyalty started losing business to larger consultancies with more expertise in moving some call center personnel offshore. As he looked for other ways to grow eLoyalty, Conway found few paths not already clogged with competitors. The business of call center software offered only small paths of growth that would have to be won inch by inch. The only way to leap far ahead of the pack would be to innovate, to create something that no other player could offer. The seed of NASA’s work had begun to bloom in Conway’s head. Along with the working of the space agency’s process, Conway knew two other things well: his own business of call center optimization and, as CEO of a Nasdaq company, the latest and greatest tricks being performed on Wall Street.

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The psychiatrist considered Conway’s pitch and thought not only that it had merit but also that it could change the world of business and the practice of psychology. Inventing a product to change customer service could by itself prove immensely lucrative. The customer service industry is far larger than most people realize. AT&T, for instance, has 100,000 seats in its call centers and spends $4 billion a year to run them. The four million call center employees in the United States, in fact, represent the third-largest occupational category in the country. Inventing a better tool in this industry could be worth multiple billions of dollars every year. For years, constructing a bot that could quantify spoken words and determine personalities and thoughts was impossible.

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Working with Telecom, Capers became close with Kelly Conway, who eventually rose to be CEO. The few years the two worked together were formative ones for Conway. He became engrossed with the theories and methods established at NASA for evaluating, reading, and predicting people. Conway eventually left Telecom to found eLoyalty, a consultancy for companies with large call centers, and he buried away in his head what he’d learned about assessing people. “I had a feeling it would someday become really useful,” Conway says. Conway’s eLoyalty grew and did well; it eventually went public and its stock was traded on the Nasdaq. But Conway didn’t forget about NASA or Capers.4 People’s core personalities rarely change.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
Published 3 Aug 2015

They were definitely the best relationship workers. PUTTING THE DISCOVERIES TO WORK Human interaction is so powerful that increasing it just a little improves group performance a lot. For example, Pentland and his lab investigated a huge Bank of America call center where the emphasis was on productivity; reducing the average call handle time at that one call center by just 5 percent would save the company $1 million a year. The bank grouped employees into teams of about twenty, but they didn’t interact much, in part because their work was entirely solitary, sitting in a cubicle with a phone and a computer.

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Yet the members did interact a bit, and when Pentland asked them to wear the sociometric badges for six weeks, he found that the best predictor of team productivity was how much the members interacted in the little time they had, and what he calls engagement, the degree to which all team members were involved in the interaction. So Pentland proposed that managers try an experiment: Give a whole twenty-person team their coffee break at the same time. In a call center of over 3,000 employees, it was easy to shift others’ breaks to maintain service. The result was that group members interacted more, though it still wasn’t much; more of them were involved in the interaction; and productivity rocketed. The effects were so clear that the bank switched to team-based breaks at all its call centers, estimating the move would save $15 million a year. The same thing seems to happen everywhere. Even when people work mostly on their own, the right patterns of interaction when they do get together—as distinct from individuals’ personalities or anything else—are the main way groups get better.

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Meg Bear, “Why Empathy Is the Critical 21st Century Skill,” posted at LinkedIn, 24 April 2014, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140424221331-1407199-why-empathy-is-the-critical-21st-century-skill. When Jim Bush was in charge of American Express’s call centers . . . Personal interview with Jim Bush, 29 March 2012. See also Jim Bush, “How American Express Transformed Its Call Centers,” HBR Blogs, 19 April 2011. Belinda Parmar, a U.K. technology commentator . . . Belinda Parmar, “Can Empathy Really Work in a Business World Dominated by Testosterone?” The Guardian, 18 June 2014. Columbia University business professor Rita McGrath . . .

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

Then they follow that script, sometimes word for word, in the hope of getting the caller off the line as quickly as possible. It can be deadening work, made drearier still because managers in many call centers, in an effort to boost productivity, listen in on reps' conversations and monitor how long each call lasts. Little wonder, then, that call centers in the United States and the UK have annual turnover rates that average about 35 percent, double the rate for other jobs. In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now. Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer (now part of ), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees.

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Technique When you call a customer service line to complain about your cable television bill or to check the whereabouts of that blender you ordered, the phone usually rings in a colorless cavern known as a call center. The person who answers the call, a customer service representative, has a tough job. He typically sits for hours among a warren of cramped cubicles headset strapped on, a diet soda by his side. The pay is paltry. And the people the rep encounters on the phone one after another after another generally aren't ringing up to offer kudos or to ask about the rep's weekend plans. They've got a gripe, a frustration, or a problem that needs solving. Right. Now. If that weren't trying enough, call center reps have little decision latitude and their jobs are often the very definition of routine.

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Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (New York: Portfolio, 2008). Tamara J. Erickson, Task, Not Time: Profile of a Gen Y Job, Harvard Business Review (February 2008): 19. Diane Brady and Jena McGregor, Customer Service Champs, BusinessWeek , March 2, 2009. Martha Frase-Blunt, Call Centers Come Home, HR Magazine 52 ( January 2007): 84; Ann Bednarz, Call Centers Are Heading for Home, Network World , January 30, 2006. Paul Restuccia, What Will Jobs of the Future Be? Creativity, Self-Direction Valued, Boston Herald , February 12, 2007. Gary Hamel, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 5 Sep 2016

Big Data has also been used to study the productivity of call center workers. A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks.

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Talking was discouraged because workers were supposed to spend as many of their minutes as possible on the phone, solving customers’ problems. Coffee breaks were scheduled one by one. The researchers found, to their surprise, that the fastest and most efficient call center team was also the most social. These employees pooh-poohed the rules and gabbed much more than the others. And when all of the employees were encouraged to socialize more, call center productivity soared. But data studies that track employees’ behavior can also be used to cull a workforce. As the 2008 recession ripped through the economy, HR officials in the tech sector started to look at those Cataphora charts with a new purpose.

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Replacing a worker earning $50,000 a year costs a company about $10,000, or 20 percent of that worker’s yearly pay, according to the Center for American Progress. Replacing a high-level employee can cost multiples of that—as much as two years of salary. Naturally, many hiring models attempt to calculate the likelihood that each job candidate will stick around. Evolv, Inc., now a part of Cornerstone OnDemand, helped Xerox scout out prospects for its calling center, which employs more than forty thousand people. The churn model took into account some of the metrics you might expect, including the average time people stuck around on previous jobs. But they also found some intriguing correlations. People the system classified as “creative types” tended to stay longer at the job, while those who scored high on “inquisitiveness” were more likely to set their questioning minds toward other opportunities.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

One of the European managers we interviewed was worried about the level of racism that remained in assuming that Indian university graduates would be happy working in a call center if it was for a European or American company. “The top talent can compete on a global stage; we’ve already proved that, but you can’t expect these people to go and work in a call center. But some people seem to believe that is going to happen; it’s bizarre . . . this is just racism parading by some other name. They are going to be really grateful for the chance to work in a call center.” A Chinese banking executive also told us that an ethnic hierarchy worked in his bank because there was widespread resentment of a glass ceiling for local Chinese employees, as all the talent that had been fast tracked appeared to come from Western countries.

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Within a major American bank, there was no strategy to shift jobs to India from New York or elsewhere within the group, but a discussion between senior staff in Mumbai and sponsors in New York led to a “handshake for a few operations jobs.” This was in 2002, when the company began engaging in a number of pilot projects in response to increasing cost pressures. The experiment with back-office functions reflected the growth in offshore call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO). There was little point using staff in New York or London to process invoices or very basic data-entry jobs when it could be done in real time in India or Vietnam at a fraction of the price. Although the company was in the early stages of developing wealth management and investment banking within the country, there was rapid growth of the middle office that includes research and analytical jobs for its New York and London offices.

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Her senior colleague added that what was really different was the quality of the research they were generating for the front line to use—that is those who actually negotiate the deals with clients. “These are the areas that we find that talent is delivering to an even higher standard than expected. We’re not doing those menial call center type jobs. It’s global work and that’s where we think we’ve been able to add a lot more value than what was initially expected and that will continue.” Quality: From Local Adaptation to Global Markets We have already seen how Western companies have played a key role in the transfer of knowledge in China and India.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

—TERRY GOU, FOUNDER OF FOXCONN INTRODUCTION THE GREAT DISPLACEMENT I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let you know that we are coming for your jobs. I recently met a pair of old friends for drinks in Manhattan. One is an executive who works at a software company in New York. They replace call center workers with artificial intelligence software. I asked her whether she believed her work would result in job losses. She responded matter-of-factly, “We are getting better and better at things that will make large numbers of workers extraneous. And we will succeed. There needs to be a dramatic reskilling of the workforce, but that’s not going to be practical for a lot of people.

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GE, my dad’s old company and once a beacon of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007. With improved technology and new access to global markets, American companies realized they could outsource manufacturing, information technology, and customer service to Chinese and Mexican factories and Indian programmers and call centers. U.S. companies outsourced and offshored 14 million jobs by 2013, many of which would have previously been filled by domestic workers at higher wages. This resulted in lower prices, higher efficiencies, and some new opportunities but also increased pressures on American workers who now had to compete with a global labor pool.

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Many of the settings for these jobs are large corporates that, during the next downturn, will replace headcount with a combination of software, bots, and AI. Consider that 2.5 million of the jobs in the clerical and administrative category are customer service representatives. They are typically high school graduates making $15.53 an hour or $32,000 a year in call centers. We’ve all had crummy experiences with voice recognition software and pounded our phone keys until we got a human on the line. But the AI experience is about to improve to a point where we’re not going to be able to tell the difference. Several companies right now employ a hybrid approach where voice recordings are combined with a human in the Philippines tapping buttons so that a Filipino can “call” you but you think you’re talking to a native speaker because you’re hearing a prerecorded voice.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal
by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz
Published 20 Jul 2020

* * * • • • SINGER’S RESULTS-ORIENTED APPROACH earned him a good reputation in the call-center industry and he was recruited for a new post. He returned with his family to Sacramento in 2002 and took a job as CEO of a different company’s overseas call center. Owned by FirstRing India, it had more than five hundred employees and attracted money from a venture capital fund that was bringing in new leadership, including a new CEO, Singer, to improve performance. Outsourcing had soared, and the call center, in a building outside Bangalore, ran round-the-clock shifts. Workers in cubicles with soundproofed walls made outbound sales calls for Discover Card and answered calls for companies ranging from American Express to ADT Inc.

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Workers in cubicles with soundproofed walls made outbound sales calls for Discover Card and answered calls for companies ranging from American Express to ADT Inc. Prab Singh, an easygoing U.S.-raised Sikh with a turban and beard, was helping to manage the center when he learned Singer would be his new boss. Though the call center was set in a modern technology park, leading a business in the fast-growing but poor country came with operational obstacles. No public transportation went to the call center, so managers ran vans back and forth to Bangalore between shifts. The roads were bad and the vans were constantly breaking down, preventing people from getting to work. Sometimes comical cultural challenges abounded.

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Singer was making a career change himself. He told Hamilton he’d been offered a job with the Money Store, a national subprime lender based in Sacramento. Singer landed the position after doing college counseling for the children of management at the company. He would be handling recruitment and training at a call center and seemed excited. He’d make more money and work regular daytime hours. Hamilton took over Singer’s database and hauled away boxes of Singer’s college brochures. Singer was busy, already working at the Money Store while wrapping up applications for counseling clients. Allison was sentimental about leaving the business, but it was different for her husband, she told Hamilton.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

When there was enough work to do, Gary was obligated to work at least 30 hours per week. When there was not enough work to do, he might only be able to get 10 or 20 hours worth of work. He never knew when hours would be available, which meant that he couldn’t commit to another job outside of the call center. In July, when he’d first started the remote call center job, this hadn’t seemed like a problem. Because he took calls about broken air conditioners, there was more than enough work to do during the summer heat. When he couldn’t work 30 hours or didn’t want to, he had to let his boss know in advance so that his absence wouldn’t impact his rating as a contractor.

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For a half hour here, a half hour there, to try to collect extra hours.” During the month he spent training without pay, Gary hadn’t been able to pay his bills. Now he didn’t have any savings to fill in the gaps between periods when he could get work with the call center. Whatever happened, Gary knew that some had it worse. He’d kept in touch with a few of the other call center workers who had been in his virtual training course. Some told him they were being paid $3 or $4 per hour, which meant their managers—most likely also contractors—were keeping a large percentage of their wages for themselves. It wasn’t as though an employment relationship would necessarily have prevented wage theft.

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The Big Brother website did not make enough money to live on, and though Kristy was about to sell it for a modest sum (a wise move, considering that Twitter and Facebook were about to take over as platforms on which strangers discussed television shows), it wouldn’t be the kind of sale that could support a family. Kristy had closed her daycare when she moved into a new neighborhood. And selling garage sale finds on eBay wasn’t going to cut it. In the few customer service jobs Kristy had taken at call centers years earlier, she had not enjoyed working under someone else’s rules. Slowly, this preference for working at home had turned into a lack of experience working outside of the home. She hadn’t waited on tables, had no experience in fast food, and had not learned any skills that might be particularly useful in a factory.

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together
by Andrew Selee
Published 4 Jun 2018

And Mexico has huge comparative advantages: people like Pinzón speak American English, they live in the same time zone, and they can also serve Spanish-speaking clients in the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans now work in call centers—perhaps over 100,000—which is still below the numbers in India and the Philippines but gaining quickly. “Any area around a call center will have burritos,” says Pinzón, turning back to the subject of food. In Mexico City, tacos with homemade corn tortillas, cilantro, onion, and salsa are the quintessential on-the-go lunch food. But people who grew up in the States prefer burritos made of wheat tortillas—the heart of Tex-Mex cuisine.

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Within a couple blocks of TeleTech, five or six restaurants now serve burritos to attract workers from the call center. That’s one way you can pick TeleTech workers out of the crowds eating in the small restaurants in this busy part of Mexico City. The other way is that they speak English to each other. Pinzón, who went through the sixth grade in Mexico, speaks fluent Spanish, but she prefers English and says most of her friends do too. She met most of them through the networks of young people who work in call centers; that is also how she met her husband, Chris Chirinos. He speaks Spanish with a marked American accent, having spent most his life in California.

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Frustrated, she finally decided to return to Mexico City, the metropolis in which she had been born eighteen years earlier. “I miss the small towns,” she says wistfully, as a truck rolls by in the distance near her home in Mexico City. After moving back, Pinzón found work with TeleTech, one of several large call centers in Mexico that hire young people who have grown up in the United States to provide service to cable companies, credit card providers, and other corporate clients. Companies like TeleTech used to set up centers mostly in India because of the availability of English-speaking workers, but they have now started tapping Mexico and its growing pool of native English speakers like Pinzón.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Those who did were usually employed at the lower rungs of the information economy.20 They found service-sector jobs at the ticketing counter of the Delhi metro, at lower-end call centers, at customer service positions in malls, as entry-level data operators for government programs like the unique identification number (UID) project, and at airline and tourism counters. Graduates who were employed at the metro ticketing counters and call centers visited the center to talk to the students about the pleasures of working in a clean, air-conditioned environment and wearing stylish clothes such as well-fitted shirts or short kurtas.

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Through the studies of platforms and infrastructure, bitcoin mining, programming languages, underground cable networks, and much more, this volume drives home what is often termed the “materiality of the digital”—that is, the physicality of computational and new media technologies that are too often described in ethereal terms. Computing and new media depend upon flesh-and-bone metabolism. Our “virtual worlds” are made possible by battalions of human beings (as well as nonhuman organisms): cable layers, miners, e-waste recyclers, content moderators, call-center operators, data-entry technicians, and repair technicians, many of whom come from marginalized class, racial, and gendered positions. Computing and new media run on a vast metabolic conflagration. In certain cases, the work of fabricating so-called virtual experiences exposes laborers to a daily regimen of toxic by-products of electronics manufacturing and disposal and, in other cases, to forms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that grow out of long working days spent concentrating on realms of the digital world that the rest of us rely upon them to keep out of view: still-frame and live-action portrayals of extreme violence, child pornography, and vicious or hateful speech.

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In the early years of Sears customer service workers would not only have to enter customer correspondence data into a form that could be processed by the information systems that the company used to manage its internal databases but would also then copy their responses by hand as a means of establishing a more personal relationship to their otherwise unknown and invisible consumers. A century later Amazon would solve the same problem using human call center operators, many of them originally hired out of local Seattle-area coffee shops in order to provide a more recognizably “authentic” interaction.28 Even in the era of online feedback and user ratings, the human element required to establish and maintain trust remains a necessary—and extremely expensive—component of even the most highly automated high-tech operations.29 Amazon was notorious in its early years for the ruthless efficiency with which it ran its customer service operations.

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

That would be great for you though, right? Because the cost of serving someone else’s customer is zero! Yay for the cost savings team! Then, when your customer tells all her friends about her experience, you will lose more customers. Your call center costs will continue to go down. At some point, when the last customer has left, you can eliminate your call center altogether. Total cost victory achieved. Cost and Quality are Not Mutually Exclusive Once you’re making a profit at something, and you feel like you’ve got as many people buying it as are happy to buy it (market saturation), the next move is to try and to cut costs.

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Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth. The real world throws a lot of variety at you. It’s bound to throw things at you that you didn’t prepare for, plan for, or anticipate. In most cases, service providers must reorganize to absorb variety rather than reduce or contain it. Online shoe store Zappos’ call centers are designed to absorb variety. Most call centers look at customer support as a cost. After all, if you have already been paid for a product and delivered it, then you already have your money and any additional effort on your part will only cost you money, right? Zappos looks at the equation differently. Zappos knows that a customer call probably represents a very tiny fraction of their total interactions with the company.

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Ron Johnson, who joined Apple from Target to launch Apple Retail, started asking people about the best service experiences they had ever had. The majority of people spoke of hotel experiences. So Apple patterned its stores on the hotel experience, including a bar—the Genius Bar. “Instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice,” says Johnson. While most companies are moving customer support to overseas call centers, Apple is bringing real face-to-face support to your neighborhood. In the early stages, Apple recruited managers from the hospitality industry, most notably from service leader Ritz-Carlton. Each manager spent a week in Cupertino for specialized training. Managers were steeped in the Apple philosophy of service.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2007

I am more like a police officer on the side of the road who can step in if need be, and I use detailed reports from outsourcers to ensure the cogs are moving as intended. I check reports from fulfillment each Monday and monthly reports from the same the first of each month. The latter reports include orders received from the call center, which I can compare to the call center bills to gauge profit. Otherwise, I just check bank accounts online on the first and fifteenth of each month to look for odd deductions. If I find something, one e-mail will fix it, and if not, it’s back to kendo, painting, hiking, or whatever I happen to be doing at the time.

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Interview them about costs and ask them for referrals to call centers and credit card processors they’ve collaborated with for file transfers and problem solving. Don’t assemble an architecture of strangers—there will be programming costs and mistakes, both of which are expensive. Set up an account with the credit card processor first, for which you will need your own merchant account. This is critical, as the fulfillment house can only handle refunds and declined cards for transactions they process themselves through an outsourced credit card processor. Optionally, set up an account with one of the call centers your new fulfillment center recommends.

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CD/DVD Duplication, Printing, and Product Packaging AVC Corporation (www.avccorp.com) SF Video (www.sfvideo.com) Local Fulfillment (fewer than 20 units shipped per week) Mailing Fulfillment Service Association (www.mfsanet.org) End-to-End Fulfillment Companies (more than 20 units shipped per week, $500+ setup) Motivational Fulfillment (www.mfpsinc.com) The secret backend to campaigns from HBO, PBS, Comic Relief, Body by Jake, and more. Innotrac (www.innotrac.com) They are currently one of the largest DR marking companies. Moulton Fulfillment (www.moultonfulfillment.com) 200,000-square-foot facility with real-time online inventory reports. Call Centers (per-minute and/or per-sale fees) There are generally two classes of call centers: order takers and commissioned reps. Interview each provider you consider to understand the options and costs involved. The former is a good option if you give the product price in an advertisement (hard offer), are offering free information (lead generation), or don’t need trained salespeople who can overcome objections.

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
by Nick Reding
Published 1 Jul 2009

And so it seemed only fitting that the key to Murphy’s economic stimulus plan was the Industrial Park, kitty-corner from the Sportsmen’s, where in March 2006 a gridded road system already cut the acreage into blocks. Among the weeds sprouting up now that the farmer who once leased those 250 acres was no longer spraying herbicide, a sign read “Oelwein Industrial Park—Come Grow with Us!” Murphy said the city had been courting a call center to lease the space, but it had two competitors: a similar-sized town in Nebraska and a town near Mumbai, India. If the call center prospect fell through, there were bound to be other options, said Murphy. It just wasn’t entirely clear what they might be, or when they’d make themselves available. Meanwhile, things in Oelwein were growing more desperate every month.

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Some real treatment alternatives might help Oelwein nip drug abuse in the bud, rather than simply treating its symptoms—even as those symptoms gained ineluctable momentum. For now, though, that was all a pipe dream. There was no excess revenue for anything, never mind treatment. Murphy’s task was to raise the town from the ashes. He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company.

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Compared with this, his past battles as a liberal pro-lifer had been a cakewalk. During 2004 and 2005, Murphy had done everything possible to run the small-lab meth business out of town as a means of preparing Oelwein to rebuild. This was not just to compete with the towns in India or Nebraska that might lure the likes of the call center. It was to compete with Oelwein’s more immediate neighbors. Nathan had told me, along with several other people, that DHS workers in nearby Buchanan County—home of pretty, prosperous little Independence—had for years been recommending that their worst cases move to Fayette County, and particularly to Oelwein, where taxes were low and the rental market was burgeoning.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh suggested, half in jest, that they call the Zappos 800 number for ordering shoes. He said they should, without telling the Zappos call-center employee who they were, ask for help in finding a pizzeria that would deliver to the hotel. Hsieh made a bet that the Zappos call-center employee would help because his firm is dedicated to serving others—regardless of the request. One of the Sketchers people took the CEO up on his boast and made the call, with others in the group listening in on the speakerphone. The Zappos call-center employee was initially confused as to how to respond. But, as Hsieh predicted, she then helped locate the desired pizza.

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The company, for example, trains team members on how to fully engage callers, with the goal of meeting their needs whenever possible. It wants each caller to Zappos to leave the interaction happier. The company does not use efficiency metrics (number of calls per hour) to reward its call-center employees. Nor does it promote “upselling,” where callers are encouraged to buy more products beyond their initial purchase. Zappos likes to publicize that some customers stay on the line with its call-center reps for hours at a time (with a recent call breaking the firm’s previous record in lasting 10 hours and 43 minutes). Paying its employees to stay on the phone for hours is hard to justify from a profit perspective—yet that is what Zappos does.

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For example, Zappos places great emphasis on customer service and, more generally, customer happiness (what it calls WOW). The company tracks a variety of statistics such as the number of calls handled, which its call-center people see every day. However, Zappos doesn’t set targets on call time or upsell revenue. The key metric is what the company calls the Personal Emotional Connection. This is assessed several times a week by staff who listen in on calls and assess the effectiveness of call-center members. Their ratings are shared with each person and improvement areas are discussed. Another key metric is what it calls a Net Promoter Score. This metric compares the number of people, as assessed by a follow-up survey, who recommend or promote Zappos to others versus those who are detractors of the company.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Precisely that kind of work and those kind of working conditions are becoming more common. Think of people who get relegated to work in gig-economy jobs. Or people who fulfill orders in Amazon warehouses, racing around picking boxes off shelves, too busy to take bathroom breaks. Or the thousands of people living lives of quiet desperation in call centers—monitored, measured, and managed by machines. Some call center workers rarely interact with an actual human manager, and usually it is only to be rebuked because the performance-monitoring software has “reported” them for doing something wrong. Even for ordinary white-collar workers, the modern workplace abounds with dehumanizing policies and practices, some trivial, some more profound.

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Where to begin with such overweening self-regard? First of all, this is Netflix. They make some TV shows and provide streaming movies over the Internet. They’re not putting a man on the moon or tinkering with the human genome to find a cure for cancer. Second, the company has nearly five thousand employees, and many are customer support call center reps, some of whom make as little as $14 an hour. These are not professional basketballers earning millions of dollars a year or members of the Olympic ice hockey team. For the record, professional sports teams do not, in fact, have stars in every position. Moreover, the best pro sports teams succeed exactly because the players feel like a family.

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On Glassdoor, a website where employees anonymously rate employers, Netflix garners a score of 3.7 out of 5. That’s lower than Google, Apple, and Facebook, even lower than Ford Motor Company, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and ExxonMobil. The desk jockeys at Netflix complain about a bruising environment with high turnover and rapid burnout. One call center worker wrote on Glassdoor: “Everything, from the time you spent in the restroom, to the time you spent on a certain type of call, is broken down to the second and charted. Honestly the most hostile environment I’ve ever been in.” To be sure, some happy Netflix employees rave about the company. But the gripes like these stand out: “The amount of people who got fired for the FIRST THREE WEEKS I was there was unbelievable.”

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

As more and more work is done by robots and AI, more and more of our economy’s value is generated by things other than people. We are facing a situation in which there will be fewer and fewer human workers capable of paying income taxes over time. Take the example of Google’s AI doing the work of call center workers, which was announced in mid-2020. How much will Google pay in taxes? Certainly much less than the more than two million Americans working in call centers right now making between $10 and $15 an hour. The same will be true of self-driving trucks and the more than three million Americans who currently drive a truck for a living. If we truly want to use our economic prosperity to build a stronger country, we need to harvest these kinds of productivity gains in order to fund real changes.

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Four million manufacturing jobs had been eliminated in recent years, and I realized that what I saw in the Midwest and the South was the new normal. And even that normal was going to get ground to dust by future and impending waves of automation and technology that were going to overrun communities until there was nothing left. What happened to those millions of manufacturing jobs would soon happen to retail jobs, call center jobs, trucking jobs, and on and on through the economy. Both my time in these communities and the data were saying the same thing. The tide was coming in, and more and more people were going to get swept away. And then Trump won. Imagine being someone who had spent six years helping create hundreds of jobs in the Midwest and the South—and getting awards for it—and realizing that your work was like pouring water in a bathtub that had a giant hole ripped in the bottom of it and the water rushing out had helped elect Donald Trump.

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I’m running for President as a Democrat in 2020 because I believe we must start having honest conversations about and formulate real solutions to the growing impact of technological unemployment/automation that has already displaced millions of Americans and will soon affect millions more. The elimination of 4 million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other midwestern states gave us Donald Trump. The displacement of retail workers, truck drivers, fast food workers, call center workers, etc. will strain our society beyond repair. The simple truth is that our technology is advancing faster than our labor market can adapt. The most immediate and vital step is to implement a Universal Basic Income (“the Freedom Dividend”) of $12k/year for all adults. This will serve as an economic and social support for the transition and preserve our consumer market while we shift to a new economy.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets it is most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple syrup substitutes. — Fourteen months after the maple syrup mystery was solved, Mayor Michael Bloomberg paid a visit to the 311 call center, which is housed in a city building in the warrens of downtown Manhattan, just a few blocks east of Ground Zero. With its high ceilings, playful Flor tiles underfoot, and dual LCD monitors on every desk, the main call center room feels a lot like a Web start-up, until one registers the steady murmur of the fifty “customer service professionals” working the phones. Mounted on one wall is an oversize dashboard, with chunky blue, red, and green LED pixels tallying the day’s inflows by city department: calls waiting, maximum waiting time, agents on call—and the most important statistic of all, service level, which reports the percentage of calls that are answered within thirty seconds.

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Done well, they can even outperform the market. Several years after the launch of 311, New York City commissioned a third-party firm to compare the customer satisfaction of 311 users with that of users of other call centers in both the public and private sectors. The 311 customer satisfaction ratings came out on top, barely edging out hotel and retail experiences but beating other government call centers, such as the IRS’s, by a mile. (At the very bottom of the list, not surprisingly, cable companies.) Extracting information from, or reporting problems to, a government agency is traditionally a recipe for psychic pain, because bureaucracies are so incompetent at addressing individual needs.

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Launched in March 2003, 311 now fields on average more than 50,000 calls a day, offering callers information about more than 3,000 services: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs. The service has translators on call to support 180 different languages. Since its launch, 311 operators in New York have fielded more than 100 million calls. Having those 311 call centers in place offered the city a direct medium with which to communicate with citizens worried about the strange breakfast smells saturating their neighborhoods. During “maple syrup events,” as city officials came to call them, 311 operators were instructed to explain to callers that the smell was harmless, and that they should go about their business as usual.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

And it was all built on personalization. Please Hold to Be Connected to Our Algorithm It is well known that not every call-center agent is equipped to handle every type of call that comes in. The larger the company, the less likely it is that any one person will be able to deal with every single inquiry, which is the reason customers are typically routed to different departments in which agents are trained to have different skills and knowledge bases. A straightforward example might be the global company whose call centers regularly receive calls in several different languages. Both callers and agents may speak one or more of several possible languages, but not necessarily all of them.

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When the French-speaking customer phones up, they may be advised to press “1” on their keypad, while the English-speaking customer might be instructed to press “2.” They are then routed through to the person best suited to deal with their call. But what if—instead of simply redirecting customers to different call-center agents based upon language or specialist knowledge—an algorithm could be used to determine particular qualities of the person calling in: based upon speech patterns, the particular words they used, and even details as seemingly trivial as whether they said “um” or “err”—and then utilize these insights to put them through to the agent best suited for dealing with their emotional needs?

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If people’s communication needs are not met by being given the kind of positive “feedback” they require (a feelings-oriented person being asked cold hard facts, for example) they go into distress, which can be diffused only if the person on the other end of the conversation is able to adequately pick up on the warning signals and respond appropriately. In a call-center environment this knowledge results in an extraordinary qualitative change, according to Mattersight. A person patched through to an individual with a similar personality type to their own will have an average conversation length of five minutes, with a 92 percent problem-resolution rate. A caller paired up to a conflicting personality type, on the other hand, will see their call length double to ten minutes—while the problem-resolution rate tumbles to 47 percent.

Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade
Published 4 Apr 2018

That would entail an awkward conversation if the purpose of the call was to alert shoreside personnel that the top officer was making a fatal mistake, like sailing directly into the path of a hurricane. The call center number, which was to be used in a marine emergency or when crew members had other issues, such as human resources problems, was also posted around the ships. The people at the call center had been given the phone numbers of “eight or nine people” at TOTE. In an emergency, the call center operator would just start calling down the list until she or he got a responsible human being on the other end of the line. It appeared that “safety” meant leaving a paper trail that all necessary drills had been done aboard the ships.

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But after receiving that email, the safety manager of TOTE Services didn’t bother to check the weather. That’s why his mind was a total blank when he got Davidson’s urgent voice mail message on the morning of October 1. (Lawrence also didn’t know that the emergency calling center’s code “PC” meant “Please call.” Did the call center have a log of their acronyms that you might need to know? “They may but I’ve never asked for it,” Lawrence replied.) When he finally talked to Davidson that morning, Lawrence said he knew the hurricane was somewhere in the Atlantic, but he wasn’t aware that El Faro had sailed anywhere near it.

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In order to get Lawrence on the line, Davidson had had to make a second call to the emergency call center, and that conversation was recorded. The audio of that call was played at the hearing and sent a chill through the room. Some people left the room before it was broadcast because they didn’t want to hear the voice of a dying man. You could clearly hear the panic in his voice. “Oh man,” he said to the operator. “Oh God. The Clock is ticking.” Lawrence had a ten-minute conversation with Davidson after that call, but the conversation wasn’t recorded—the emergency call center had patched him through. Why did Davidson express so much urgency to an anonymous operator and then compose himself when he spoke to TOTE’s man ashore a minute later?

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

So many companies yearn for more innovation and creativity, but they don’t take the very first critical step—thinking of their employees as artists. Purpose-Powered The University of Pennsylvania’s Adam Grant did a very simple but powerful experiment with university fundraising call center employees. He broke them into three random groups. The first was read stories from previous call center employees about how the job had helped them develop their sales skills. The second set was told stories about how alumni had benefited from the donations raised by the call center. The third, the control group, had unrelated stories read to them. He replicated the study five times and found the same results. Those who were read the second story, the one about purpose, more than doubled the dollars raised.

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Caring for others means engaging with others, and for many doing dirty work, they are expected to be nearly invisible within an organization. This doesn’t just apply to sanitation workers or morticians. It also applies to roles like working in a call center. I met with a member of the management team of a major telecommunications company, who openly talked about how the company views their call center employees as “sub-human.” In this case, the researchers were interested in the maintenance staff at a hospital, the folks who clean up after the sick, dying, and recently deceased. It is a dirty job, but in the context of a high-caring enterprise.

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After joining Google, Arthur found the reality to be very different. Like all companies with thousands of employees, Google struggled to fully enable their youngest hires with meaningful opportunities and roles within the organization. Though Arthur was sitting in the heart of Google in Silicon Valley, he could have just as easily been in a call center for a utility company in any anonymous office park. The job consisted of 30 hours per week of mainly rote roles. The remaining hours were spent in meetings talking about the rote tasks; there was little creative freedom or clear purpose to the work. The only difference was that his peers were also over-achievers and brilliant individuals who shared his vision of Google when they had started.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

In many countries, services are the fastest-growing part of the economy, reflecting rapid growth in cell phone services, hotels, restaurants, construction, call centers, financial services, and other activities. Across all developing countries, output in services has been increasing by more than 5 percent per year since 1995, so that the total value of services (in real terms after accounting for inflation) has increased 150 percent. In some countries, there is a particularly important shift toward more modern services such as software development, technical services (engineering and architecture), outsourced business processes (from insurance claims to transcribing medical records), and call centers, all of which create jobs and increase skills over time.

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Similarly, Jenny Aker of Tufts University found that mobile phones reduced price variations in grain markets in Niger by a minimum of 6.4 percent, and even more in remote markets, which contributed to both lower consumer prices and higher profits for farmers.31 And, of course, alongside mobile phones, increased internet connectivity has created new economic opportunities and transformed lives across developing countries—at least where it has reached so far. Call centers in the Philippines provide travel services, technical support to computer users, customer care services, and financial services to consumers around the world. There are now more than a thousand call centers in the Philippines, creating several hundred thousand jobs for semiskilled workers that didn’t exist before. Data entry firms have sprouted up in Kenya, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, Colombia, Brazil, and dozens of other countries.

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Advances in technology and much deeper global connectivity have allowed developing countries to provide services to other countries as never before: developing countries accounted for 14 percent of global service exports in 1990; two decades later, the share had jumped to 21 percent. Indian software companies are the most famous example, but they are not alone. Sri Lankan engineers are working with firms around the world, South African banks are spreading across the rest of the continent, call centers in Belize are answering billing questions for American cell phone users, companies in the Philippines are transcribing insurance and medical records, and Kenyan accounting firms are providing services to their neighbors. Manufacturing and industry have expanded just as fast, with growth exceeding 5 percent per year.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

The low wages, combined with the insecurity of the employment relationship in the high-tech sector and the physical and mental strains of the jobs, likely influence the extreme volatility and fast employee turnover in low-wage high-tech employment. For example, Cathy Reynolds was offered a promotion to supervisor after four months at an insurance claims company because of her seniority; only three other people had been at the company longer. Call center and data entry work are sites of intense technologicallymediated surveillance, as the experience of women in the YWCA community amply illustrated. Work processes in call center and data entry Drowning in the Sink-or-Swim Economy 73 occupations are highly visible. Efficiency is measured and displayed constantly: employers track the number of bids entered or calls answered at the bottom of employees’ computer screens, and check the numbers several times a day to monitor their progress.

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But the majority of women I interviewed in the YWCA community talked about a different kind of experience with technology altogether, an experience marked not by technology lack or deficiency but by technological ubiquity. They described their extensive use of computers in the lowwage workforce—about half of the women I interviewed had been data entry or call center workers. Others talked about encountering computers in the social service system. They described welfare caseworkers who blocked eye contact by hiding behind a computer terminal. They described 10 Chapter 1 their feelings of hopelessness and frustration when caseworkers couldn’t find their information in “the system,” a feeling intensified by the computer’s apparent power to decide their family’s fate.

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In interviews and public events, many have said that they think “computers are the future,” and have conceded that technological skills are something they should have to remain competitive in the job market. But they also directly experience the more exploitative face of IT as workers in low-wage, high-tech occupations such as data entry and call centers, as clients of increasingly computerized government services, and as citizens surveyed by technologies in public institutions and spaces. It is not so much that they lack access to technology but that their everyday experiences with it can be invasive, intrusive, and extractive. As I began this research, my overreliance on access-based models of high-tech equity and my privileged class and racial position led me to overlook—and even obscure—poor and working-class women’s extensive interaction with information systems.

Asterisk Cookbook
by Leif Madsen and Russell Bryant
Published 30 Mar 2011

Audio Manipulation Introduction The recipes in this chapter are designed to help you with the injection of audio into and the monitoring of channels in your Asterisk environment. Many of the recipes focus on a particular aspect but can be built up or modified using the skills learned in other recipes in this book. Monitoring and Barging into Live Calls Problem As the manager of a call center, you need to be able to listen in on calls to help with training new employees. Solution The most simple solution is to simply connect to any active channel using the ChanSpy() application, which then provides you the ability to flip through active channels using DTMF. The b option means to only listen to actively bridged calls: [CallCenterTraining] exten => 500,1,Verbose(2,Listening to live agents) same => n,ChanSpy(,b) If you only want to spy on certain channels, you can use the chanprefix option to control which types of channels you want to listen to.

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With some creativity, ChanSpy() can be used in many situations it wasn’t necessarily designed for (see Triggering Audio Playback into a Call Using DTMF). Not only can ChanSpy() be used to listen to the conversation between channels, but you can also speak to a single channel where only one person can hear you, referred to as whispering. Whispering to a channel is commonplace in situations where a manager of a call center is training an employee, and needs to listen to an agent during the call. To enable whispering to channels that are being spied on, use the w option: [CallCenterTraining] exten => 500,1,Verbose(2,Listening to live agents with whisper) same => n,ChanSpy(,bw) Of course, we’re going to be looking for some finer grain control for who we’re listening to.

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About the Authors Leif Madsen first got involved with the Asterisk community when he was looking for a voice conferencing solution. Once he learned that there was no official Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif is currently working as a consultant, specializing in Asterisk clustering and call-center integration. You can get more information at http://www.leifmadsen.com. Russell Bryant is the Engineering Manager for the Open Source Software team at Digium, Inc. He has been a core member of the Asterisk development team since the Fall of 2004. At the first AstriCon in 2004, he was named the release maintainer for Asterisk's first major release series, Asterisk 1.0.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

It was hard to find competent workers in this industry in San Francisco—the workforce in the Bay Area catered more to Silicon Valley tech companies. The majority of workers were trained as engineers, sales representatives, or marketing consultants; working at a call center was not what the average San Franciscan saw as a promising career trajectory. They needed to move the company to a place where hospitality and customer service were priorities. They also decided that instead of building out a satellite call center, they needed to move the whole company. Customer service was not going to be an afterthought for Zappos. It was its entire business model. So, after weeks of deliberating between various cities, from Phoenix to Portland to Des Moines, they landed on Henderson, a suburban town just south of the city limits of Las Vegas.

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News of his death flooded the internet, with thousands of messages and memories posted by people from Bill Clinton to Ivanka Trump to Jeff Bezos, offering a public mourning not seen for a business leader since the passing of Steve Jobs a decade before. The sight of his awkward smile—shared thousands of times across social media, in newspapers, and on television—crystallized his image of an uncommonly beloved tech entrepreneur, one who had changed the lives of countless people, from business leaders to workers in his call center, and strangers he’d met at the bar. As the tributes flowed in, we were working as business reporters for Forbes when a number of obvious questions quickly emerged for us. Angel had covered the lives of billionaires for years, and David had a focus on investigating tech companies. We were immediately perplexed by how a certifiable tech leader—the beloved face of a beloved brand, no less—had died in a fire in a nondescript New England town, of all places.

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The end result was a program that focused on employees’ motivations. For instance, an offer to pay employees to leave the company during orientation tested whether they were committed. The program also required that everyone from new executives to entry-level employees spend time working in the call center before they started their official roles—a practice that had proven successful for Fred during his time at Nordstrom. But Mark’s work quickly expanded beyond its initial purview. Tony often complained that their cubicle was referred to as “executive row,” so Mark took to calling it “monkey row” and decorated the space to illustrate the point with a series of nets to the ceiling from which stuffed animals and plants hung.

Advanced Software Testing—Vol. 3, 2nd Edition
by Jamie L. Mitchell and Rex Black
Published 15 Feb 2015

This applies whether the application was declined by the bank, cancelled by the customer, or ultimately converted into an active loan/line of credit/reverse mortgage. 003 Scope The scope of the HELLOCARMS project includes: Selecting a COTS solution from a field of five vendors. Working with the selected application vendor to modify the solution to meet Globobank’s requirements. Providing a browser-based front-end for loan processing access from the Internet, existing Globobank call centers, outsourced (non-Globobank) call centers, retail banking centers, and brokers. However, the HELLOCARMS first release will only provide access from a Globobank call center (specifically Fairbanks). Developing an interface to Globobank’s existing Scoring Mainframe for scoring a customer based on their loan application and HELLOCARMS features. Developing an interface to use Globobank’s existing underwriting and origination system, Loan Document Printing System (LoDoPS), for document preparation.

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Receiving customer-related data from the Globobank Rainmaker Borrower Qualification Winnow (GloboRainBQW) system to generate outbound offers to potential (but not current) Globobank customers via phone, e-mail, and paper-mail. 004 System Business Benefits The business benefits associated with the HELLOCARMS include: Automating a currently manual process, and allowing loan inquiries and applications from the Internet and via call center personnel (both from the current call centers and potentially from outsourced call centers, retail banking centers, and loan brokers). Decreasing the time to process the front-end portion of a loan from approximately 30 minutes to 5 minutes. This will allow Globobank’s Consumer Products Division to dramatically increase the volumes of loans processed to meet its business plan.

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A reverse mortgage results in the homeowner taking out a regularly increasing secured loan, secured by the equity in the borrower’s home. 1. These definitions are adapted from www.dictionary.com. 000 Introduction The Home Equity Loan, Line-of-Credit, and Reverse Mortgage System (HELLOCARMS), as to be deployed in the first release, allows Globobank Telephone Bankers in the Globobank Fairbanks call center to accept applications for home equity products (loans, lines of credit, and reverse mortgages) from customers. The second release will allow applications over the Internet, including from Globobank business partners as well as customers themselves. At a high level, the system is configured as shown in Figure 1.

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim
Published 10 Jun 2013

An Informed Consumer of Analytics There are many ways that managers, working closely with the quantitative analysts in their organizations, can use analytics to enhance their decisions. Let’s take a recent decision that Jennifer Joy made at Cigna—a leading health service company. Joy is vice president of Clinical Operations, and she runs a large call center for the company. The call center works with Cigna’s customers to improve their health and wellness, particularly if they have a chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease, that requires ongoing treatment. Jen is a nurse by background, not an analyst. But she has an MBA and is a believer in the importance of analytical thinking.

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Cousins pointed out, “It took some courage on her part to investigate whether these interventions—the main purpose of Jen’s organization—were really working, but she didn’t hesitate to find out the truth.” The results suggested that certain call center interventions weren’t as helpful as anticipated for many types of diseases, but were more effective for others that they didn’t anticipate. For the former group, Joy took action and decided to shorten the length of the calls for customers with certain diseases until it could be determined whether they were helpful at all. For the latter group, her team is expanding and redeploying call center staff to more value-adding activity with customers. She’s working with Cousins’s group on other analytics projects, including controlled experiments that test different coaching approaches, such as engaging more deeply with a customer’s doctor.

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However, by 2009 it had become apparent that the fees had become a liability. Expedia’s rates were closer to those of the hotels’ own rates, so the primary appeal of Expedia had become convenience—and change/cancel fees were not convenient. Analysts looked at customer satisfaction rates, and they were particularly low for customers who had to pay the fees. Expedia’s call center representatives were authorized to waive the change/cancel fees for only one reason: a death in the customer’s family. A look at the number of waivers showed double-digit growth for the past three years. Either there was a death epidemic, or customers had figured out they could get their money back this way.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

I’m used to being in control, doing my own planning. Now I feel like someone else has made all the decisions for me. I feel downgraded. —worker at a recently automated General Electric plant in 1970 Every weekday, Conor Sprouls goes to work as a customer service representative for MetLife at a call center in Warwick, Rhode Island. When he gets to his desk, he boots up his computer, and a small blue window appears in the bottom-right corner of his screen. This blue window is Cogito, an app-based “AI coach” that MetLife uses to keep tabs on its human customer service representatives. Every time Sprouls gets a call, Cogito listens in on the line, and provides him with real-time feedback.

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In addition to Cogito, there are also retail-oriented AI companies like Percolata, a Silicon Valley start-up that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients, which uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker. Another AI start-up, Beqom, automates the process of calculating worker pay and year-end bonuses. And Nexus AI, a “workforce management” system, allows managers to sort workers into teams based on calculated attributes like “high performers” and “good chemistry.” When I visited MetLife’s call center, I was struck by the authority Cogito’s software had been given, even though it was still fairly new. The app tracks the number of notifications each agent receives, which are compiled into a score and used by managers to track agent performance over time. (Agents aren’t allowed to minimize their Cogito windows on their screens—if they do, the program alerts their supervisor.)

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“There was one associate, we were seeing her calls were going several minutes longer than the traditional call,” Smith said. “By listening to Cogito, they could tell she was repeating information that didn’t need to be repeated.” MetLife, which uses Cogito’s software with more than 1,500 of its call center employees, says using the app has increased its customer satisfaction scores by 13 percent. And the MetLife agents I spoke to during my visit didn’t seem miserable about it. (Granted, I was being accompanied by an official from the company’s corporate communications team, so employees may have been on their best behavior.)

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

When we meet for lunch at a steakhouse a five-minute drive away (this is one of those neighborhoods without sidewalks), Hsieh tells me he moved Zappos from San Francisco to Las Vegas because the city has “a call center population” and a twenty-four/seven culture. That’s a nice way of saying this is a place where you can find the lower-skilled, lower-paid workers you need for customer service. Within that universe, though, Zappos really does deliver on its promise of being “free from boring work environments, go-nowhere jobs, and typical corporate America!” Our tour guide—he proudly informs us that you need to know two hundred things about Zappos to be a certified host—says, “I was working at a call center that was kind of the opposite of this—kind of a sweatshop” before joining two and a half years earlier.

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For the superstars, it is one of the forces creating richer clients, bigger cases, and fatter fees. But at the bottom, cheaper emerging market lawyers are undercutting the salaries of Western lawyers, just as outsourcing has brought down costs—and wages—in manufacturing and more routine services like call center work. One example is Pangea3, an Indian legal process outsourcing firm, which recently opened offices in the United States. Employing hundreds of lawyers who work around-the-clock shifts, Pangea3 does basic, repetitive legal work like drafting contracts and reviewing documents. Its clients have included blue-chip companies like American Express, GE, Sony, Yahoo!

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The Mac 400 is a cheaper, cruder, and lighter version of its American parent—it weighs less than three pounds, rather than fifteen; sells for around $800 (already barely half of the $1,500 it cost when it hit the market), rather than $10,000; and costs $500,000 to develop, rather than $5.4 million. Eight of the nine engineers who created it were based at GE’s Bangalore research lab. Selling Western technology and brands into emerging markets is an old story. So is selling cheap emerging market labor—in the form of manufactured goods, electronics, or commodity white-collar services like call centers—into developed markets. The Mac 400 is an example of the next stage—emerging market engineers, employed by a Western company, creating a product inspired by a Western prototype, and redesigned for emerging market consumers. The world’s smartest megacorporations—GE, Google, Goldman Sachs—are finding ways to profit from the great economic shift of our times.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

I’m not anticapitalist. I’m on my fifth start-up. But I am anti-arrogance. Why do the executives who run these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?” English had channeled a torrent of frustration with automated customer service. If my experience is typical, many companies—especially those in telecommunications, insurance, health care, and travel—are forgoing human contact in order to cut costs, deploying either robots or foreign call centers whose agents know nothing about the business and are paid per call (so they try to make it fast by passing you off to someone else).

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What’s needed in those instances is what Mark Granovetter calls the power of weak bonds: the Internet’s unique capacity to assemble diverse groups of people so they can fill in one another’s gaps in knowledge.53 The Value of a Coffee Break The face-to-face advantage wasn’t seen only among techies. The MIT research team has tried out their wearable sensors on all sorts of employees, including those who work in banks, on farms, in hospitals, and at call centers. They’ve found that the happy buzz of workplace chatter predicts productivity everywhere they’ve looked.54 Of all the worksites, their call-center study piqued my curiosity most because working in one can be such a soul-deadening job. Employees face rigid schedules and scripts, social isolation, and an emphasis on quantity over quality, and as a rule, they can’t rise much in the organization.

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I figured out how to solve it,’ or ‘This is how to pitch this new product,’ ” he continued. Even he seemed amazed that something as simple as changing the break schedule could have such a dramatic effect. As a result of their experiment, the bank’s call-center manager shifted to coordinated coffee breaks—and the plan worked. Recognizing that employees, like the bank clients they serve, are driven to make genuine human connections has led to vastly better outcomes. Coordinated breaks at all ten of the bank’s call centers (involving twenty-five thousand employees) improved the weak teams’ performance by more than 20 percent, increased performance overall by 8 percent, and boosted employee satisfaction by more than 10 percent, Sandy Pentland reports.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

Many profiling methods seem complicated, but in essence are simply instantiations of the fundamental concept introduced in Chapter 4: define a numeric function with some parameters, define a goal or objective, and find the parameters that best meet the objective. So let’s consider a simple example from business operations management. Businesses would like to use data to help to understand how well their call centers are supporting their customers.[68] One aspect of supporting customers well is to not leave them sitting on hold for long periods of time. So how might we profile the typical wait time of our customers who call into the call center? We might calculate the mean and standard deviation of the wait time. That seems like exactly what a manager with basic statistical training might do—it turns out to be a simple instance of model fitting.

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We might instead report the median, which is not so sensitive to the skew, or possibly even better, fit a different distribution (maybe after talking to a statistically oriented data scientist about what might be appropriate). Figure 12-1. A distribution of wait times for callers into a bank’s call center. To illustrate how a data science savvy manager might proceed, let’s look at a distribution of wait times for callers into a bank’s call center over a couple of months. Figure 12-1 shows such a distribution. Importantly, we see how visualizing the distribution should cause our data science radar to issue an alert. The distribution is not a symmetric bell curve. We should then worry about simply profiling wait times by reporting the mean and standard deviation.

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Thanks to David Martens for his help with the mobile locations visualization. Thanks to Chris Volinsky for providing data from his work on the Netflix Challenge. Thanks to Sonny Tambe for early access to his results on big data technologies and productivity. Thanks to Patrick Perry for pointing us to the bank call center example used in Chapter 12. Thanks to Geoff Webb for the use of the Magnum Opus association mining system. Most of all we thank our families for their love, patience and encouragement. A great deal of open source software was used in the preparation of this book and its examples. The authors wish to thank the developers and contributors of: Python and Perl Scipy, Numpy, Matplotlib, and Scikit-Learn Weka The Machine Learning Repository at the University of California at Irvine (Bache & Lichman, 2013) Finally, we encourage readers to check our website for updates to this material, new chapters, errata, addenda, and accompanying slide sets

Kanban in Action
by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sunden
Published 17 Mar 2014

Finding out what the customer needs and values and delivering just that also builds quality in. Failure demand in call centers In the book Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work (Vanguard Consulting Ltd., 2003, http://amzn.com/0954618300), John Seddon tells the story of a call center for which about 40% of calls were questions about invoices. The failure to create a clear and understandable invoice caused a lot of demand on the system that easily could be avoided. And sure enough—when the company changed the layout and structure of the invoice, the failure demand went down, and the call center got a lot fewer calls in total. A Word from the Coach One simple and useful practice is to start tracking and visualizing the failure demand.

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That, at first, might seem obvious and to be something you’d want; but when you think about it, it’s a bit dangerous, too. If you start to measure how long each support call takes in a call center, you’ll find that people begin closing calls early rather than focusing on helping the customer. Workers in the call center will prefer short calls over longer ones, even if that means their customers won’t get the help they need. Metrics may drive the call-center employees toward the wrong behavior. The knowledge that “you get what you measure” could also be used to your advantage. One such technique is to put a limit on the amount of work in the Done column, sometimes referred to as the cake limit (see chapter 12).

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Index [A][B][C][D][E][F][G][H][I][J][K][L][M][N][O][P][Q][R][S][T][U][V][W][X] A A-team A/B testing abandoned ideas, as metric Accept column acceptance testing accountability Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success Agile Manifesto Agile Retrospectives Agile software development Agile42 AgileZen Analyze column Anderson, David J. Andon boards animals as avatars annotating cards Aptitud B balancing flow speed and work items batches, working with smaller BDD (behavior-driven development) Bellware, Scott big daily boredom bugs giving precedence to types of work items business impact, 2nd C call centers cartoons on cards celebrations frequent flyer miles WIP limit CFD (cumulative flow diagram) data needed for drawing diagram overview reading diagram charts. See diagrams. Coaching Kata Cockburn, Alistair coin flipping game. See also Pass the Pennies. component teams constraints.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

Indeed, if you open a factory, and are doing things right, “it will be more productive a year later because the workers themselves on the factory floor are critical thinkers and can improve processes along the way,” said Byron Auguste, the McKinsey director. In any factory or call center, he noted, “there is often dramatic variation in productivity in different parts of the system. If you have continuous learners on the shop floor or in the call center, there is a constant opportunity to learn and spread the word, and then everyone improves. If you are doing that in every node of your production, design, and aftersales service, you will have a system that delivers three percent productivity growth every year and is not dependent on new inventions coming out of Carnegie Mellon University or Silicon Valley.”

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It all happened so fast, but it is clear that sometime around the year 2000 many people in many places realized that they were engaging with people with whom they had never engaged before—whether it was Tom’s mom and her new online bridge partner in Siberia or the local gas station owner discovering through the Internet a new supplier of cheaper tires in Panama. At the same time, these same people in these same places discovered that they were being touched by people who had never touched them before—whether it was a young Indian voice on the phone from a Bangalore call center trying to sign them up for a new Visa card or a young Chinese student in Shanghai who had just taken the place they had hoped to have at Harvard. What they were all feeling was that the world is flat (the title of Tom’s 2005 book)—meaning that more people could suddenly compete, connect, and collaborate with more other people from more different places for less money with greater ease than ever before in the history of humankind.

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In today’s hyper-connected marketplace, to be a leading company, now a company has to be a company of leaders—every individual has to contribute significant value and impact.” Herewith, the new help-wanted section. White-Collar Indian In February 2004 Tom went to Bangalore, India, to make a documentary program on outsourcing for the New York Times–Discovery Channel. Part of the documentary was filmed at the outsourcing company 24/7 Customer and its call center, manned by hundreds of Indians doing what were then relatively low-wage white-collar service jobs via long-distance phone lines. Late at night—daytime in America—the room was a cacophony of voices, with young Indian men and women trying to fix someone’s Dell computer or straighten out a credit card account or sell a new phone contract.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

If your phone is infected with malware, once you dial your bank’s customer service number, the rootkit detects one of its targeted institutions is being phoned and can intercept and reroute the call. It is another classic man-in-the-middle attack that allows the criminals to shape and mold the reality you see on your screen and bend it to their desired outcome. As a result, when you dial 1-800-4MY-BANK, your call is invisibly rerouted to a call center manned and operated by international organized crime. Given the wide use of foreign call centers by financial institutions, who would question an accent on the other end of the line when you spoke to your “bank”? The spoof would be relatively easy to perpetrate. Once you were connected, you would be asked for your account number, mother’s maiden name, password, and other security information “just to verify you.”

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In addition to hacker-for-hire services, Crime, Inc. subcontracts out for a wide variety of administrative services such as banking, translation, travel, and call center operations. For instance, companies such as CallService.biz fill a niche in the digital underground by providing on-demand English-, French-, and German-speaking stand-ins to help crooks contravene bank security measures required to initiate wire transfers, unblock hacked accounts, or change address contact information with the banks. Staffed 24/7, the multilingual crime call center will play any duplicitous role you would like, including providing job and educational references, for a mere $10 per call.

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Simple enough if you dial Mom and she picks up your call. But what about when you dial Citibank, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo? You’re not reaching a banker at the local branch the way you might have twenty years ago. Instead, you’re being connected to someone you’ve never spoken to before from a call center, generally in a foreign country manned by people with foreign accents. By using mobile phone malware, hackers can install a “rootkit” on your mobile phone that gives them control over all features of the device, including its touch screen and number pad. Rootkits are malicious software that hide normal computer processes and functions from a user’s view and give hackers administrative or “root” access to any device.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

Our sales pitch is that if you buy our software you won’t need to hire an army of outbound sales reps who spend their days blindly calling people, because our software will generate inbound leads and bring the customers to you. Yet here we are, operating an old-fashioned call center, with a bunch of low-paid kids calling thousands of people, day after day. HubSpot doesn’t keep this room a secret, but the company doesn’t talk about it much, either. It’s not exactly a lovable, magical, one-plus-one-equals-three kind of place. The truth is that most tech companies do some selling over the phone, and for a simple reason: It’s cheap. Oracle, a $40 billion software company, has started hiring thousands of college students and cramming them into call centers, as a way to lower its selling costs. Tech companies refer to these operations as “inside sales,” which sounds more respectable than “telemarketing.”

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I tell him I’m sorry about my outburst, and I can’t wait to get started on this new project. “Oh,” Zack says, “there’s one more thing.” The content factory has been getting overcrowded, he tells me. So in addition to getting my own little blog, I am going to be moving to a new location, away from the blog team, in the telemarketing call center. It’s the loudest room in the building. People call it the spider monkey room. Zack assures me that this move will only be temporary. HubSpot is renovating space on the fourth floor, and eventually our team will move up there. Once again I give him my best “team player” smile and tell him this all sounds great.

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As a CMO friend of mine puts it, “The lower end of the market is a dial-for-dollars segment.” HubSpot isn’t the only software company using a low-cost sales model. Another friend of mine works at a software company that’s about the same size as HubSpot and engages in the same kind of touchy-feely rhetoric while behind the scenes operating the same kind of call center. The company’s investors are demanding astronomical growth rates, and while cold-calling thousands of leads may be a brute-force, blunt-instrument tactic, it’s the only way they can hit their numbers. “When you get a hard-charging sales culture in place, and you’re trying to keep up insane growth rates, all that high-minded preaching about how the New Economy means not doing things like they used to do in the Bad Old Days—all that stuff goes out the window, and they bring in Alec Baldwin to give his steak knives speech,” my friend says.

Why We Work
by Barry Schwartz
Published 31 Aug 2015

Taylor, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management, laid out in microscopic detail the best ways to divide production into individual jobs, so that little skill or attention was required, and the best way to arrange pay, so that maximum effort would be produced. Factories like this have mostly left American shores, but one sees the same pattern played out in modern versions of the factory, like call centers and order-fulfillment centers. Workers in both environments are micromanaged. In call centers, they’re given detailed scripts to follow (which is necessary, since they are often located in a different country, thousands of miles away, have trouble with the language and, beyond the scripts, know almost nothing of the products or services about which they are taking calls.)

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You might believe that for most people, by their very natures, work is about pay and nothing more. Only the “elite” want challenge, meaning, and engagement, and can expect it from their work. Aside from being more than a little arrogant, this view is incorrect. Many people who do what we think of as mundane jobs—janitors, factory workers, call-center employees—care about more than the wage. And plenty of high-flying professionals work just for the money. What people come to seek in work largely depends on what their work makes available. And the conditions of human labor created by the industrial revolution, and perpetuated thanks in part to theories from the social sciences, have systematically deprived people of fulfillment from their work.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

One is globalization, in effect bringing a large new source of cheap labor into the domestic economy; either through cheap imports or the offshoring of production, domestic workers have to compete with workers elsewhere who work for much lower wages (although they are also less productive). This could explain downward pressure on blue-collar wages or the low pay in basic services such as call centers. Figure 9. The capitalist pyramid. The other potential explanation is the adoption of new technologies requiring skills that were initially in short supply. Companies that use computers and other new technologies need people with greater cognitive abilities—computers can do the easy, repetitive work, so the humans need to do the more challenging and creative work.

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Alan Blinder showed that offshorable jobs in the United States had suffered an estimated 13 percent wage penalty as of 2004.31 Another study found a 1 percentage point increase in the low-wage import share is associated with a 2.8 percent decline in blue-collar wages.32 On balance, however, the technical change explanation emerges as the most important driver of increasing income inequality.33 This is not the popular perception. When a factory or call center closes in the United States and reopens in China or India, or when cheap clothing imports put domestic manufacturers out of business because they can’t compete, or when immigrant workers seem to bid down wages for low-skill jobs in the neighborhood, it seems pretty obvious that globalization is the culprit for the fact that low-income families have been faring poorly in recent decades.

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For example, rather than being a center for auto manufacture, like the Detroit of the past, Hungary has become a specialist producer of auto engines, making one in every twenty-five engines in the world, while Poland specializes in transmissions, and so on. It is not just manufacturing that has globalized. Professional services are global too. Bankers, lawyers, consultants, and the like are likely to be widely traveled with projects or colleagues or postings overseas. Many more routine services, such as call centers and medical imaging offices, have also begun to ship tasks to developing countries with cheaper labor, although this outsourcing is much smaller in scale than the impression given by the media. In both cases, manufacturing and services, globalization and the adoption of new technologies have gone hand in hand.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
by Stephen Baker
Published 17 Feb 2011

Would this type of machine soon be popping up in offices and answering customers’ questions on the phone? Ferrucci envisioned a Jeopardy machine spawning a host of specialized know-it-alls. With the right training, a technology that could understand everyday language and retrieve answers in a matter of seconds could fit just about anywhere. Its first job would likely be in call centers. It could answer tax questions, provide details about bus schedules, ask about the symptoms of a laptop on the fritz and walk a customer through a software update. That stuff was obvious. But there were plenty of other jobs. Consider publicly traded companies, Ferrucci said. They had to comply with a dizzying assortment of rules and regulations, everything from leaks of inside information in e-mails to the timely disclosure of earnings surprises or product failures to regulators and investors.

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Like practically everyone else on the team, she had a doctorate in computer science, hers from the University of Delaware. She had worked for five years at Lucent Technology’s Bell Labs, in New Jersey. There she taught machines how to participate in a dialogue and how to modulate their voices to communicate different signals. (Lucent was developing automated call centers.) When Chu-Carroll came to IBM in 2001, joining her husband, Mark, she plunged into building Q-A technologies. (Mark later left for Google.) In mid-2007, the nascent Jeopardy system wasn’t really a machine at all. Fragments of a Jeopardy player existed as a collection of software programs, some of them hand-me-downs from the recent bake-off, all of them easy to load onto a laptop.

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Of all the data stored in the world’s computers and coursing through its networks, the vast majority is unstructured. Hewlett Packard, for example, the biggest computer company on earth, gets a hundred fifty million Web visits a month. That’s nearly thirty-five hundred customers and prospects per minute. Those visits produce data. So do notes from the company’s call centers, online chat rooms, blog entries, warranty claims, and user reviews. “Ninety percent of our data is unstructured,” said Prasanna Dhore, HP’s vice president of customer intelligence. “There’s always a gap between what you want to know about the customer and what is knowable.” Analysis of the pile of data helps reduce that gap, bringing the customer into sharper focus.

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 2 Oct 2017

(For instance, if the customer had made six previous calls to get an issue resolved, then it didn’t matter if the seventh was handled brilliantly.) The CEB team called the customers’ memory of previous treatment their “baggage.” Most call center reps had the instinct to avoid the customer’s baggage. If they saw in the records that the customer had been passed around a lot, they wouldn’t mention it. Why bring it up? It’s like pouring salt on the wound, they figured. Better just to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. So the CEB ran a set of studies on the art of “baggage handling.” At one call center, the researchers assigned reps at random either to ignore customer baggage or to address it. For instance, let’s say that a customer had called repeatedly about battery problems with a new tablet computer.

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What’s indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions. This is a critical lesson for anyone in service businesses—from restaurants to medical clinics to call centers to spas—where success hinges on the customer experience. Consider the Magic Castle Hotel, which as of press time was one of the three top-rated hotels in Los Angeles, out of hundreds. It triumphed over competition like the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles. Magic Castle’s reviews are stunning: Out of more than 2,900 reviews on Trip-Advisor, over 93% of guests rate the hotel as either “excellent” or “very good.”

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As Elam said above, “we were strictly peers at work and really knew very little about each other beyond our roles at the company.” That’s a frozen relationship. But, as we’ve seen, acting with responsiveness to others can create tighter bonds: bonds between teachers and parents, doctors and patients, call center reps and customers, colleagues at work, and even strangers in a lab experiment. And those bonds can continue to strengthen with astonishing speed. A defining moment of connection can be both brief and extraordinary. * * * I. For another example of nonresponsiveness, look no further than your teenager.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

Others are willing to pay a slight premium to avoid being stigmatized as a company that ships jobs overseas. Somewhere in Hollywood it’s quite possible that a young showrunner is working up a script called Insourcing, about the misadventures of an Indian manager sent to run a call center in the United States. Or he could just crib from the May 2011 Washington Post article by Paul Glader. Glader visited a call center in New York run by Aegis Communications, a unit of the Indian conglomerate Essar, where workers earn $12 to $14 per hour to “make or take calls for customers of prescription drug plans or Medicare contracts and enter and verify information.”

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Even though the United States doesn’t try very hard, and imposes needless barriers on itself, between 2005 and 2011 service exports rose more rapidly than goods exports did. And there’s room for much more. Rising wealth around the world means greater demand for services. Developing countries build exports—goods or services—by taking the low road: set up a factory to make cheap lightbulbs or build a low-wage call center, and you’re off. But it’s not all about a race to the bottom. The United States exports a lot of very expensive services—money management, education, health care, tourism—that have previously been unaffordable for the vast majority of humanity and that are getting more affordable. Like the Collinses of Wallquest before 2008, most American businesses were content to sell to their friends and neighbors and never gave much thought to selling overseas.

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Bull, a show about hot young twentysomethings doing stuff on Wall Street, aired on TNT in August 2000, just as the stock market was going to melt down, and Hot Properties, an ABC sitcom about hot young real estate brokers in Los Angeles, debuted in the fall of 2005, just as the housing market was about to peak. The NBC sitcom Outsourced, about the hilarity that ensues when a young American runs a call center in India, aired in the fall of 2010. At precisely that moment the smart money was beginning to move in the other direction. Like manufacturers, some service companies have found that they may have taken outsourcing or offshoring one or two steps too far. The same set of factors that push executives to reconsider manufacturing in the United States are leading some to reconsider the location of service positions that had been offshored.

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge
by William H. Inmon , Bonnie K. O'Neil and Lowell Fryman
Published 15 Feb 2008

Feldman uses a revenue number of $500K/year per employee, which translates to $240/hr. 1000 employees * 50% failed searches * 240/hr * 2.5 hours searching = $300K/week or greater than $15M/year. 70 Chapter 4 Business Metadata, Communication, and Search 4.4.2.6 Decrease in Call Center Volume The impact of failed searches on call center volume can be measured. If both internal and external personnel can find the information they need on a Web portal, then this represents less HR or sales requests. Feldman reports that call center volume decreases by 30% when search is improved. Good online customer service can handle up to 90 percent of customer questions. Implementing premium search can immediately boost call deflection, cutting the number of calls in half.

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Feldman backs up her statistics by noting that others have found similar results, notably: ✦ Ford Motor Company ✦ Working council of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) ✦ Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) ✦ Reuters ✦ Kit Sims Taylor Here are some attempts to quantify the cost impact of failed search in the enterprise. 4.4.2.1 Attempts to Quantify Search Impact Feldman identifies three types of costs that can be quantified: ✦ Employee time wasted ✦ Duplicating/reworking information ✦ Opportunity cost On the positive side, Feldman and Seybold identify two areas in which increased search capacity has a positive impact: ✦ Decrease in call center volume ✦ Increase in sales (conversion rates and shopping basket size—e-commerce) Each of these areas is summarized below. 4.4 Communications and Search 4.4.2.2 69 Baseline Assumptions The IDC study begins with the following baseline assumptions: ✦ Each employee costs the enterprise $80,000, which includes salary plus benefits. ✦ The average knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours/day (30%) searching for information. ✦ The enterprise employs 1000 knowledge workers. ✦ 50% of information is not centrally indexed (housed in silos as on someone’s notebook computer or a database). ✦ 50% of Web searches fail/are abandoned. 4.4.2.3 Employee Time Wasted Based on these assumptions, Feldman calculated that the enterprise wastes $48,000 per week, or almost $2.5 million a year in searches.

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Appendix Metadata System of Record Example Table 1 Metadata object system of record Meta Object Entity Name Entity Type Entity Definition Entity Scope Entity Active Ind Entity Logical Business Rule Logical Application Name Entity Synonym Name Logical Attribute Logical Attribute Definition Attribute Logical Business Rule Attribute Logical FK Ind Attribute Business Area Logical Business Function Data Subject Area Physical Column Name Physical Column Data Type Physical Column Length Physical Column Precision Strategic Modeling Tool Tactical Modeling Tool C C C C C U U C U DBMS Tool Data Integration Tool Reporting Tool U C C C C U C U C C U U C C U U C U C U C U C U (Cont.) 283 284 Appendix Table 1 Metadata object system of record (continued) Meta Object Strategic Modeling Tool Physical Column Decimal places Physical Column Default Value Physical Column Nullable Ind Physical Column Comment Physical Column Primary Key Ind Physical Column Foreign Key Ind Table Name Table Owner Table Type Table Comments Physical Table Name Physical Column Name Physical View Name Physical Database Name Physical Schema Name ETL Object Name Source Table Source Column Target Table Target Column ETL Job Name ETL Transformation Rule ETL Job Run Date ETL Job Execution Time ETL Job Row Count ETL Job Status Report Name Report Element Name Report Table Name Report Database Name Report DB Sequence Report Element Business Rule Tactical Modeling Tool DBMS Tool C U C U C U C U C C C C C U U U U U C C C C C Data Integration Tool Reporting Tool C R R R R C C C C C C C R R R R C Appendix 285 Metadata Usage Matrix Example The following table summarizes the metadata objects and the anticipated usage of each object in the following functions: Table 1 Summary of metadata objects usage Source – Metadata Object Entity Name Entity Type Entity Definition Entity Scope Entity Container Entity Active Ind Entity Logical Business Rule Logical Application Name Entity Synonym Name Logical Attribute Logical Attribute Definition Attribute Logical Business Rule Attribute Logical FK Ind Attribute Business Area Logical Business Function Data Subject Area Physical Column Name Physical Column Data Type Physical Column Length Physical Column Precision Physical Column Decimal Places Physical Column Default Value Physical Column Nullable Ind Data Lineage Impact Analysis Definition and or Glossary Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y (Cont.) 286 Appendix Table 1 Summary of metadata objects usage (continued) Source – Metadata Object Physical Column Comment Physical Column Primary Key Ind Physical Column Foreign Key Ind Table Name Table Owner Table Type Table Comments Physical Table Name Physical Column Name Physical View Name Physical Database Name Physical Schema Name ETL Object Name Source Table Source Column Target Table Target Column ETL Job Name ETL Transformation Rule ETL Job Run Date ETL Job Execution Time ETL Job Row Count ETL Job Status Report Name Report Element Name Report Table Name Report Database Name Report DB Sequence Report Element Business Rule Data Lineage Impact Analysis Definition and or Glossary Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Index Abstraction, linking structured and unstructured data, 230–231 Accuracy, metadata information, 33–34 Administration, infrastructure issues functionality requirements, 169 history keeping, 169–170 BI, see Business intelligence Broader term, definition component, 61, 63–64 Business Glossary features, 111–112 integrated technical and business metadata delivery, 152–153 Business intelligence (BI), business metadata delivery infrastructure, 163 Business metadata capture, see Capture, business metadata components, 13 definition, 38 delivery, see Delivery, business metadata funding, see Funding, business metadata historical perspective, 3–11 importance, 274–275 locations corporate forms, 15–16 reports, 14, 29–31 screens, 13–14 origins, 19–20 repository construction, see Metadata project resources, 281–282 technical metadata comparison, 12–13 conversion, 135–136, 182–186 infrastructure for integration, 165–166 separation, 140 tracking over time, 20–21 types, 158–160 Business rules business management, 238–239 business metadata, 237, 245 capturing rationale, 238–239 definition, 235–236 maintenance, 242 management, 243 metadata repository, 244–245 ruleflow, 242–243 sources, 237–238 systems, 239, 242–243 Call center volume, search problem quantification, 70 Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), note-taking as asset producing, 265 Capture, business metadata barriers, 275 corporate knowledge base, 93–94 culture, 95–96 editing automation, 128–129 expansion of definition and descriptions, 129–131 granularization, 129 homonym resolution, 132–134 manual editing, 134–135 staging area, 134 synonym resolution, 131–132 Governance Lite™, 107–109, 111 individual documentation problem, 114–115 knowledge socialization, see Knowledge socialization metadata sources comparison of sources, 127 data warehouse, 126 database management system system catalogs, 124 documents, 123 enterprise resource planning applications, 122 extract-transform-load, 124–125 legacy systems, 125–126 on-line analytical processing tools, 124 on-line transaction processing, 125–126 reports, 122–123 spreadsheets, 123 principles, 95–96 publicity, 112–113 rationale, 90–93 technical metadata conversion to business metadata, 135–136 287 288 Index Capture, business metadata (Continued) technology search, 109–111 Web 2.0 folksonomy, 118–119 mashups, 115–116 overview, 115 Card catalog, see Library card catalog CDC, see Centers for Disease Control Centers for Disease Control (CDC), linking structured and unstructured data, 231 CIF, see Corporate Information Factory C-map, see Concept Map CMMI, see Capability Maturity Model Integration Collective intelligence, knowledge socialization, 97 Communications audits, 251 clarity problems bad business decisions, 57 English language limitations, 59 everyday communications, 56–57 faulty rollups, 57–58 units of measure differences, 59 classification, see Taxonomy definitions components, 61–62 guidelines, 60–61 importance, 59–60 miscellaneous guidelines, 64 usage notes, 62–64 historic library creation, 253 human/computer communication problem, 276–278 screening, 251–253 search problem information and knowledge workers, 65–66 information provider guidelines, 71–72 quantification, 67–70 search techniques, 71 tracking down information, 66–67 Compliance communications audits, 251 historic library creation, 253 screening, 251–253 data profiling, 254–256 financial audit metadata utility, 250 transaction background activities, 250–251 prospects, 280 Sarbanes-Oxley Act provisions, 248–240 types, 249–251 Concept Map (C-map), semantic framework, 205, 209 Conceptual model, semantic framework, 204 Controlled vocabulary (CV), semantic framework, 200–201 Corporate forms, business metadata content, 15–16 Corporate Information Factory (CIF), implementation, 81–82 Corporate knowledge base, components, 93–94 Create Read Update Delete (CRUD), conflict resolution, 167 CRM, see Customer relationship management Cross selling, business metadata capture rationale, 92 CRUD, see Create Read Update Delete Customer relationship management (CRM), business metadata capture rationale, 92 Customer, definition, 56 CV, see Controlled vocabulary DASD, see Direct access storage device Data, definition, 176 Database management system (DBMS) historical perspective, 5 metadata storage, 19 system catalog as metadata resource, 124 Data Flux, data quality presentation, 190–191 Data Governance Council, metadata stewardship, 42–43 Data quality continuum, 190 Data Warehousing report, 49 definition, 177 presentation, 189–190 Data Stewardship Council, metadata stewardship, 43–44 Data warehouse historical perspective, 7–9 infrastructure, 160–161 metadata resource, 126 metadata warehouse features, 161–162 DBMS, see Database management system Decision table, business rule representation, 239–242 Decision tree, business rule representation, 239, 241 Index Definition components, 61–62 dictionary role in information quality, 186 guidelines, 60–61 importance, 59–60 miscellaneous guidelines, 64 usage notes, 62–64 Delivery, business metadata examples corporate dictionary, 147–148 integrated technical and business metadata delivery, 152–153 mashups, 149–150 technical use, 151–152 training, 148–149 visual analytic techniques, 150–151 indirect usage accessibility from multiple places, 142–143 application access, 147 interactive reports, 145–146 overview, 141–142 Web delivery, 143–144 information quality business metadata, 188–190 infrastructure considerations business intelligence environments, 163 graphical affinity, 163–164 legacy environment, 162–163 mashups, 164 principles, 140–141 prospects, 280 Description Logics (DL), semantic framework, 206 Dictionary, see Glossary Direct access storage device (DASD), historical perspective, 4–6 Disk storage, historical perspective, 4–6 DL, see Description Logics Documents, metadata resource, 123 Editing, metadata automation, 128–129 expansion of definition and descriptions, 129–131 granularization, 129 homonym resolution, 132–134 manual editing, 134–135 staging area, 134 synonym resolution, 131–132 Employee turnover, business metadata capture rationale, 91–92 289 Enterprise resource planning (ERP), metadata resource, 85, 122 Entity/relationship (ER) model, semantic framework, 203–204, 208, 210–211 ER model, see Entity/relationship model ERP, see Enterprise resource planning ETL, see Extract-transform-load Extract-transform-load (ETL), metadata resource, 85, 124–125 Federated metadata, integrated metadata management, 168 Financial audit metadata utility, 250 transaction background activities, 250–251 First-order logic (FOL), semantic framework, 206 FOL, see First-order logic Folksonomy knowledge capture, 118–119 self-organizing tags, 77 Forms, see Corporate forms Fourth generation language historical perspective, 6–7 metadata handling, 11 Funding, business metadata advantages and disadvantages of approaches, 52–53 centralized implementation, 51 localized implementation, 51–52 overview, 50–51 Glossary business functions, 60 information quality role, 186 semantic framework, 201 Governance Lite™, knowledge capture, 107–109, 111 Granularization, metadata, 129 Graphical affinity, business metadata delivery infrastructure, 163–164 Grid, metadata representation, 18 Groupware, knowledge socialization, 100–103, 279 Homonyms, resolution, 132–134 Industrial recognition, text, 227 Information quality business and technical metadata interaction, 177–186 business metadata delivery, 188–190 290 Index Information quality (Continued) definition, 177 dictionary role, 186 methodology, 187–188 Information Technology (IT) department challenges, 278–279 metadata responsibility, 38–39 Information, definition, 177 IT department, see Information Technology department KB, see Knowledge base KM, see Knowledge management Knowledge base (KB) definition, 267 building, 267 Knowledge management (KM) business metadata intersection artifact generation, 262–263 corporate dictionary example, 263 definition, 260 goals, 260–261 importance, 261 social issues graying work force, 269–270 socialization effect on knowledge, 270 tacit knowledge, see Tacit knowledge techniques, 267–268 Knowledge socialization collective intelligence, 97 experts, 97–98 groupware, 100–103, 279 knowledge management, 268, 270 technology fostering portal and collaboration servers, 100–103 social networking, 99 wikis, 103–106 Knowledge worker metadata capture, 94 search problem, 65–66 Legacy systems business metadata delivery infrastructure, 162–163 metadata resource, 125–126 Library card catalog, metadata analogy, 27–29 Life cycle, metadata, 45–48 Magnetic tape data storage, 4 languages for data reading, 10 Mashup business metadata delivery, 149–150, 164 knowledge capture, 115–116 Master data management (MDM) conflict resolution, 167 overview, 22 MDM, see Master data management Metadata definition, 9, 26–27 examples, 9 grid representation, 18 management importance, 32 metamodel, 158–160 system of record example, 283–284 usage matrix example, 285–286 Metadata project business metadata versus technical metadata, 83–84 buying versus building, 170–172 classification, 82–83 funding, see Funding, business metadata iterations of development, 84 local metadata tools, 85 metadata sources, 86–87 preexisting repositories, 172–173 rationale, 80–82 scope defining, 85–87 Metadata Stewardship Council, responsibilities, 44–45 Narrower term, definition component, 61, 63–64 National Cancer Institute (NCI), semantic vocabulary implementation, 214–216 NCI, see National Cancer Institute Null, data profiling, 183, 185–186 ODS, see Operational data store OLAP, see Online analytical processing On-line analytical processing, metadata resource, 85124 On-line transaction processing, metadata resource, 125–126 Ontology, semantic framework, 207 Operational data store (ODS), data warehousing, 8 Opportunity cost, search problem quantification, 69 OWL, see Web Ontology Language Ownership, definition, 40 Patterns, identification, 183–184, 186 PC, see Personal computer Index Personal computer (PC) historical perspective, 7 metadata handling, 11 Preferred term, definition component, 62 Punch cards historical perspective, 4 metadata, 9–10 Quality, see Data quality; Information quality Range of values, data profiling, 183, 186 RDF, see Resource Definition Framework Reference file overview, 21–22 updating, 22 Regulations, see Compliance Related term, definition component, 61 Reports interactive reports, 145–146 metadata resource, 14, 29–31, 122–123 Repository, see Metadata project Resource Definition Framework (RDF), semantic framework, 204–205 Reuse, metadata, 32–33 Sales, search problem quantification, 70 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, provisions, 248–240 Screen, business metadata content, 13–14 Search problem enterprise search, 279 information and knowledge workers, 65–66 information provider guidelines, 71–72 quantification, 67–70 search techniques, 71 tracking down information, 66–67 Self-organizing map, linking structured and unstructured data, 233 Self-organizing tags, taxonomy, 77 Semantics business metadata delivering definitions and relationships, 208–209 exposing semantics to business, 210–211 expression, 209–210 overview, 207–208 context sensitivity, 197–199 framework Concept Map, 205, 209 conceptual model, 204 controlled vocabulary, 200–201 Description Logics, 206 291 entity/relationship model, 203–204, 208, 210–211 first-order logic, 206 glossary, 201 ontology, 207 Resource Definition Framework, 204–205 taxonomy, 202 thesauri, 203 topic map, 205 UML, 205–206 Web Ontology Language, 204–205, 210 human/computer concept, 199–200, 278 importance, 196–197 practical issues integration, 211–212 National Cancer Institute semantic vocabulary implementation, 214–216 service-oriented architecture, 214 Web Services, 212–213 prospects for integration and discovery, 280 semantic Web, 195–196 spectrum, 200–201, 208 Semistructured data, examples and technologies, 222–223 Serial transfer, knowledge management, 267–268 Service-oriented architecture (SOA) integrated metadata management, 168 semantics integration, 214 SOA, see Service-oriented architecture SOAP, semantic interface, 212 Socialization, see Knowledge socialization Social networking, knowledge socialization, 99 Spreadsheets, metadata resource, 123 Stemmed words, text distillation, 225 Stewardship business metadata approaches, 44–45 artifacts, 44 Data Governance Council, 42–43 Data Stewardship Council, 43–44 historical perspective, 41–42 Metadata Stewardship Council, 44–45 definition, 40–41 Structured metadata characteristics, 16–18 examples and technologies, 219–220 linking structured and unstructured data abstraction, 230–231 examples, 231, 233 292 Index Structured metadata (Continued) integration, 230 unstructured data comparison, 221 Synonyms, resolution, 131–132 Tacit knowledge definition, 94, 264 note-taking as asset producing, 265–266 transfer nurturing, 266 Taxonomy basic rules, 73, 75 document categorization, 76 governance and taxonomy, 77 language and vocabulary, 75–76 lowest common denominator, 75 overview, 72 self-organizing tags, 77 semantic framework, 202 simplicity, 76 Team Room, knowledge socialization, 100–103 Technical metadata business metadata comparison, 12–13 conversion, 135–136 infrastructure for integration, 165–166 separation, 140 categories, 2 Technical metadata conversion to business metadata, 135–136, 182–186 profiling, 179–182 Text business metadata terms, 227–228 communications audits, 252–253 distillation, 224–229 extraneous words, 225 industrial recognition, 227 pulling, 223 relationship recognition, 228–229 stemmed words, 225 word counting, 226 Thesauri, semantic framework, 203 Topic map, semantic framework, 205 UML, semantic framework, 205–206 Unstructured metadata characteristics, 16–18 examples and technologies, 220–221 mining prospects, 281 structured data comparison, 221 text business metadata terms, 227–228 distillation, 224–229 extraneous words, 225 industrial recognition, 227 pulling, 223 relationship recognition, 228–229 stemmed words, 225 word counting, 226 Value/frequency report, data profiling, 181, 184–186 Web 2.0 knowledge capture folksonomy, 118–119 mashups, 115–116 overview, 115 semantic Web, 195–196 Web Ontology Language (OWL), semantic framework, 204–205, 210 Web Services, semantics interface, 212–213 Wiki governance, 106 knowledge capture, 104 limitations, 105–106 portal collaboration comparison, 105 wikinomics, 104 Wikipedia, 103–104, 212 Words, see Text 

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

Unlike sales account executives, support reps are typically not dedicated to specific accounts. But that doesn’t mean they can’t get quickly up to speed on the person calling in for help. Putting the customer at ease is especially important because by the time the customer calls, she has experienced a certain level of frustration, not to mention likely having been put on hold by the call center system. Increasingly, support reps are making small talk using personal information about a customer from social networking profiles and CRM systems. That way, reps can start calls on a more positive note and keep the customer engaged if she needs time, for example, to look up a solution or ask a colleague for help.

…

Last, but not least, companies have realized they can crowdsource, or outsource to the “crowd,” a substantial portion of support questions by encouraging customers to talk to one another, troubleshoot for one another, and share tips and tricks in online forums. For instance, a number of such customer self-support groups have sprung up on Facebook, often to vendors’ surprise and delight as these greatly alleviate the burden on their own reps and call centers. To better understand this phenomenon, I monitored the YouTube discussion boards on Facebook for several weeks. A few individuals in particular were extremely active in helpFrom the Library of Kerri Ross 78 Pa r t I I Tra n s fo r m i n g t h e Way We D o B u s i n e s s ing answer questions posted by other community members.

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Most cited a passion for the product and a desire to demonstrate their knowledge and be viewed as an expert in the community. Recently, salesforce.com unveiled its Service Cloud offering, connecting product conversations across different information silos such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook with internal knowledge bases that power customer portals and call center applications. The Service Cloud allows vendors to monitor, aggregate, and search conversations customers are having about their products, and to incorporate crowdsourced solutions into their centralized knowledge based in Salesforce CRM. In addition, Get Satisfaction, Lithium, and FixYa are popular startups that specialize in crowdsourced support tools.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

By 2019, the major stock exchanges were staffed by only small groups of people relegated to certain areas of the trading floor.27 The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that even these few holdouts are no longer essential, as the exchanges moved rapidly to fully electronic trading. Call centers that provide customer service or technical support are another area that is clearly ripe for disruption. Rapid advances in the natural language processing capabilities of artificial intelligence are producing applications that can automate ever more of this work via both voice communication technology and online chatbots. These jobs, of course, were already highly vulnerable to offshoring. As technology has advanced, however, many of the call center jobs in lower-wage countries like India and the Philippines are being vaporized by automation.

…

As technology has advanced, however, many of the call center jobs in lower-wage countries like India and the Philippines are being vaporized by automation. Responding to customer service queries is a task that in many ways is ideally suited to machine learning. Each interaction between a customer and a call center worker generates a rich set of data, including the question asked, the answer provided and whether the interaction fully resolved the issue. Machine learning algorithms can churn through thousands of these interactions and quickly become proficient at responding to the significant fraction of queries that tend to come up again and again. And once the system is in place, and as more customer calls come in, the algorithms get smarter and smarter.

…

And once the system is in place, and as more customer calls come in, the algorithms get smarter and smarter. There are literally dozens of startup companies offering AI-powered chatbots to automate customer service. Many of these are positioned in specific sectors such as healthcare or financial services.28 As these technologies continue to advance, call center staffing is likely to fall as things eventually reach a point where a human operator is required only for the most challenging customer interactions. The ability to write computer code is often presented as a kind of panacea for technological job market disruption. Those losing jobs in industries like journalism or even coal mining have been advised to “learn to code.”

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

If peripheral jobs are created, it is much more likely to be in the country where the workers reside. I would argue that “free trade” is the wrong lens through which to view offshoring. Instead, it is much more akin to virtual immigration. Suppose, for example, that a huge customer service call center were to be built south of San Diego, just across the border from Mexico. Thousands of low-wage workers are issued “day worker” passes and are bused across the border to staff the call center every morning. At the end of the workday, the buses travel in the opposite direction. What is the difference between this situation (which would certainly be viewed as an immigration issue) and moving the jobs electronically to India or the Philippines?

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As technology advances, we can expect that more and more of the routine tasks now performed by offshore workers will eventually be handled entirely by machines. This has already occurred with respect to some call center workers who have been replaced by voice automation technology. As truly powerful natural language systems like IBM’s Watson move into the customer service arena, huge numbers of offshore call center jobs are poised to be vaporized. As this process unfolds, it seems likely that those companies—and nations—that have invested heavily in offshoring as a route to profitability and prosperity will have little choice but to move up the value chain.

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The system would draw on product specifications, prices, and clinical studies and research to make specific and instant recommendations to doctors and procurement managers.24 Watson is also looking for a role in the financial industry, where the system may be poised to provide personalized financial advice by delving into a wealth of information about specific customers as well as general market and economic conditions. The deployment of Watson in customer service call centers is perhaps the area with the most disruptive near-term potential, and it is likely no coincidence that within a year of Watson’s triumph on Jeopardy!, IBM was already working with Citigroup to explore applications for the system in the company’s massive retail banking operation.25 IBM’s new technology is still in its infancy.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Dec 2012

What’s more, Grant’s research has shown that purpose is a performance enhancer not only in efforts like the promotion of hand washing and recycling, but also in traditional sales. In 2008, he carried out a fascinating study of a call center at a major U.S. university. Each night, employees made phone calls to alumni to raise money for the school. As is the habit of social psychologists, Grant randomly organized the fund-raisers into three groups. Then he arranged their work conditions to be identical—except for the five minutes prior to their shift. For two consecutive nights, one group read stories from people who’d previously worked in the call center, explaining that the job had taught them useful sales skills (perhaps attunement, buoyancy, and clarity).

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Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and one of America’s top young social psychologists. Some of his previous research had examined extraversion28 and he’d become curious that a trait so widely associated with sales didn’t have much connection to success in that realm. So he decided to find out why. Grant collected data from a software company that operates call centers to sell its products. He began by asking more than three hundred sales representatives to complete several personality assessments, including one that social scientists use to measure where people fall on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. This particular assessment lists statements such as “I am the life of the party” and “I am quiet around strangers” and asks participants to rate themselves on a 1-to-7 scale, with their answers resulting in a numerical measure of extraversion.

…

For two consecutive nights, one group read stories from people who’d previously worked in the call center, explaining that the job had taught them useful sales skills (perhaps attunement, buoyancy, and clarity). This was the “personal benefit group.” Another—the “purpose group”—read stories from university alumni who’d received scholarships funded by the money this call center had raised describing how those scholarships had helped them. The third collection of callers was the control group, who read stories that had nothing to do with either personal benefit or purpose. After the reading exercise, the workers hit the phones, admonished not to mention the stories they’d just read to the people they were trying to persuade to donate money. A few weeks later, Grant looked at their sales numbers.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

In early 2018 the retailer allowed more remote work because it was running out of space in some of its call centers. Emanuel and Harrington compared the call volume for workers who were allowed to work at home before and after they switched to remote work. They found that “at the time of the transition to remote work, hourly calls rose by 7.5%,” despite finding no change in the composition of calls. There was a reduction in unexcused absences, and little change in the ratings customers gave the workers for their calls. Similarly, when call-center workers were forced to go home because of COVID-19, productivity increased by 8 percent.

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We noted earlier the finding of Emanuel and Harrington that remote working was associated with improved productivity in call centers. That holds up in randomized trials as well. Stanford economists Nicholas Bloom and John Roberts, along with colleagues in China, analyzed data from a Chinese travel agency that conducted an experiment with working at home. Among workers who were interested in remote work, the firm randomized some to work at home and some to continue coming to the office. The workers who were allowed to work from home were 13 percent more productive than the workers who had to commute. If call-center work is more productive at home, why did companies wait until COVID-19 to go remote?

…

For forty years, futurists like Alvin Toffler have argued that electronic interactions would make face-to-face meetings unnecessary and that would lead to massive out-migration from cities. For forty years, they were wrong. Then, suddenly, they were right. Has Zoom replaced the conference room? The evidence suggests disruption but not a hinge of history. Simple tasks, like working in a call center, can be done well remotely, but there is evidence that remote workers learn less than their in-person counterparts. Recent research suggests that the workers who sign up for remote jobs are less committed and productive than workers who want to be live. New hiring for remote jobs, including architects, aerospace engineers, and environmental scientists, had not recovered by the end of 2020, while new hiring for non-remote jobs, like painters, messengers, and stock clerks, had largely come back.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

After his first few weeks, Piacentini called his wife back in Milan and told her not to pack their things for Seattle quite yet. But after Galli left, he grew more comfortable at Amazon. A year later, during the layoffs, he was tasked with closing Amazon’s new multilingual call center in The Hague. The facility had been poorly selected. The Hague was a financial and diplomatic hub, and the call center was incongruously located in a marble-floored building that had once been occupied by a bank. It never should have been opened in the first place, but “people at various levels were making decentralized decisions to move quickly and the process wasn’t strong,” Piacentini says.

…

Most recently, in 2013, workers at two Amazon FCs in Germany went on strike for four days, demanding better pay and benefits. The company refused to negotiate with the union. The unions themselves say there’s another hurdle involved—employees’ fear of retribution. In January 2001, the company closed a Seattle customer-service call center, as part of a larger round of cost-cutting measures. Amazon said closing the facility was unrelated to recent union activity there, but the union involved was not so sure. “The number one thing standing in the way of Amazon unionization is fear,” says Rennie Sawade, a spokesman for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.

…

In the grip of the dot-com downturn, Hsieh simply refused to let Zappos die, putting in $1.5 million of his own money and selling off some of his personal assets to keep it afloat. He moved the company from San Francisco to Las Vegas to cut costs and to make it easier to find workers for its customer-service call center. In 2004, Hsieh attracted an investment from Sequoia Capital, the firm that had backed LinkExchange. Sequoia, which had rejected Zappos a few times before coming around, invested a total of $48 million in the startup across several rounds, and a partner, Michael Moritz, joined the board of directors.

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide
by Hawon Jung
Published 21 Mar 2023

The wide, open floor of a call center, whether for a credit-card firm or a telecom company, would always be packed with hundreds of women. They were either just out of school, like Lee, or they were middle-aged women, like her mother, with few other options after their careers and ambitions had been truncated by marriage and childcare duties. While South Korean companies are often hailed for their convenient and quick customer service, especially compared to that of other countries, women like Lee and her mother bore the brunt of all the dark sides of the mantra “Customer is King.” Many call-center women suffered from bladder infections because they were required to report every single bathroom break to a manager, who would time the duration of such visits.

…

The Cannes-winning director spoke out in several occasions against sexism, gender violence, and the lack of complex female characters in films. His recent pictures were hailed for featuring strong female leads with complicated inner lives, including The Handmaiden in 2016 and Decision to Leave in 2022. CHAPTER 10 Until 2016, Lee Hyo-Rin, a thirty-five-year-old former call-center representative, didn’t think twice about her lived experiences—her father beat her mom, bosses touched her body, male coworkers—“the future family breadwinners”—always got promoted first, and her friends complained of boyfriends who were “a bit hot-tempered.” The daughter of a struggling, working-class family, Lee never complained, never protested—and never questioned why things were the way they were, especially at work.

…

Many call-center women suffered from bladder infections because they were required to report every single bathroom break to a manager, who would time the duration of such visits. Most workers were never allowed to end a call first, even with customers who would “spew all kinds of sexual insults you could possibly imagine, or never knew existed,” said Lee. (Though that practice, at least, started to change in 2017 when a teenaged call-center intern killed herself, another worker fainted after being forced to listen to sexual insults from a customer for hours, and a number of similar cases made headlines.) Men quickly moved up the ladder of “chicken cage” cubicles to become managers. Most women, traumatized and stressed, left and were replaced—”like disposable products,” said Lee—by other women, who would also quit a few years, if not months, later.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Published 6 Mar 2007

Once we have these drivers by product, activity, and channel, we can aggregate costs across all units to arrive at both transaction and total product cost. These costs are then available for use in profitability models. For example, we can report the full end-to-end product cost of residential mortgages including acquisition and renewal costs by channel, back office processing, call center support, system costs, Head Office and regional overheads. For every customer we can then arrive at the costs associated with “ownership” of each separate product in the customer’s portfolio, based on transaction usage and channel preference.11 While the math to compute activity-based costs isn’t that difficult, coming up with the needed data does require a substantial degree of diligent investigation.

…

Honda instituted an analytical “early warning” program to identify major potential quality issues from warranty service records. These records are sent to Honda by dealers, and they include both categorized quality problems and free text. Other text comes from transcripts of calls by mechanics to experts in various domains at headquarters and from customer calls to call centers. Honda’s primary concern was that any serious problems identified by dealers or customers would be noticed at headquarters and addressed quickly. So Honda analysts set up a system to mine the textual data coming from these different sources. Words appearing for the first time (particularly those suggesting major problems, such as fire) and words appearing more than predicted were flagged for human analysts to look at.

…

Health-ways uses data on members’ demographic, claims, prescription, and lab procedures to predict (using artificial intelligence neural network technology) which ones will be at highest risk for greater future total medical expenditures over the next year. Healthways employs more than fifteen-hundred registered nurses who then provide telephonic and direct mail interventions from one of its ten call centers nationwide to help members develop healthy behaviors which reduce the severity of the disease, improve outcomes, and reduce the cost to the health plan. This approach to risk management can also reduce ongoing health maintenance costs and lower the risk of disease recurrence.21 Other approaches to evidence-based health care involve developing appropriate treatment protocols for patients in health care facilities.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Much of the growth of the U.S. white-collar workforce after World War II was driven by the rapid spread of communications networks: telemarketers, telephone operators, and technical and sales support jobs all involved giving companies the infrastructure to connect customers with employees. Computerization transformed these occupations: call centers moved overseas and the first generation of automated switchboards replaced a good number of switchboard and telephone operators. Software companies like Nuance, the SRI spin-off that offers speaker-independent voice recognition, have begun to radically transform customer call centers and airline reservation systems. Despite consumers’ rejection of “voicemail hell,” system technology like My Cybertwin and Nuance will soon put at risk jobs that involve interacting with customers via the telephone.

…

However, today we are entering an era where humans can, with growing ease, be designed in or out of “the loop,” even in formerly high-status, high-income, white-collar professional areas. On one end of the spectrum smart robots can load and unload trucks. On the other end, software “robots” are replacing call center workers and office clerks, as well as transforming high-skill, high-status professions such as radiology. In the future, how will the line be drawn between man and machine, and who will draw it? Despite the growing debate over the consequences of the next generation of automation, there has been very little discussion about the designers and their values.

…

Together they built My Cybertwin into a business selling FAQbot technology to companies like banks and insurance companies. These bots would give website users relevant answers to their frequently asked questions about products and services. It proved to be a great way for companies to inexpensively offer personalized information to their customers, saving money by avoiding customer call center staffing and telephony costs. At the time, however, the technology was not yet mature. Though the company had some initial business success, My Cybertwin also had competitors, so Capper looked for ways to expand into new markets. They tried to turn My Cybertwin into a program that created a software avatar that would interact with other people over the Internet, even while its owner was offline.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

The world tends to change faster than bureaucracies can keep up, which causes problems for any organization that has lashed itself to an unbending framework of performance measures. Imagine a company with targets for resolving queries from customers who phone the call center, but no target for dealing with a problem using the Web. The target demands that resources should be funneled to the call center, when they might be better used on the website. Anyone who wants to improve will have to ignore the target. There are also two ways to sidestep a target completely: lying and cheating. It’s sometimes possible to lie—miss your target, but say you hit it—and that sounds bad enough.

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Each chapter explores a different aspect of messiness, showing how it can spur creativity, nurture resilience, and generally bring out the best in us. That is true whether we are performing with a piano in front of a concert hall audience or a slide deck in front of a boardroom; whether we are running a corporation or manning a call center; whether we are commanding an army, dating, or trying to be a good parent. The success we admire is often built on messy foundations—even if those foundations are often hidden away. I will stand up for messiness not because I think messiness is the answer to all life’s problems, but because I think messiness has too few defenders.

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A best man faced giving a wedding speech without proper footwear because the Zappos courier, UPS, had screwed up; on hearing his tale, a Zappos rep rushed him free shoes by express delivery. Another Zappos rep took a call from a customer who was staying in Las Vegas, not far from Zappos HQ. The customer was trying to get a pair of shoes that Zappos no longer stocked; the Zappos rep found them in stock at a rival retailer at a nearby shopping mall, left the call center, bought the shoes, and delivered them to the customer by hand.26 Zappos would soon be out of business if every customer received such treatment. But in each of these cases the customer was in an unusual situation: I’m returning my husband’s shoes because he just died; my shoes haven’t arrived and I am best man at a wedding tomorrow; I can’t get the shoes I want and I’m just a couple of miles from your office right now.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Many modern jobs are transactional service jobs—that is, they feature people helping customers access what they need from complex business systems. But whether the customer is buying an airline ticket, ordering a meal, or making an appointment, these transactions are so routinized that they are simple to translate into code. You might well know someone—a bank teller, an airline reservations clerk, a call center representative—who lost his or her job to the new reality of computerized systems enabling self-service. At least, you feel the absence of them when you contact a company and encounter a machine interface. Just as Era One of automation continues to play out, so does Era Two. There is still plenty of work currently performed by humans that could be more cheaply and capably performed by machines—increasingly smart ones in particular.

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Finally, we’d argue that, if the goal is to provide truly exceptional or differentiated products and services at scale, only an augmentation arrangement can accomplish that. We’re all familiar with completely automated customer service, and most of us have developed strategies for finding a human to talk to about our problem (you know—pressing zero or saying “agent”). The menu of call center information options often just doesn’t cut it. If you want your service to be high quality, or if you want your products to be differentiated from competitors, having computers churn out your processes is unlikely to do the job. When we talk about companies with high reputations in the marketplace, we seldom talk about their automation.

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An example is the use of Blue Prism software by Britain’s Co-operative Bank. Traditionally, its employees have followed a typical process when a customer has called to report a lost or stolen credit card. Having gleaned the relevant information from the customer in a conversation lasting perhaps five minutes, the call center agent would spend twenty-five minutes interacting with a variety of different internal systems to cancel the existing card, enter notes on the account, provide for delivery of a new card, and so forth. By programming software to perform these rather mundane and repetitive tasks (investing in, as Bathgate calls it, robotic process automation), Co-operative Bank has enabled agents who were dealing with two lost-card incidents per hour to deal with perhaps a dozen.

Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--And How It All Came Crashing Down . . .
by Ben Mezrich
Published 27 May 2013

And even though Scott had repeatedly explained that they weren’t interested in sports gambling, Eric had maintained that the sports books were the place to start. So again and again, Eric parked the Fiat in front of one of the nondescript warehouses or the low ranch houses and ushered the four of them inside. Each time the setup was the same. Cubicled call centers spread out across bland spaces—hell, if you walked into a call center at Hewlett-Packard or Cisco, you’d expect to see the same thing. Once they got into the back offices, they found that most of the operators behind the sports books were Americans, while the front-office staff was usually Costa Rican. But the most remarkable thing about the sports books—and the thing that they all seemed to have in common—was the seedy element at the top levels.

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Poker, the way it was played in America, had been born in Mississippi in the Wild West era. But Scott intended to take it into the modern age, to turn it sophisticated, to make it as tempting and addictive packaged in electronic bits and bytes as it was on a felt table over a sawdust floor. Sports betting—that was a different business. It was call centers taking phone calls all day long; it was dirty, mobbed up, and illegal. Poker was sophisticated, young, and hip. To capture that, Scott knew the key was going to be the game itself—the software. Now that he had his core team, was on his way to finding financing, and knew where he was going to build his empire, the next step was to figure out how.

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Which was why at the moment, Garin was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the area they’d designated as Customer Service. In front of him were a computer and a telephone. The 1-800 number that led to that phone had been inserted into the beta introduction page, so for the moment Garin was their call center, ready for action. “Okay, I guess it’s time,” Scott said. He signaled Hilt, who began to type into his computer, communicating with the server hosts at HostaRica, then with the Koreans, who would be monitoring the beta test as well. As Hilt had pointed out, it really was mostly friends and family—though they had also sent out notices through a few of the more public poker forums, advertising themselves in a decidedly grassroots manner.

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

Most British he disliked, he said apologetically, because of what they had done to India, because they always did things differently, like driving on the left and refusing to join European monetary union, and because they always acted so superior. “India will take the world to a higher plane,” he said. “Everybody should understand that—even the British.” I could not help liking him. • • • Powerful new images have emerged of India in the last ten or so years, fed mostly by its success in information technology and offshore call centers, the growing reach of Bollywood abroad—popularized in part by the increasing wealth and visibility of Indian communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere—and by India’s much-analyzed nuclear weapons program, which was first openly declared in 1998. In the same way that viewing India through a purely religious lens often distorts one’s view of the country—and can lead to a basic misreading of what is happening—these new images can also mislead.

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And when I asked him whether this work is intellectually challenging enough for him, Alok replied: “Wow! That is an awesome question!” He never really answered it. Yet the world of which Alok is a part (admittedly a relatively privileged part)—of the Internet, of information technology, of software maintenance, and of call centers, back-office processing units, and research and development hubs—is in other respects very serious. The success of India’s IT companies in attracting ever more impressive flows of offshore business from the United States and Europe has reverberations way beyond the air-conditioned offices of IT companies in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, or Mumbai.

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During my time in India I have often been amused by the foreign executives I have met who spend years occupying the same hotel rooms while they await the green light for their company to invest in India so that they can set up a permanent office. The fact that they are prepared to wait so long is an indication of how important the Indian market is to the global strategy of most U.S. and European corporations. In 2005 GE, which kick-started India’s offshore boom in the late 1980s when it set up its first Indian call center near Delhi, launched an Indian bank. GE said it anticipated “indefinite” double-digit growth in the Indian banking market over the coming decades. No one blinked. The fact that India has so far to travel makes it an especially attractive long-term prospect to many foreign investors. In Alok—and the many entrepreneurs like him in booming urban India—the global multinationals have an energetic ally.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber
Published 9 Feb 2014

Piece by piece, the Achievement-Orange logic grew deeper roots. Tasks were specialized: some people would take care of intake of new patients and determine how nurses would best serve them; planners were hired to provide nurses with a daily schedule, optimizing the route from patient to patient; call center employees started taking patients’ calls; given the growing size of the organizations, regional managers and directors were appointed as bosses to supervise the nurses in the field. To ensure accurate planning and drive up efficiency, time norms were established for each type of intervention: in one company, for instance, intravenous injections would be allotted exactly 10 minutes, bathing 15 minutes, wound dressing 10 minutes, and changing a compression stocking 2.5 minutes.

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The responsibility lies with the teams and Jos [de Blok, the founder].32 Coaches have no hierarchical power, but make no mistake, they play a crucial role just the same. Self-management is no walk in the park. Newer teams in particular face a steep learning curve. They are effectively in charge of all the aspects of creating and running a small organization of 12 people (remember, there are no intakers, no planners, no call center operators, no administrators, no managers), and at the same time they are learning to manage interpersonal dynamics within a self-organizing, boss-less team. The regional coach is a precious resource to the teams; upon request she can give advice or share how other teams have solved similar problems.

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At Buurtzorg, for example, the 7,000 nurses are supported by only 30 people working from a humble building in a residential part of Almelo, a town in the northern Netherlands—a far cry from the headquarters building you might expect for such a successful company. None of them are involved in the typical headquarters functions of nursing companies (intake, planning, call center). Buurtzorg has incredibly motivated employees (it is regularly elected “best company to work for” in the country) but, like many other Teal Organizations, it has no human resources department. People working at headquarters have a strong ethos of service to the teams of nurses—their duty is to support nurses with the same dedication and responsiveness that the nurses bring to their patients.

Building Microservices
by Sam Newman
Published 25 Dec 2014

More likely, we’ll have different roles at work. For example, a principal in the CALL_CENTER group might be allowed to view any piece of information about a customer except his payment details. The principal might also be able to issue refunds, but that amount might be capped. Someone who has the CALL_CENTER_TEAM_LEADER role, however, might be able to issue larger refunds. These decisions need to be local to the microservice in question. I have seen people use the various attributes supplied by identity providers in horrible ways, using really fine-grained roles like CALL_CENTER_50_DOLLAR_REFUND, where they end up putting information specific to one part of one of our system’s behavior into their directory services.

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And if they want to change it, they reach into the database! This is really simple when you first think about it, and is probably the fastest form of integration to start with — which probably explains its popularity. Figure 4-1 shows our registration UI, which creates customers by performing SQL operations directly on the database. It also shows our call center application that views and edits customer data by running SQL on the database. And the warehouse updates information about customer orders by querying the database. This is a common enough pattern, but it’s one fraught with difficulties. Figure 4-1. Using DB integration to access and change customer information First, we are allowing external parties to view and bind to internal implementation details.

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There is going to be logic associated with how a customer is changed. Where is that logic? If consumers are directly manipulating the DB, then they have to own the associated logic. The logic to perform the same sorts of manipulation to a customer may now be spread among multiple consumers. If the warehouse, registration UI, and call center UI all need to edit customer information, I need to fix a bug or change the behavior in three different places, and deploy those changes too. Goodbye, cohesion. Remember when we talked about the core principles behind good microservices? Strong cohesion and loose coupling — with database integration, we lose both things.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

Yang, who already entered the 2020 presidential race, argues that the US needs radically new policies to prevent mass unemployment and a violent backlash. “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society . . . That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”3 Yang is—as New York Times writer Kevin Roose puts it—“a longer-than-long shot” presidential candidate, but his themes are likely to be taken up by more electable candidates. “If we don’t change things dramatically,” Yang says in his “Andrew Yang for President” video, children will grow up in a country with “fewer and fewer opportunities and a handful of companies and individuals reaping the gains from the new technologies while the rest of us struggle to find opportunities and lose our jobs.”

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In the 2000s, Blinder became passionately concerned by the possibility that advancing information technology—what today we call digital technology—could lead to the loss of US jobs due to offshoring. What he had in mind is reverse telemigration. Instead of foreign workers working virtually in our offices, he was concerned that “our” work would be sent to foreign offices. And in many areas like call centers, and back-office processing, that is exactly what happened. As part of his effort to raise the alarm, he developed a ranking of how “offshorable” each US occupations was. His ranking was based on two criteria. If the job had to be done at a specific location in America, then it could not be displaced by foreign competition.

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A “massive employment crisis is already underway. . . . Artificial intelligence, robotics, and software are about to replace millions of workers. This is no longer speculative—it is already happening.” There is, he asserts, a very real threat facing tens of millions of Americans, everyone from truck drivers and lawyers to call center workers and accountants. He predicts a violent backlash. “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society. We’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the streets.” Yang embraces the standard stance of populist-as-outsider.

England
by David Else
Published 14 Oct 2010

You’ll need five days to complete the whole route; the northeast England section, from Penrith (in Cumbria) to the east coast is a good three-day trip. If you wanted to cut the urban sections, Penrith to Consett is perfect in a weekend. The C2C is aimed at road bikes, but there are several optional off-road sections. * * * CALL THE NORTHEAST The northeast is the call-centre capital of England, mostly because the area desperately needed to attract jobs to the region following the demise of traditional industry. But another reason might have to do with the distinctive accent, which polls have shown to be the friendliest and most trustworthy of all English accents! * * * The other option is the Hadrian’s Cycleway (Click here in Cumbria.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

One of the best examples of all three revolutions simultaneously at work is the Indian outsourcing industry. Young, educated Indians who belong to the country’s burgeoning middle class have flocked to work at urban call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, which in 2011 generated $59 billion in revenue and directly and indirectly employed almost 10 million Indians.39 As Shehzad Nadeem observed in Dead Ringers, his study of the impact of Indian call centers on their workers, “The identities and aspirations of the ICT [information and communications technology] workforce are defined increasingly with reference to the West. . . .

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Radical in their rejection of old values, conspicuous in their consumption, workers construct an image of the West that is used to benchmark India’s progress toward modernity.”40 Although the jobs pay relatively well, they plunge young Indians into a welter of contradictions and competing aspirations—that is, aspirations to succeed in an Indian social and economic context while sublimating their cultural identities with fake accents and names and dealing with abuse and exploitation at the hands of affluent customers in a different continent. For young urban Indian women in particular, the jobs have provided opportunities and economic benefits that they might otherwise not have had, leading to lasting changes in behavior that are upending cultural norms. Never mind the lurid newspaper article that talked about call centers as “a part of India where freedom knows no bounds, love is a favourite pastime, and sex is recreation.” Closer to the mark would be a recent survey by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce that young working married women in Indian cities are increasingly choosing to put off having children in favor of developing their careers.41 REVOLUTIONARY CONSEQUENCES: UNDERMINING THE BARRIERS TO POWER Plenty of events would seem to suggest that things have not changed all that much, that micropowers are an anomaly, and, ultimately, that big power can and will continue to call the shots.

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Consider the activities encompassed under the rubric of “outsourcing.” At first, this simply meant contracting with outside vendors for materials or sending goods away for assembly or some other phase in the manufacturing chain. Then outsourcing spread to services—initially, the lower-skilled services like basic accounting or call centers for fielding basic customer issues. But now, the scope of outsourcing extends to telemedicine—doctors who issue diagnoses or laboratory experts who process tests or accountants in India who file tax returns for US companies. A constellation of small firms whose geographic location is an increasingly less relevant factor turns out to be capable of delivering specialty and knowledge-intensive services at lower cost but equal quality to the in-house shops painstakingly cultivated by the old industry giants.

eBoys
by Randall E. Stross
Published 30 Oct 2008

Beirne added more details about what they saw on their visit: “Watching this girl on the phone in their mini­call center—the ability to do the McDonald’s ‘So would you like fries with that?’—the ability to add on to someone’s bill—‘Yes, yes, yes, yes’—the next thing you know, you’ve got a twenty-dollar order and away you go, and ‘I just called for milk!’ She gets an order, she just flew.” The woman in the call center worked by prompts from the system. “Barely spoke English, but didn’t need to. I’m serious. It’s so cool.” At Beirne’s mention that the call-center people probably didn’t earn more than the minimum wage, Kagle broke in: “This is an entrepreneurial company, and a lot of this has been done without a lot of capital, so there’s a big need to professionalize it.”

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It was the first to go public—but then the stock sank. It appeared that the brightest star of the early batch would be the eleventh investment, in Genesys Telecommunications Labs, one of Bruce Dunlevie’s companies, which made software for routing telephone calls from customers in large corporate call centers. The collective value of a typical venture capital portfolio will go down before it goes up—the pattern is called the J curve—because the companies that are not going to survive die before the best performers begin to shine and pull the value of the portfolio up with them. That, at least, had been the pattern in the past.

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Beirne had a sudden thought: Would there be a way, he wondered aloud, of starting a companion business that would provide scheduled home delivery for Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and other e-tailers? “Amazon is not going to be your partner in this,” Dunlevie said. “But they may,” Beirne insisted. “Amazon to your door? They can’t do Amazon to your door.” “Amazon to my door is the way it works now.” “But not delivered by someone that represents the company with a call center that’s handled by the company, that handles all your returns, scheduled delivery.” “I’m not buying it. I’m just not buying it. I have yet to return anything to Amazon. They do order consolidation. And they deliver it when I’m not there, which is the way I want it.” “You’ve got to be a top one percent user of Amazon, probably,” Beirne said.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World
by Jesse Krieger
Published 2 Jun 2014

Now it’s possible to hire, manage and coordinate teams of specialists in different countries and time zones via online platforms that enable a wide array of business functions. With little more than well-defined job requirements, you can connect with service providers around the world to act as virtual departments within your business. This goes well beyond simply “outsourcing a call center”, as that assumes there was a domestic call center beforehand… What we are interested in here is taking advantage of the 21st century Internet economy to design new business models. There is something innately fun in doing business this way and as a by-product you come to learn a little about different cultures and geographies as well as who specializes in what, and where.

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USB Superstore has two clear calls-to-action on their homepage: 1) Submit a quote request 2) Call a toll-free number The primary focus is to drive sales In many cases, you can type the script that the listener will hear directly into the IVR along with the numbers to route calls to. If no one is available, the caller can leave a message, which is then sent as an mp3 audio file, via email, to the appropriate person. The recipient can listen to the audio file right from their workstation and call back when time permits. Although we’ve all had at least one frustrating call center experience, they are very efficient from a business owner’s perspective and can be very clear and succinct. The goal here is not to give potential customers the runaround via automated voice menus, but rather to get them in touch with the Sales Team as quickly as possible. Having a toll-free number and an IVR lends an aura of legitimacy to your business, even if the calls are being routed to your home phone line in the early stages.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

These web-based businesses wanted to have a relationship with their customers, but they didn’t have the right tools for reaching them. The existing world of customer service systems was all call center–based and telephony oriented. Everything was done on the phone. But this new generation of companies did not conduct the majority of their interactions on the phone. They didn’t want to outsource to a call center and bury customers there. They wanted to chat with them where they lived—on the Web—or get in touch with them by email, but the then-current generation of software just wasn’t built to do that.

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Our first focus was on the product—and 39 Page 39 Svane c02.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:23 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D on thinking about how to do it differently. All we knew was that it had to be lean and elegant. Curiously enough, we didn’t think about much else—even the basics that would have been in an instruction manual. (There was no instruction manual!) We never thought about “call center systems.” We never thought about a “target market.” We never thought about competition. All we thought about was trying a different approach to existing customer service software. There was no business plan. There was no plan. For a long time, we didn’t have a name for our project. Morten had originally baptized it “Project Eisenhut,” which is German for Iron Hat.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

“The Hidden Costs of IT Outsourcing.” MIT Sloan Management Review 42, no. 3: 60–69. Batt, Rosemary, David Holman, and Ursula Holtgrewe. 2009. “The Globalization of Service Work: Comparative Institutional Perspectives on Call Centers.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 62, no. 4: 453–487. Batt, Rosemary, and Hiroatsu Nohara. 2009. “How Institutions and Business Strategies Affect Wages: A Cross National Study of Call Centers.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 62, no. 4: 533–552. Bebchuk, Lucian, and Jesse Fried. 2004. Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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This strategy led companies to focus their key strategies and attention on the development of brands and strong customer identification with the company’s goods or services; on building the capacity to introduce new products or designs; or on implementing true economies of scale or scope in production and operation. Activities outside of this core were shifted away. As a result, companies outsourced customer relations to third-party call centers; manufacturers shifted production to networks of subcontractors for subassemblies; and private, public, and nonprofit organizations contracted out everything from cleaning and janitorial services to payroll and human resource functions. Shedding Employment By focusing on core competencies, lead businesses in the economy have shed the employment relationship for many activities, and all that comes with it.

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The same technologic and information systems that made outsourcing possible, combined with the reduction of many international trade restrictions, such as quotas and tariffs, enabled offshoring to expand rapidly as a source of intermediate products for manufacturers or as a source for more and more final products for retailers.22 In more recent years, digital technologies and the growth of higher-level skills in India, China, and elsewhere led to similar offshoring in service industries—in areas ranging from call centers to software engineering. Outsourcing and offshoring have also been a growing topic of popular debate in the past decade and featured prominently in the presidential campaign of 2012. Offshoring has drawn particular attention because of its perceived impacts on wages and employment of U.S. workers directly affected by it.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

While China resists such maneuvers, it also knows that the only way to neutralize Australia’s alliance with America is to make it a supply chain ally. Tug-of-war is just as fierce higher up the value chain. The Eastwood City Cyberpark in Manila is home to a bustling high-rise cluster of offices with thirty thousand call center workers varying their shifts by the global time zone they serve—much the same way as the Indian call center workers in Bangalore used to do before the Filipinos took their business. The intense competition among circuit nodes is a reminder that the global economy shapes how we work more than geography or daylight. The former Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston once wrote, “Time zones matter more than borders,”5 and indeed some economists have recently proposed that the United States reduce to just two time zones.6 If horizontal tug-of-war is resource mercantilism, then vertical tug-of-war is innovation mercantilism: grabbing the most technologically sophisticated and financially profitable segments of strategic industries.

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With Chinese-built infrastructure, Sri Lanka has already made big gains in tourism and exports of textiles, garments, and tea. Now India can leverage China’s infrastructure to more efficiently deliver its own projects for Sri Lanka, from railways to housing, and use the island as a reliable back office and outsourcing site for call centers and car part assembly for the huge south Indian market of 300 million people. The Indian Ocean is once again the epicenter of competitive connectivity. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, India’s coastal kingdoms haggled with European colonial merchants to get the most favorable terms for carrying their goods to far-off markets.

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Investors are willing to go into SEZs for low-cost labor and protection from regulatory hassles, while governments need foreign investment to create jobs and train workers, import technology and skills, and provide a demonstration effect for the rest of the economy. So far, it has proven to be a win-win combination: Sacrifice some sovereignty in order to become a productive member of the supply chain world. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of industrial parks and technology clusters that focused on higher-value areas such as call centers, software programming, and logistics management emerged in both developed and developing countries. Their role models were America’s already established Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (which also became a foreign trade zone in the 1980s). Bangalore and Hyderabad, today India’s IT jewels, benefited from diaspora talent, investment from multinationals such as Texas Instruments, and support from a new agency called Software Technology Parks of India.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

A customer with a question about a product—delivery time, the color, shipping, a return—had to disconnect from the Internet to use the phone to call customer service. Rosenzweig and PeopleSupport co-founder David Nash created the first outsourced chat service for online retailers. They opened a call center in Los Angeles and ran offbeat recruitment ads, such as “I dare you to send us your résumé. Hell, we’re only the hottest dot-com start-up in town,” and “Stock options are better than a knee to the shorts.” The call center was located in Westwood, Los Angeles, and most of their employees were UCLA students or graduates. Dot-com companies signed up in droves to outsource their customer support, sending their own employees to Westwood to train the PeopleSupport team.

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Stamm eventually acknowledged that he was the idea, engineering, and start-up guy. As his company grew to more than five hundred employees, he realized he was out of his element as a manager. MJ found it refreshing to have a founder who was aware of his limitations. Under Zingale, Clarify evolved from doing one thing—call center automation—to offering various products for customer service, including marketing, analytics, sales, and support. It became a platform of services, allowing companies to modify the interface by adding fields, tables, screens, and other tools. By the late 1990s, Zingale and Stamm had learned to work well together, and Clarify had become a hot property.

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THERESIA Theresia had an idea for a new category of investing, one that related to a few of her favorite things: shopping, travel, and real estate. Having landed the WebCohort/Imperva deal, and with her investment in PeopleSupport rising from the ashes and now showing amazing growth after moving its call center operations to the Philippines, she was on the trail of what she believed would be the next great investment opportunity for Accel. Her “proactive investment thesis,” as she called it, came from watching Google grow into the most popular way to search the Web. In 2003 Google earned $106 million on sales of nearly $1 billion.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

Hardly a week goes by without a major American employer announcing a round of layoffs as part of a new “restructuring plan” designed to “improve profitability.” American Express was flush with cash in 2015, but ordered a round of layoffs in a bid to quickly boost its profit margins and stock price. It didn’t work—AmEx stock slid some more and stayed down for the following two years. Sprint was minting money in 2016 but slashed thousands of call center jobs to reduce expenses, a move that simultaneously wreaked havoc on workers and led to inferior customer service. Offshoring continues, too. Carrier, the air-conditioning company, sent jobs to Mexico in 2017 even after President Trump intervened. And Nabisco, AT&T, and Brooks Brothers all shifted jobs overseas in recent years.

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“We found urgent requests for help were increasingly the result of everyday events, like an unexpectedly steep medical bill, a student loan payment, or a car breaking down,” Schulman said. The next year, PayPal decided to survey its low-paid and entry-level employees, a group that included many men and women working in call centers, and which accounted for about half the company’s workforce. Schulman went into the exercise with high hopes. “Honestly I was doing it because I thought the results that would come back were going to be really good, because PayPal is a tech company, and we pay at or above market rates everywhere around the world because we want to attract really great employees,” he said.

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“Honestly I was doing it because I thought the results that would come back were going to be really good, because PayPal is a tech company, and we pay at or above market rates everywhere around the world because we want to attract really great employees,” he said. That was not the case. Two thirds of respondents said they were running short on cash between paychecks. “We got the survey results back and I was actually shocked to see that our hourly workers—like our call center employees, our entry-level employees—were just like the rest of the market, struggling to make ends meet.” Schulman was stunned. “What it told me is that for about half our employees, the market wasn’t working. Capitalism wasn’t working.” At one of the most profitable companies in the world, more than 10,000 employees were barely making enough to survive.

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice)
by Adam Goucher and Tim Riley
Published 13 Oct 2009

It’s Too Slow; We Hate It With the random 4s issue resolved, it was time for the real testing to begin: user acceptance testing (UAT). On some projects, UAT is little more than a formality, but on this project (and all of the projects I’ve worked on since dealing with call-center support software), UAT was central to go-live decisions. To that point, Susan, a call-center shift manager and UAT lead for this project, had veto authority over any decision about what was released into production and when. The feature aspects of UAT went as expected. There were some minor revisions to be made, but nothing unreasonable or overly difficult to implement.

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COLLABORATION IS THE CORNERSTONE OF BEAUTIFUL PERFORMANCE TESTING 47 It Can’t Be the Network As it turned out, the eVersity project was canceled before the application made it into production (and by canceled, I mean that client just called one day to tell us that their entire division had been eliminated), so we never got a chance to see how accurate our performance testing had been. On the bright side, it meant that the team was available for the client-server to Web call-center conversion project that showed up a couple of weeks later. The first several months of the project were uneventful from a performance testing perspective. Sam and the rest of the developers kept me in the loop from the beginning. Jim, the client VP who commissioned the project, used to be a mainframe developer who specialized in performance, so we didn’t have any trouble with the contract or deliverables definitions related to performance, and the historical system usage was already documented for us.

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There were some minor revisions to be made, but nothing unreasonable or overly difficult to implement. The feedback that had us all confused and concerned was that every single user acceptance tester mentioned—with greater or lesser vehemence—something about the application being “slow” or “taking too long.” Obviously we were concerned, because there is nothing that makes a call-center representative’s day worse than having to listen to frustrated customers’ colorful epithets when told, “Thank you for your patience, our system is a little slow today.” We were confused because the website was fast, especially over the corporate network, and each UAT team was comprised of 5 representatives taking 10 simulated calls each, or about 100 calls per hour.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

Where honest illusions add joy into the world, dishonest ones are intentionally aimed toward convincing people their worlds are a tawdry and miserable sort of place. Similarly, I received a very large number of testimonies from call center employees. None considered his or her job bullshit because of conditions of employment—actually, these appear to vary enormously, from nightmarish levels of surveillance to surprisingly relaxed—but because the work involved tricking or pressuring people into doing things that weren’t really in their best interest. Here’s a sampling: • “I had a bunch of bullshit call center jobs selling things that people didn’t really want/need, taking insurance claims, conducting pointless market research

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I called people up to hock them useless shit they didn’t need: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering (with some mindless add-ons) for £6.99 a month.” • “Most of the support covered basic computer operations the customer could easily google. They were geared toward old people or those that didn’t know better, I think.” • “Our call center’s resources are almost wholly devoted to coaching agents on how to talk people into things they don’t need as opposed to solving the real problems they are calling about.” So once again, what really irks is (1) the aggression and (2) the deception. Here I can speak from personal experience, having done such jobs, albeit usually very, very briefly: there are few things less pleasant than being forced against your better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense.

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This is, incidentally, a particularly British variation of rights-scolding (though it increasingly infects the rest of Europe): older people who grew up with cradle-to-grave welfare state protections mocking young people for thinking they might be entitled to the same thing. There was also another factor, much though Rachel was slightly embarrassed to admit it: the position paid extremely well; more than either of her parents was making. For someone who’d spent her entire adult existence as a penniless student supporting herself through temping, call center, and catering jobs, it would be refreshing to finally get a taste of bourgeois life. Rachel: I’d done the “office thing” and the “crap job thing,” so how bad could a crap office job be, really? I had no concept of the bottom-of-the-ocean black depths of boredom I would sink to under a bulk of bureaucracy, terrible management, and myriad bullshit tasks.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Keith Naughton and Spencer Soper, “Alexa, Take the Wheel: Ford Models to Put Amazon in Driver Seat,” Bloomberg.com, January 5, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/steering-wheel-shopping-arrives-as-alexa-hitches-ride-with-ford; Ryan Knutson and Laura Stevens, “Amazon and Google Consider Turning Smart Speakers into Home Phones,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-google-dial-up-plans-to-turn-smart-speakers-into-home-phones-1487154781; Kevin McLaughlin, “AWS Takes Aim at Call Center Industry,” Information, February 28, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/aws-takes-aim-at-call-center-industry. 45. Lucas Matney, “Siri-Creator Shows Off First Public Demo of Viv, ‘The Intelligent Interface for Everything,’” TechCrunch, http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything. 46.

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“Social Media Analytics,” Xerox Research Center Europe, April 3, 2017, http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Our-Research/Natural-Language-Processing/Social-Media-Analytics; Amy Webb, “8 Tech Trends to Watch in 2016,” Harvard Business Review, December 8, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/12/8-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2016; Christina Crowell, “Machines That Talk to Us May Soon Sense Our Feelings, Too,” Scientific American, June 24, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/machines-that-talk-to-us-may-soon-sense-our-feelings-too; R. G. Conlee, “How Automation and Analytics Are Changing Customer Care,” Conduent Blog, July 18, 2016, https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2016/07/18/how-automation-and-analytics-are-changing-customer-care; Ryan Knutson, “Call Centers May Know a Surprising Amount About You,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/that-anonymous-voice-at-the-call-center-they-may-know-a-lot-about-you-1483698608. 74. Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Bold Promises Fade to Doubts for a Trump-Linked Data Firm,” New York Times, March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html; Mary-Ann Russon, “Political Revolution: How Big Data Won the US Presidency for Donald Trump,” International Business Times UK, January 20, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/political-revolution-how-big-data-won-us-presidency-donald-trump-1602269; Grassegger and Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down”; Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit,” Guardian, February 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit; Paul-Olivier Dehaye, “The (Dis)Information Mercenaries Now Controlling Trump’s Databases,” Medium, January 3, 2017, https://medium.com/personaldata-io/the-dis-information-mercenaries-now-controlling-trumps-databases-4f6a20d4f3e7; Harry Davies, “Ted Cruz Using Firm That Harvested Data on Millions of Unwitting Facebook Users,” Guardian, December 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data. 75.

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Alexa is ready with restaurant recommendations or advice on where to get your tires checked. “As pervasive as possible” explains why Amazon wants its Echo/Alexa device to also function as a home phone, able to make and receive calls; why it inked an agreement to install Echo in the nearly 5,000 rooms of the Wynn resort in Las Vegas; and why it is selling Alexa to call centers to automate the process of responding to live questions from customers by phone and text.44 Each expansion of Alexa’s territory increases the volume of voice surplus accrued to Amazon’s servers and fed to Alexa. The path to the coronation of the One Voice is not an easy one, and there are other travelers determined to elbow their way to the finish line.

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting
by Ashutosh Deshmukh
Published 13 Dec 2005

There is an endless debate about what these terms mean, and different definitions and interpretations are offered by vendors, consultants and academicians. The explanations provided here use commonly accepted definitions and provide general understanding of the terms. CRM integrates customer-centric efforts such as marketing campaigns, call centers, help desks, sales force automation and customer analytics (such as most profitable customers). SRM and SCM handle managing sourcing of raw materials, production, inventory and logistics; additionally, these also improve collaboration with suppliers, manage risk and analyze supplier profitability.

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The Evolution of Accounting Software 39 • Ability to view billing and payment information, purchases and returns chronologically, by order or by item • Drill-down capabilities • Chat facilities with sales people Credit Approval • Web-based credit check and credit approvals • Automatic credit check and approval • Automatic credit card validation • Ability to check on established credit limit Billing and Collections • E-mail invoicing • Electronic bill presentment • Ability to handle multi-format payments; for example, letters of credit, bills of exchange, electronic fund transfers, credit cards, digital cash and so forth Services • Capability to create and track service request • Ability to integrate call centers and e-mail requests with back-end office processing • Access to company knowledge bases • Real-time information on orders, shipping and payment information • Ability to create collaborative platforms or forums • Online technical support Expenditure and Conversion Cycles EDI • Integrated EDI solution – electronically sends and receives purchase orders and payments • Can handle various EDI standards • EDI solution pre-mapped to each trading partner’s standards • Links to third-party translators and mapping software applications • Interfaces with EDI and fax software • Bar code interface Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc.

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Tools such as paper-based records, telephone interviews, focus groups and marketing surveys have been used for CRM purposes. The advent of the Internet, data warehouses and data mining technologies offer more sophisticated ways to manage the customer relationship process. The objectives of CRM include improving customer service, increasing efficiency and effectiveness of call centers and marketing channels, cross selling of products, discovering new customers and improving profitability of existing customers. Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. The Revenue Cycle 135 CRM endeavors to focus disparate pieces of information such as customer behavior, customer demographic and financial data, sales and marketing, channel effectiveness, and service and support functions to establish a better relationship with the customer.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Using speech recognition technology and natural language processing, a company called Clinc is now developing a new AI voice assistant to be used in drive-through windows of fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Taco Bell.18 And in 2018, Google announced that it is building AI technology to replace workers in call centers. Virtual agents will answer the phone when a customer calls. If a customer request involves something the algorithm cannot yet do, he or she will automatically be rerouted to a human agent. Another algorithm then analyzes these conversations to identify patterns in the data, which in turn helps improve the capabilities of the virtual agent.19 As the technology evolves, its effects on the labor market could be significant. Despite decades of companies’ moving jobs offshore, roughly 2.2 million Americans still work in 6,800 call centers across the country, and several hundred thousand do similar jobs in smaller sites.20 * * * One of the greatest leaps forward has taken place in autonomous driving.

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Burns, 2018, “Clinc Is Building a Voice AI System to Replace Humans in Drive-Through Restaurants,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/video/clinc-is-building-a-voice-ai-system-to-replace-humans-in-drive-through-restaurants/. 19. D. Gershgorn, 2018, “Google Is Building ‘Virtual Agents’ to Handle Call Centers’ Grunt Work,” Quartz, July 24, https://qz.com/1335348/google-is-building-virtual-agents-to-handle-call-centers-grunt-work/. 20. Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson, forthcoming, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox.” 21. See C. B. Frey and M. A. Osborne, 2017, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?

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The disruptive force of technology, Yang fears, could cause another wave of Luddite uprisings: “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society.… [W]e’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”8 The point is not fatalism or pessimism. And it is surely not that we would be better off slowing down the pace of progress or restricting automation. The Industrial Revolution was the beginning of an unprecedented transformation that benefited everyone over the long run.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by Sofi Thanhauser
Published 25 Jan 2022

The glittering glass tower forms a marked contrast to the appearance of the rest of the city. The tower houses call centers rented out to businesses by the owner, Yusuf Amdani, the president of Grupo Karim’s, a major presence in textiles and real estate in Honduras. A young Honduran like Allan could spend his entire life within Amdani’s suzerainty. Indeed, Allan almost had. Amdani owns UNITEC, Allan’s alma mater, which gives a discount to students who work in the call centers of the tower he also owns. Students and call center workers on their lunch break can shop at Altera, a mall within the Smart City, also owned by Amdani.

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At the high end, minimum wage paid $465 a month, at the low end $263. Many of these workers have three to four kids. And besides, he said, it was only the really big companies that actually paid the legal minimum wage. The only other job his college degree could get him in Honduras, Allan said, was work in a call center, but that work paid $500 a month at most. Unless, he said bitterly, you were the president of the Central Bank of Honduras, Rina María Oliva Brizzio, daughter of the president of Congress, who makes $8,300 a month even without a degree in finance. I asked if his parents were going to be sad to be so far from Allan’s daughter, who is three.

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Students and call center workers on their lunch break can shop at Altera, a mall within the Smart City, also owned by Amdani. When they graduate, they can find full-time work at the call centers, or in one of his many manufacturing facilities in Choloma. There, his holdings include spinning mills, fabric plants, and garment factories. Past the Altia tower, Yusuf Amdani’s own house is easily recognizable from a distance because it is built higher up in the hills than any other structure in the city, set flagrantly above the line above which it is technically illegal to build. I stopped at the tower on my way to the major port in San Pedro Sula. With the help of my translator, Gustavo, I explained to the receptionist at the Honduran Manufacturers Association that I was writing a book and needed access to the port to understand how export processing zones helped the Honduran economy.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

Because of this, dozens of companies are entering the space, focusing not only on facial information but on the other ways we engage the world emotionally. Tel Aviv–based Beyond Verbal is an emotions analytics company that extracts and identifies feelings conveyed by intonations in the human voice. Its initial primary application was for use in call centers and other customer services in order to read and understand consumer emotions and sentiment on the spot. Today they are expanding into other markets, specifically wellness and health.9 Based on over twenty-one years of research by physicists and neural psychologists, the company’s systems have been trained using more than 1.6 million voice samples from people in 174 countries.

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The samples are each analyzed by three psychologists who must agree on the emotions being conveyed in order to be added into the training database. According to the company, the software can not only detect a caller’s primary and secondary moods but also certain aspects about their attitudes and personalities. All of this can be used to guide automated systems and customer service agents in how best to meet the customer’s needs. Call centers can use it in different ways to better respond to situations. For instance, there are different strategies for dealing with frustrated customers genuinely seeking a solution versus those who just want to voice their frustration. Beyond Verbal’s technology uses deep learning and pattern recognition techniques to extract the emotional content from voice waveforms.

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Looking at comments from some of the industry’s leading players, we can ascertain what they themselves anticipate or want to see happen in the future. As mentioned earlier, Yuval Mor of Beyond Verbal thinks emotions analytics software will soon be available on virtually every voice-enabled platform. This would mean that software agents like Siri or call centers on the other side of the world would be able to judge your mood and frame of mind in the instant you interacted with them. Additionally, your phone calls to friends would be able to offer the option of including an emotion channel, above and beyond what was already being conveyed naturally. Presumably, in the interest of personal privacy, each of these will offer the ability to opt out if you so desire.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Published 23 May 2011

Once you buy a typical consumer product, the company doesn’t want to hear from you. If you call, it means something is going wrong. An average call to a company’s call center costs $6 or $7 when you include all the costs, according to Elizabeth Herrell, Forrester’s expert on contact centers. Technical support calls cost around twice that: $10 to $20. This adds up. Companies that do telephone support spend billions of dollars to run those call centers. The quest to reduce those support costs has driven two of the huge trends in corporate America in the past ten years. First, starting in the late 1990s, companies recognized they could send people to their Web sites for information.

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As of this writing, compensation for overseas telephone staff runs about 40 percent lower than the same staff in the United States—and most of the costs of those calls are staff costs. Based on these cost savings, 3.4 million American jobs and 1.2 million European jobs are likely to go offshore by 2015, many of them jobs in call centers.3 But are those calls any better at helping people? Don’t you dread calling support on the phone and navigating those interactive voice response systems? The problem isn’t whether the person on the other end is in India or Ireland; it’s whether he or she can actually help. And as for Web self-service—sure, we all try it, but the results are hit or miss.

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In a recent study of cancer patients by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health: See “The USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health National Survey of Households Affected by Cancer,” November 2006, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-2. 3. 3.4 million American jobs and 1.2 million European jobs will go offshore by 2015, many of them jobs in call centers: This estimate of American jobs going overseas comes from the May 14, 2004, Forrester report “Near-Term Growth Of Offshoring Accelerating” by John McCarthy, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-3a. The European estimate comes from the August 18, 2004, Forrester report “Two-Speed Europe: Why 1 Million Jobs Will Move Offshore” by Andrew Parker, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-3b. 4.

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

Which is why, rather than bury its phone number deep within the website, Zappos posted its number atop every page and staffed its call center 24/7. (Some calls, so long and intimate, resemble “protracted talk therapy,” as one observer noted.) Which is why Zappos offered a 365-day return window and free shipping. Which is why, when one customer failed to return a pair of shoes because of a death in the family, Zappos sent her flowers. To shift the framework like this—from a conventional financial one to a quasi-friendly one—Zappos first needed to shift the framework between the company itself and its workers. A call-center job isn’t typically very desirable, nor does it pay well.

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And why a stroll through the cubicles at Zappos feels like a trip to Mardi Gras, with music, games, and costumes. Customer reps are encouraged to talk to a customer for as long as they want (all without a script, natch); they are authorized to settle problems without calling in a supervisor and can even “fire” a customer who makes trouble. Just how desirable is a call-center job at Zappos? In a recent year when it hired 250 new employees, the company fielded 25,000 applications—for a job that pays only $11 per hour! The most impressive result of all this frame-shifting? It worked: Zappos smoked the competition and became what is thought to be the biggest online shoe store in the world.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal , Tantum Collins , David Silverman and Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015

In 2008, Pentland studied a Bank of America call center. Such centers tend to be standardized and reductionist—up there with manufacturing in terms of the degree to which things are prescribed. Success is measured by AHT (average call handle time), which ideally should be as low as possible. Pentland gave workers sociometric badges all day for six weeks, and measured levels of interaction and engagement. When he shifted the coffee break system from being individual to being team based, interaction rose and AHT dropped, demonstrating a strong link between interaction and productivity. As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity

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As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity. • • • But fostering such engagement is more easily said than done. Almost every company has posters and slogans urging employees to “work together,” but simply telling people to “communicate” is the equivalent of Taylor’s telling his workers to “do things faster,” and stopping there. GM, in addition to the “cost is everything” slogan, had posters everywhere reading “QUALITY ABOVE ALL”—but it was the former, not the latter, that was practiced. It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture.

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engagement and external exploration . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 19–20. higher levels of creative output . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 100. 87.5 percent . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 102. high and low-performing groups . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 106. Bank of America call center . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 93. average call handle time . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 94. $15 million in productivity . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 95. PART IV LETTING GO No captain . . . Nicolson, Seize the Fire, 25. CHAPTER 10: HANDS OFF largest naval force . . .

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

Beyond the imperative for solid execution, most startups confront only one “do or die” decision about their technology and operations: whether to outsource key activities or undertake them internally. For example, an entrepreneur might face choices about whether to equip a new warehouse or instead rent an existing facility; whether to outsource customer service to a third-party call center operator; and whether to build software applications in-house or hire a contractor. Such decisions involve significant risk, because a new venture’s first investment round often provides just enough capital to run the business for twelve to eighteen months. If it takes four months to figure out that outsourcing product development to a contractor was a big mistake, and another three months to recruit a team of engineers to do that work in-house, an entrepreneur could have burned through half of the capital she raised—with little progress to show and no margin for additional errors.

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Likewise, the founder/CEOs of these struggling startups were more likely to have been disappointed with the quality of advice they received from their investors and more likely to report frequent, serious, and divisive conflict with investors over strategic priorities. Partners Finding the right strategic partners can have a major impact on an early-stage startup’s performance. Partners can lend their resources—key technologies, manufacturing capacity, warehouses, call centers, and so forth—to a new venture that lacks the wherewithal and/or time to develop such resources in-house. However, the asymmetry in bargaining power between a big, mature, resource-rich company and a fledgling startup can make it difficult to secure the right resources on reasonable terms. Quincy, for example, outsourced manufacturing to third-party clothing factories, a common practice for apparel startups.

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Finally, a scaling startup already has engineers who can build the new products, and they may be able to speed up development by repurposing some technology and components. Likewise, the team may be able to gain operational efficiencies by leveraging slack capacity in operations, say, in warehouses or call centers. While these benefits from product line expansion may be compelling, the risks can be daunting. Any new product faces all of the liabilities of newness that we reviewed in Part I: Demand may be weaker than expected, rivals may offer a better mousetrap, product development may be delayed, and so forth.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
by C. K. Prahalad
Published 15 Jan 2005

Block by block we slowly built up a clicks-and-mortar strategy.”18 This progressive and imaginative use of technology was a vital key to ICICI’s ability to serve the BOP profitably. ICICI Bank: Innovations in Finance 295 COPS Internet 7% 5% Call Center 6% Jan. 2002 Branch 35% ATM 47% Branch ATM Cash Jan. ’02 Transactions Apr. ’01 18% 19% 82% 81% Non-Cash Jan. ’02 Transactions Apr. ’01 41% 50% 33% 39% Call Centers Internet COPS Nil Nil 9% 6% 7% 5% 10% Nil Figure 2 ICICI’s channel usage. Source: http://r0.unctad.org/ecommerce/event_docs/monterey/ mor-icici-india-EFfD.ppt. ICICI also was a new entrant to retail banking.

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Reducing Corruption: Transaction Governance Capacity Appendix: List of eSeva Services Payment of utility bills Electricity Water and sewerage Telephone bills Property tax Filing of CST returns Filing of A2 returns of APGST Filing of AA9 returns of APGST Collection of examination fee Filing of IT returns of salaried class Sale of prepaid parking tickets Permits and licenses Renewal of trade licenses Change of address of a vehicle owner Transfer of ownership of a vehicle Issue of driving licenses Renewal of driving licenses (nontransport vehicles) Registration of new vehicles Quarterly tax payments of autos Quarterly tax payments of goods vehicles Lifetime tax payments of new vehicles Certificates Registration of birth Registration of death Issue of birth certificates Issue of death certificates Internet services Internet-enabled electronic payments Downloading of forms and government orders Reservations and other services Reservation of APSRTC bus tickets Reservation of water tanker Filing of passport applications Sale of nonjudicial stamps Sale of trade license applications Sale of National Games tickets Sale of entry tickets for WTA Sale of EAMCET applications Business to Consumer (B2C) services Collection of telephone bill payments Sale of new AirTel prepaid phone cards Top up/recharge of AirTel Magic cards Sale of entry tickets for Tollywood Star cricket Sale of entry tickets for Cricket match (RWSO) Filing of Reliance CDMA mobile phone connections ■ ■ ■ ■ Railway reservation Sale of movie tickets Payment of traffic-related offenses Payment of degree examination fees of O.U. 97 98 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid Sale of I-CET applications Online reservation of Tirupati Temple tickets Collection of bill payments of Idea Cellular Collection of bill payments of HUTCH Issue of encumbrance certificate Market value assistance General insurance Reservation of tourism tickets for accommodation Reservation of tourism bus tickets Call center Indian Airlines ticket reservation Life insurance premium payment Issue of caste certificates Sale of Indira Vikas Patra ATM services Collection of bill payments of Air Tel Renewal of drug licenses Issue of bus passes Collection of trade licenses of Labor Department 6 Development as Social Transformation W e have looked at the BOP as a viable and profitable growth market.

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Monitoring thousands of drivers, damages to merchandise, turnover, and attending to customer demands for more accurate delivery time forecasting are not trivial. Finally, controlling the default level might be the key challenge for Casas Bahia. The company opened a centralized call and collection center to address this challenge. Since consolidating more than 300 call center employees from all stores, collections recovery has increased 100 percent. Casas Bahia must develop a process whereby it can maintain or reduce its current default rate while continuing with its plan of rapid expansion. Another threat is the increasing competition of large hypermarts. It is unclear whether or not those chains will develop the capability to serve the BOP with any significant presence.

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History
by Kirsten Grind
Published 11 Jun 2012

Meetings were held in conference rooms with the door closed, rather than in the shared areas that WaMu had created when it built the skyscraper. Everyone avoided the bank’s cubes, the tall, echoing “shower stalls” that could transmit noise across the room. At the FDIC in Washington, a representative in the agency’s call center e-mailed one of Bair’s deputies with an update at the end of the day. “The FDIC call center received 233 inquiries from WaMu customers concerned about the safety of their deposits. Call center staff indicated the volume was steady and the callers appeared to be very concerned.” That evening the three men most responsible for the country’s financial system—Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, New York Fed chairman Tim Geithner, and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke—delivered an ultimatum to a group of Wall Street bankers who had been instructed to gather at the Fed’s offices in lower Manhattan.

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As Killinger worked on the Great Western deal, he and Debbie were in the middle of renovating the kitchen. Executives at the bank, calling with some concern or another about the merger, heard hammers banging in the background during the conversation. Killinger once drove to the opening of one of Washington Mutual’s new call centers with dirt under his fingernails, although this was unusual. Killinger cared strongly about appearances. They bought the house for $215,000 in 1983. By 2008, it was valued at about $2 million. Even when the Killingers had finished remodeling, however, the house looked respectable but average. It was the kind of house you might find in any upper-middle-class neighborhood.

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She had suffered the same kind of devastation that beset Pepper, and she didn’t think she could just sit around and stew about it. On the phone, the two devised a plan to raise money for the hundreds of workers who they knew would soon lose their jobs. Specifically, they wanted to help the people working in WaMu’s call centers or its branches across the country—the ones working for less than $25 an hour. It would be known as the WaMu Alumni Fund. Other former WaMu executives joined the effort. Pepper wrote a long e-mail to the bank’s employees, explaining the group’s plans. Over the years, he had written many letters about the bank.

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game
by Lee Munson
Published 6 Dec 2011

The brokerage firm was switching tons of assets from the brokerage side to the banking side to boost the bank’s deposits. It was nuts. Overnight, a bank that had nothing but a call center and a single location in Reno was now ready to start borrowing money from the Federal Reserve based on deposits that were created overnight with the click of a mouse. Each step was carefully crafted to quickly capitalize a bank in order to lend money on mortgages. Total loyalty would need to be enforced. Step two was the credit cards. Hey, I got one myself. They were pushing the cards on anyone they could get to fill out the form or call into the credit call center. It didn’t matter if you had a big or small account, or even if you had an account in the first place.

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Actually, it wasn’t really the bank, but PHH Mortgage. They provide “Private Label Solutions” and according to their web site are the “mortgage engine behind many leading banks and financial institutions including Charles Schwab Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation, UMB.”5 Once, the person in the call center told me the Merrill Lynch mortgage room was next door. I plugged the referral number into the CRM, and once the deal closed, I was paid my money. We never called it a commission, but it is hard to call it anything else. While I was able, over the years, to do a few primary mortgage referrals, most of the action was in HELOCs.

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It
by Craig Brandon
Published 17 Aug 2010

Lenders set up funds and lines of credit for schools to use in exchange for putting the banks on their preferred lender list and for the colleges dropping out of the direct federal loan program, which was designed to provide low-interest loans to students. In addition, colleges allowed lenders to set up call centers that directed calls from parents to the college about student aid directly to the lenders’ call centers, where the people who answered the phone pretended to be college employees. They were actually salesmen from the loan companies. Why bother with the government loans and all those forms, parents were told, when the predatory lenders here can do all the work for you?

…

While the 2010 changes to the federal student loan program will help this problem by increasing Pell grants to low-income students and reducing the payments for student loans, the bloated costs of higher education will remain a significant problem until they are dealt with by college administrations. In chapter two, we looked at the kickbacks that party school administrators were accepting from predatory lenders in exchange for allowing them to set up call centers where lenders pretended to be college employees. In addition, some colleges allowed lenders to put their names on the college’s “preferred lender” lists that implied they were endorsed by the college. Students who complained to administrators about financial problems were simply handed a predatory loan application, even though the government loan programs usually offer a much better deal.

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Remain Twenty-Something for Ever
by Isy Suttie
Published 28 Jan 2016

Luckily, being a single writer/performer/Pac-Man aficionado allowed me to scrabble around to my heart’s content, because I didn’t have to inform a boyfriend of my scrabbling schedule and because you don’t really have to grow up in my job. Admittedly, at THAT point, to make ends meet I was also working in a call center for a virtually bankrupt food-delivery company in a corrugated iron shack with no windows, but that made me feel that my options were even more open. Surely they were open. They had to be. At the very least, someone was going to build a window into the wall. Weren’t they? This is a book about what happened after that pivotal moment at the service station when Amy and Gavin, two of the best housemates I’ve ever had, told me they were having a baby.

…

Some of them were from school, and I could barely recall them—a blur of clumsy kisses that tasted of cider and Embassy Filter cigarettes, things that happened while one of you was babysitting, buying matching T-shirts, sweaty palms on roller coasters, broken hearts that felt like they would never heal, and a prismatic myriad of terrible fingering techniques. The three six-to-nine-month ones weren’t worth examination, either. One had been at youth theater, and was only really because he was Kenickie in Grease; the second was with a guy from a call center I once worked at who said “groovy” a lot; and the third was with Tom, a musician who was lovely but not right for me. So that left the long-term one that wasn’t Sam—an on-off relationship with a guy in college that was fueled by lager and late-night chats about which Mike Leigh film we’d ideally be in (little did we know we were about to graduate straight into playing pigs, rats, ducks, and crack addicts in Theater in Education tours*)—it was just one of those inevitable drama-school things that happens, like orange leg warmers and people dribbling with concentration as they try to become “centered.”

…

HIS WIFE: Erm—we paid a tenner to get in— SCOTTISH GUY NEAR BACK: No, Ruth, this is so bad, I’ve got to do something. For the sake of all of us. PEOPLE AROUND HIM: Yeah! SCOTTISH GUY NEAR BACK: I’ll pay you twenty quid to get off! I pause, strum the trusty D chord again, and look at him. I hadn’t gone full time with stand-up at that point. I was working in the call center, and twenty pounds was a hell of a lot of money to me. In a way, this would be “earning money from stand-up,” wouldn’t it? I was standing on a stage, talking, and someone was going to give me money. In fact, they were giving me a pound a minute! The fact that he was giving me money to stop talking was a small detail.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

But that afternoon, I tried to call my daughter in France using my brand new phone. No luck. The phone did not allow me to make international calls. This led me into the Kafkian world of customer service. I first called the store and asked to be connected with the mobile phone department. No one picked up. I then tried the call center and talked to a representative, who could not help me. I eventually had to take another trip to the store to get this fixed. For me, it was a textbook case of a company that had become more focused on selling a product than genuinely seeking to help its customers. The company was shooting itself in both feet by having front liners no longer able or motivated to truly engage with customers and meet their needs.

…

If sensors reveal, for example, that the fridge does not get opened often enough or that people do not get out of bed, the agents can initiate help. When we started investigating GreatCall as a business, we were shocked to learn that fewer than 2 percent of the call agents leave their job every year. In most call centers, turnover is typically over 100 percent a year. It is a draining job to answer customers’ complaints and often be unable to help much. GreatCall is a jaw-dropping exception because employees know they are saving lives. Still, finding meaning and purpose is not restricted to jobs that involve saving lives.

…

Effective diversity at the board level is about finding the right skills and building critical mass—not tokenism—so different perspectives and views achieve better outcomes.15 Racial imbalances among employees turned out to be more challenging to redress. In 2016, focus groups I ran with minority employees and managers made one thing painfully clear to me: our African American colleagues often felt stuck at entry-level positions, with few prospects for advancement. At headquarters, they felt trapped in the call center, hardly ever considered for promotions. Best Buy’s General Counsel Keith Nelsen, as executive sponsor of the Black Employee Resource Group, was batting hard on behalf of Black candidates, but they never got the jobs. Many employees of color were from other parts of the country and felt displaced in Minnesota.

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
by David J. Anderson
Published 6 Apr 2010

It was launched to the market as PCS Vision. The launch involved release of around 15 new handsets with a target of 16 new features that utilized the high-speed data capabilities of the new network. Sprint had a retail network across the United States that employed 17,000 people. They had a similar number of folks in call centers who took customer-care calls from users. Both the retail sales channel and the customer-care associates had to be trained to support the launch of the new service. I jokingly suggested that the best way to do this would be shut everything down for two days, fly everyone into Kansas City for a night, and rent the Kansas City Chiefs’ stadium, where we could deliver a two-hour PowerPoint presentation on the big screens at either end of the stadium.

…

Our customers would hardly accept a 48-hour support outage while we trained our operators on the next generation of technology. And losing two days of sales revenue from the retail channel wouldn’t have helped our annual revenue targets. A training program was devised, and train-the-trainer education was delivered. A program for training regional retail staff was devised, as was a similar one for call centers. Trainers were sent out into the field for six weeks to train small groups of people as they came off shift. The cost of delivering the training was huge. The time commitment—six weeks—was significant, and the half-life of the training in the memories of the workforce was also about six weeks.

…

Failure Load Failure load is demand generated by the customer that might have been avoided through higher quality delivered earlier. For example, a lot of help desk calls generate costs for a business. If the software or technology product or service were of higher quality, more usable, more intuitive, more fit-for-purpose, then there would be fewer calls. This would enable the business to reduce the number of call center personnel and reduce costs. Lots of calls to a help desk tend to generate lots of production defect tickets. When selecting the functions in scope for a project or iteration, the business must choose between new ideas and production defects. Production defects aren’t just software bugs; they include usability problems and other non-functional issues such as poor performance, lack of responsiveness under load or certain network conditions, and so on.

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money
by Frank J. Ohlhorst
Published 28 Nov 2012

Some of the data may have to be purchased, and some may be available under the public domain. The key is to start with the internal, structured data first, such as sales logs, inventory movement, registered transactions, customer information, pricing, and supplier interactions. Next come the unstructured data, such as call center and support logs, customer feedback (perhaps e-mails and other communications), surveys, and data gathered by sensors (store traffic, parking lot usage). The list can include many other internally tracked elements; however, it is critical to be aware of diminishing returns on investment with the data sourced.

…

The prospect of being able to process troves of data very quickly, in-memory, without time-consuming forays to retrieve information stored on disk drives, will be a major enabler, and this will allow companies to assemble, sort, and analyze data much more rapidly. For example, T-Mobile is using SAP’s HANA to mine data on its 30 million U.S. customers from stores, text messages, and call centers to tailor personalized deals. What used to take T-Mobile a week to accomplish can now be done in three hours with the SAP system. Organizations that can utilize this capability to make faster and more informed business decisions will have a distinct advantage over competitors. In a short period of time, Hadoop has transitioned from relative obscurity as a consumer Internet project into the mainstream consciousness of enterprise IT.

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
by Patty McCord
Published 9 Jan 2018

That commitment to achievement is what we want to foster, not the expectation that as long as you’re working hard, the company will have your back. We should not make false promises of job security. I was consulting to a CEO and he asked me, “What should I do about our call center people? We’ve moved the rest of the company into a new building, and I don’t think we want to bring our call center people into the space. I think it might be best to outsource that work now.” I asked him, “Why have you been lying to them?” He said, “What are you talking about? I would never do that! Never in a million years!” So I asked him, “Is it true that you said that everybody who comes to work for you will have a future in the company, that their career with the company will continue as long as they’re willing to contribute?”

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Mike Halsall, a construction company executive, told us that significant disruptions to his industry include: Increased collaboration (making an opaque industry more transparent and substantially more efficient) Ever-more sophisticated design software and visualization 3D printing Halsall estimates that the sum of these disruptions could reduce the number of people working in construction by more than 25 percent within ten years. (The construction industry, by the way, represents a $4.7 trillion industry annually.) In the corporate travel industry, Russ Howell, EVP of Global Technology at BCD Travel, notes that 50 percent of the transactions at telephone-based call centers moved to the Internet in less than a decade. Furthermore, he expects 50 percent of those to move to mobile smartphones within three years. As this new information-based paradigm causes the very metabolism of the world to heat up, we’re increasingly feeling its macroeconomic impact. For example, the cheapest 3D printers now cost only $100, which means that within five years or so most of us will be able to afford 3D printers to fabricate toys, cutlery, tools and fittings—essentially anything we’re able to dream up.

…

Needless to say, Xiaomi features a full complement of ExO characteristics. Xiaomi has an extremely flat structure consisting of core founders, department leaders and about 4,300 employees, a system that enables short-line communication and decision-making in a fast-paced organization [Autonomy]. Some 3,000 employees, including 1,500 people working at a call center, perform e-commerce, logistics and after-sales. The rest of the workforce (1,300 employees) works in R&D, which, at 30 percent of the workforce, is significant. The culture of the individual teams is that of a traditional clan or tribe—family-like and focused on mentoring, collaboration and adhocracy [Autonomy, Experimentation].

…

We’ve already seen some of the ways Zappos uses ExO attributes: an emphasis on customer service [MTP: “Provide the Best Customer Service Possible”]; its creation of a community around common passions and a common location in the Las Vegas Downtown Project, and its managed communities through Like-Like relationships [Community]; and its use of the Face Game to improve internal culture [Engagement: gamification]. To that list add the fact that Zappos employees answer 5,000 calls a month and 1,200 emails a week (and even more during the holiday season, when call-frequency increases significantly). Call center employees don’t have scripts and there are no limits on call times; in fact, the longest Zappos call reported is ten hours and twenty-nine minutes [Autonomy, Dashboards]. 50 percent of a new recruit’s probationary review is based on his or her cultural fit with the company. Each recruit spends four weeks shadowing experienced employees [MTP], and at the end of that period is offered $3,000 to leave the company—further weeding out cultural misfits.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

Across the United States, calls to 211 networks (which provide information about social services and emergency support) also skyrocketed during the pandemic, to 75,000 calls a day from 30,000 per day during ordinary times, according to United Way Worldwide, which runs the 211 program. Calls also lasted longer, with some taking as long as thirty minutes versus the usual four to six minutes, as many people were food or housing insecure for the first time and had no idea where to begin. Ordinarily, if a disaster hits one region and the local call center gets overwhelmed, other call centers in other parts of the country can provide backup. But this time all of the 211 networks were swamped. To deal with the overload, developers at United Way used Twilio Flex to create a system that lets people in any part of the country call an 800 number and get routed to their local 211 service or go to an AI-assisted interactive voice response (IVR) system that answered commonly asked questions.

…

Providers can launch a video visit with a patient, review relevant patient history, and update clinical documentation directly within Epic. Not all of the new use cases involved life-and-death situations. In Brugherio, Italy, we helped QVC Italia, a TV-based shopping channel, remain in operation by deploying a Twilio-based call center that let its customer service agents work from home. The new system supports not just phone calls but also SMS and WhatsApp—and took less than a week to get up and running. Back in the States, we helped Comcast integrate Twilio Video into their internal customer database so technicians could help a customer whose critical TV or Internet connection wasn’t working, without having to step foot in the customer’s house.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

The company uses the accompanying analytic suite to “identify top performers” (and, by implication, those at the bottom as well), and plan schedules and distribute assignments in the store accordingly. Theatro’s devices are less elaborate than a Hitachi wearable called Business Microscope, which aims to capture, quantify and make inferences from several dimensions of employee behavior.33 As grim as call-center work is, a Hitachi press release brags about their ability to render it more dystopian yet via the use of this tool—improving performance metrics not by reducing employees’ workload, but by compelling them to be more physically active during their allotted break periods.34 Hitachi’s wearables, in turn, are less capable than the badges offered by Cambridge, MA, startup Sociometric Solutions, which are “equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer” and are capable of registering “tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.”35 As with all of these devices, the aim is to continuously monitor (and eventually regulate) employee behavior.

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Though top executives may, for the time being, manage to wriggle free from algorithmic performance evaluation, it seems highly likely that employment at all other levels will become increasingly contingent on a continuously iterated double articulation of assessment and selection that leaves no room whatsoever for the distracted, the halfway-competent, the deliberately shirking or simply the different. Everything that wearables and workstation systems do for the shop floor, the call center and the checkout counter, analytic suites like BetterWorks do for the management echelon.41 The same anomaly detection subroutines that identify when a customer service representative’s average call length or escalation rate has climbed past the permissible value can trivially discover when someone is away from their desk too long, taking over-frequent bathroom breaks or gossiping with friends in other departments (never mind that such interdepartmental contacts are how organizations break through groupthink and actually innovate).42 As employee monitoring (and self-monitoring) inexorably advances across the enterprise, the data it generates won’t simply evaporate.

…

Nothing that might challenge the social and economic order in any way is ever allowed to breach the surface. The state retains full responsibility for the distribution of social goods, doling them out as rewards to parties in favor, and withholding them from suspect ethnicities and other fractious social formations. Everyday life in Perfect Harmony is the voice-stress analysis of the call-center worker that allows for the training of the virtual agent that replaces her. It is the risk-assessment algorithm that predicted she would be laid off, and preemptively raised the APR on her loans, as well as the blockchain-mediated smartlock that turfs her out of her high-rise microflat the moment she comes up short on rent.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

Across the country, it created an opportunity to learn about the new challenges that tech was creating and the brighter prospects that might emerge if we could harness technology in new ways.8 As we drove the Interstate 10 corridor, a recent addition to the El Paso economy caught our eye. Massive call centers had sprung up in the desert, a rapidly growing industry drawing on the region’s ability to recruit workers who speak both English and Spanish. These call centers, which employ thousands of El Pasoans, can serve a population of almost a billion people throughout the Western Hemisphere. But as we toured the area, a nagging thought weighed heavily, and it wasn’t a happy one. Many of these call center jobs could vanish a decade from now, maybe even sooner, replaced by artificial intelligence. As we met with the region’s leaders to talk about how AI was likely to impact the local economy, it seemed important to start with a caveat.

…

But with improved outdoor microphones, artificial intelligence can capture and understand the spoken word as well as a person, meaning that this task could soon be performed entirely by a machine. Before we know it, we’ll approach a drive-through and talk to a computer rather than a person. The computer may not be 100 percent accurate, but neither is a human being. That’s why there will be an opportunity to verify and correct our order. It’s why we looked at the burgeoning call-center industry in El Paso with a mixture of admiration and concern. So much of talking to customers on the phone involves understanding what they want and solving their problems. But computers are handling simple customer support requests already. Often it feels as if the hardest thing to do when calling for customer support is reaching a real person.

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill
Published 5 Jan 2015

Kushner’s business plan had projected that 7,500 people would sign up by the time the October 1 launch enrollment period ended on March 31, 2014. Oscar would need a lot of word of mouth, propelled by those ads and the distribution of its literature in targeted neighborhoods, to get that many people to click through and buy. Still, as a crew of new customer service call center people were being tested with mock questions (“I’m thirty-two. Why do I need this?”) in a glass-enclosed room off to the side, Kushner and his partners were pumped. They thought they had cracked the code. That they understood the numbers. That their outsourced telemedicine doctors would not create a budget hole.

…

One reported in at about 8:30 that the only problem was traffic on the phone lines, which had become jammed. The traffic was now so high, one senior person reported to one of the CMS press people, that he was beginning to think they had been “hacked by some right wingers. But so far so good.” “HAVE A GREAT DAY” By now Bataille was picking up reports from call center supervisors that people were complaining about something having to do with the identity verification process for registering an account. Either it was broken or the instructions about how to use it were unclear. I already knew that. At 8 A.M. I had gone online pretending to be from Indiana (one of the thirty-six states on the federal exchange) and was told, first, that, unlike in Kentucky, I had to establish an account before I could browse around.

…

Here’s what I got back: This is what we’re telling reporters right now: “We have built a dynamic system and are prepared to make adjustments as needed and improve the consumer experience. This new system will allow millions of Americans to access quality, affordable health care coverage.… Consumers who need help can also contact the call center, use the live chat function, or go to localhelp.​healthcare.​gov to find an in-person assistor in their community.” It was a parodylike attempt to glide over reality with the kind of happy talk—“dynamic”!—that Washington reporters roll their eyes at. My own reaction to that statement and to the “Have a great day” live chat sign-off was more jaundiced.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

“I can’t tell you how many checkbooks we printed to first name ‘asdf’ last name ‘jkl’… and all of them got printed,” Steve Armstrong remembered. On top of it all, X.com’s phone line exploded with customer complaints. One news article pointed to X.com’s call volume as evidence of early traction, but for its team members fielding calls in a makeshift back-office call center (dubbed “the cave”), angry customers were a perpetual source of anxiety. Everyone, it seems, was a critic. In late January 2000, X.com’s CEO’s mother, Maye Musk, wrote to her son with product guidance. “A friend and I don’t use our titanium credit card much as we cannot get frequent flyer miles.

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If something went wrong, users reasoned, it must be X.com’s fault. Customer service, company leadership decided, must be made a priority. * * * At first, X.com tried the typical approach: outsourcing calls and complaints. X.com contracted with California-based firms, including staffing a call center in Burbank. But these solutions were expensive and often incapable of solving user problems. “They charged us tons of money, and they were terrible,” Musk said. X.com’s Julie Anderson set out to find a solution. Anderson scouted other customer service firms around the country, including one promising location in Boise, Idaho.

…

Responsible. Hardworking. You name it,” remembered Anderson. Because of the outpost’s early success, X.com leadership gave the go ahead to briskly expand the Nebraska operation, which grew from a couple dozen customer service reps on April 17 to 161 reps by May 12. In a mere matter of weeks, the Nebraska call center had more employees than the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, and the group’s results were dramatic. By May 12, 2000, X.com could proudly announce in a company-wide email that “the email backlog is nearly gone.” The company also closed the expensive Burbank customer service operation. That summer and in the years that followed, X.com employees made regular pilgrimages to Omaha—product team members in order to understand the tools needed by reps, company executives to establish relationships with the Omaha senior managers, and more.

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town
by Beth Macy
Published 14 Jul 2014

In 1975, right out of high school, Kissee started her working career doing piecework for Sara Lee Knit Products, and she was earning ten dollars an hour plus benefits when it closed in 1994—not long after Chinese textile managers came and watched her work. “In the beginning, we used to get truckloads of stuff they’d sewed badly, and we had to redo their mistakes,” she recalled. “No one ever said we’d be replaced.” But replaced she was, first in the textile mills, then in the call centers—where it was workers from the Philippines who ultimately nabbed her call-center job at StarTek in 2011. It was her sixth layoff or company closing in eighteen years. “I like’d to died,” Sallie Wells of Bassett told the Martinsville Bulletin on the day the W.M. plant closing was announced. She’d spent ten years working in its sanding room.

…

I took notes while Henry County assistant prosecutor Wayne Withers drove my car, pointing out churches where copper pipes had been ripped out and homes where burglars were caught stealing opiates and antianxiety drugs. We drove past sad old strip malls and parking lots riddled with weeds, vacant except for a guy hawking sports jerseys from the trunk of his car. We drove by the abandoned call center that was supposed to reemploy hundreds of the displaced workers and did so, beginning in 2004—before it shut down, eight years later, and moved offshore to the Philippines. “I see a lot of people in court now for fighting with their wives,” Withers said. “People who were middle class before they lost their jobs.

…

Ed) is pictured on the wall of the corporate offices, aka the Taj Mahal. (Photograph by Jared Soares) Aftermath: A Trade Adjustment Assistance worker helps displaced Henry County worker Frances Kissee fill out her paperwork. Kissee lost six jobs in eighteen years to closures, the most recent in 2012 when the Martinsville call center she was working for moved operations to the Philippines. (Photograph by Jared Soares) Aftermath: Once regal, C.C. Bassett’s house on the hill has fallen into disrepair, along with most of the town. “It’s a money pit,” said current owner Carolyn Brown, who has trouble heating it in winter. Mr.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

One former McKinsey consultant said the firm earned its money reorganizing parts of the company. Stephen Smith had worked for more than twenty years at a call center in Connecticut when, with no warning, he learned the company was closing three area call centers, including his. At age forty-six, Smith had to search for a new job. As reported by The Guardian, Smith said about ninety employees were offered severance packages or the option of relocating to Georgia or Tennessee—not a viable option for employees with spouses who worked, or who had children in school. Cindy Liddick had worked at the AT&T call center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for twelve years before it closed in 2018.

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McKinsey designed a system—the Claims Core Process Redesign—that pushed adjusters to make quick, lowball offers rather than allow them to come up with settlements that they considered fair. Adjusters, now tethered to a computerized claims system called Colossus, were reduced to little more than call-center workers reading prepared scripts. Pop-outs became rare. For homeowners’ claims, it was another computer program—Xactimate. But the idea was the same. Push claimants to accept less than the covered amount. Allstate says this characterization is “false and misleading” and that it overhauled its claims system in the 1990s to “pay claims more promptly and accurately.”

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

From its early days, HBO executives took a look at these regional call centers and saw an opportunity. HBO filled its satellite offices with specialists whose job was to sidle up to the cable company call centers and win over their employees. In theory, the phone operators were supposed to be telling customers about a diverse range of offers, say, a one-time discount from the Disney Channel, or a special offer from Showtime. But HBO’s specialists did everything they could to make sure that HBO, not Showtime, was at the forefront of conversations by lavishing rewards on the call center employees, ranging from cash to appliances to plane tickets to Hawaii.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A ABC, 15, 80 Abdul-Mateen II, Yahya, 330 Abraham, Nancy, 341, 368 Abraham, Seth, 38, 55, 121–22 Adams, Amy, 341 Adamson, Allen, 337 Adler, Ed, 195 advertising (See marketing) Akselrad, Harold, 181, 204 Albrecht, Chris, 45, 54, 87, 104, 137, 185, 350 background of, 25–27 Band of Brothers and, 135, 147, 153 as CEO of HBO, 160 on Chris Rock, 93 Comic Relief, staging of, 29–30 Emerson affair and assault by, 56–58, 126, 197–99 at IMG, 211–12 investment in TV series and, 79–81 Jensen assault and arrest of, 194–97, 199 marriage to Coady, 243–45 resignation of, 199 The Sopranos and, 97–101, 105–6, 125–26, 127 as West Coast programming head, 27–30 The Wire and, 171 Albrecht, Kate, 245 Aldrin, Buzz, 108 Alexander, Jason, 50 Alford Plea, 249–50 Ali, Muhammad, 1, 4, 5 Allen, Woody, 342 All England Club, 53 Altman, Robert, 39 Altschuler, John, 271 “Always on Sunday” (Tammany Hall), 145–46 Amazon, 337 AMC, 210–11, 237, 283 American Beauty, 139 Americans, The, 283 American Way of Death, The (Mitford), 138–39 Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo, 282 Anderson, Don, 68 And the Band Played On, 60–61 Angels in America (Kushner), 165 Angels in America (TV series), 165–67, 169 Antholis, Kary, 31–32, 108, 163, 164 anthology series, 46–47 Any Given Wednesday, 291 AOL-Time Warner HBO, impact on, 141–43 merger creating, 133–34 stock performance of, 159–60 See also Time Warner Apatow, Judd, 56, 110, 230–31 Apple TV, 278 Arledge, Roone, 35–36 Arli$$, 79 Armstrong, Jesse, 313–15, 359, 360–61 AT&T announces streaming service, 319 debt load of, 328 dividend of, 328–29 Elliott Management stake in, 325 Justice Department antitrust suit against, 301–2, 309 relationship between HBO and AT&T executives, 317–18 Stankey-Plepler town hall on post-merger future of HBO, 309–12 Time Warner purchased by, 295–98 WarnerMedia spinoff and merger with Discovery, 353–59 Auerbach, Jeffrey, 163 B Baldwin, Dave, 52, 134, 143, 145, 160, 249, 250 Baldwin, Jason, 82, 83 Balian, Gina, 224 Ball, Alan, 139–41, 143–44, 173, 220, 222 Ballers, 287 Band of Brothers, 135, 147, 152–53 Barr, Roseanne, 44 Barris, Kenya, 333 Bartlett, Murray, 363 BBDO Worldwide, 84–85 Bellamar, Ariane, 350–51 Benben, Brian, 49–50 Benioff, David, 223, 224, 225, 300, 301 Ben Stiller Show, The, 56 Berbick, Trevor, 37 Berg, Alec, 271 Berkes, Otto as chief technology officer, 260–61 confrontations between Berkes’s team and HBO’s IT department, 274–76 difficulties in creating platform for HBO Now, 274–76 plan for overhauling streaming service (Project Halley), 261–63 Plepler and, 275–76 resignation of, 277 Berlinger, Joe, 69–71, 82, 83, 84, 248, 249, 250, 303, 304 Bernstein, Rick, 192, 214 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 55, 87, 206 Albrecht arrest for assaulting Jensen, handling of, 57–58, 195–97, 199 at Albrecht’s wedding to Coady, 243–45 background and early career of, 77–78 Band of Brothers contract and, 135 as CEO of HBO, 73, 77–79 as co-COO of AOL-Time Warner, 160 dismissive on Netflix’s success, 239, 269 ends tennis coverage, 121–22 From the Earth to the Moon budget approved by, 106–7 on Fuchs dismissal, 74 investment in TV series and, 79 sale of Time-Warner to AT&T and, 295–96 Time Warner-AOL merger and, 143 Big Little Lies, 344 Big Love, 187 Binder, Mike, 154 Biondi, Frank, 24, 41 biopics, 59–63 Bitterman, Betty, 119–20, 137–38 Black Lady Sketch Show, A, 342 Black viewership, 68–69 Blockbuster, 132, 180, 234 Bloodworth-Thomason, Linda, 188, 217 Bloys, Casey, 172, 230, 253–54, 271, 284 data science and, 368–69 female executives hired under, 342 Insecure and, 299 on Netflix’s spending on stand-up comedy, 294 as president of programming, 287 Succession and, 315, 316 on “the next great show,” 369–70 Boardwalk Empire, 231–33 Boedeker, Hal, 209 Bowie, David, 50 Bowman, Robert, 277 boxing programming, 34–38, 54–56, 190–94, 214, 316 Braun, Lloyd, 94, 95 Brie, Alison, 350 Bright, Kevin, 49–50 Bright Shining Lie, A, 114–16 Brim, Margaret, 121–22 Brindle, Shelley, 19, 142, 185, 197, 245, 267, 276–77, 280 Brodsky, Irene Taylor, 304 Brown, Tina, 213 Bryant Park office, 24 budget for Band of Brothers, 135, 292–93 for Dream On, 50 in early 1980s, 29 for From the Earth to the Moon, 106–7 for Game of Thrones, 224 “HBO shrug” and, 135, 153, 158–59, 293 for Larry Sanders Show, 66, 67 licensing/coproduction strategy for early series, 66–67 for Nevins’s documentaries, 31 for The Pacific, 292, 293 for Sopranos episodes, 126–27 theatrical model of budgeting for shows, 158–59 for Tyson, 38 Burns, Ed, 104 Buscemi, Steve, 232–33 Bushnell, Candace, 88–92, 168 business model cable operator call centers, relationship with, 19 customer data, lack of, 18–19 lavish entertainment of clients, 19 Byers, Mark, 70–71, 82–83 C Californication, 211 Callender, Colin, 61–62, 86, 87, 166, 217 Campbell, Bruce, 356 Campbell, Joseph, 99 Caramanica, Jon, 298 Carlin, George, 28–29 Carnivàle, 187, 241 Carson, Johnny, 65 Carvey, Dana, 65 Case, Steve, 134, 296 “Case for Reparations, The” (Coates), 329–30 Cathouse, 22 Cayce, Edgar, 98–99 CBS, 15, 17, 45–46, 90, 164–65 Central Park West, 89–90 Century Plaza Tower office, 28 Chaney, Jen, 342 Chappelle, Dave, 65, 294 Chase, David, 93–101, 105, 123–24, 147–48, 162, 208, 226, 348–49, 369 Chau, Hong, 330 Cher, 86 Chernin, Peter, 27, 295 Chernobyl, 368 Cherry, Marc, 171 “Chimps” ad campaign, 84–85 Chris Rock Show, The, 92–93 churn, 20–21 Cinemax, 18 Citizen Cohn, 59 Clarkson, S.

More Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 25 Jun 2008

Econ 101 management is the style used by people who know just enough economic theory to be dangerous. The Econ 101 manager assumes that everyone is motivated by money, and that the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to give them financial rewards and punishments to create incentives. For example, AOL might pay their call-center people for every customer they persuade not to cancel their subscription. A software company might give bonuses to programmers who create the fewest bugs. It works about as well as giving your chickens money to buy their own food. One big problem is that it replaces intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation.

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Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again. The second implication of fixing everything two ways is that eventually, all the common and simple problems are solved, and what you’re left with is very weird uncommon problems.

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Greed will get you nowhere R ecently, I was talking with the people who have been doing most of the customer service for Fog Creek over the last year, and I asked what methods they found most effective for dealing with angry customers. “Frankly,” they said, “we have pretty nice customers. We haven’t really had any angry customers.” Well, OK, we do have nice customers, but it seems rather unusual that in a year of answering the phones, nobody was angry. I thought the nature of working at a call center was dealing with angry people all day long. Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service 253 “Nope. Our customers are nice.” Here’s what I think. I think that our customers are nice because they’re not worried. They’re not worried because we have a ridiculously liberal return policy: “We don’t want your money if you’re not amazingly happy.”

Stealth of Nations
by Robert Neuwirth
Published 18 Oct 2011

Other countries offer tax breaks to whole swaths of industries—for instance, this is how India promoted the creation of industrial parks to house call centers and information technology firms. What’s interesting about these deals is that, in essence, they legally convey to certain segments of the business community the benefits of being in System D. Of course, you might argue that these businesses are excellent investments in the long run—that New York office towers will, over the long haul, wind up stimulating the economy and producing additional tax revenues, that the workers hired by the call centers and IT firms in India are young people who will constitute the country’s growing and prosperous middle class for decades to come.

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Of course, you might argue that these businesses are excellent investments in the long run—that New York office towers will, over the long haul, wind up stimulating the economy and producing additional tax revenues, that the workers hired by the call centers and IT firms in India are young people who will constitute the country’s growing and prosperous middle class for decades to come. But, on the other side of the debate, some argue that office towers would get built anyway without any subsidy and that the tax deals promote overdevelopment. And, in the Indian arena, some economists point out that the number of people working in call centers and IT businesses is a tiny percentage of the population. Street hawking, by contrast, employs far more people, and is, therefore, far more crucial to India’s economic survival. Another economic complaint against System D businesses is that they are simply not geared to grow. As sociologist Alejandro Portes, who has written analytical works about System D since the 1980s, put it, “This is not an engine for capital accumulation and investment.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

As MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his collaborators (Lorin Hitt of the University of Pennsylvania, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University, and my NYU colleague Prasanna Tambe, among others) have discovered in a series of studies, digital technologies hold the potential to dramatically improve the productivity of economic activity organized within companies, but such productivity gains only accrue to those firms (about 20% of all firms in their studies) that also invest in a series of “complementary organizational changes,” like the redesign of work, an increase in performance-based pay, an increased empowerment of workers, and a flattening of the hierarchy.12 We have also witnessed a wide range of outsourcing that has been enabled by digital technologies, as Dartmouth’s James Quinn described in detail in his MIT Sloan Management Review article.13 Today, for example, a vast majority of firms outsource all or part of their employee tech support and call-center operations, and almost all of high-tech manufacturing is done by a few giant firms based in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. Many firms, having discovered that there were high coordination costs associated with outsourcing to firms in other countries, opted for the middle ground of offshoring, moving work outside the country but often retaining it within their organization through an operating unit based in a country with lower-cost labor.

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As a recent study by Shu-Yi Oei and Diane Ring highlights, the regulatory ambiguity that occurs when slotting sharing economy work into existing categories can lead to analogous tax compliance and enforcement gaps on sharing economy platforms.10 For many reasons it is hard to find accurate numbers capturing the exact magnitude of offshoring. Some of these reasons shed light on comparable measurement challenges we can expect as the sharing economy grows. While some jobs can be tracked (e.g., full-time credit card call center positions relocated from the United States to India), other jobs are more difficult to track because it is not jobs per se but rather specific components that are being offshored. For example, as work itself changes, and is increasingly fragmented into hundreds of tasks that are staffed on platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, it is nearly impossible to measure what percentage of the work in question is being offshored.

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As Blinder observes, “It is critical to distinguish between two very different sorts of services … personally delivered (or just “personal”) and impersonally delivered (or just “impersonal”). The first category encompasses a bewildering variety of jobs, ranging from janitors and childcare workers on the low-wage end to surgeons and CEOs on the high-wage end. Similarly, the second category includes both low-end jobs like call center operators and high-end jobs like scientists.”11 What’s key, Blinder maintains, is to focus not on a job’s skill or the educational credentials required to do the job but rather on whether the service in question can be delivered electronically over long distances without compromising quality. As it turns out, while some jobs fall into this category, most do not.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

In fact, software and hardware have progressed so rapidly that by 2009, chess programs running on ordinary personal computers, and even mobile phones, have achieved grandmaster levels with Elo ratings of 2,898 and have won tournaments against the top human players.31 Labor and Capital Technology is not only creating winners and losers among those with differing amounts of human capital, it is also changing the way national income is divided between the owners of physical capital and labor (people like factory owners and factory workers)—the two classical inputs to production. When Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn, purchased thirty thousand robots to work in the company’s factories in China, he was substituting capital for labor.32 Similarly, when an automated voice-response system usurps some of the functions of human call center operators, the production process has more capital and less labor. Entrepreneurs and managers are constantly making these types of decisions, weighing the relative costs of each type of input, as well as the effects on the quality, reliability, and variety of output that can be produced. Rod Brooks estimates that the Baxter robot we met in chapter 2 works for the equivalent of about four dollars per hour, including all costs.33 As we discussed at the start of this chapter, to the extent that a factory owner previously employed a human to do the same task that Baxter could do, the economic incentive would be to substitute capital (Baxter) for labor as long as the human was paid more than four dollars per hour.

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But over time inertia may be overcome by the advantages of reducing transit times for finished products and being closer to customers, engineers and designers, educated workers, or even regions where the rule of law is strong. This can bring manufacturing back to America, as entrepreneurs like Rod Brooks have been emphasizing. A similar argument applies outside of manufacturing. For instance, interactive voice-response systems are automating jobs in call centers. United Airlines has been successful in making such a transition. This can disproportionally affect low-cost workers in places like India and the Philippines. Similarly, many medical doctors used to have their dictation sent overseas to be transcribed. But an increasing number are now happy with computer transcription.

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Immigration Policy (West) breast cancer Bresnahan, Tim Brin, Sergey broadband Brookings Institution Brooks, Rodney browsers Brynjolfsson, Erik Buddha Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. (BEA) business: burdens and mandates on computer use in; see also information technology (IT) Moore’s Law in process changes in regulation of robot use in; see also automation see also manufacturing business cycles Busque, Leah Byrne, Donald California, University of, at Berkeley call centers Canada, immigrant entrepreneurship in Capek, Karel capital: bargaining power associated with intangible labor’s replacement by nonhuman capital, human see also superstars capital, organizational capitalism Card, David Carlsberg breweries Carnegie Mellon University Case, Steve Cato Institute Cavallo, Alberto Center for American Progress Chesky, Brian chess Chetty, Raj Chile, immigrant entrepreneurship in China: automation in capitalism in manufacturing employment in Chinn, Menzie choice modeling Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) Chunara, Rumi Churchill, Winston circuits, integrated Cisco Systems cities, plunder and conquest of Clark, John Bates Clarke, Arthur C.

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
by Dan Heath
Published 3 Mar 2020

—A public health parable (adapted from the original, which is commonly attributed to Irving Zola) In 2012, Ryan O’Neill, the head of the customer experience group for the travel website Expedia, had been sifting through some data from the company’s call center. One number he uncovered was so farfetched as to be almost unbelievable. For every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia—reserving flights or hotel rooms or rental cars—58 of them placed a call afterward for help. The primary appeal of an online travel site, of course, is self-service. No calls necessary. Imagine a gas station that allowed you to swipe a credit card right at the pump—and then, about 60% of the time, something went wrong that forced you to go inside the store for help. That was Expedia. Traditionally, the call center had been managed for efficiency and customer satisfaction.

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In Iceland, the campaign leaders engaged the teenagers and almost all the major influences on them: parents, teachers, coaches, and others. Each one had something critical to contribute. By contrast, downstream action is often much narrower. Think of the Expedia example that opened the book: To react to a customer’s call required the effort of just one call-center representative. But to prevent that customer from calling at all required integration among multiple teams of people. Once you’ve surrounded the problem, then you need to organize all those people’s efforts. And you need an aim that’s compelling and important—a shared goal that keeps them contributing even in stressful situations where, as in the next story, people’s lives may depend on your work

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage
by Douglas B. Laney
Published 4 Sep 2017

Well, even if my global bank hasn’t figured out how easy it is to monetize customer information, there’s a prime example of one that has. Westpac Bank in Australia has five customer-facing divisions serving some thirteen million customers. Its consumer bank operates a network of over 1,400 branches, third-party distributors and call centers, and nearly four thousand ATMs, along with internet banking services.1 And whereas my bank’s mission statement starts with something hackneyed about “client service,” the number one company value listed on Westpac’s corporate website is “Delighting Customers—by deeply understanding and exceeding expectations.”2 It’s here where Westpac decided to put its money (and information) where its mouth is.

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It just didn’t have a complete picture of who each customer was. But under the leadership of Karen Ganschow, general manager of customer relationship marketing, Westpac launched a “KnowMe” program to centralize and analyze all of customer activity—including bank website browsing history, ATM and call center usage, and so forth. “We want to make sure that every time we interact with a customer there is something that is personalised for them,” Ganschow said. “We are trying to use data so that customers will stay engaged with the bank forever.” But she also acknowledged the information-related challenges and opportunities: “Our data sources are growing very fast and customer interactions are growing very fast.

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All asset valuation-related methods such as internal rate of return (IRR) or economic value added (EVA), along with all accounting methods for any kind of asset, are based on a set of assumptions. It is important that assumptions are properly described and consistently applied. The models generally work best when treating a class of information (for example, customer data, product data, maintenance data, call center data, or employee data) as a portfolio of information. While it may be easier to apply these models to specific datasets, you will likely find more benefit in applying them to logical groupings (portfolios) of related information assets. Finally, we offer multiple models for various needs and circumstances (Figure 11.1).

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

“Value of Connectivity,” Deloitte, https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/value-of-connectivity.html. 9.Watch the video here: Free Basics Partner Stories: Rappler, https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2016/free-basics-partner-stories-rappler/. 10.The population of the Philippines was 112,579,898 as of July 3, 2022, based on the latest UN data; see “Philippines Population (Live),” Worldometer, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/philippines-population/. 11.David Dizon, “Why Philippines Has Overtaken India as World’s Call Center Capital,” ABS-CBN News, December 2, 2010, https://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/12/02/10/why-philippines-has-overtaken-india-worlds-call-center-capital. 12.Such businesses include Kim Dotcom and his file-sharing site Megaupload, which, according to FBI and US court documents, operated partly from the Philippines. See David Fisher, “Free but $266 Million in Debt: The Deal That Gave the FBI an Inside Man Who Could Testify Against Kim Dotcom,” New Zealand Herald, November 27, 2015, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?

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A former colony of the United States, the Philippines’ nearly 113 million people10 boasted of an English-speaking, often college-educated, labor force familiar with Western culture. That’s one reason why our country has long been a source of cheap labor for the West. In 2010, the Philippines overtook India as the world’s top call center, business process outsourcing (BPO), and shared services hub.11 More significantly, we became a prime source of internet scams, from the days of Hotmail and email spam. Many foreign businesses experimenting in gray areas came to the Philippines because it had few or no internet regulations, and what regulations it did have, it didn’t enforce.12 Some parts of the Philippines developed a reputation for services euphemistically known as “onlining” that spammed email addresses around the world.13 Our country was also where the hate factory 8chan, later 8kun, best known as a forum for violent extremists, was based and later linked to QAnon: the American father and son suspected of creating it had been living on a pig farm south of Manila.14 A lot of that changed after a global crackdown between 2010 and 2012, when internet security researchers and law enforcement agencies dismantled spambots and technology evolved to control them.

Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations
by Russell Anderson-Williams
Published 24 Jul 2012

[ 37 ] Using Audio Option 2 – different sounds at path points This is without a doubt one of the best ways to add some real flare to your Prezi. By adding sound at certain path points in your Prezi, you can add narration to your story, allow subject matter experts to talk to your audience, or use background noise to help explain certain environments you're discussing, that is, busy warehouses, supermarkets, call centers, and sales floors. The possibilities are all down to your own creativity, but let's get started and get your Prezi doing the talking for you. What you need for Option 2? Just as you did earlier, you'll need to open Windows Live Movie Maker and create a movie file. This time we won't need to convert it to .swf as the standard .wmv format will suffice.

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Creating an environment When new members of staff join your business they normally spend a few days in a classroom environment having training. There's a projector and a whiteboard, and for the most part they engage in good conversations with the trainer and each other and learn a lot. But then when they hit the retail shop floor or the sales floor of your busy call center they feel slightly overwhelmed. This is mainly due to the fact that their training environment is very different from the real thing. So why not use sound in your training induction Prezis to create the same kind of atmosphere? It doesn't have to be constant noise throughout the induction but by giving them a flavor of how their working environment will sound, you can help prepare them for the real thing.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

He liked the one he already had and found working on it meaningful. As of 2015, Facebook’s market capitalization is $230 billion. Thiel and Breyer are both happy to have lost that argument and let Zuckerberg keep working on Facebook.61 Adam Grant, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, found the same phenomenon in an experiment at a call center. He divided up call center representatives into three separate groups. All three groups were making calls for a university fundraising operation. The first group was instructed to read about the personal benefits of the job, such as making money and developing communication skills. The second group read stories about people who had received scholarships from the money raised and how it had improved their lives before hitting the phones .

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns
by Mohnish Pabrai
Published 17 May 2009

Each of these offices is typically independently owned by a commissioned agent. This distribution overhead costs at least 15 percent of the premiums that State Farm and Allstate charge. GEICO has a near-permanent 15 percent cost advantage—read arbitrage spread—compared to most auto insurers. GEICO sells all its policies directly out of inbound call centers staffed by paid GEICO employees and through geico.com. Both channels cost dramatically less than putting up thousands of brick and mortar storefronts owned by agents—each of whom expect to make at least six, seven, or eight figures annually. The Internet has helped move a growing percentage of sales over geico.com.

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At one point, GEICO was likely paying over 25 cents a minute for its toll-free 800 service. Today, I doubt if it costs the company even 1 cent a minute. Its major cost for telephone sales is the staff of thousands of GEICO counselors. Even these could be reduced painlessly through attrition while opening a call center or two in India—increasing the arbitrage spread even more. In a decade or two, most of GEICO’s transactions are likely to be over the Internet at costs approaching zero, and the arbitrage spread will widen further. State Farm and Allstate did not derive these same cost benefits from the Internet or the telephone.

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi
by Lyndsay Wise
Published 16 Sep 2012

available include both traditional BI environments and targeted solutions that are developed to satisfy a specific need or to address a defined business problem. Niche applications also exist that include industry-specific offerings or corporate performance management. But some of the most common BI applications include sales and marketing analytics, call center monitoring, and budgeting and forecasting. For instance, let’s say a small retailer is trying to understand why sales for a particular product has dropped in 2 of their 24 stores but remained steady at the other locations. They might have to look at sales history to identify whether this is normal performance historically, whether circumstances have changed at those two locations, inventory, foot traffic, placement of items, and how these compare to the better performing locations.

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Once companies want to understand how finance and accounting intersects with sales and distribution, or how customer satisfaction can be used to up-sell and expand sales, the ability to view information across the organization in a centralized repository becomes essential. 1 In general, data manipulation is not as bad as it sounds. In many companies the concept of customer or membership date can differ. For instance, IT considers other departments’ customers, whereas customer service looks at a customer as a person calling into the call center. Companies that deal with membership may have differing views on when a membership starts. In some cases, it might be when the application is submitted, in other cases it will be when payment is received, while in others it might be when a customer is invoiced. All of these situations mean that different people within businesses have different worldviews and apply separate calculations to their work, resulting in data that is considered “manipulated” to some extent. 82 CHAPTER 8 The strategy behind BI adoption Mitigating risk Another reason organizations look at BI is to help mitigate risk.

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Organizations look first to structured content to analyze trends, customer behavior, partner and supplier management, and design marketing campaigns. Even though this information can be complicated, the ability to go beyond the obvious is where other information comes from. Internal unstructured/semistructured data Information contained in emails, documents, call center notes, etc., represent good examples of unstructured content that is increasingly being captured as part of BI initiatives. Organizations are 152 CHAPTER 13 A look at technical considerations trying to identify why customers stay or leave and what their levels of satisfaction are. Because of the increasing competitive nature of the marketplace these days, businesses can no longer ignore multiple types of data sets.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

Here complex mathematical models sift through huge amounts of data—more than could ever be stored on a laptop or cell phone—and become skilled at identifying different speech patterns. Over time, they become more adept at recognizing vocabulary, regional accents, colloquialisms, and the context of conversations by analyzing, for example, recordings of call center conversations with customers. The machines are learning. These rapid developments in voice recognition weren’t lost on Jeff Bezos. By the early 2010s, his Prime program had gained traction and was pulling large numbers of customers into the Amazon universe, but he was looking for the next big tool to keep his AI flywheel spinning ever faster.

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McKinsey is also quick to point out that economic growth is likely to offset the numbers of jobs lost because of increased spending on health care, and growing investment in infrastructure, energy, and technology. It might be true that the economy will eventually replace those jobs, but in the interim a scenario where nearly a third of the world’s workers will be forced to seek new jobs is chilling. It stretches the imagination to believe that the legions of warehouse workers, call center agents, grocery cashiers, retail clerks, and truck drivers who lose their jobs to automation will quickly and easily learn to become computer programmers, solar energy installers, or home care providers. The global economy may eventually generate enough new jobs to replace the 800 million lost, but the disruption in the meantime will be immense.

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But as we shall see, the wage hike was both a brilliant public relations move and—remember this is Bezos, one of the most competitive people in the world—a tactic that put his competitors at a disadvantage. For most Amazon workers, that raise was welcome, but for some, the boost to $15 an hour came at a cost. As part of the deal, the company would cut out restricted stock units for call center and warehouse employees as well as monthly incentive-based pay bonuses for warehouse workers tied to production goals. Some workers complained in the press that the raise was at best a wash, and others complained that they’d actually lose money on the deal. When those press reports reached the desk of Dave Clark, he told his team to find those workers who were disadvantaged by the decision and make sure they were made whole.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Published 12 Mar 2019

I called the support center, and they immediately canceled the task and said, ‘Don’t do this. We’ll be in touch with the client.’” Explaining that he’d “come to realize some of the scams that are being pulled through TaskRabbit,” and that he’d encountered such a scam several times, Michael asked the call center about their decision. “They used the same language that I heard in a previous conversation, where there was another definitely scam task. And I can’t remember the language exactly, but it was something like: ‘Well, sometimes people misuse the platform to try to work around a situation,’ or something to that effect.”

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A poll conducted in conjunction with the paper’s coverage of the layoffs found that “nearly three-quarters of all households had a close encounter with layoffs” between 1980 and 1996, and that in a third of all households, a family member had lost a job.29 In some cases, the lost jobs were replaced with automation as computers and software made certain jobs and procedures redundant. In other cases, work expectations were simply ratcheted upward as workers, anxious that they would lose their jobs in the next round of layoffs, pushed themselves to do more with less. The layoffs were also used to shed full-time employees, replacing them with outsourced services such as call centers, staffing companies, and perma-temps. The popular business titles of the age are instructive: The Overworked American, Mean Business, Lean and Mean, The White Collar Sweatshop, and The Disposable American.30 This focus on production—and on the expendability of workers—was similar to the early industrial age and the efforts of companies to wring every last minute of work out of their workers.

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If the hours/times of work are dictated by the employer or market, the worker is not independent. Having employer-dictated hours is nothing new. Grocery store clerks and retail workers can’t just show up whenever they want—they have set hours. Law-firm attorneys, teachers, accountants, postal workers, emergency room doctors, and call center employees have their hours set by an employer and the market: no one wants their mail to arrive at midnight or to get a telemarketing call at 4 a.m. Some of these jobs also have staffing considerations: we want teachers to be present when students are at school and a certain number of doctors to fulfill the needs of a busy emergency room.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

The Western countries have pushed poor countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income.”11 Free trade in goods triggered the initial backlash by low- and middle-skilled manufacturing workers in advanced economies. For example, auto industry workers lost their jobs when factories moved to Mexico and other nations with cheaper labor. Disaffection has spilled into a much larger services sector. At the low end, workers in low-wage economies started manning call centers. Increasingly, law firms farm out document reviews. Accountants in Poland can do US tax returns at a fraction of the cost. Technicians anywhere can read medical imagery. And computer programmers all over the world can provide their services to Silicon Valley. All this economic and sociocultural dislocation led to rising opposition to global population migration.

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A similar fate will increasingly hurt low- and semi-skilled white collar service workers where virtual access can substitute for physical presence. With a few months of training and no language barriers to worry about, virtual counterparts in emerging markets can fill many service jobs remotely. Middle-class security offers no refuge from competition. Call centers come to mind first, but accountants, lawyers, and even doctors may increasingly face virtual competition. Rivals in China and Asia have proliferated. Even if jobs are secure, job candidates will multiply, easing pressure on employers to raise pay. Indeed, with 2.5 billion citizens in China and India, dubbed Chindians, and many more in other emerging markets joining the global labor force, workers in advanced economies need to beware.

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“Telemigrants” in countries with low wages can perform the same jobs as millions of higher-paid service workers in advanced economies. When accountants in the United States join the ranks of factory workers who watched their jobs go abroad, should we impose trade restrictions on foreign accountants? On insurance agents? On money managers and lawyers? Or computer programmers? Or call center service workers? Initially, workers in poor economies will compete with service workers in advanced economies. Over time, robots or globots will replace service workers everywhere. They take no lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, vacations, and at least in the foreseeable future they won’t demand raises.

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully
by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett
Published 3 Apr 2023

In 2016, researchers at Texas A&M Health Science Center, School of Public Health, published a study that looked at productivity in call center workers provided with sit-stand desks over the course of six months. Half of the 167 participants were provided with the adjustable desks while half had regular desks and desk chairs. The standers—who ended up sitting 1.6 hours less per day than their counterparts—showed themselves to be increasingly more productive than the sitters (based on the success of their calls), beginning at 23 percent more productivity the first month and 53 percent more productivity at six months. The standers also reported less body discomfort. The call center standers’ productivity squares with what we know about kids who use stand-up desks: Standing is associated with significant improvements in executive function and working-memory capabilities in students.

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Dunstan, David W., Shilpa Dogra, Sophie E. Carter, and Neville Owen. “Sit Less and Move More for Cardiovascular Health: Emerging Insights and Opportunities.” Nature Reviews Cardiology 18 (September 2021): 637–48. DOI: 10.1038/​s41569-021-00547-y. Garrett, Gregory, Mark Benden, Ranjana Mehta, et al. “Call Center Productivity Over 6 Months Following a Standing Desk Intervention.” IIE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors 4, no. 2–3 (2016): 188–95. DOI: 10.1080/​21577323.2016.1183534. Harrell, Eben. “How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold.” Harvard Business Review, October 30, 2015.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

Israel once had a phone fracas with a United Airlines support person who admitted admit he had never been inside an airport. Very few customers have much love for any of those options. We don’t like being relegated to navigating automated answering decision trees. We don’t like waiting for 20 minutes to talk to someone in a call center, where people are trained to find the quickest possible way to get the customer off the phone. We want a sympathetic person who can understand our issues and solve them simply and promptly. We had come to the point where we had just about given up on this issue. We had resigned ourselves to a lifetime of mediocre service.

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The 2 Percent Intrusion If most people hate most marketing most of the time, why are we all inundated with these ads? Shel Israel learned the answer back in 1995 when he worked for a large PR agency, and MCI, a now-defunct telecom company, was his client. The company pushed its discount phone service by having call center employees phone people at home at dinnertime. Israel told his client that every time he mentioned MCI in conversations, people became irate, because they hated those intrusive calls. The client confided he, too, had the same experience. Sometimes it got so bad that he avoided disclosing who he worked for.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

Employees contribute complementary skills and take on complementary roles. They learn how to work together. It’s bad news when a good one goes. The management of employee turnover is a significant challenge for all companies. For example, another multinational corporation looked to decrease turnover among customer service agents at a call center in Barcelona. Folks would come just to spend the summer in that beautiful city and then suddenly give notice and split. It would help to identify such job applicants in advance. In this endeavor, the organization is aiming PA inwardly to predict its own staff’s behavior, in contrast to the more common activity of predicting its patrons’ behavior.

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Across all of HP, promotions do decrease Flight Risk, but within this Sales Compensation team, where a number of promotions had been associated with relatively low raises, the effect was reversed: Those employees who had been promoted more times were more likely to quit, unless a more significant pay hike had gone along with the promotion. The analysis is only as good as the data (garbage in, garbage out). In a similar but unrelated project for another company, I predictively modeled how long new prospective hires for a Fortune 1000 B2B provider of credit information would stay on if hired for call center staffing. Candidates with previous outbound sales experience proved 69 percent more likely to remain on the job at least nine months. Other factors included the number of jobs in the past decade, the referring source of the applicant, and the highest degree attained. This project dodged a land mine, as preliminary results falsely showed new hires without a high school degree were 2.6 times as likely to stay on the job longer.

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One time, I was sifting and organizing an online service’s data in preparation to predict which customers would intentionally cancel their subscriptions. Along the way I noticed a major leak in the boat. Tons of customers were involuntarily canceling due to credit card failures on their monthly or quarterly membership dues. One processing error message arose for many of these cases: “Hold—call center.” This meant the merchant should keep holding the credit card and call in to see if the payment’s authorization could be completed with some additional steps. Since the transactions were automatic—no merchant was physically holding a card—these customers just slipped through the cracks and were lost.

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages
by Annelise Orleck
Published 27 Feb 2018

Every time we ask for our salary there is a dispute.”1 Wage theft goes hand in hand with contractualization, Atienza explains. “Contractualization” makes it difficult for workers to turn to the government for help, because labor laws protect only “full-time, permanent” employees. Most workers in fast food and at call centers (another big employer of Filipinos under thirty) are classified as “temporary” or “contract” labor. This is true even if they have worked for the same company for years. RESPECT and SENTRO are fighting hard for legislation to guarantee predictable schedules, and long-term security for all Filipino workers.

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See also farmworkers Brazil: court case against Arcos Dorados, 73–74; port and oil workers’ work stoppages in, 73; Senate hearings on McDonald’s, 9, 36; struggles over land ownership, 182 Brito, Santa, 25–26, 83–85 Brooks, Kwanza, 100–101 Brown, Michael, 72 Buckner, Ann, 65 Burrow, Sharan, 54 Bustos, Edwin, 24 Butler, Laphonza, 27, 81 BYD (electric-vehicle manufacturer), 242 Cabot Creamery (Agri-Mark), 197 Cáceres, Berta, 43, 46 California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, 16 California United Long-Term Care Workers Union, 27 call center workers, 100 Cambodia: beer promoters, 17–20; destruction of small farms in, 184; “fast fashion”/garment industry, 123–26, 149–50; Food and Service Workers’ Federation (CFSWF), 18–19; hotel housekeepers, 22; Pol Pot regime, 155; responses to garment worker protests, 128, 151–53, 158; Tonlé apparel manufacturing, 250–51; urban population growth, 161.

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See also social movement activism Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW): assistance for the organizers of the San Quintín berry pickers, 214; on employer conducted safety checks, 119; gains for tomato field-workers, 194–95; organizing model, global applications, 195; strategic approach, 194 Cochran, Jim, 246–48 collective ownership, 244–46 Collins, Barbara, 111–12 Communist Manifesto (Marx), 86 community benefits agreements (CBAs), 254, 256–57, 258 community benefits movement, 256–57 conflict minerals, 50 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 97 Conklin, Wim, 155 consciousness-raising/peer discussions: education using, 58, 160, 210; empowerment from, 56, 224; and global organizing efforts, 147. See also education construction workers, hazards faced by, 22 consumers: consumer boycotts, 41, 216; educating, 158–59, 164; and fast-fashion industry, 129; focusing actions on, 194, 210–11; and ubiquity of low prices, 6; and ready availability of fresh produce, 220 contract labor: call center workers, 100; fast-food workers, 99–100; fostering solidarity among, 66–67; garment workers, 177; and the “gig” economy, 68; grape pickers, 209; and low wages, 67–68; as product of globalization, 68, 167; as strategy for avoiding corporate responsibility, 177; teachers, 66, 79, 91 Contreras, Miguel, 254 Conway, Jill Ker, 130 Cooper Union, New York, 37 Cordillera region, Philippines: heirloom rice project, 231, 233; indigenous farming communities, 227, 232; migration from, 232; traditional agroecology practices, rice rituals, 230–31; as a UNESCO “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Site,” 231 corn production, Mexico, impact of NAFTA, 15–16 Corona, Bert (“El Viejo”), 94 Coronacion, Joanna Bernice (“Sister Nice”): concept of freedom, 12; on contractualizing fast-food workers, 99; and DUBS, 63; education, 48–49; on globalized social movement activism, 97; on need to dismantle patriarchy, 48; on wage theft, 101 corporations/transnational corporate imperialism: and corporate wealth, 4–5; and industrialized agribusiness, 13–14; and neoliberalism, 5.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

The IRS doesn’t arrest people for small tax bills, and if it did, it would not use local police forces to do so. For an excellent report on a massive India-based call-center scam that resulted in the 2016 indictment and arrest of hundreds of people in the United States and abroad for stealing tens of millions of dollars with calls like these, see “Scam Likely,” Season 4 of the podcast Chameleon (Campside Media, 2022) [https://www.campsidemedia.com/shows/chameleon-scam-likely]; US indictment of 61 people and entities [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dozens-individuals-indicted-multimillion-dollar-indian-call-center-scam-targeting-us-victims]. 14. Binjamin Wilkomirski affair: S. Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (New York: Schocken, 2001); “Fragments of a Fraud,” Guardian, October 14, 1999 [https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/oct/15/features11.g24].

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When a source presents itself as objective and fair (like faux-centrist BipartisanReport.com, which first posted the Gorsuch story), we’re more susceptible to deception. Anything presented by an authority—assuming the recipient recognizes and respects the source—has a head start on being accepted as true or worth obeying. This is one reason why a common “call-center scam” involves telling victims that they owe money to a tax authority (such as the US Internal Revenue Service), immigration agency, or other government entity and that law enforcement will come right away to serve an arrest warrant unless the bill is paid over the phone.13 The power of the source in amplifying our truth bias is even more potent when we find the storyteller to be sympathetic.

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls
by David Sedaris
Published 22 Apr 2013

But you can’t pick things out—a man’s face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win. A Friend in the Ghetto I was in London, squinting out my kitchen window at a distant helicopter, when a sales rep phoned from some overseas call center. “Mr. Sedriz?” he asked. “Is that who I have the pleasure of addressing?” The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn’t exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes. “I am hoping this morning to interest you in a cell phone,” he announced.

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Or a raccoon, or a mongoose, or a honey badger. As weeks passed and the cell phone salesman didn’t call back, I started worrying that he’d lost his job. Maybe, though, that’s just me being a cultural elitist, assuming that his life must go from bad to worse. Isn’t it just as likely that he got promoted or, better still, that he left the call center for greener pastures? That’s it, I tell myself. Once he settles into the new job and moves into that house he’s been eyeing, after his maid has left for the day and he’s figured out which remote works the television and which one is for the DVD player, he’s going to need someone to relate to. Then he’ll dig up my number, reach for his cell phone, and, by God, call me.

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere
by Tsedal Neeley
Published 14 Oct 2021

A group of economists teamed up to assess the benefits that work-from-home practices can have on performance and productivity at China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip. One of the study authors, James Liang, was a cofounder of the company, and thus had a vested interest in this question. Interestingly, when they asked 996 employees from the Shanghai call center if they were interested in working from home, about half expressed interest, but only 249 met the company qualifications of having at least a six-month tenure, broadband technology, and a private workspace to do their job at home. The scholars randomly chose to study 125 employees who worked from home, while the other half continued to go to the office.

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When this question was posed to 273 employees who worked from home in sales, marketing, accounting, and engineering, the researchers found that highly complex jobs that did not require social support were more conducive to remote work than collocated work. This study also found that low-complexity jobs that did not require much interactive collaboration, such as call centers, were more productive when working from home. Even for workers whose jobs were more interactive, the researchers found no negative correlations between remote work and job performance. In other words, remote work doesn’t significantly hurt job performance in any type of work. For some job features, performance is better with more extensive virtual work, and in others, the impact is neutral.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

The northern boomtown of Monterrey has doubled in population to 4.5 million over the last thirty years and become a center of manufacturing innovation that is spreading across the country. In central Mexico, Querétaro is a jack-of-all-trades, making everything from wine to appliances and trucks, as well as offering services from call centers to logistics. León, once known as the city of shoes and leather, was hard hit by Chinese competition but responded by shifting to agro-industry, chemicals, and cars. Aguascalientes is home to Toyota’s most modern manufacturing plant outside Japan. Farther south the city of Puebla has a large Volkswagen plant.

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This unique “missing middle” is quite astonishing even for a relatively undeveloped country—the Philippines’ average income is less than $3,000. However, signs of life have emerged in second cities like Cebu and Bacolod, which have seen their populations grow by 25 percent since 2000 and are starting to attract some of the call centers and IT service companies that have become an important pillar of the economy. In the developed world, there are only two countries with more than 100 million people, and they have vastly different track records for developing second-tier cities. Since 1985 fifteen cities in the United States have grown to have more than one million people, while in Japan the comparable number is one, Hamamatsu, an industrial city about 160 miles southwest of Tokyo, which grew in part by absorbing surrounding towns in 2005.

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In India, only about two million people work in IT services, or less than 1 percent of the workforce. Smaller copycat IT service booms have occurred in the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, but those have produced jobs only in the tens of thousands. The same applies to the Philippines, where employment in the booming call center industry exploded from zero to more than 350,000 employees in the 2000s, but that still represents a tiny fraction of the workforce. So far the rise of these service industries has not been big enough to drive the mass modernization of rural farm economies. In the Asian miracle economies of Japan and South Korea, as much as a quarter of the population migrated from farm to factory during their long periods of rapid growth.

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

Finally, degrading safety further, many of these networks and systems contain legacy applications and operating systems that make it difficult to secure the payment data. Merchant systems Internet E-commerce application Back-office applications Fraud detection systems Customer service applications Consumer Third-party systems Payment gateway Fulfillment Acquiring (merchant) bank Call centers Issuing bank Card networks FIGURE 5-1. Credit card data proliferation But what if we took another approach? What happens when we throw out a lot of today’s assumptions around electronic payments and e-commerce and assume that the merchant shouldn’t have to store the data at all? What if we never even handed this sensitive information over to the merchant in the first place?

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Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before. —Bill Gates New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent book in 2005 called The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) in which he explored the outsourcing revolution, from call centers in India and tax form processing in China to radiography analysis in Australia. I live Friedman’s flat world today; in fact, I am sitting on a plane to Hyderabad to visit part of my development team as I write this text. My current team is based in the United States (Redmond), Europe (London and Munich), India (Hyderabad), and China (Beijing).

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The effect is similar to the effects of global commerce, which takes away the advantage of renting storefront property on your town’s busy Main Street or opening a bank office near a busy seaport or railway station. Tasks are routed by sophisticated business rules engines that determine whether a call center message should be routed to India or China, or whether the cheapest supplier for a particular good has the inventory in stock. BPM software changes the very composition of supply chains, providing the ability to dynamically reconfigure a supply chain based on dynamic business conditions. Business transactions take place across many companies under conditions ranging from microseconds to many years.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

So let’s revisit those keywords from the beginning of this section, but from the context of Chatbots . What happens to the employment of existing call center workers with Chatbots? By 2020, Gartner predicts that this type of conversation automation will manage 85% of businesses’ customer relationships (Busby, 2016). How many people will this potentially effect? Just in the US alone, 5 million people are employed in call centers, while in countries like India and the Philippines, call centers provide employment to millions of people. So what impact will this one technology have on income inequality, wages, and poverty levels when it replaces labor?

Together
by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Published 5 Mar 2020

And she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to maintain her independence. “It’s a bit of a lost feeling,” she says. “Wow, mortality has always been there. But it always seemed so far off.” It makes her feel lonely to face it alone. Sophie Andrews is well acquainted with seniors like Anne. Andrews is the president of Silver Line, a call center for the elderly in the UK whose motto is: “No question too big, no problem too small, no need to be alone.” The Silver Line has fielded two million calls since starting in 2013 with the number of calls increasing 10 percent every month, all by word of mouth. “There’s such a stigma to loneliness,” she said.

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See also support services AA sponsorship as, 168–69 bonds formed through, 181–82 Cole on, 165, 166–68 Eisenberger on brain activity and, 166 faith traditions on, 164, 165 Gandhi on, 165 Islam, 165 purpose in, 167, 169 role, in religion, 164 social connection and, 165 stress response decrease in, 166 therapeutic role of, 168 therapeutic state of relief from, 167 types of, 166–67 well-being increase in, 166 widows, loneliness and, 166 Shakespeare, William, 58 shame Brown on, 91 family and incarceration, 91–93 in female loneliness, 91–93 from loneliness, xviii–xix of opioid addiction, xv shared space, Lederach on, 213 sharing meals, friendships and, 212–16 Sharp, Ronald, 217 shift, in social networks, 101 Shultz, Susanne, 29–30 Silver Line call center for elderly, in UK, 131–32 singing, Dunbar on, 225–26 single population, in Asia, 128 situational loneliness, 41 sleep, loneliness impact on, 39 Smart and Secure Children (SSC) parent leadership program, 272–73 smartphones Anderson on children use of, 256 Asia Travel Frog game, 128 multitasking myth and, 106 quality conversations negatively impacted by, 109 Smith, Ace, 244–50 Smith, Christian, 165 social acceptance, 251 social and professional use, of social media, 105 social anxiety, 48 Lloyd on depression, loneliness and, 44–47 trauma and, 173 social behavior, digital technology and adolescent, 103 social connection, xix childhood resilience impacted by, 175–76 culture of kindness link to, 75–76 female loneliness reliance on, 176 health impacted by, 5–7 Holt-Lunstad health study for, 12–15 lifespan impact from, 12–14 loneliness and, 8 in Okinawa, Japan, 77 personality impact on, 8 protective factor of, 13 service and, 165 Tait on, 120 social exclusion, 252 social geography, disconnection and, 135 social isolation, of adolescents, 244–47, 249–50 academic performance study and, 251–52 bullying compared to, 248 The Social Leap (von Hippel), 30 social media, 255 befriending of self and, 196 behavior, brain science understanding in, 105 comparisons and, 112–13 depression and anxiety impacted by, 257 empathy and, 110 on enemy perception, 138 loneliness and, xv peer connection and, 258 Primack on high levels of, 103–4 social and professional use of, 105 validation seeking and, 102 social networks elderly population decrease of, 130 estrangement from erosion of, 100 immigrants and, 124–25 modern progress advances impact on, 98 Putnam on erosion of, 97 shift in, 101 social neuroscience, 28 social norm, of reciprocity, 164 social outcasts, 10–11 social prescribing, 16 social terms, of culture of connection, 60–69 social threats Cacioppo, S., on, 41 Cole on, 49 societal change, evolution of loneliness and, 95–96 solitude, 211 art and, 208 Cain on reading and, 208 creativity and intimacy from, 205 digital technology impact on, 113 heart action in, 207 loneliness compared to, 9 music and, 208 in nature, 208 power of gratitude and love in, 207 relationship of self and, 205–8 self-reflection and, 206 as voluntary isolation, 9 Space Gathering, of Bian, 192–93, 215, 216 Bolnick on, 194 SSC.

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See also digital technology isolation and loneliness impacted by, 109 meaningful connections impacted by, 108–9, 220 pace of change increase from, 100–101 texting, conversation and, 109–10 theory of loneliness, of Cacioppo, J., 27–29, 185–86 therapeutic role, of service to others, 168 therapeutic state of relief, from service to others, 167 therapy support groups, 225 3Wishes Project, 20–23 Togetherness Program, of CareMore, 16–19 touch Dunbar on, 222 endorphins released during, 222 trail, of evolution of loneliness, 29–32 transactional relationships, 217 trauma ACEs and, 174–75 BBBS and, 177–78 bullying and, 178–81 mask of loneliness and, 173–82 social anxiety and, 173 Werner study on resilience from, 175–77 Travel Frog smartphone game, in Asia, 128 trust infant perceptual narrowing, 36 of infants, 35–36 Lederach on, 138 Turkle, Sherry on conversation and digital technology, 109 on empathy and digital technology, 111 Twenge, Jean, 251–52 UCLA loneliness scale, 10 Uhls, Yalda, 261 on empathy and digital technology, 110–11 UK. See United Kingdom Undercover Agents of Kindness, of Parmenter, 267–70 understanding emotions, as RULER skill, 263 Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 151 United Kingdom (UK) on loneliness, 14–16 Men’s Shed Association in, 87 Silver Line call center for elderly in, 131–32 United States (US), elderly social services in, 129–30 universal condition, of loneliness, xx University of Chicago, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, 28–29 Upanishads, on sacrifice, 164 US. See United States validation seeking, social media and, 102 values female loneliness and cultural, 94–95 modern culture, connections impacted by, xvii veterans bond of, 151–52 Cacioppo, J., and S., on social resilience of, 163 military code of toughness, 153 video conference of moai, 79 positive attributes of, 114 Village Movement, for elderly population, 132–34 violence anger expression of, 159–60 loneliness connection with, 156–68 vital function, of loneliness, 23 von Hippel, Bill, 30 Waldinger, Robert, 221–22 Wang, Helen, 267–68 Way, Niobe, 88–89, 90 way station models, 114–15 PMG as, 117–20 We Dine Together program, for compassion, 270–71 Weinstein, Netta on digital screen time, 103, 256–57 on smartphones and conversations, 109 Weinzweig, Ari, 233–36 well-being culture of kindness and, 163 emotional, xix, 15–16 service to others increase in, 166 Werner, Emmy on belonging and attachment importance, 176 childhood resilience study of, 175–77 Western culture, privacy and independence in, 57–60 Western Europe, oneliness and aloneness in, 58 white nationalism, Black and Stevenson experience of, 142–45, 147 WHO.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

The converging technologies and economic forces that inspired Frederick Taylor to invent scientific management find pure and too often sinister expression on America’s highways and in the cabs of her trucks. In industries where competition is intense and workers interchangeable, the result—stressful working conditions that push people to their limit—is more or less inevitable under current U.S. labor laws. You see this again and again in industries as varied as trucking, call centers, and fast-food outlets. Wherever it’s relatively easy for new companies to enter an industry, the people doing the labor required can be trained in just a few weeks, and individual businesses compete on cost instead of quality, companies will subject employees to conditions that lead to high turnover.

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A critical difference between the stack ranking of white-collar workers and the rate system imposed on blue-collar workers is that while companies can ill-afford to lose employees whose skills are in demand, shedding workers who are easily replaced is often a company’s explicit goal. This is almost certainly why one of these systems has died out and the other persists. This practice is hardly limited to Amazon. It’s common across a huge swath of jobs requiring little training, as Emily discovered when she also worked at a call center and a McDonald’s. According to the accounts of many workers who spent years at Amazon, the rate they must hit from one day to the next fluctuates, but overall it’s gradually going up. This results in all kinds of perverse incentives. “The percentile curve is just based off of what everyone is doing right now,” says Tyler Hamilton, the picker and stower at Amazon’s Shakopee, Minnesota, fulfillment center.

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But as management consultants latched on to it and engineers who understood it took on leadership roles at other companies, it spread. Every endeavor undertaken by a group of humans, it seemed, could be “lean-ized,” just as everything, Taylor’s disciples had declared, could be Taylorized. Soon after it came to the West in the 1980s, kaizen popped up everywhere, in the management of seemingly everything, from health care to call centers. For Amazon, Marc realized, the equivalents of Toyota’s shop floor were the fulfillment centers where the company received, stored, packed, and shipped its goods. But Amazon’s shop floor also included the trucks that drove those goods to the fulfillment center in the first place, and the last-mile delivery of goods from the warehouse to the customer.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Moffitt, “Childhood Forecasting of a Small Segment of the Population with Large Economic Burden,” Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 1 (2017): article no. UNSP 0005. 50. Mary Shacklett, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Taking Call Centers to the Next Level,” Tech Pro Research, June 12, 2017, http://www.techproresearch.com/article/how-artificial-intelligence-is-taking-call-centers-to-the-next-level/. 51. For an extraordinary chronicling of the problems generated by edtech, see Audrey Watters, “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade,” Hacked Education (blog), http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow. 52.

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These conversational fillers disguise the power of a firm like Google with the hesitation or deference typically expressed by a human’s unpolished speech. They cloak a robocall as a human inquiry. For those on the receiving end of the calls, it is all too easy to imagine abuse: a deluge of calls from robotized call centers. Counterfeiting humanity is not merely deceptive, it is also unfair, giving the counterfeiter the benefit of the appearance of personal support and interest without its reality. As we will see in case after case—of robot teachers, soldiers, customer-service representatives, and more—dissatisfaction and distress at failed imitations of humanity are not merely the result of imperfect technology.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

But a few outsourced services were what businesses like to call customer-facing. Some ransomware groups shared a call center in India, with representatives contacting employees or clients of victim organizations that hadn’t paid up. Following a script provided by the hackers, the callers would describe the incident to the people on the other end of the line—who in some cases weren’t even aware an attack had taken place—and then pressure them to convince the victim organization to pay. While it’s not clear whether REvil used this same Indian call center, Unknown did say in his interview with Smilyanets that direct calls provide “a very good result,” adding, “We call each target as well as their partners and journalists—the pressure increases significantly.”

…

He didn’t bother to run his idea by the Ransomware Hunting Team or by other security researchers on a Slack channel he’d joined to brainstorm ways to protect essential services from cybercriminals. “This was all me.” The next morning, Lawrence awoke to a flurry of replies. Responding first, the DoppelPaymer gang agreed to his proposal. DoppelPaymer said that they “always try to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, [and 911 call centers], not only now.” If they hit a hospital by mistake, they would “decrypt for free.” Still, realizing that Lawrence would make their pledge public on BleepingComputer, DoppelPaymer warned other victims against posing as healthcare providers to avoid paying a ransom: “We’ll do double, triple check before releasing decrypt for free.”

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Published 27 Dec 2008

The jobs they tend to displace don’t involve much independent thought, but rather raw computational or processing ability. They get rid of these low-skilled jobs in two ways: (1) by doing them themselves (e.g., through voice recognition phone trees); and (2) by allowing others in lower-wage labor markets to do them for us (as in the much maligned and much celebrated call centers in India). The result is that the jobs created over the last forty years have not gotten more specific; they have actually gotten broader.36With computerization, we are not, on average, rendered into mindless number punchers. Rather, computers have taken over many rote tasks, and instead, we need to be able to synthesize, process, and draw abstractions from the increasing amounts of data that are presented to us.

…

It’s not that our jobs have necessarily gotten harder, but the increase in variance in our everyday tasks and the fact that they require more mental concentration and cognitive skills may be quite stress-inducing. There is always a new surprise just around the corner for the knowledge worker. The boring jobs that can be delegated to computers have been. Others that can’t have been outsourced to low-wage labor markets (the famous Indian call centers), thanks to telecommunications technologies. The only low-skilled jobs that really remain in the United States are those which involve personal contact that cannot be performed from afar. It’s no surprise that the fastest-growing low-wage occupations are food service preparation, followed by home health care workers.37 After all, you can’t very well get a computer or a call service center to wipe your incontinent grandmother or serve her three hot meals a day.

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them
by G. Elliott Morris
Published 11 Jul 2022

And while the polls on average are relatively unbiased, they are fantastically bad in some situations. But part of the reason we’re mad at polls is that there is a misunderstanding between the public and the pollsters—and between the pollsters and the press who cover their calculations. Many pollsters, with their fancy algorithms, “big data,” call centers, and statistical wizardry, have done a poor job conveying the methods they use to arrive at their estimates and the conditions under which these estimates are invalidated. The press has done a poor job trying to understand these nuances, instead simply repeating misleading claims about too-narrow margins of error and hyping the ability of polls to predict the outcome of an electoral horse race.

…

The internet offers a multitude of new approaches to measuring the average American. DIALING VERSUS DIAL-UP Polling firms that conduct their surveys online can collect interviews from thousands of Americans very quickly, and usually at a fraction of the cost of telephone polls. They do not have to hire people to punch in tens of thousands of cell phone numbers at a call center. There are many ways to recruit participants; you can pay people to visit your website and give them polls to fill out, advertise a survey on social media platforms, and send emails or text messages directing people to an online link. Many people will even give you their data for free, or treat survey-taking as a sort of game to pass the time, usually in exchange for a chance to win a prize.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

*There’s usually a ritual in place to make sure everything possible is done to avoid actual human involvement for as long as possible, even if it is inevitable. The cliché we’ve all lived through is that you call about, say, a problem in how an insurance or credit rating Siren Server has screwed up a key decision about your life. Perhaps you were denied coverage for needed medical treatment. After an hours-long battle with the maze of a robo call center, you finally talk to a real person, probably in India or the Philippines. This might be the first time real human eyes associated with the Siren Server have perceived your data. However Amazon is also exploring how to get non-elite service jobs out of the way of the Siren Servers of the future.

…

Brian, 169n artificial hearts, 157–58 artificial intelligence (AI), 23, 61, 94, 95, 114, 116, 136, 138n, 147, 155, 157, 178, 191, 192–93, 325, 330, 354, 359n artificial memory, 35 art market, 108 Art of the Long View, The (Schwartz), 214 ashrams, 213 assets, 31, 60 “As We May Think” (Bush), 221n asymmetry, 54–55, 61–66, 118, 188, 203, 246–48, 285–88, 291–92, 310 Athens, 22–25 atomic bomb, 127 “attractor nightmare,” 48 auctions, 170, 286 aulos, 23n austerity, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 authenticity, 128–32, 137 authors, 62n automata, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 automated services, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 automated trading systems, 74–78, 115 automation, 7, 85, 123–24, 192, 234, 259, 261, 343 automobiles, 43, 86, 90–92, 98, 118–19, 125n, 302, 311, 314, 343, 367 avatar cameras, 265 avatars, 89n, 265, 283–85 baby boomers, 97–100, 339, 346 bailouts, financial, 45, 52, 60, 74–75, 82 Baird-Murray, Kathleen, 200n “Ballad of John Henry, The,” 134–35 bandwidth, 171–72 banking, 32–33, 42, 43, 69, 76–78, 151–52, 251, 269n, 289, 345–46 bankruptcy, 2, 89, 251 bargains, 64–65, 95–96 Barlow, John Perry, 353 Barnes & Noble, 62n, 182 barter system, 20, 57 Battlestar Galactica, 137, 138n “beach fantasy,” 12–13, 18, 236–37, 331, 366–67 Beatles, 211, 212, 213 behavior models, 32, 121, 131, 173–74, 286–87 behavior modification, 173–74 Belarus, 136 belief systems, 139–40 Bell, Gordon, 313 bell curve distribution, 39, 39–45, 204, 208, 262, 291–93 Bell Labs, 94 Bentham, Jeremy, 308n Berners-Lee, Tim, 230 Bezos, Jeff, 352 big business, 265–67, 297–98 big data, 107–40, 150, 151–52, 155, 179, 189, 191–92, 202–4, 265–66, 297–98, 305, 346, 366, 367 big money, 202–4, 265–67 billboards, 170, 267, 310 billing, 171–72, 184–85 Bing, 181–82 biodiversity, 146–47 biological realism, 253–54 biotechnology, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 Bitcoin, 34n BitTorrent, 223 blackmail, 61, 172–73, 207, 273, 314, 316, 322 Black Monday, 74 blogs, 118n, 120, 225, 245, 259, 349, 350 books, 1–2, 62, 63, 65, 113, 182, 192, 193, 246–47, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 bots, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 brain function, 195–96, 260, 328 brain scans, 111–12, 218, 367 Brand, Stewart, 214 brand advertising, 267 Brandeis, Louis, 25, 208 Brazil, 54 Brooks, David, 326 Burma, 200n Burning Man, 132 Bush, George H. W., 149 Bush, Vannevar, 221n business data, 112–13, 150, 189 business plans, 107–8, 117–20, 154, 169–74, 175, 236, 258, 301–2, 344–45 cached data mirrors, 223 Cage, John, 212 California, University of, at Berkeley, 104, 107–8, 111, 172 call centers, 177n Caltech, 94, 184 Cambridge, Mass., 157–58 cameras, 2, 10, 89, 265, 309–11, 319 capital flows, 37, 43–45, 47, 49, 201, 329, 355–56 capitalism, 11, 16–17, 20, 43–46, 47, 49, 66–67, 79, 208, 243, 246–48, 258, 260–63, 272, 273n, 277, 329 capital resources, 86 “captured” populations, 170–71 carbon credits, 87, 88, 298–99, 300, 301–3, 314 cartels, 158 Catholic Church, 190 cell phones, 34n, 39, 85, 87, 162, 172, 182n, 192, 229, 269n, 273, 314, 315, 331 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 199–200 chance, 23n change acceleration, 10, 21, 130–33, 136, 193–95, 217 chaos, 165–66, 273n, 331 cheating, 120, 335 Chicago, Ill., 47 China, 54, 70, 85, 87, 199, 200, 201, 208 Christianity, 190, 193–94, 293 Christian Science, 293 civility, 293–94 civilization, 123, 255, 300, 311, 336 civil liberties, 317–24 classified ads, 177n click-through counts, 183, 286, 347 clothing, 89, 260, 367 Cloud Atlas, 165 cloud processors and storage, 11–12, 19, 20, 42, 62, 88, 92, 100, 110, 113, 121, 124n, 144, 146n, 147, 149, 151, 153–54, 168, 203, 209, 245–46, 255, 258, 261–62, 274, 284, 292, 306, 311–13, 326, 338, 347–48, 350, 359 code, 112, 272 cognition, 111–12, 195–96, 260, 312–13, 314, 315, 328 Cold War, 189 Coleman, Ornette, 353 collectives, 358–60 collusion, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 Columbia Records, 161n commercial rights, 317–24, 347 commissions, 184 communications industry, 258 communism, 136, 153, 291, 344 compensatory servers, 64 competition, 42, 60, 81, 143–44, 147, 153, 180, 181, 187–88, 246–48, 326 complexity, 53–54 Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson), 229 computer programmers, 113–14, 123, 286n computers: artificiality of, 130, 134 calculations by, 146n, 147–48, 149, 151 cloud processors and, see cloud processors and storage development of, 53, 129–30 as machines, 22–25, 123, 129–30, 155, 158, 165–66, 178, 191, 193, 195, 248, 257–58, 261, 328 memory of, 146n networks of, see digital networks parallel, 147–48, 149, 151 personal (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 programming of, 113–14, 120, 123, 157, 180, 193, 248, 272, 286n, 342, 362–63 remote, 11–12 reversible, 143n security of, 175, 345–46 servers for, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 software for, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 user interface for, 362–63, 364 computer science, 113–14, 120, 123, 157, 180, 193, 248, 272, 286n, 342, 362–63 conflicts of interest, 62n Confucianism, 214, 215–16 connectivity, 171–72, 184–85, 273, 296n, 309, 316, 331 consciousness, 195–96 conservatism, 148, 149–51, 153, 204, 208, 249, 251, 253, 256, 293 construction industry, 151 consultants, 69–72 consumer electronics, 85–86, 162 consumer-facing sites, 179–80, 182, 216 consumers, see economies, consumer “content farms,” 120 contracts, 79–82, 172, 182, 183–84, 246–48, 314, 347, 352–53 copyright, 44, 47, 49, 60, 61, 96, 183, 206, 207, 224–26, 239–40, 263–64 corporations, 265–67, 307, 314, 348–51 correlations, 75–76, 114–15, 192, 274–75 correlative algorithms, 75–76 corruption, 31, 48, 77, 235, 257, 341n cost comparisons, 64 cost-effectiveness, 136–37 cost externalization, 59n countercultures, 24 Craigslist, 177n credit, 52, 116, 177, 193, 287–90, 305, 320, 337–38 credit cards, 185, 186, 269n credit ratings, 52, 116, 177, 193, 320 creepiness, 305–24 crime, 48, 307, 311, 319–21 crowdsourcing, 21, 86, 119–20, 356 cryptography, 14 currencies, 286–87 customer service, 177 cyberactivism, 14, 199, 200–201, 210, 308–9, 335–36, 339 cyberattacks, 201 cybernetics, 230 cyberpunk literature, 309, 356n Daedalus, 22 data, 12, 20, 50–54, 55, 71–76, 92, 167n, 174, 176–77, 178, 196, 223, 234–35, 246–48, 256–58, 271–75, 286–87, 292, 300, 307, 316, 317–24, 347 see also big data databases, 20, 71–72, 75–76, 178, 192, 203 data copying, 50–51 data mining, 120 dating services, 108–9, 113, 167–68, 274–75, 286 Deadpool, 189 death denial, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 death tolls, 134 debt, 29, 30n, 54, 92, 95, 96 Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber), 30n decision-making, 63–64, 184, 266, 269–75, 284n decision reduction, 266, 269–71, 284n deconstructionism, 131 democracy, 9, 32–33, 44, 90–92, 120, 200, 202–4, 207, 208, 209, 209, 210, 246–48, 277–78, 321, 324, 336, 342 Democratic Party, 202 demonetization, 172, 176n, 186, 207, 260–61 denial of service, 171–72, 312–13, 315 depopulation, 97, 133 depressions, economic, 69–70, 75, 135, 151–52, 288, 299 deprinters, 88 derivatives funds, 56, 60, 149, 153, 155, 301 determinism, 125, 143, 156, 166–68, 202, 328, 361 devaluation, 15–16, 19–21 developed world, 53–54 Diamond, Jared, 134 dice throws, 23n Dick, Philip K., 18, 137 differential pricing, 63–64 digital cameras, 2 digital networks, 2–3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19–21, 31, 35, 49, 50–51, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 59, 60–61, 66–67, 69–71, 74, 75, 77–80, 92, 96, 99, 107–8, 118–19, 120, 122, 129–30, 133n, 136–37, 143–48, 192, 199, 209, 221–30, 234, 235, 245–51, 259, 277, 278, 286–87, 308–9, 316, 337, 345, 349, 350, 355, 366–67 design of, 40–45 educational, 92–97 effects, 99, 153, 169–74, 179, 181–82, 183, 186, 207, 305, 362–63, 366 elite, 15, 31, 54–55, 60, 122, 201 graph-shaped, 214, 242–43 medical, 98–99 nodes of, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 power of, 147–49, 167 punishing vs. rewarding, 169–74, 182, 183 tree-shaped, 241–42, 243, 246 see also Internet digital rights movement, 225–26 digital technology, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 dignity, 51–52, 73–74, 92, 209, 239, 253–64, 280, 319, 365–66 direct current (DC), 327 disease, 110 disenfranchisement, 15–16 dossiers, personal, 109, 318 dot-com bubble, 186, 301 double-blind tests, 112 Drexler, Eric, 162 DSM, 124n dualism, 194–95 Duncan, Isadora, 214 Dyson, George, 192 dystopias, 130, 137–38 earthquakes, 266 Eastern Religion, 211–17 eBay, 173, 176, 177n, 180, 241, 343 eBooks, 113, 246–47, 352–60 eBureau, 109 economic avatars, 283–85, 302, 337–38 economics, 1–3, 15, 22, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 67, 122, 143, 148–52, 153, 155–56, 204, 208, 209, 236, 259, 274, 288, 298–99, 311, 362n, 363 economies: austerity in, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 barter system for, 20, 57 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 competition in, 42, 60, 81, 143–44, 147, 153, 180, 181, 187–88, 246–48, 326 consumer, 16–17, 43, 54, 56n, 62, 63–65, 72–74, 85–86, 98, 114, 117, 154, 162, 173–74, 177, 179–80, 182, 192, 193, 215, 216, 223, 227, 241, 246, 247, 248–64, 271–72, 273, 286–88, 293, 323, 347–48, 349, 355–56, 357, 358–60 depressions in, 69–70, 75, 135, 151–52, 288, 299 dignity in, 51–52, 73–74, 92, 209, 239, 253–64, 280, 319, 365–66 distributions in, 37–45 of education, 92–97 efficiency in, 39, 42–43, 53, 61, 66–67, 71–74, 88, 90, 97, 118, 123, 155, 176n, 187–88, 191, 236, 246, 310, 349 entrepreneurial, 14, 57, 79, 82, 100–106, 116, 117–20, 122, 128, 148–49, 166, 167, 183, 200, 234, 241–43, 248, 274, 326, 359 equilibrium in, 148–51 financial sector in, 7n, 29–31, 35, 38, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–67, 69–70, 74–80, 82, 115, 116–20, 148n, 153–54, 155, 179–85, 200, 208, 218, 254, 257, 258, 277–78, 298, 299–300, 301, 336–37, 344–45, 348, 350 freedom and, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 global, 33n, 153–56, 173, 201, 214–15, 280 government oversight of, 44, 45–46, 49, 79–80, 96, 151–52, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 299–300, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 growth in, 32, 43–45, 53–54, 119, 149–51, 236, 256–57, 270–71, 274–75, 291–94, 350 of health care, 98–99, 100, 153–54 historical analysis of, 29–31, 37–38, 69–70 humanistic, 194, 209, 233–351 361–367 of human labor, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99–100, 257–58, 292 identity in, 82, 283–90, 305, 306, 307, 315–16 inclusiveness of, 291–94 information, 1–3, 8–9, 15–17, 18, 19–20, 21, 35, 60–61, 92–97, 118, 185, 188, 201, 207, 209, 241–43, 245–46, 246–48, 256–58, 263, 283–87, 291–303, 331, 361–67 leadership in, 341–51 legal issues for, 49, 74–78 levees in, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 92, 94, 96, 98, 108, 171, 176n, 224–25, 239–43, 253–54, 263, 345 local advantages in, 64, 94–95, 143–44, 153–56, 173, 203, 280 market, 16–17, 20, 23–24, 33–34, 38, 39, 43–46, 47, 50–52, 66–67, 75, 108, 118–19, 126, 136, 143, 144–48, 151–52, 155, 156, 167, 202, 207, 221–22, 240, 246–48, 254–57, 261, 262–63, 266, 277–78, 288, 292–93, 297–300, 318, 324, 326, 329, 344, 354, 355–56; see also capitalism mathematical analysis of, 40–41 models of, 40–41, 148–52, 153, 155–56 monopolies in, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 29–34, 35, 42, 50–52, 54, 71–74, 252–64 Nelsonian, 335, 349–50 neutrality in, 286–87 optimization of, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 outcomes in, 40–41, 144–45 political impact of, 21, 47–48, 96, 149–51, 155, 167, 295–96 pricing strategies in, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 productivity of, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins in, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 public perception of, 66n, 79–80, 149–50 recessions in, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 regulation of, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 risk in, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 self-destructive, 60–61 social aspect of, 37–38, 40, 148–52, 153, 154–56 stimulus methods for, 151–52 sustainable, 235–37, 285–87 transformation of, 280–94, 341–51 trust as factor in, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 value in, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 variables in, 149–50 vendors in, 71–74 Edison, Thomas, 263, 327 editors, 92 education, 92–97, 98, 120, 150, 201 efficiency, 39, 42–43, 53, 61, 66–67, 71–74, 88, 90, 97, 118, 123, 155, 176n, 187–88, 191, 236, 246, 310, 349 Egypt, 95 eHarmony, 167–68 Einstein, Albert, 208n, 364 elderly, 97–100, 133, 269, 296n, 346 elections, 202–4, 249, 251 electricity, 131, 327 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 “elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 Eloi, 137 employment, 2, 7–8, 11, 22, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 85–106, 117, 123, 135, 149, 151–52, 178, 201, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 encryption, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 338 End of History, The (Fukuyama), 165 endoscopes, 11 end-use license agreements (EULAs), 79–82, 314 energy landscapes, 145–48, 152, 209, 336, 350 energy sector, 43, 55–56, 90, 144, 258, 301–3 Engelbart, Doug, 215 engineering, 113–14, 120, 123–24, 157, 180, 192, 193, 194, 217, 218, 248, 272, 286n, 326, 342, 362–63 Enlightenment, 35, 255 enneagrams, 124n, 215 Enron Corp., 49, 74–75 entertainment industry, 7, 66, 109, 120, 135, 136, 185–86, 258, 260 see also mass media entrepreneurship, 14, 57, 79, 82, 100–106, 116, 117–20, 122, 128, 148–49, 166, 167, 183, 200, 234, 241–43, 248, 274, 326, 359 entropy, 55–56, 143, 183–84 environmental issues, 32 equilibrium, 148–51 Erlich, Paul, 132 est, 214 Ethernet, 229 Etsy, 343 Europe, 45, 54, 77, 199 evolution, 131, 137–38, 144, 146–47 exclusion principle, 181, 202 Expedia, 65 experiments, scientific, 112 experts, 88, 94–95, 124, 133–34, 178, 325–31, 341, 342 externalization, 59n Facebook, 2, 8, 14, 20, 56–57, 93, 109, 154, 169, 171, 174, 180, 181, 188, 190–91, 200n, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217, 227, 242–43, 246, 248, 249, 251, 270, 280, 286, 306, 309, 310, 313, 314, 317, 318, 322, 326, 329, 341, 343, 344, 346, 347–48, 366 facial recognition, 305n, 309–10 factories, 43, 85–86, 88, 135 famine, 17, 132 Fannie Mae, 69 fascism, 159–60 fashion, 89, 260 feedback, 112, 162, 169, 203, 298, 301–3, 363–64, 365 fees, service, 81, 82 feudalism, 79 Feynman, Richard, 94 file sharing, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 100, 223–30, 239–40, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 “filter bubbles,” 225, 357 filters, 119–20, 200, 225, 356–57 financial crisis (2008), 76–77, 115, 148n financial services, 7n, 29–31, 35, 38, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–67, 69–70, 74–80, 82, 115, 116–20, 148n, 153–54, 155, 179–85, 200, 208, 218, 254, 257, 258, 277–78, 298, 299–300, 301, 336–37, 344–45, 348, 350 firewalls, 305 first-class economic citizens, 246, 247, 248–51, 273, 286–87, 323, 349, 355–56 Flightfox, 64 fluctuations, 76–78 flu outbreaks, 110, 120 fMRI, 111–12 food supplies, 17, 123, 131 “Fool on the Hill, The,” 213 Ford, Henry, 43 Ford, Martin, 56n Forster, E.

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M., 129–30, 261, 328 “Forum,” 214 Foucault, Michel, 308n 4chan, 335 4′33″ (Cage), 212 fractional reserve system, 33 Franco, Francisco, 159–60 freedom, 13–15, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 freelancing, 253–54 Free Print Shop, 228 “free rise,” 182–89, 355 free speech, 223, 225 free will, 166–68 “friction,” 179, 225, 230, 235, 354 Friendster, 180, 181 Fukuyama, Francis, 165, 189 fundamentalism, 131, 193–94 future: chaos in, 165–66, 273n, 331 economic analysis of, 1–3, 15, 22, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 67, 122, 143, 148–52, 153, 155–56, 204, 208, 209, 236, 259, 274, 288, 298–99, 311, 362n, 363 humanistic economy for, 194, 209, 233–351 361–367 “humors” of, 124–40, 230 modern conception of, 123–40, 193–94, 255 natural basis of, 125, 127, 128–29 optimism about, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 politics of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 technological trends in, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 utopian conception of, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 future-oriented money, 32–34, 35 Gadget, 186 Gallant, Jack, 111–12 games, 362, 363 Gates, Bill, 93 Gattaca, 130 Gawker, 118n Gelernter, David, 313 “general” machines, 158 General Motors, 56–57 general relativity theory, 167n Generation X, 346 genetic engineering, 130 genetics, 109–10, 130, 131, 146–47, 329, 366 genomics, 109–10, 146–47, 366 Germany, 45 Ghostery, 109 ghost suburbs, 296 Gibson, William, 137, 309 Gizmodo, 117–18 Global Business Network (GBN), 214–15 global climate change, 17, 32, 53, 132, 133, 134, 203, 266, 295, 296–97, 301–2, 331 global economy, 33n, 153–56, 173, 201, 214–15, 280 global village, 201 God, 29, 30–31, 139 Golden Goblet, 121, 121, 175, 328 golden rule, 335–36 gold standard, 34 Google, 14, 15, 19, 69, 74, 75–76, 90, 94, 106, 110, 120, 128, 153, 154, 170, 171, 174, 176, 180, 181–82, 188, 191, 192, 193, 199–200, 201, 209, 210, 217, 225, 227, 246, 249, 265, 267, 272, 278, 280, 286, 305n, 307, 309–10, 322, 325, 330, 344, 348, 352 Google Goggles, 309–10 Googleplex, 199–200 goops, 85–89, 99 Gore, Al, 80n Graeber, David, 30n granularity, 277 graph-shaped networks, 241, 242–43 Great Britain, 200 Great Depression, 69–70, 75, 135, 299 Great Recession, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 204, 311, 336–37 Greece, 22–25, 45, 125 Grigorov, Mario, 267 guitars, 154 guns, 310–11 Gurdjieff, George, 215, 216 gurus, 211–13 hackers, 14, 82, 265, 306–7, 345–46 Hardin, Garrett, 66n Hartmann, Thom, 33n Hayek, Friedrich, 204 health care, 66–67, 95, 98–99, 100, 132–33, 153–54, 249, 253, 258, 337, 346 health insurance, 66–67, 95, 98–99, 100, 153–54 Hearts and Minds, 353n heart surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 157–58 heat, 56 hedge funds, 69, 106, 137 Hephaestus, 22, 23 high-dimensional problems, 145 high-frequency trading, 56, 76–78, 154 highways, 79–80, 345 Hinduism, 214 Hippocrates, 124n Hiroshima bombing (1945), 127 Hollywood, 204, 206, 242 holographic radiation, 11 Homebrew Club, 228 homelessness, 151 homeopathy, 131–32 Homer, 23, 55 Honan, Mat, 82 housing market, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 HTML, 227, 230 Huffington Post, 176, 180, 189 human agency, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 humanistic information economy, 194, 209, 233–351 361–367 human reproduction, 131 humors (tropes), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 hunter-gatherer societies, 131, 261–62 hyperefficient markets, 39, 42–43 hypermedia, 224–30, 245 hyper-unemployment, 7–8 hypotheses, 113, 128, 151 IBM, 191 identity, 14–15, 82, 124, 173–74, 175, 248–51, 283–90, 305, 306, 307, 315–16, 319–21 identity theft, 82, 315–16 illusions, 55, 110n, 120–21, 135, 154–56, 195, 257 immigration, 91, 97, 346 immortality, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 imports, 70 income levels, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 incrementalism, 239–40 indentured servitude, 33n, 158 India, 54, 211–13 industrialization, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 infant mortality rates, 17, 134 infinity, 55–56 inflation, 32, 33–34 information: age of, 15–17, 42, 166, 241 ambiguity of, 41, 53–54, 155–56 asymmetry of, 54–55, 61–66, 118, 188, 203, 246–48, 285–88, 291–92, 310 behavior influenced by, 32, 121, 131, 173–74, 286–87 collection of, 61–62, 108–9 context of, 143–44, 178, 188–89, 223–24, 225, 245–46, 247, 248–51, 338, 356–57, 360 correlations in, 75–76, 114–15, 192, 274–75 for decision-making, 63–64, 184, 266, 269–75, 284n digital networks for, see digital networks duplication of, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 223–30, 239–40, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 economic impact of, 1–3, 8–9, 15–17, 18, 19–20, 21, 35, 60–61, 92–97, 118, 185, 188, 201, 207, 209, 241–43, 245–46, 246–48, 256–58, 263, 283–87, 291–303, 331, 361–67 in education, 92–97 encrypted, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 false, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 filters for, 119–20, 200, 225, 356–57 free, 7–9, 15–16, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 214, 223–30, 239–40, 246, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 history of, 29–31 human agency in, 22–25, 69–70, 120–21, 122, 190–91 interpretation of, 29n, 114–15, 116, 120–21, 129–32, 154, 158, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 investment, 59–60, 179–85 life cycle of, 175–76 patterns in, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 privacy of, see privacy provenance of, 245–46, 247, 338 sampling of, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 shared, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 100, 223–30, 239–40, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 signals in, 76–78, 148, 293–94 storage of, 29, 167n, 184–85; see also cloud processors and storage; servers superior, 61–66, 114, 128, 143, 171, 246–48 technology of, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 transparency of, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 190–91, 306–7 two-way links in, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 value of, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 see also big data; data infrastructure, 79–80, 87, 179, 201, 290, 345 initial public offerings (IPOs), 103 ink, 87, 331 Inner Directeds, 215 Instagram, 2, 53 instant prices, 272, 275, 288, 320 insurance industry, 44, 56, 60, 66–67, 95, 98–99, 100, 153–54, 203, 306 intellectual property, 44, 47, 49, 60, 61, 96, 102, 183, 204, 205–10, 223, 224–26, 236, 239–40, 246, 253–64 intelligence agencies, 56, 61, 199–200, 291, 346 intelligence tests, 39, 40 interest rates, 81 Internet: advertising on, 14, 20, 24, 42, 66, 81, 107, 109, 114, 129, 154, 169–74, 177, 182, 207, 227, 242, 266–67, 275, 286, 291, 322–24, 347–48, 354, 355 anonymity of, 172, 248–51, 283–90 culture of, 13–15, 25 development of, 69, 74, 79–80, 89, 129–30, 159, 162, 190–96, 223, 228 economic impact of, 1–2, 18, 19–20, 24, 31, 43, 60–66, 79–82, 117, 136–37, 169–74, 181, 186 employment and, 2, 7–8, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 117, 123, 135, 149, 178, 201, 257–58 file sharing on, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 100, 223–30, 239–40, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 free products and services of, 7n, 10, 60–61, 73, 81, 82, 90, 94–96, 97, 128, 154, 176, 183, 187, 201, 205–10, 234, 246–48, 253–64, 283–88, 289, 308–9, 317–24, 337–38, 348–50, 366 human contributions to, 19–21, 128, 129–30, 191–92, 253–64 identity in, 14–15, 82, 173–74, 175, 283–90, 315–16 investment in, 117–20, 181 legal issues in, 63, 79–82, 204, 206, 318–19 licensing agreements for, 79–82 as network, 2–3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19–21, 31, 49, 50–51, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 75, 92, 129–30, 143–48, 228–29, 259, 286–87, 308–9 political aspect of, 13–15, 205–10 search engines for, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293; see also Google security of, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 surveillance of, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 transparency of, 63–66, 176, 205–6, 278, 291, 308–9, 316, 336 websites on, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Internet2, 69 Internet service providers (ISPs), 171–72 Interstate Highway System, 79–80, 345 “In-valid,” 130 inventors, 117–20 investment, financial, 45, 50, 59–67, 74–80, 115, 116–20, 155, 179–85, 208, 218, 257, 258, 277–78, 298, 301, 348, 350 Invisible Hand humor, 126, 128 IP addresses, 248 iPads, 267 Iran, 199, 200 irony, 130 Islam, 184 Italy, 133 Jacquard programmable looms, 23n “jailbreaking,” 103–4 Japan, 85, 97, 98, 133 Jeopardy, 191 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 302 jingles, 267 jobs, see employment Jobs, Steve, 93, 166n, 192, 358 JOBS Act (2012), 117n journalism, 92, 94 Kapital, Das (Marx), 136 Keynesianism, 38, 151–52, 204, 209, 274, 288 Khan Academy, 94 Kickstarter, 117–20, 186–87, 343 Kindle, 352 Kinect, 89n, 265 “Kirk’s Wager,” 139 Klout, 365 Kodak, 2, 53 Kottke, Dan, 211 KPFA, 136 Kurzweil, Ray, 127, 325, 327 Kushner, Tony, 165, 189 LaBerge, Stephen, 162 labor, human, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99–100, 257–58, 292 labor unions, 44, 47–48, 49, 96, 239, 240 Laffer curve, 149–51, 150, 152 Las Vegas, Nev., 296, 298 lawyers, 98–99, 100, 136, 184, 318–19 leadership, 341–51 legacy prices, 272–75, 288 legal issues, 49, 63, 74–82, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 136, 184, 204, 206, 318–19 Lehman Brothers, 188 lemonade stands, 79–82 “lemons,” 118–19 Lennon, John, 211, 213 levees, economic, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 92, 94, 96, 98, 108, 171, 176n, 224–25, 239–43, 253–54, 263, 345 leveraged mortgages, 49–50, 61, 227, 245, 289n, 296 liberal arts, 97 liberalism, 135–36, 148, 152, 202, 204, 208, 235, 236, 251, 253, 256, 265, 293, 350 libertarianism, 14, 34, 80, 202, 208, 210, 262, 321 liberty, 13–15, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 licensing agreements, 79–82 “Lifestreams” (Gelernter), 313 Lights in the Tunnel, The (Ford), 56n Linux, 206, 253, 291, 344 litigation, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 184 loans, 32–33, 42, 43, 74, 151–52, 306 local advantages, 64, 94–95, 143–44, 153–56, 173, 203, 280 Local/Global Flip, 153–56, 173, 280 locked-in software, 172–73, 182, 273–74 logical copies, 223 Long-Term Capital Management, 49, 74–75 looms, 22, 23n, 24 loopholes, tax, 77 lotteries, 338–39 lucid dreaming, 162 Luddites, 135, 136 lyres, 22, 23n, 24 machines, 19–20, 86, 92, 123, 129–30, 158, 261, 309–11, 328 see also computers “Machine Stops, The” (Forster), 129–30, 261, 328 machine translations, 19–20 machine vision, 309–11 McMillen, Keith, 117 magic, 110, 115, 151, 178, 216, 338 Malthus, Thomas, 132, 134 Malthusian humor, 125, 127, 132–33 management, 49 manufacturing sector, 49, 85–89, 99, 123, 154, 343 market economies, see economies, market marketing, 211–13, 266–67, 306, 346 “Markets for Lemons” problem, 118–19 Markoff, John, 213 marriage, 167–68, 274–75, 286 Marxism, 15, 22, 37–38, 48, 136–37, 262 as humor, 126 mash-ups, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 Maslow, Abraham, 260, 315 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 75, 93, 94, 96–97, 157–58, 184 mass media, 7, 66, 86, 109, 120, 135, 136, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 material extinction, 125 materialism, 125n, 195 mathematics, 11, 20, 40–41, 70, 71–72, 75–78, 116, 148, 155, 161, 189n, 273n see also statistics Matrix, The, 130, 137, 155 Maxwell, James Clerk, 55 Maxwell’s Demon, 55–56 mechanicals, 49, 51n Mechanical Turk, 177–78, 185, 187, 349 Medicaid, 99 medicine, 11–13, 17, 18, 54, 66–67, 97–106, 131, 132–33, 134, 150, 157–58, 325, 346, 363, 366–67 Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff), 215 mega-dossiers, 60 memes, 124 Memex, 221n memories, 131, 312–13, 314 meta-analysis, 112 metaphysics, 12, 127, 139, 193–95 Metcalf’s Law, 169n, 350 Mexico City, 159–62 microfilm, 221n microorganisms, 162 micropayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 Microsoft, 19, 89, 265 Middle Ages, 190 middle class, 2, 3, 9, 11, 16–17, 37–38, 40, 42–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 60, 74, 79, 91, 92, 95, 98, 171, 205, 208, 210, 224–25, 239–43, 246, 253–54, 259, 262, 263, 280, 291–94, 331, 341n, 344, 345, 347, 354 milling machines, 86 mind reading, 111 Minority Report, 130, 310 Minsky, Marvin, 94, 157–58, 217, 326, 330–31 mission statements, 154–55 Mixed (Augmented) Reality, 312–13, 314, 315 mobile phones, 34n, 39, 85, 87, 162, 172, 182n, 192, 229, 269n, 273, 314, 315, 331 models, economic, 40–41, 148–52, 153, 155–56 modernity, 123–40, 193–94, 255 molds, 86 monetization, 172, 176n, 185, 186, 207, 210, 241–43, 255–56, 258, 260–61, 263, 298, 331, 338, 344–45 money, 3, 21, 29–35, 86, 108, 124, 148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 172, 185, 241–43, 278–79, 284–85, 289, 364 monocultures, 94 monopolies, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 Moondust, 362n Moore’s Law, 9–18, 20, 153, 274–75, 288 morality, 29–34, 35, 42, 50–52, 54, 71–74, 188, 194–95, 252–64, 335–36 Morlocks, 137 morning-after pill, 104 morphing, 162 mortality, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 mortgages, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 300 motivation, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 motivational speakers, 216 movies, 111–12, 130, 137, 165, 192, 193, 204, 206, 256, 261–62, 277–78, 310 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 23n MRI, 111n music industry, 11, 18, 22, 23–24, 42, 47–51, 54, 61, 66, 74, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 129, 132, 134–35, 154, 157, 159–62, 186–87, 192, 206–7, 224, 227, 239, 253, 266–67, 281, 318, 347, 353, 354, 355, 357 Myspace, 180 Nancarrow, Conlon, 159–62 Nancarrow, Yoko, 161 nanopayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 nanorobots, 11, 12, 17 nanotechnology, 11, 12, 17, 87, 162 Napster, 92 narcissism, 153–56, 188, 201 narratives, 165–66, 199 National Security Agency (NSA), 199–200 natural medicine, 131 Nelson, Ted, 128, 221, 228, 245, 349–50 Nelsonian systems, 221–30, 335 Nelson’s humor, 128 Netflix, 192, 223 “net neutrality,” 172 networked cameras, 309–11, 319 networks, see digital networks neutrinos, 110n New Age, 211–17 Newmark, Craig, 177n New Mexico, 159, 203 newspapers, 109, 135, 177n, 225, 284, 285n New York, N.Y., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

Microsoft, among other companies, is working to close that digital divide. But broadband access does not automatically engender sustainable employment opportunities. For example, call center jobs enabled by the Internet offer little stability: in recent years, hundreds of thousands of these jobs have vanished from low-income US communities, most of them transferred to lower-wage nations like the Philippines and India. “We can’t rely on old ideas—like call centers, we must create value around new possibilities,” Hackbert said. “The most exciting enterprises are making it up as they go along, they’re comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.”

…

Justin Burton was just one of many young people I met in Kentucky who saw themselves as part of this cycle. The opportunity to use their hands as well as their heads—in craft workshops, breweries and distilleries, small farms, specialty food production, sustainable forestry, and the trades—seemed a hopeful alternative to low-wage service jobs in hospitals, factories, and call centers. David Tipton, Berea’s dean of labor, said that regardless of the short-term success of these and similar efforts, over the long term they are a critical part of the essential task of reinventing work in the region. “Jobs are just jobs,” he told me. “If you cultivate a certain skill, and there are no jobs related to that skill, well, you’re just out of luck.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

Still, it was strange, and when David and I visited the call center, we could see at once that it was the same one used for Eldon Insurance. As I later testified to the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in its “Disinformation and ‘fake news’” inquiry, sixty people or so manned the phones, at about five rows of desks, making outgoing calls to customers in what I was told was the Eldon database to ask questions about Brexit where they usually would be answering questions from their insurance customers. The manager of the call center was a young woman who looked to be about my age.

…

It was difficult, in fact, to tell the difference between the Leave.EU campaign crew and the insurance office workers as I passed by them on the way to the boardroom. There were about ten people in all, each in charge of a different department: press and PR, social media, canvassing, events, and running the call center. Mostly pale and plainly dressed, they were seated stolidly in their chairs, their ID lanyards around their necks, looking rather unenthusiastic—until they started listening to David and me speak. Once they understood what we were there to do, they were grateful that we had come. They told us they felt like “fish out of water.”

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Emboldened by the Jet Age, companies broke themselves into pieces and spread them around searching for comparative advantage. Given enough telephones, flights, and mainframes, they could put their headquarters in one place, their factories in another, their R & D labs in a third, their back-office file cabinets in a fourth, and their call centers in a fifth. Once they added FedEx to the equation and swapped out their mainframes for PCs, factories left for Mexico (then China), call centers for India, and R & D for Beijing. The puzzle keeps rearranging itself, and the pieces keep moving farther away. The next thing to go is the notion of having a headquarters, and the idea that a global enterprise can and should be run by one person from one place.

…

If an airline wanted to fly to Chicago, it needed permission from the government; if you wanted to, you called your travel agent, because the Internet was then still just a science experiment. Twenty years later, by now a professor at North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Kasarda had seen enough of NAFTA to know that factories were headed overseas, and call centers, branch offices, and even headquarters would soon follow. They would all need to link up again somehow, and faster than before. “The Global Air Cargo–Industrial Complexes” was his first stab at explaining it in 1991, imagining factories lining the runways someday. FedEx saw these schematics and called seeking his help—it was grappling with something called e-commerce.

…

They were building an aerotropolis, all right, but they hadn’t yet figured out what to do with it. GMR’s real business is infrastructure—aerotropoli are only its latest offering. It builds power plants—natural gas, coal, hydro—paves roads, and opens airports. It is “getting India ready,” according to its tag line. Ready, that is, to steamroll whatever bits of the world its call center operators and office tigers haven’t already flattened. India grew at a torrid 9 percent annually for most of the past decade, a pace it can’t possibly regain and sustain without much, much more of what GMR is selling—the bones and sinews of modern commerce. The company’s namesake and founder is a proud, self-made patriarch who made his first fortune selling burlap, one G.

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

JAMES MANYIKA: Yes, that’s a great example of where the labor-supplied limiting portion was really “the Knowledge” of all the streets and shortcuts in the minds of the London taxi drivers. When you devalue that skill because of GPS systems, what’s left over is just the driving, and many more people can drive and get you from A to B. Another example here, in an old form of deskilling, is to think about call center operators. It used to be that your call center person actually had to know what they were talking about often at a technical level in order to be helpful to you. Today, however, organizations embedded that knowledge into the script that they read. What’s left over for the most part is just someone who can read a script.

…

I grew up in the Middle East during the time of the first Gulf War, so I’ve realized that there are so many problems in the world that need to be solved. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to a machine that’s just going to wake up someday and be able to solve all these problems. So, to answer your question, I’m not concerned. MARTIN FORD: If you think about a relatively routine job, for example a customer service job in a call center, it does sound like the technology you’re creating might enable machines to do that more human element of the work as well. When I’m asked about this, which is often, I say the jobs that are most likely to be safe are the more human-oriented jobs, the ones that involve emotional intelligence. But it sounds like you’re pushing the technology into this area as well, so it does seem that there’s a very broad range of occupations that could be eventually be impacted, including some areas currently perceived as quite safe from automation.

…

They don’t really need to know the technical details, at least not as much as before; they just need to be able to follow and read the script, unless they get to a real corner case, where they can escalate to a deep expert. There are many examples of service work and service technician work, whether it’s through the call center, or even people physically showing up to done on-site repairs, where some portions of that work are going through this massive deskilling—because the knowledge is embedded in either technology, or scripts, or some other way to encapsulate the knowledge required to solve the problem. In the end, what’s left over is something much more deskilled.

The Numerati
by Stephen Baker
Published 11 Aug 2008

If so, the models would eventually include this detail, among countless others. Takriti's job is to depict flesh-and-blood humans as math. Takriti is not given to bold forecasts. But if his system is successful, here's how it will work: Picture an IBM manager who gets an assignment to send a team of five to set up a call center in Manila. She sits down at the computer and fills out a form. It's almost like booking a vacation online. She puts in the dates and clicks on menus to describe the job and the skills needed. Perhaps she stipulates the ideal budget range. The results come back, recommending a particular team. All the skills are represented.

…

Maybe the computer will come to conclusions about the individual's circle of friends or be able to predict his or her behavior. For now, though, with only a tiny sliver of a second to devote to each blog post, Umbria is delivering far simpler fare. It's looking to see if the writers have opinions about services or products—a new cell phone, for example, or the call center for a large bank. The only conclusion it reaches is whether the blogger has a favorable or unfavorable opinion. Thumbs up, thumbs down. It sounds crude. What makes the blog world especially valuable to marketers, though, is not its precision but its unfiltered immediacy. Opinions change day by day, sometimes hour by hour.

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success
by Greg Nudelman and Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Published 8 May 2011

Freeman Evans broke down what constitutes online consumer research. For example, 60% read customer reviews and 42% checked in-store availability before going to the store to buy. Multichannel no longer means just online and brick-and-mortar stores. Even Web-only stores need to consider mobile and call-center use. And increasingly, people are accessing the Web from new channels such as their gaming console and connected TV. Each channel brings its own expectations to search. If you were to do more multichannel, search-behavior ethnographies like this, you would eventually find a pattern: People use multiple search features, across multiple modes of discovery.

…

Some search features that support discovery include the following: faceted search—which shows people results having particular attributes and lets them browse and refine the results user-review search—which lets people read the frank feedback of other consumers and possibly exposes the attributes of the reviewers through faceted search buying guide, product-info sheet, or demo video search—which incorporate features of document search like text mining and advanced relevancy to show supplemental information alongside results from the product catalog Context of the Channel People’s expectations of search features vary according to the context of the channel. For example, they expect mobile to be location-aware, and in-store kiosks to be inventory aware. On the Web, they expect pages to be optimized for a big screen; on mobile devices, for a small one. And they also expect a store to know which channel they’ve used. For example, a call center should have different return information for an online shopper than for someone who shopped at a brick-and-mortar store. Although the multichannel search experience is already common, it is not yet a well-designed experience. It’s a kluge. People face unnecessary gaps across channels, often because the channels aren’t aware of each other.

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg)
by Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch
Published 22 Nov 2016

The BBA’s members were the same banks that sat on the Libor panels, banks whose annual subscriptions paid the BBA staff ’s wages. There was also what could generously be called a skills gap. The BBA’s Libor manager, John Ewan, was in his early thirties and had no banking experience. Prior to joining the association in 2005, he had spent time working in a call center before packing it in and traveling the world for 18 months. Tall and gawky with bulging eyes and prominent sideburns, Ewan frequently wore a startled expression. Behind his back, bosses fretted about whether he was up to the job.2 During meetings he would sit quietly and take notes. He lacked the experience to stand up in a room full of veteran bankers and challenge their behavior.

…

They included requiring banks to get their processes for setting Libor approved by external auditors, adding new banks to the Libor panels, culling some of the more obscure maturities such as four months and seven months, and basing the published rate on a random selection of bank submissions rather than using those of each bank on every panel. If those modest proposals had been adopted, many of the problems that followed might have been prevented. In the end, two of the most powerful men in the global economy weren’t making the decisions. Libor’s destiny rested in the hands of 15 unnamed, middle-ranking bankers and a former call-center worker in London. Despite its pervasiveness, the benchmark resided in a kind of regulatory wasteland. There were no references to it in any of the 56 THE FIX myriad laws and regulations governing financial markets and no readily enforceable rules on how the rate should be set by individual traders or their employers.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

I thought about our foundation’s motto—“Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life”—and how it’s hard to stay healthy if your local medical clinic can’t keep vaccines cold because the refrigerators don’t work. It’s hard to be productive if you don’t have lights to read by. And it’s impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don’t have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centers. Melinda and I often meet children like nine-year-old Ovulube Chinachi, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and does his homework by candlelight. Around the same time, the late scientist David MacKay, a professor at Cambridge University, shared a graph with me that showed the relationship between income and energy use—a country’s per capita income and the amount of electricity used by its people.

…

Small-scale solar can be an option for people in poor, rural areas who need to charge their cell phones and run lights at night. But that kind of solution is never going to deliver the massive amounts of cheap, always-available electricity these countries need to jump-start their economies. They’re looking to do what China did: grow their economies by attracting industries like manufacturing and call centers—the types of businesses that demand far more (and far more reliable) power than small-scale renewables can provide today. If these countries opt for coal plants, as China and every rich country did, it’ll be a disaster for the climate. But right now, that’s their most economical option. * * * — It’s not immediately obvious why there’s such a thing as a Green Premium in the first place.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland and Jj Sutherland
Published 29 Sep 2014

Instead, most corporations set up an environment where people are more involved in politics than in making a profit. At Zappos if you don’t fit with the team, and the culture, you don’t fit in the company. Their annualized attrition rate is 12 percent, and most of the turnover, they say, is in their call center. That’s because they fire people who aren’t passionate about delivering for customers. Zappos sees those people as the public face of the company, and its standards are high. Folks at Zappos are flexible on a lot of things, but not on that. I’ve seen this same dynamic play out on teams. One person on a team might have specialized knowledge or skills—knowledge they hoard like misers.

…

Ashram College assholes, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1 Association for Computing Machinery AT&T ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) autonomy, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 7.1 avionics Backlog, 2.1, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, app.1 priorities and, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and product vision Bailar, John bandwagon effect, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Bangladesh banks, financial crisis and, 9.1, 9.2 barriers Barton, Brent, 6.1, 6.2 Baxter robot Bell, Steve Bell Labs, 2.1, 4.1 BellSouth Ben-Shahar, Tal, 7.1, 7.2 Big Picture Bikhchandani, Sushil blame, in teams, 3.1, 3.2 BMW Booz Allen Hamilton, Katzenbach Center at Borland Software Corporation Boston, Mass., 1.1, 3.1, 3.2 Boston Celtics Bowens, Maneka Boyd, John, 8.1, 8.2 brain mapping, multitasking and Brooks, Fred Brooks, Rodney, 2.1, 9.1 Brooks’s Law Brown, Rachel bureaucracy, 9.1, 9.2 Burndown Chart, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, app.1 cabals Cairo call center, Zappos cell phones, 5.1, 9.1 driving and, 5.1, 5.2 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3.1, 6.1 Challenger disaster, 3.1, 3.2 Change Control Boards, 8.1, 9.1 Change for Free change orders Change or Die Chicago Tribune, churches, Scrum at Cohn, Mike Cold War collaboration, 7.1, 7.2 Colorado, Sunshine laws in Colorado, University of, Medical School communication saturation, 4.1, 4.2, 8.1 Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) complacency, dangers of complex adaptive systems, 2.1, 2.2 Cone of Uncertainty, 119 “Constant Error in Psychological Ratings, A” (Thorndike) context switching, loss to continuous improvement Happiness Metric and happy bubbles and, 7.1 contracts Change for Free in government Coomer, Greg Copenhagen Coplien, Jim Coram, Robert corporate culture change in cost overruns Cowan, Nelson cross-functionality, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 7.1, 8.1 Crozier, William customer-responsive models customers: external vs. internal wants of cynicism Daily Stand-Ups (Daily Scrum), 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, app.1 Dalkey, Norman D-day DeAngelo, Michael Decide, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 decision loop decision making Product Owner and self-control and Declaration of Independence Delivering Happiness (Hsieh), Delphi method, 6.1, 6.2 Deming, W.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

.* Infant mortality has fallen by almost two-thirds from one in ten live births in 1985 to thirty-seven per thousand today.1 Though poverty is still endemic and India retains the capacity to shock, the trappings of modern life are everywhere: cars, motorbikes, flyovers, mobile phones, supermarkets, tall buildings, call centers, pace, energy. For all its litany of indignities and daily injustices, India feels like a country that, as one author puts it, is “becoming”—though quite what it is becoming is yet to become clear.2 It is important to state something unequivocally. Growth—and by that I mean even raw growth as measured imperfectly by GDP—has the power to transform poor people’s lives.

…

In 2017 South Koreans are more than eight times wealthier than their Ghanaian counterparts for one reason: the miracle of compound growth.3 This book has argued that growth is not all it is cracked up to be—often it does not mean what you think it means. But if you are poor, economic growth can be transformative. Fast growth can alleviate poverty both by generating jobs—digging roads, constructing office blocks, or manning call centers—and by providing the government with tax revenue that it can use to redistribute wealth and build the physical and institutional infrastructure needed for more and better growth.4 Of course it can create other problems, pulling people from the countryside into urban slums or clogging up the roads with diesel-spewing vehicles.

How to Predict the Unpredictable
by William Poundstone

Here’s a grim thought for the next time you’re waiting to speak to a customer service representative. Whether you’re put on hold is sometimes determined by a prediction of how profitable a customer you are. The jargon is ARPU, for “average revenue per user.” To Big Data, we’re all slabs of consumer meat. The call center’s software uses caller ID, just as some psychic hotlines do. In case you’ve never tried it, Googling a phone number usually returns a name and address. Another search or two, and you’ve got plenty. Boiler-room psychics play out this information to convince the gullible of their powers. Big Data has other methods.

…

It knows whether the person is calling from a mobile phone or landline and has the mailing address of the account. Neustar is able to rate customer profitability instantly. Its software can predict the odds that a credit card applicant will qualify. When the chance is high, the customer gets to speak to a human being immediately. Presumed deadbeats are shunted to an overflow call center far, far away. The next time you have trouble getting through to a business, you might want to hang up and call back using an Internet phone service like Google Voice. This time the software will see your Internet phone number, not your regular one. That won’t always work in your favor, but sometimes it will.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency
by Roger L. Martin
Published 28 Sep 2020

Other proxies get surrogated as well. The standard models also hold that having excess labor on the job is inefficient. Another proxy for efficiency is the elimination of slack. Exactly how many workers need to be, for example, on the retail floor to serve the expected number of customers? Exactly how many minutes should a call-center operator spend on each customer call? Anything more than the minimum is slack and hence the embodiment of inefficiency. Therefore, companies have been using ever more sophisticated algorithms to schedule workers as tightly as possible, leaving no slack for employees to serve their customers better.

…

Ton’s work clearly demonstrates that a model embracing optimal rather than minimal slack does in fact work in retail. She shows that a combination of higher pay, more training (particularly cross-training), greater slack, and limited assortment is the combination that produces extraordinary results in retailing—and has been applied beyond in nursing homes and call centers. It is clearly doable, and her Good Jobs Institute is helping other retailers to adopt this successful approach—which sees slack as a variable in a complex adaptive system to be balanced rather than as an error to be eliminated. Manufacturing experts recognize the importance of slack when dealing with the most complex machines, for example the giant industrial paper machines used in making high-volume grades such as photocopier paper or toilet tissue.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
by Mike Cohn
Published 1 Mar 2004

Too many commercial products take the approach that it’s possible to guess what users want. If you have the chance to observe users work with your software, take it. This chance for rapid and direct feedback from users is one of many reasons to release software as early and often as possible. At one company the users were nurses working in a call center. The nurses answered medical questions from callers. The nurses indicated that they needed a large text field that could be used for documenting the results of the call when the call was finished. An initial version of the software included a large text field on the call wrapup screen. However, after the initial release each member of the development team spent a day observing the users.

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The Users’ Manager When doing development on a project for internal use, the organization may be reluctant to give you full and unlimited access to one or more users but may be willing to give you access to the users’ manager. Consider this a bait-and-switch unless the manager is also a true user of the software. Even then, it is almost certain that the manager has different usage patterns of the software than does a typical user. For example, on one call center application the team was initially given access to shift supervisors. While shift supervisors did use the software, many of the features they wanted in a new version were focused around managing call queues and transferring calls between agents. These features were of very minimal importance to the users they supervised, for whom the software was mostly intended.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

The attributes that make digital technologies appear ghostly, disembodied, and otherworldly are belied by their material, industrial, and sometimes boring infrastructural qualities.34 Digital remains depend on the global supply chains and human exploitation underlying the success of corporate platforms, including the extraction of minerals necessary for the production of hardware, factories in cities like Shenzhen, and call center workers and content moderators in cities like Manila and Mumbai.35 Digital remains also rely on vast server farms that dot rural landscapes, sapping up endless amounts of energy, and on physical fiber optic cables under the ocean floor.36 Despite the material nature of computer technologies and their practical uses in commerce, offices, schools, and the military, there has long been a sense that they can foster communication with the dead.37 Although Marxist definitions of labor and the valorization of affect are helpful when considering how capitalism extracts profit from digital interactions, data are not just tied to political economic processes but rely on notions of legacy, kinship, posterity, and sentiment.38 “Data” originally referred to things given, perhaps as a gift.

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Verge, November 17, 2015. www.theverge.com/2015/11/17/9751380/facebook-paris-attacks-flag-profile-photos-safety-check-lebanon. Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” New Yorker, January 23, 2017. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich. Padios, Jan. A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Papailias, Penelope. “Witnessing in the Age of the Database: Viral Memorials, Affective Publics, and the Assemblage of Mourning.”

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

When she became CEO in 2011, she realized a combination of pervasive low interest rates and technological change was going to drive huge disruption for her company and her employees. “I said to myself, I don’t want to be one of those companies that has to turn all these people out on the streets.”19 Mulligan made several practical moves. She started a program to teach people in the company’s call centers to write code, joined a program to teach actuaries to be data analysts, and developed a program of “train in, train out,” which provided two years’ tuition at a local community college for workers whose jobs were eliminated. “Companies have an obligation to society to try and do this,” she said.

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He described how he saw that firsthand with his own workers. He prides PayPal on paying at or above market rates across the globe. Yet when they did a study of the net disposable income of their employees—what they had left after essential living expenses and taxes—he found that their entry level call center workers had disposable incomes below 10 percent. “And we feel that 20 percent is the bare minimum you need for somebody to have savings, to be able to not struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. We were paying at or above market rates. So clearly, the market isn’t working for a segment of our population.

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
by Harry Markopolos
Published 1 Mar 2010

Chapter 5 The Goddess of Justice Wears a Blindfold If I needed a reminder of how potentially dangerous an investigation of the financial industry can be to a whistleblower, I got it in February 2003. An honest man named Peter Scannell was working in Putnam Investments’ Quincy, Massachusetts, call center, basically taking customer buy and sell orders. Eventually he realized that some of his customers were market-timing; at the end of the trading day, if the American stock market had gone up they bought mutual funds loaded with foreign stocks, figuring those stocks would rise when trading began in the foreign markets the next day.

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A Ponzi scheme is actually one of the easiest fraud schemes to detect because there is no underlying investment product and no trading, while the assets are being diverted to pay offinvestors. Yet this case was assigned to SEC staffers who had absolutely no experience and little knowledge of Ponzi schemes, and they really had no place within the SEC to go to learn about them. To further increase the SEC’s auditing effectiveness, I would create a Center for All Lessons Learned, a CALL center, similar to a database that has been used with great effectiveness for decades by the U.S. Army. CALL would collate and sort through every fraud uncovered by the SEC. These frauds would be analyzed to find both the common and the unique elements so that the odds of future similar frauds being undetected would be greatly reduced.

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Pension fund regulation should be moved from the Department of Labor to the SEC. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission should be brought into the SEC, which would then become the sole capital markets regulator. To ensure the highest degree of coordination, this super-agency would maintain a centralized database, a super-duper CALL center so that the details of any enforcement action by one agency would be online for all the other agencies to see and utilize. Spread the knowledge, share the experience, be bigger than the biggest bad guys. Bernie Madoff got caught for the first time in 1992, but apparently none of the investigators after the turn of the century knew about it.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America
by Diana Elizabeth Kendall
Published 27 Jul 2005

An NBC sitcom, Outsourced, has sought to frame the issue of outsourcing humorously by depicting a supposedly all-American company, Mid-American Novelties, that sells products such as whoopee cushions, foam hands with extended fingers (like those used at sporting events), and plastic molds that look like pools of fake blood. The Mid-American Novelties call center, where customers place orders, has been outsourced to India. When the company sends a manager, Todd Dempsy (Ben Rappaport), from the United States to run the call center, he quickly learns that he must educate his new staff in the ways of American culture so that they can more effectively interact with U.S. callers and make sales. To accomplish this goal, Dempsy requires employees in India to watch old films so that they can learn U.S. popular culture.

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They must study English, lose their accents, and pretend to live in the United States when talking with callers. This humorous framing downplays the crisis that outsourcing has created for many U.S. workers and their families. It also minimizes the problems faced by people who increasingly must rely on globalized call centers for technology support and to purchase products and services. In media framing of stories about job loss in the United States, illegal immigration is a key culprit, along with downsizing and outsourcing. Articles and news reports about the “Americano Dream” explain how indigenous workers are pitted against illegal immigrants, sometimes referred to more politely as undocumented workers, who are a source of cheap labor in this country.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Published 1 Mar 2013

Four Reasons to Use the One Metric That Matters The OMTM is of most importance early on. Later, as your startup scales, you will want to focus on more metrics, and you’ll have the resources and experience to do so. Importantly, you’ll also have a team to whom you can delegate metrics. Your operations person might care about uptime or latency, your call center might worry about average time on hold, and so on. At Year One Labs, one of the litmus tests for us as advisors and investors was the clarity with which a team understood, and tracked, their OMTM. If it was on the tip of their tongues, and aligned with their current stage, that was a good thing.

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In many B2B-focused companies, the top 20% of customers generate 150–300% of profits, while the middle 70% of customers break even, and the lowest 10% of customers reduce 50–200% of profits.[146] You’ll track support metrics like top-requested features, number of outstanding trouble tickets, post-sales support, call center hold time, and so on. This will indicate where you’re losing money, and whether the product is standardized and stable enough to move into growth and scaling. Segment this data, too. Figure out who’s costing the most money. Then consider firing them.[147] Once, it was hard to break out individual customer costs, but electronic systems make it possible to assign activities—such as support calls, emails, additional storage, or a truck roll—to individual customers.

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Scale stage considerations, The Hole in the Middle stages and, Model + Stage Drives the Metric You Track buy-in, executive, Beforehand: Get Buy-in, Get Executive Buy-in buyer and seller growth rate, What DuProprio Watches buyer and seller ratings, What DuProprio Watches, Conversion Rates and Segmentation C CAC (customer acquisition cost) Backify case study, Backupify’s Customer Lifecycle Learning determining normal value for metrics, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing in e-commerce model, A Practical Example, Abandonment in mobile apps model, Model Three: Free Mobile App, Mobile Download Size in Revenue stage, Stage Four: Revenue, Where Does the Money Come From?, Breakeven on Variable Costs in SaaS model, Model Two: Software as a Service (SaaS) paid engine and, Virality Engine Caddell, Bud, Deciding What to Do with Your Life, The Lean Canvas CakeMail mailing platform, Mailing List Effectiveness call center hold time metric, Support Costs call to action, Mailing List Click-Through Rates campaign contribution metric, Mailing List Click-Through Rates Campbell, Patrick on setting pricing, Pricing Metrics, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing on upselling, Upselling and Growing Revenue cancellation rate, Am I Good Enough?

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

His nasally vowels gave many the mistaken impression he was a native Chicagoan. O’Sullivan dreamed of being a writer, and started freelancing political pieces for Gawker, Jacobin, and other left-leaning outlets. To pay the bills, he landed in a call center at a tech company, a lower-level peon answering angry customer support questions. The work was depressing, but he spent his off-hours pursuing his passion, hustling for opportunities to write. More vivid than his dreary call center job was O’Sullivan’s digital life on Twitter. He mostly used it to follow political accounts and news and to connect with other writers. He started chatting with other leftists and joking around with people who began as anonymous avatars in his Twitter feed, then slowly grew to become his online friends.

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The contract-based labor model that eschewed directly employing drivers. The campaigns against drivers who wanted to unionize. To him, this faceless, monolithic tech company would never defend its Muslim cab drivers. O’Sullivan couldn’t pinpoint whether it was his deep, familial ties to organized labor, the frustration he felt towards his shitty call center tech job, or the deep-seated need to fight back against Trump. He just snapped: he had had it with Uber. Sitting alone in his cold apartment in the dead of a Chicago winter, he started typing a response to Uber’s tweet, still fuming with anger. “congrats to @Uber_NYC on breaking a strike to profit off of refugees being consigned to Hell,” @Bro_Pair tweeted, “eat shit and die.”

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

The reason is not only India’s role as a global software hub but the large number of newly unemployed in the call center sector, with which India has become synonymous. Machine learning has caught up to Bangalore’s chatty call center workers, automating customer service, data analysis, and other tasks. The IT industry remains India’s largest employer—with 4 million workers and $150 billion in annual revenues in 2017—but net new annual hiring has plummeted from a peak of 400,000 toward zero. Top IT companies such as Infosys and Tech Mahindra will have layoffs of nearly 500,000 by 2020. Filipino back-office workers face the same risk to their call center jobs. Start-ups are absorbing some of the displaced while luring those who don’t want to work in corporate behemoths.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
Published 23 Mar 2011

The addition of sidewalks and pervious public green space figured into both Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle’s elegant transformation of a grocery store into a public library in Texas, and The Beck Group’s award-winning conversion of a Super Kmart into a megachurch in Georgia. Many other vacant big-box stores have been converted to call centers and office space—including the headquarters for Hormel Foods, which includes the Spam Museum in a former Kmart in Minnesota. There are countless additional examples of this kind of recycling that show welcome but minor improvements to the physical and social infrastructure. 5 However, retrofitting’s greater potential goes well beyond incremental adaptive reuse or renovation.

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Empty big boxes have facilitated the same kind of diversification of activities and enrichment of social opportunities along suburban strips. They have been adaptively reused as churches/synagogues/ mosques, libraries, courthouses, government offices, community centers, school and university buildings, nightclubs, dinner theaters, multiplex cinemas, gymnasiums, an indoor go-cart raceway, the Spam Museum, call centers, offices, and medical clinics (one example in Savannah reused the heavy voltage from the frozen food section of a former grocery store to power an MRI scanner).31 The addition of these programs to suburban areas lacking in third places enriches their neighborhoods and adds opportunities for greater communal interaction—even without further changes to the physical context.

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It also offers an opportunity to reclaim park and open space that may have been lost to commercial development in previous generations and to mitigate the environmental damage, especially to the local watershed, that the paved-over conditions of malls produced. Examples of changing the use at mall sites to create needed local jobs in lower middle-class and blue-collar suburbs are Eastgate in Chattanooga, Tennessee; NetCenter in Hampton Roads, Virginia; and NetPark in Tampa, Florida. The big floor plates of department stores are ideal for a call center business. Adaptive reuse of these buildings usually involves adding windows and/or skylights to existing vacated department stores to bring in natural light. In some instances, the internal concourses of the mall remain intact but are unused. In other examples, such as Downtown Park Forest and Willingboro Town Center, the local municipality has been forced to step in and assume ownership of the dead mall site in order to forestall the spread of blight.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

He set about crafting a facility that he dubbed not a store but a gallery. He’d staff it like Tesla’s other stores, include the same educational materials, but no pricing would be allowed on the premises. If somebody was interested in buying a car, they’d be directed to a computer where they’d enter their contact info. A call center in Colorado would follow up. The law dictated that their vehicle couldn’t physically be located in the state prior to the sale—but that wasn’t a problem for Tesla, as there wasn’t exactly a ton of inventory lying around. Customers who ordered vehicles generally had to wait for them to be made. Only after a Texas customer’s check had arrived at Tesla could the vehicle enter the state.

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Though Musk was chairman and the largest single investor of both Tesla and SolarCity, the two companies’ cultures had diverged greatly. The basic means of selling their products were miles apart, for instance. Musk despised hard sales practices, which had contributed to Tesla’s stores acting more like education centers. SolarCity was all about the hard sell, with salesmen traveling door-to-door and using call centers to pressure potential customers. The sales force was highly incentivized for such practices, too. Tesla disliked the idea of having its salespeople working against each other, shying away from the commissions that SolarCity embraced. The differences showed in the books. Wheeler’s team calculated that SolarCity had spent $175 million in commission payments in the previous twelve months, compared to just $40 million at Tesla.

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Back then, the Model S represented a challenging sell to buyers uncertain about an upstart carmaker offering an untested technology. After the success of the Model S, however, those concerns weren’t as prominent for the Model 3. Those buyers still needed some handholding, though, especially when it came to financing and trading in current vehicles. Kim worked to beef up call centers, where in-house sales teams would take the lead in closing deals. Tesla wasn’t going to make the mistake it had made with the Roadster and the Model S, assuming reservations would automatically convert into sales. Cayle Hunter had been hired in January 2018 to oversee the new in-house sales and delivery team based in Las Vegas, in an old SolarCity office not far from the Strip.* Other, smaller teams were based in Fremont and New York.

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2012

But the other reason compensation is many, many multiples of the average wage in this country is that trading stocks, doing IPOs, merging companies, managing money is a very lucrative business. Not everyone can do it. It looks easy, football field-sized trading rooms jammed with adrenalin rush maniacs like you sitting in front of huge stacks of LCD screens. It might as well be a call center in Mumbai. But it’s hard. Really nasty hard. Wall Street hires in that top one percentile zone – as in intelligence. And then they make your life miserable hoping you’ll quit before they break you. Or hoping they break you before you lose money for the firm. It’s not WalMart or General Motors or even Pfizer or Intel.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

On the new network you could call any toll-free number, not just AT&T hosted numbers, and there would be no ANI on the call, unless you were calling 800-CALL-ATT or a few other numbers that are internal numbers hosted by the call center itself. All you have to do to cause ANI-fails to toll-free numbers now is dial 10-10-288-0 and touch tone in the 800 number when AT&T comes on the line. This method of causing ANI-fails is great because you don’t have to speak to a live operator and you can even have your modem wardial 800 numbers without fear of your ANI being logged. 94192c16.qxd 6/3/08 3:35 PM Page 667 A New Era of Telephony However there are some AT&T call centers that still forward ANI, and you may be able to reach them even if the call centers aren’t in your area. Try op diverting to an AT&T language assistance operator.

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The number is never good from out of state, but most of my “colleagues” in the call center don’t know this and give it out, causing much frustration when the caller calls back to complain and get a good number. It’s a toll-free number and clearly marked “out-of-state,” but most callers don’t want the “Toll-Free Number Runaround.” They want a “direct number,” then get the recording that the number in the 780 exchange is not valid. So how does a Telco go about changing the listings in the directory database that I (and my 600 friends in my call center) use every day? Do what we tell people who call wondering why their number isn’t in our directory: “Call your Local Phone Company, and make sure they have your listing correct.

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Portable programmable road signs are often mounted on wheels atop a small trailer (complete with gasoline generator and a dedicated PC or proprietary controller or cellular modem) and towed to road construction sites as needed. Surprisingly, the metal cabinet containing the programming electronics is seldom (or insecurely) locked. Large LED array signs are often used on factory floors to display production run data to assembly-line workers, or in call centers to indicate call volume, ANI data, or other information to operators. These units are usually hardwired via RS-232 interface to a company computer. If you come across a programmable sign (say, at a garage sale but there is no manual or programming device with it) get the manufacturer’s name off the unit and contact them for an operations and programming manual for that model.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

In particular, over the past 25 years, physical activities that require a degree of physical coordination and sensory perception have proven more resistant to automation than basic information processing, a phenomenon known as Moravec’s Paradox’. For instance, many types of clerical work have been automated, and millions of people interact with robot bank tellers and airport ticket agents each day. More recently, call center work—which was widely offshored to India, the Philippines, or other low-wage nations in the 1990s—has increasingly been replaced by automated voice response systems that can recognize an increasingly large domain-specific vocabulary and even complete sentences. In contrast, vision, fine motor skills, and locomotion have been much harder to automate.

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry
by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler
Published 19 Nov 2009

As much as we had wished to win enterprise companies in the past, and even made some lackluster efforts to do so, we did not have the distribution or distribution capacity in place to make this a sustainable pursuit. Building distribution is a tremendous challenge: it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and it’s always evolving (especially as geographic targets change). The first step was to expand beyond our call center in San Francisco and place sales reps in the field. We needed individuals who were experts in the various markets and professionals with a proven track record. Although the corporate sales team did a fantastic job on the phone, they weren’t the right group to build enterprise sales. They had just graduated from college, had no experience selling face-to-face, and wore T-shirts and jeans to work.

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The threatening letter demanded we cease operating under the salesforce name. This was a gigantic problem. Trademark infringement is a notoriously sticky subject in Australia—and one that can cost companies huge sums of money. Additionally, SalesForce Australia was an intimidating company to have as an adversary. It had been in the market running outsourced call centers since 1994 and had established a name for itself by working with such huge customers as Hewlett-Packard and BMW. In an effort to prepare for the worst outcome—having to enter the market under a different name—we trademarked the name sforce. I did not, however, want to have to use the alternate name.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

We’ll walk the streets of Seattle’s up-and-coming Pioneer Square, once known for its methadone clinics and now home to companies such as Zynga and Blue Nile. We will visit Berlin, Europe’s sexiest city but still surprisingly poor, and Raleigh-Durham, which is relatively dull but increasingly prosperous. We will discover why Walmart.com had to leave Arkansas and what this means for auto workers in Flint and call-center employees in Albuquerque. In doing so, we will discover how the changes in the world economy are reshaping the American workplace and American communities. These are the forces that will determine the location of future jobs and the fate of particular cities and regions. We will learn what causes these changes and how they will affect our careers, our communities, and our way of life.

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Wages in China have been creeping up, a predictable effect of increased prosperity. China’s move to revalue its currency, the yuan, has further increased labor costs from the perspective of American companies. General Electric has reopened an appliances factory in Kentucky after years overseas. Carbonite has brought a call center back to Boston from India. After twelve years in Mexico, Otis Elevators is moving its production from Nogales back to South Carolina. There are even signs of “insourcing,” the opposite of outsourcing, in which foreign companies invest in production facilities in the United States. A Chinese company called Yuncheng has opened a factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, finding it cheaper than Shanghai.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

What is called “skilling” is too often a euphemism for rendering mechanical what once demanded at least a degree of knowledge, alertness and involvement. The skills of the craftsman, the mechanic, the builder, the butcher, the baker have decayed; a great deal of work, reduced to the purely routine, remains literally stupefying. The work routines of modern supermarkets and call centers have been dubbed “digital Taylorism,” in homage to the inventor of the conveyor belt.16 Drastic cost reductions have reduced “face time,” as sociability is now called. The “creativity” of many jobs is just branding: “hard-working passionate chefs creating every day” runs an advertisement for a well-known fast-food chain.

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See also Irina Grugulis et al., “ ‘No Place to Hide’: The Reality of Leadership in UK Supermarkets,” SKOPE Research Paper 91, on the McDonald’s-ization of work. On digital Taylorism, see Philip Brown et al., The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65–82. For the grisly world of call centers, see Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 100–16. 17. St Paul’s Institute, Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today (London: St Paul’s Institute, 2011). 18. H. Bielenski, G. Bosch and A. Wagner, Employment and Working Time in Europe (Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions [EFILWC], 2002).

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

The two party headquarters—the DNC and the RNC—are just a couple blocks away from the Capitol and feature large rooms filled with tables and telephones. Party leaders encourage lawmakers to spend hours at these telephones, calling through lists of potential donors. Representative Peter Defazio, a Democrat from Oregon, described the situation: “If you walked in there, you would say, ‘Boy, this is about the worst looking, most abusive looking call center situation I’ve seen in my life. … These people don’t have any workspace, the other person is virtually touching them.”13 Politicians eye the plush K Street lobbying career (or the career as lobbyists in state capitals) that beckons at the end of a successful stint as an elected official. In his 2012 book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, the Harvard professor Larry Lessig tells the story of the Mississippi senator John Stennis.

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“If you want to sell stuff made in China, you no longer have to have representatives on the ground in that country, nor do you have to place orders for a certain, guaranteed volume of goods. All you have to do is click on a site like Alibaba.com.” As Wessel points out, other companies now exist that provide twenty-four-hour call centers and state-of-the-art business management software to small organizations. “The competitive advantages of scale are being commoditized. Minimum efficient scale is getting smaller and smaller.10 The impact of the collapse of scale will change—in fact, already is changing—our economy and our companies in ways we do not yet understand.

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski
Published 23 Feb 2016

When the national cricket team plays arch rival Pakistan, the total amount wagered can approach $3 billion. Yet the Asian betting market is changing. Gamblers no longer need to track down black market bookmakers in rooms behind backstreet bars. There was a time when they would need to bring cash and a code word; now they can bet by phone or online. Glossy call centers have replaced grimy betting rooms. The new industry is a step away from the illegal black market, but it remains little regulated. This is the “gray market”: modern, corporate, and opaque. When it comes to high-stakes betting on sports such as soccer, Asia is the location of choice for many Western gamblers.

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See robots (bots) backgammon, 172–173 Baldwin, Roger, 36–37, 38 bankroll management, 65–67, 144–145 bankruptcy, 66 bans on bank transfers, 198 by casinos, 22, 40, 43 by poker websites, 192–193, 195 in sports, 90 baseball, 79–80, 87, 88, 106, 200, 209 basketball, 82, 85–86, 107 Bass, Thomas, 14 Bayern, Shawn, 181 Beane, Billy, 209 Beasley-Murray, Ben, 20 Beat the Dealer (Thorp), 35, 39, 61, 208 beauty contests, Keynes’ interpretation of, 122–123, 124 behavior accounting for, 208 deeper understanding of, developing, 217 influence of, in poker, 191–192 involved in lying, 190–191 of opponents and the need for predictions, 163 robots copying, 192 social, influence of, 203 tit-for-tat, 161 unanticipated, errant algorithms and, 118 unpredictability of, 3, 133, 134 Benter, Bill, 35, 39, 42, 43, 45–46, 52, 55, 56–57, 67–68, 79, 91, 103, 206, 207, 211, 218 Bertsimas, Dimitris, 214 Betfair, 93–94, 95, 97, 111, 112, 113, 114–115, 116–117 betting exchanges, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 110, 111, 112–113, 114–115, 132, 217 betting limits, 22, 140 See also limited-stakes poker betting syndicates in horse racing, 35, 52–53, 54, 56, 57–58, 64, 66–69, 103, 206 legalization of, 101 lotteries and, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 202 private, traditional preserve of, 96 in sports, 89, 100, 102, 103, 110 betting window, 112 bias favorite-long-shot, 45, 46, 57 in models, 211 overlays, 56 physical, 7, 8, 21 psychological, 6, 98 billiards, 19 Billings, Darse, 167 Binion’s Gambling Hall, 139–140 Black, Andrew, 93–94 black market bookmakers, 90–91 blackjack bankroll management in, 65, 144 card counting in, 35, 38, 41, 71, 152, 180, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214 complexity and, 83–84 computerized prediction in, 42 evolution of methods in, 208 idea for an optimal strategy in, 36–37 loopholes found in, 72, 197 and the Monte Carlo method, 61 online, 71–73 randomness in, 38, 40, 41, 42, 71, 212 university course studying, 213–214 bluffing, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 177, 190, 208, 217 body language, 162–163 Bolton, Ruth, 46, 49–52, 54, 55, 68, 69, 211, 216, 218 bonus abuse, 72 bonuses, 71, 72 bookmakers aims of, 88–89 arbitrage and, 110, 111 betting limits and, 91 black market, 90–91 competition faced by, 93, 94 and information flow, 89, 90 and legalization of gambling, 101 online gambling and, 73 predictions and, 73, 75, 77, 81, 87–88, 89 robots as, 130 and slippage, 114 sports and, 90–92, 93, 95, 101, 110, 111 traditional, 43, 93, 111 Borel, Émile, 40, 41, 62, 63, 148, 156, 211–212 Boston Globe (newspaper), 32 bot hunters, 193 Bowling, Michael, 187 brains adult, 177–178 artificial, 173–174, 175 child, 172, 178 injured parts of, related to regret, 153 memory and, 180 Bringing Down the House (Mezrich), 214 brute force approach, 33–34, 64, 168, 171 bucketing, 152, 180 Bundesliga, 78 Burch, Neil, 181, 188 butterfly effect, 9, 124 cable, 110, 113 California State Lottery, 141 call centers, 90 Cantey, Wilbert, 37 Cantor Fitzgerald, 87 Cantor Gaming, 87–88, 89 card counting, 35, 38, 41, 71, 152, 180, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214 card shuffling, 40–42, 62, 215 Carnegie Library, 80 Cash WinFall, 29–32 casino industry, 212 casinos bans by, 22, 40, 43 gaming machines at, rules involving, 177 security at, 2, 20, 21, 22, 40, 73, 197, 213 See also blackjack; poker; roulette causation and correlation, issue of, 206–207 Centaur, 100 Cepheus poker bot, 188 Chadwick, Henry, 80 Champions League, 93 Chaos (journal), 15 chaos theory, 9, 13, 22, 120, 124, 127, 217 chaotic decision making, 162 Chapin, R.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China
by Desmond Shum
Published 6 Sep 2021

While it took months—and often a bribe—to get a landline telephone from a lumbering state-owned phone company, paging technology, sold by private firms, allowed people to leapfrog ahead. Scores of paging firms opened up vast call centers, firing messages nationwide. By the late 1990s, close to 100 million Chinese had pagers. Then another disruptive technology—mobile telephones—arrived with messaging capabilities built in, and paging began to lose out. Lan’s firm, PalmInfo, attempted to give these call centers a new lease on life, offering secretarial and banking services. ChinaVest was interested in PalmInfo and we ultimately helped Lan raise $4 million. In late 1999, Lan offered me a job, spurring another big change in my life.

Radicalized
by Cory Doctorow
Published 19 Mar 2019

“Too much screen-time, Daddy,” Maddy said, a perfect impression of her mother, made all the more uncanny by their increasing resemblance and a recent matching mommy-daughter haircut with blue highlights. He picked up Maddy and gave her a hard squeeze while she squealed and kicked and laughed. “OK, kiddo,” he said, and caught Lacey’s eye. Lacey looked worried. Joe had the school run that morning. Lacey had gone back to work, landing a job at a call center that handled reservation problems for a big hotel chain, and Joe had shifted his hours around so that he could do the drop-off in the morning and Lacey could do the pickup at night. It wasn’t a good career move—there was a direct correlation between being at your desk at 8:00 a.m. and getting a promotion—but since the day of Lacey’s diagnosis, all his passion for a career had leaked out of him and been replaced by an equally urgent sense that his time with his family was a fleeting thing to be savored.

…

The cops had served no-knock warrants on all four, gone in with guns drawn and SWAT backup—but had somehow managed to fail to shoot any of them in the process. Joe took some comfort in that. Social media exploded with the personal lives of these four guys, who were, to put it mildly, basic as fuck. They had bullshit jobs: jobs that no one, not even them, thought worth doing. One was a management consultant. One was a customer service manager for a call center. One was an ad-tech programmer. One was a marketing specialist for cryptocurrency startups. All shared one trait: they’d watched the slow death of an insured loved one who’d been denied coverage. In an earlier age, they’d have stewed in private misery, become alcoholics, shot themselves. Instead, they’d followed simple online instructions for starting a message board and hosting it on a bulletproof server accessible only via the Tor network.

Lessons From Private Equity Any Company Can Use
by Orit Gadiesh and Hugh MacArthur
Published 14 Aug 2008

For the second initiative, the new owners assigned a high-level executive team—supported by outside technical experts—to spearhead a change management program to consolidate loan processing, credit collection, and trade finance into two new customer service centers. This initiative included a parallel step that dedicated project teams to upgrade Korea First’s IT organization, adding telemarketing and customer call-center capacities. By choreographing these steps in parallel, Newbridge was able to make Korea First’s new facilities operational within five months. Finally, the blueprint took into account the need to build the right organization with the right salespeople to support the full-potential plan. As in many Asian business cultures, Korea’s labor and management have a loyalty compact supported by strong employment laws.

The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman
Published 1 Jan 2013

Had they done that and come up with loan-modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.” A spokesman for Goldman Sachs said the company disagreed with Wyatt’s account but offered no specifics. At Bank of America, by far the country’s largest servicer, an employee who works in one of the bank’s many call centers finds the process as mystifying as do the borrowers to whom he speaks every day. The employee says homeowners have been regularly routed to him after being rejected from HAMP for unclear reasons. Sometimes it’s news to them they’d been denied at all. He says he’s learned not to put any stock in those previous denials—the income information in Bank of America’s system entered by some other employee in another department is often incorrect.

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The representative said we should save those payments because we would use them for a new down payment when we were approved for the modification. So we did exactly as we were told. But, once we were assigned to a modification caseworker, we could never get her on the phone. Ever. It took six months for first contact. Then, we were served foreclosure papers. I begged and pleaded and frantically reminded the call center representatives every day that we had only done what we were told. I advised [them] we had saved all of the payments and had six months’ worth of payments in the bank that I would hand over now. They said they could not accept payments on a property in foreclosure. We hired an attorney and they eventually offered to modify the loan after a couple of years of fighting it, but we would also owe $8,000 in their attorney’s fees.

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There is a segment of the population”—like the consumers of her company’s higher-end product, she felt—“that cares and will pay for it.” If they are aware how inhumane the reality is. But awareness has a long way to go, and logistics doesn’t just mean online retail; food packagers and processors, medical suppliers, and factories use mega-3PLs as well. And a whole lot of other industries—hotels, call centers—take advantage of the price controls and plausible deniability that temporary staffing offers. “Maybe awareness will lead to better working conditions,” says Vinod Singhal, a professor of operations management at Georgia Tech. “But …” Given the state of the economy, he isn’t optimistic. This is the kind of resignation many of my coworkers have been forced to accept.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

March 23, 2014. wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303369904579423402132106512-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMjExNDIyWj. 40 PhoneID Score: Kashmir Hill. “Your Phone Number Is Going to Get a Reputation Score.” Forbes. Nov. 11, 2013. forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/your-phone-number-is-going-to-be-scored. 40 $214 million industry: Natasha Singer. “In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell.” New York Times. Oct. 12, 2013. nytimes.com/2013/10/13/business/in-a-mood-call-center-agents-can-tell.html. 40 Beyond Verbal background: Beyond Verbal. “App Developers.” beyondverbal.com/join-us/app-developers. 41 “measure psychological traits”: Michal Kosinski, David Stilwell, and Thor Graepel. “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.”

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Both Twitter and the AP were criticized for their lax security, and a few months later, Twitter introduced two-factor authentication, a security measure that should make such incidents less likely in the future. The financial industry didn’t escape scrutiny either, as some commentators, already chastened by the 2010 crash, began to consider the consequences of automated, high-frequency trading. The next frontier in sentiment analysis may be not in what we write but in what we say. Some call centers and customer-service lines are investing in computational voice analysis, allowing them to detect the moods of callers. The pitfalls of this practice are obvious—the software may not be accurate, customers may be sorted into categories in which they don’t want to be, people’s moods can change from call to call or even within a single call—but it gives companies more control over how they manage incoming calls.

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
by Gary Younge
Published 27 Jun 2011

Thanks to Facebook, email and Skype, we have never communicated more with more people in more places. As consumers, we have never had more in common. In India, call-center workers learn to flatten their vowels, take Western names and learn the plotlines of American sitcoms to make customers in a continent they have never visited feel more at home. On the other hand, however, we have become fearful of the outside world and do everything we can to establish and enhance our “difference.” The period when Indian call centers were taking off coincided with the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as a potent and lethal political force. “I am afraid that the celebrated cultural identities are being erased by modernization, by Americanization, by television, by a whole process of making modes of life uniform,” writes Pierre Hassner in La Violence et la paix.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Securities analysis (high-skill) can be delivered remotely; so can keyboard entry (low-skill), radiology (high-skill), and customer complaint centers. Governments have become enthusiastic exporters of service jobs, though in the United States it’s typically done through private-sector subcontractors. In Albert Brooks’s 2006 film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Brooks is seen repeatedly walking past a call center in Delhi, allowing us to hear a sequence of increasingly outlandish salutations capped finally by “This is the White House. How may I direct your call?” A 2006 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that much administration of state government programs had been shifted offshore, including—in what seemed like a cruel joke—the processing of unemployment insurance claims.22 “Twenty or thirty years from now,” Blinder mused, “will Economics 101 lectures at Princeton University be delivered by a life-like hologram of a well-educated and well-spoken professor who is actually in Mumbai, but who can see and hear the Princeton students via video and audio hookups—and who earns one-fifth of what I do?”

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But something close to the dystopia they envision where effort and skill don’t matter already exists for those toiling in the economy’s lower tiers. They should have a chat with their office receptionist. Or they could read Nickel and Dimed, or the 2010 book Catching Out, by Dick J. Reavis, a contributing editor at Texas Monthly, who went undercover as a day laborer. Waitresses, nonunion construction workers, dental assistants, call-center operators—people in these jobs are essentially replaceable, and usually have bosses who don’t distinguish between individual initiative and insubordination. Even experience is of limited value, because it’s often accompanied by diminishing physical vigor. A little further up the income scale, median income has declined during the past decade while productivity has increased.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

And we still got pitched new ideas from entrepreneurs looking for venture funding. But it was sometime in 2001 that I started noticing a difference to these pitches. They weren’t coming from Stanford MBAs or three guys in Sunnyvale with a brilliant idea. I got pitched by a group visiting from Bangalore to expand call centers for U.S. companies. Or from another group in Bombay doing contract software development work for hire. A group of Israeli physicists had a new way of creating transistors that could change the entire semiconductor business. There were some software coders in Norway working on applications for cell phones.

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The idea of living on Singapore Airlines 747s or United Airlines 777s doesn’t float my boat. The answer is simple—I’m not sure. There is no way to be sure. Most of these places still seem stuck in that industrial mode— making stuff for us. But the more I look, the more I see these pockets of innovation: a group writing code for Symbian cell phones in Norway, architecting call centers in Bombay, designing a chip for Chinese set-top boxes in Guangzhou, rethinking the physics of nanoscale electronics in Tel Aviv. They may not amount to much, but I damn sure need to understand them before I invest in any technology, in Silicon Valley or anywhere else. George Soros and Julian Robertson of Tiger had it easy.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin
Published 14 Nov 2016

DATA SOURCE: OECD online database on “Trade in Value Added” (known as TiVA), www.oecd.org. The final category is India. India’s value-added export growth has been remarkably biased toward services, although the manufacturing sector accounts for about 40 percent of its growth. This reflects the country’s well-known prowess in information technology services, call centers, and the like. Brazil and Indonesia defy simple classification. Their booming value-added exports were generated about 40 percent from the primary sector and 40 or 50 percent from the manufacturing sector. For comparison, the bottom panel of Figure 28 shows the same decomposition for the G7.

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When the ICT got good enough, the patient and surgeon could be in different countries. The first instance came in 2001 when a New York surgeon operated on a patient in Strasbourg. It is not yet routine, but as telecommunications gets better and more reliable, remote surgery could become as routine as remote call centers are today. If this happened, the best French surgeons would become very busy; anyone with a torn meniscus would want it repaired by one of the world’s leading experts, some of whom are in France. The mediocre knee surgeons would have to find something else to do. But the individuality of the New Globalization’s impact is not limited to highly skilled workers.

925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World
by Devin D. Thorpe
Published 25 Nov 2012

If you no longer have a network to approach, you can start by listing your services on Odesk.com, a web site for freelancers to ply their trade. Note than much of the competition is international from low wage countries so this is not likely to be a source for the best paying gigs, but it may be a way to get you started right now. Call center jobs: visit monster.com, the giant job board, and search for “work from home call center” and you’ll see a list of available jobs. If you search just “work from home” you’ll see many more jobs. Research any work from home employer carefully. Do not pay fees to get a job. No legitimate employer will require you to pay the company! Network marketing: many people love network marketing and make a good living at it.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

Basically, it reads their communications and makes automated suggestions about how they can improve as individuals and how the company can better manage all its employees overall. Cogito, another such company, is a sort of real-time coach for call-center agents. Its software analyzes phone conversations with customers and looks for signs of frustration, hurried speech, even “intent to buy.” As the call-center agent progresses, he might be given an “empathy cue” if the software thinks the conversation needs a bit of warmth. According to the company’s sales materials, not only can agents use the technology to “speak more confidently, concisely, and compassionately,” but the technology also looks for the common characteristics of the highest-performing agents, and “provides automated guidance to help all agents perform like the best.”

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
by Ryan Dezember
Published 13 Jul 2020

My only option if I wanted to take the job at the Journal was to rent out the house until the market improved. * * * Determined to lower the payments, I drove to the bank where I had taken out the mortgage five years earlier and asked for the banker who had made my loan. I was told he no longer worked there and was handed a 1-800 number. I spoke to one call-center worker after another, on hold for hours, restarting the conversation with each transfer or disconnection. The bank required a comical amount of faxed correspondence. I spent a lot of time in line at the Office Depot service desk to send documents that I was pretty sure no one would actually ever receive.

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The appraisal hit the mark, no termites turned up, and closing was scheduled for May. Everything was going smoothly until I called Regions Bank to request the precise amounts needed to pay off my loans. The bank wouldn’t tell me. I was directed to a toll-free line where I was bounced around a call center like a basketball that had rolled through a puddle of muck. It was as if the lender had never dealt with someone selling their house. Eventually someone told me that I had to make the request in writing, via fax, and could expect an answer to be mailed to me a week or two later. That was preposterous.

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine
by Michael Mosley
Published 1 Jun 2020

Within a week four other members of his family had also tested positive for Covid-19, as did five other people who had been in the restaurant at the same time and who had been seated at tables B and C. The restaurant was well ventilated, with an air conditioner and an extractor fan. No one seated at tables E or F seems to have become infected, perhaps because they were out of the main airflow. In another fascinating study, this time at a busy call center, South Korean researchers showed how a single, asymptomatic employee was able to infect nearly 100 others.22 The investigation started when someone working in a 19-story office building came down with Covid-19. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) sprang into action. They closed the building down and sent in a team to test everyone who worked in the building, or who had visited.

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips
by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.
Published 24 Sep 2012

United Airlines. 800/864–8331 for U.S. reservations, 800/538–2929 for international reservations, 02/69633707 within Italy | www.united.com. US Airways. 800/428–4322 for U.S. and Canada reservations, 800/622–1015 for international reservations, 848/813177 within Italy | www.usairways.com. Low-Cost Airlines Blu Express. 199/419777 within Italy, 06/98956677 from abroad | www.blu-express.com. Meridiana. 892/928 call center, 718/751–4499 from U.S., 0871/222 9319 from U.K. | www.meridiana.it. Ryanair. 44/8712460002 within the U.K., 899/552589 within Italy | ryanair.com. Wind Jet. 89/2020 | www.volawindjet.it. BUS TRAVEL An extensive network of bus lines that covers all of the Lazio region is operated by COTRAL (Consorzio Trasporti Lazio).

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You can’t always do so cheaply. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. In Italy, you can also place international calls from call centers. And then there are mobile phones —as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel. The country code for Italy is 39. The area code for Rome is 06. When dialing an Italian number from abroad, do not drop the initial 0 from the local area code.

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Green APT information kiosks called Punti Informativi Turistici (P.I.T.), with multilingual personnel, are near the most important sights and squares, as well as at Termini station and Leonardo da Vinci and Ciampino airports. They’re open 9–1 and 3–7:30 and provide information about cultural events, museums, opening hours, city transportation, and so on. You can also pick up free tourist maps and brochures. In Rome APT Tourist Information Office. Via Parigi 11, Termini | 00185 | 06/51687240. Call Center–Comune di Roma Ufficio Turismo. 06/0608 | www.060608.it. ENIT. (Italian Government Tourist Board). Via Marghera 2–6, Termini | 00185 | 06/49711, 039/039039 | www.italiantourism.com. ONLINE RESOURCES The Turismo Roma website is www.turismoroma.it and is packed with information about events and places to visit.

Rework
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 9 Mar 2010

A pair of sneakers from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh’s obsession with customer service into everything it does. At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and are allowed to talk at length with customers. The call center and the company’s headquarters are in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees—even those who don’t work in customer service or fulfillment—start out by spending four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse. It’s this devotion to customer service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.* Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm owned by Joel Salatin.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

Equally, since one-fifth of US GDP will be spent on healthcare by 2020, medical outsourcing is set to grow. This is where various services that used to be conducted by your local hospital (or at the 248 FUTURE FILES very least in your own country) are now exported to low-cost countries such as India, much in the same way that banks are outsourcing their call centers. Hospitals in the US send X-rays to India overnight via the internet for initial screening. We will slowly see the globalization and ultimately the commoditization of all but the most specialist medical services. Healthcare will therefore essentially become a retail market driven by brands (reputation), price and convenience and the patient will be firmly in control of most purchases.

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Monitoring employee activity is nothing new — Henry Ford created a sociological department to assess whether his employees gambled or drank at home — but it is becoming more common and more pervasive, thanks to technology that makes it easier to find out where people are and what they are doing. For example, at most call centers the length of all conversations is monitored, as are lunch and toilet breaks. There is even software such as NetIntelligence that, by snooping on internet usage, shows bosses exactly what their staff are up to all day. This makes micromanagement relatively easy, but it also makes employees sick.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

The solution was simple: more education and entrepreneurship. If Shen in Shanghai could start a billion-dollar T-shirt company out of his apartment, then what would stop Suzy in Scranton from doing the same, using the same factories in Vietnam, while handling customer service virtually through a call center in Bangalore? There was a powerfully postindustrial romance running through this. With the aid of digital technology, we were now free to shift the focus of our economy from outdated, broken, dirty industries and professions (manufacturing, resource extraction, manual labor), and focus on the good jobs of the future, which were defined by information and creativity.

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Technology is not at the heart of Detroit’s decline, which has its roots in racism, the auto industry’s and organized labor’s combined mismanagement in the face of global competition, and staggering political incompetence and corruption. But the digitally enabled globalization that impacted so many American businesses in the 1990s took hold in Detroit years before. The car companies pioneered the use of automated robots to replace human labor, and embraced outsourcing and offshoring long before India-based call centers became a popular phenomenon. When the Great Recession hit, it hit Detroit and the surrounding region harder than it did the rest of America. The real estate bubble’s collapse erased the modest wealth of many Detroiters, whose homes were their only asset, and the decline in consumption and stock prices squeezed auto manufacturers past the breaking point.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Like Rose, Kotkin assumes that prosperity is America’s natural condition and that the polity will make whatever decisions it must to keep the market healthy. His key argument is that our nation’s greater openness to immigration will keep our labor force, and therefore the economy, growing faster than Europe’s or Japan’s. Thus, he envisions an American heartland that might compete with India for call centers—not what most U.S. workers would regard as a happy future. As for China, he is not impressed: “The country’s lack of democratic institutions, its cultural hegemony, its historic insularity, and the rapid aging that will start by the 2020s do not augur well for its global preeminence.”11 Like Rose, Kotkin hedges his bets and so does not quite deliver the conclusion that Brooks has claimed for him.

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Thus, the evidence available at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century provides little objective evidence for an eventual market-driven turnaround in the fortunes of the American middle class. One might imagine, of course, that the Chinese will keep buying the IOU’s needed to support our civilian and military overconsumption for the next hundred years; that call centers in Nebraska can compete with India while paying higher wages; or that U.S. global banks and corporations might lengthen their time horizons and contract their global ambitions. But that does not seem to be the wisest way to bet. Notes 1. The full text of the 2011 State of the Union address can be found online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2011. 2.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

These attributes—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men, to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. In 2009, Icelanders made Johanna Sigurdardottir prime minister, electing the world’s first openly lesbian head of state. Sigurdardottir had campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, vowing to end the “age of testosterone.”

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He’s studying to be a teacher, which Franklin especially appreciates because he can reach out to the next generation of boys. His high school friends all started out saying they could go to college, but few of them followed through. “They see the commercials and think it’s easy to get a degree,” Cameron told me. “But then they get there and they’re just not prepared for the work.” Instead they got jobs in call centers doing customer service or janitorial jobs where “there’s not much room to progress.” Cameron, now twenty-two, was the class clown in high school and when he graduated was also intimidated by the idea of getting a higher degree. He spent the first two years out of school working at a Taco Bell.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

They forget that exercise is primarily designed to make them healthier, developing stress-related injuries instead in the quest for arbitrary fitness goals. Beyond personal fitness devices, some companies gamify the workplace to motivate their employees. In 2000, four tech entrepreneurs formed a remote call center called LiveOps. LiveOps enlists more than twenty thousand everyday Americans to make telemarketing phone calls, and, more recently, to run the social media platforms of large organizations from Pizza Hut to Electronic Arts. The company vets agents before admitting them to its staff, and once accepted they can work as much or as little as they like in blocks of thirty minutes.

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Some companies that use LiveOps pay by the minute—for example, twenty-five cents per minute spent on the phone—while others pay per call or per sale. LiveOps appeals to people without a fixed schedule—people who are employed part-time, at home with children, or between steady jobs. The company’s flexibility is a strength, but call center workers without a fixed schedule tend to suffer dips in motivation. To combat those dips, LiveOps introduced a gamified dashboard. Each worker’s dashboard contains a progress bar with the percentage of calls that produce sales, trophies and badges for reaching certain sales milestones, and individual challenges tackled and accomplished.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design
by Giles Colborne
Published 14 Sep 2010

vision Download from WoweBook.com . —Steve Jobs Download from WoweBook.com Share it In 2002, Alan Colville was a product manager at Telewest, a British cable TV company. He’d been charged with upgrading the set top box software, a job that touched on every part of the company’s workforce, from software developers to call centers. As he described it: People at the company were pretty cynical about new projects and change was seen as a bad thing. Everything we’d done before was too complex, had needed fixing after it was released, and was irritatingly slow. We needed to show people that this project was going to be different in that it focused on our typical customers and their needs.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

This idea has already been partly implemented by some customer-services departments, such as those pioneered by the Mattersight Corporation. Mattersight publishes its wares with the following blurb: ‘Have you ever spoken with someone and felt as though you just clicked? The magical feeling you get is the result of a personality connection. Mattersight creates that feeling every day, in call centers around the world.’ When you phone customer services with a request or complaint, Mattersight routes your call by a clever algorithm. You first state your reason for calling. The algorithm listens to your problem, analyses the words you have used and your tone of voice, and deduces not only your present emotional state but also your personality type – introverted, extroverted, rebellious or dependent.

Caribbean Islands
by Lonely Planet

Internet & Telephone Most places charge around RD$35 per hour for internet use. Abel Brawn’s Internet World (Plaza Lomba, 2nd fl; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm Sat) Fast internet access, as well as international phone service. Centro de Internet (Av Independencia 201; 8:30am-9pm Mon-Sat, to 3pm Sun) Internet and call center in Gazcue. Codetel Centro de Comunicaciones (El Conde 202; 8am-9:30pm) Large call center with internet access. Cyber Red (Sánchez 201; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat) Just off Calle El Conde; you can also make international calls here. Medical Services Clínica Abreu ( 809-687-4922; cnr Avs Independencia & Beller; 24hr) Widely regarded as the best hospital in the city, this is where members of many of the embassies go.

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Information Emergency Politur ( 809-552-0848) There are 24-hour stations next to the bus terminal in Bávaro, in Cabeza de Toro and at the Punta Cana airport. Internet Access & Telephone Cone Xion.com (Plaza Punta Cana, B á varo; per hr RD$60; 9am-10pm Mon-Sat, to 11pm Sun) A small internet place and call center. Sea and Surf (El Cortecito; per hr RD$60; 9am-7pm) Along the main beach road in Cortecito proper. Medical Services All-inclusive hotels have small on-site clinics and medical staff, who can provide first aid and basic care. Head to one of several good private hospitals in the area for more serious issues.

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Local calls cost US$0.14 per minute, national calls US$0.21 per minute. Toll-free numbers have 200 for their prefix (not the area code). The easiest way to make a phone call in the DR is to pay per minute (average rates to USA US$0.20, to Europe US$0.50, to Haiti US$0.50) at a Codetel Centro de Comunicaciones (Codetel) call center or an internet cafe. Local SIM cards can be used or cell phones can be set for roaming. There are GSM-suitable networks. Phonecards can be used at public phones and are available in denominations of RD$50, RD$100, RD$150, RD$200 and RD$250. Visas The majority of foreign travelers do not need a visa.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing)
by John E. Kelly Iii
Published 23 Sep 2013

is in this category, according to IBM Research executive Dario Gil, who headed a team that mapped out the progression. At this point, it’s still necessary to assemble teams of technology and domain experts to provide a learning system with the rules and information it needs to perform a certain well-defined task—then train it to use the information. One example is the customer-service call center. Today, when consumers call companies for help with technology problems, representatives read from scripts and search rigid knowledge-management systems for answers. The process is too often frustrating for the consumer and expensive for the company. Now, companies are training Watson to magnify the capabilities of their representatives.

Getting Real
by Jason Fried , David Heinemeier Hansson , Matthew Linderman and 37 Signals
Published 1 Jan 2006

Unfortunately, that means the software chefs never get to hear what customers are actually saying. That's problematic because listening to customers is the best way to get in tune with your product's strengths and weaknesses. The solution? Avoid building walls between your customers and the development/design team. Don't outsource customer support to a call center or third party. Do it yourself. You, and your whole team, should know what your customers are saying. When your customers are annoyed, you need to know about it. You need to hear their complaints. You need to get annoyed too. At 37signals, all of our support emails are answered personally by the people who actually build the product.

Real-World Kanban
by Mattias Skarin
Published 23 Jun 2015

The team handled pension issues and life-changing events for their customers—such as signing up new customers, processing payments and pension transfers, and tracking marriages and deaths. The team consisted of 14 people divided into two sub-teams—one with a consumer focus and the other with a corporate focus. Most of the time, the team interacted with a call center that acted as the bank’s front-line support team. Occasionally, they fielded direct requests from sales and IT teams. report erratum • discuss Chapter 5. Using Kanban in the Back Office: Outside IT • 86 This non-IT team needed to keep up with the company’s growth. The team needed to be able to add new members and get them up to speed quickly to keep up the pace instead of relying on a few senior members to handle the daily tasks.

Bosnia & Herzegovina--Culture Smart
by Elizabeth Hammond
Published 11 Jan 2011

Consulting for its help in researching and developing the concept for this series. CultureSmart!Consulting creates tailor-made seminars and consultancy programs to meet a wide range of corporate, public-sector, and individual needs. Whether delivering courses on multicultural team building in the USA, preparing Chinese engineers for a posting in Europe, training call-center staff in India, or raising the awareness of police forces to the needs of diverse ethnic communities, it provides essential, practical, and powerful skills worldwide to an increasingly international workforce. For details, visit www.culturesmartconsulting.com CultureSmart!Consulting and CultureSmart!

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

The educated classes in the developed world have long had the luxury of lecturing their blue-collar brethren about the glories of the automated future. Service personnel have been on the block for decades—their friendly faces, human voices, and quick fingers replaced by ATMs, photocopiers, phone trees, and self-checkout lines. Airports have iPads instead of food servers. No sooner did massive call centers spring up around India than automated help-desk algorithms begin replacing them. It is far easier to tell millions of newly redundant workers to “retrain for the information age” or to “join the creative entrepreneurial economy” than to be one of them or to actually do it. And who can say how quickly all that new training will also become worthless?

…

What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of human knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don’t work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where people work with their hands all day, and also live without clean water and modern medicine. They are literally dying from a lack of technology. It’s not just college-educated professionals who are under pressure today. Call center employees in India are losing their jobs to artificially intelligent agents. Electronics assembly-line workers in China are being replaced by robots at a rate that would shock even Detroit. There is an entire generation of workers in the developing world who were often the first in their families to escape farming and other subsistence labor.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

With our management team spending time cutting deals, the rest of the company struggled to address the customer service crisis. Following a cross-country tour that took her through Reno, Boise, and Denver, Julie Anderson selected Omaha, Nebraska, as the location for X.com’s new customer service center. With a large, educated workforce and lower costs than Silicon Valley, the decision to set up the 500-person call center in Omaha made financial sense. It also elicited a fair amount of attention. Word of a California-based firm opening a division in the heartland attracted headlines in local papers and prompted Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns to attend the press conference announcing the decision.8 The media coverage paid immediate dividends; a recruiting session at the Holiday Inn in early April was flooded by job-seekers.

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See also decision points for PayPal PayPal company culture, 2 annual offsite retreat, 292–295 blue hair dare, 198 compared with eBay’s, 296–299 executive time off, 218 growth of corporate feel to, 234, 262, 265, 301, 304 intellectual openness, 193 jokes, 282 parties, 246 PayPal competition better features, 41 better features at, 38 corporate intelligence about, 53, 93, 206, 266–267 major players, 84–85 PayMe, 61–63 strategy for defeating, 49–50. See also Billpoint; X.com “PayPal Damon,” 138–139, 211 PayPal departments auctions team, 277 business development team, 215 fraud investigators, 201, 202–203 new merchant services team, 212 new sales team, 214–215 outbound call center substitute, 209 . See also marketing team at PayPal PayPal employees annual reviews, 183 attitude toward pornography industry market, 216–217 departure from company, 303–304 number, at end of 2002, 297 number, in 2002, 261 number, in early 2000, 63 reaction to foray into gambling, 215 reaction to sale of PayPal, 282, 283, 287–288 response to delay of IPO, 245 PayPal IPO difficulties that followed, 309 filing, 223 importance of, 27 media coverage, 224, 225, 294 postponement, 240 pricing of, 236, 244 rescheduling, 243 tactic to speed up, 244 ticker symbol, 245 .

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
by Peter Robison
Published 29 Nov 2021

She said the FAA needed to be more responsive to its customers—by which she meant manufacturers and airlines, not the flying public. She expressed sympathy for the inconsistent answers and long waits they sometimes experienced—as if the country’s top aviation authority was some kind of corporate call center—without mentioning the funding shortfalls that had starved it of resources. That year happened to be the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, and she titled her speech “The Spirit of December 14th.” As she pointed out, this wasn’t the date of their historic twelve-second flight, but three days earlier, when Wilbur stalled the Flyer and crashed it into the dunes.

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In 2007 the company signed a $1.2 billion contract with Tata Consultancy Services, an outsourcing firm based in India. It was the largest such arrangement ever signed to that point, and it allowed Nielsen to replace more expensive employees who gathered market data in the United States. The deal caused controversy in Oldsmar, Florida, where the company had taken tax breaks to build a call center. It began laying off hundreds of people, while asking them to train their replacements at Tata. One city council member accused Nielsen, then the largest employer in the Tampa Bay suburb, of “making a joke of the tax-incentive program.” Another said it was a poor corporate citizen. (Nielsen agreed to give up the tax breaks.)

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

In their Emotional Labor in the Twenty-first Century, Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, and Deborah Rupp discovered over ten thousand mentions of “emotional labor” (or “labour”) in academic articles, half of them since 2006, and 506 with the term in the title.1 I’m pleased that the idea has caught on but the real reason for such a burst of interest in the subject is, of course, the dramatic rise in the service sector itself. Indeed, as contributors to the American gross domestic product, the manufacturing sector has declined to 12 percent while the service sector has risen to 25 percent. Day-care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, airports, stores, call centers, classrooms, social welfare offices, dental offices—in all these workplaces, gladly or reluctantly, brilliantly or poorly, employees do emotional labor. ix x Preface to the 2012 Edition But how much of it do they do? And in what way? R. Cross, W. Baker, and A. Parker call some employees “energizers.”2 The coordinator of hospital volunteers, for example, may try to create a cheerful sense of shared mission.

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Berger 2001 "The Association Between Emotion Work, Balance and Relationship Satisfaction of Couples Seeking Therapy," American Journal of Family Therapy V29 (N3):193-205. Holman, D., C. Chissick, and P. Totterdell 2002 "The Effects of Performance Monitoring on Emotional Labor and Well-Being in Call Centers," Motivation and Emotion V26(N1):57-8l. Hunter, B. 2001 "Emotion Work in Midwifery: A Review of Current Knowledge," Journal of Advanced Nursing V34 (N4) :436-444. Jacobs, Jerry A. and Ronnie]. Steinberg 1990 "Compensating Differentials and the Male-Female Wage Gap: Evidence from the New York State Comparable Worth Study," Social Forces 69 (2) :439-68.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

The methods they used to identify opportunities have remained in place through the company’s rapid growth. Managers start by asking each team to experiment with an opportunity—for example, testing the theory that Twilio could be used for call centers. Rather than be told what to build, the team is asked to figure out why customers haven’t already built the call centers themselves. The process starts with an exercise called PRFAQ, a technique used to test an idea through contact with customers to get the answer to that initial question. In the PRFAQ, the team writes a press release (similar to the Amazon process) and FAQ document for the customer, including information like the product launch date and cost (or at least a good estimate).

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

But, of course, there are limits to doing such large-scale experiments. Small-scale interventions can also be useful, however. For instance, many businesses use “mystery shoppers” to evaluate the performance of employees who deal with the public in retail stores, restaurants, and customer-service call centers. The mystery shoppers use an organization’s services just as any customer would—eating a hamburger, buying clothes, or calling a telephone help line. The employees of the organization being evaluated think the mystery shoppers are just ordinary customers and presumably treat them as they would anyone else.

…

Even though some people find the idea of a machine as a manager threatening, we already live with them every day. Think about a traffic light, for instance. Instead of a human police officer in the intersection directing traffic, a machine plays that role. Or think about the workers in a telephone call center. A machine automatically routes calls to them—a task that could be performed by a human manager. But most people don’t find either of these situations threatening or problematic. I think it’s likely that there will be many more examples of machines playing the role of managers in the future. For instance, the CrowdForge system, developed by my friends Aniket Kittur, Robert Kraut, and their colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, uses online workers to write documents like encyclopedia articles.7 We’ll call the online workers Turkers because they are recruited from an Amazon service called Mechanical Turk, which we’ll see in more detail later.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

But it also involved the destruction of millions of “old” jobs, particularly in manufacturing and, most painfully, in coal mining. Many of the individuals made unemployed never really recovered. It was next to impossible to take a 50-year-old miner, who was almost without exception male, and transform him into a customer-facing call center operative. The people filling this role were, almost without exception, female. And this problem didn’t just affect isolated individuals. Because the economic activities hit by technological and policy change were geographically concentrated, whole communities and even regions suffered. Indeed, many communities and regions have still not fully recovered from the loss of their primary economic activity and source of employment.

…

This is the route to advance taken by Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These countries were able to register impressive increases in exports, thereby enabling them to benefit from economies of scale. At first, this was restricted to manufacturing, but with the communications revolution it spread to parts of the service sector. Call center work and basic accounting and legal work have increasingly been transferred to cheaper centers abroad, particularly in India. But in the new world of the robot and AI, labor costs will be of diminished relevance. If you can get goods manufactured cheaply with little human input, why locate manufacturing in Asia when you can manufacture locally and thus avoid transport costs and delays?

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

They wore blazers and slacks and even blouses and skirts; this was one of the few places in the CIA tech world at the time where I recall seeing a sizable number of women. Some of them had the blue badges that identified them as government employees, or, as contractors called them, “govvies.” They spent their shifts picking up banks of ringing phones and talking people in the building or out in the field through their tech issues. It was a sort of IC version of call-center work: resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, and going by rote through the troubleshooting checklists. “Can you log out and back in?” “Is the network cable plugged in?” If the govvies, with their minimal tech experience, couldn’t deal with a particular issue themselves, they’d escalate it to more specialized teams, especially if the problem was happening in the “Foreign Field,” meaning CIA stations overseas in places like Kabul or Baghdad or Bogotá or Paris.

…

Besides having a political consciousness (libertarian to the point of stockpiling Krugerrands) and an abiding interest in subjects outside of tech (he read vintage mysteries and thrillers in paperback), he was a fifty-something been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator who’d managed to graduate from the call center’s ranks thanks to being a contractor. I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought: Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. Because, to put it frankly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and didn’t understand why they’d put him on such an important team.

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid
by Katherine Blunt
Published 29 Aug 2022

PG&E directed customers to its website to determine whether their home or business would lose power. Millions of people tried to pull it up to find an interactive tool that was supposed to check the status of a given address. The site crashed under the onslaught of traffic, loading as a useless blank page just when it was most needed. Phones in the company’s call centers rang nonstop. PG&E didn’t have enough time or people to answer all of them. Meanwhile, employees were frantically trying to contact 30,000 customers who relied on electricity for medical reasons. The company maintained a registry of people who used respirators, electric wheelchairs, or dialysis machines, or who had conditions that required their homes to be kept at certain temperatures.

…

It runs contrary to the reason any of us ever got into this business,” he said. “But as I look back at last week, one of the things that stands out in my mind is that we actually didn’t have any catastrophic fires in Northern and central California.” Johnson acknowledged the company’s failings. He promised it would bolster its website and its call centers and do more to tell customers when it needed to turn off the lights. It would install more sectionalizers, the devices that allow for a more surgical approach to shutoffs. It would cut more trees and insulate some of its wires to protect them from flying branches. In some communities at high risk, it would build self-contained power grids that could stay online even when the surrounding area went dark.

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook
by Marc Stickdorn , Markus Edgar Hormess , Adam Lawrence and Jakob Schneider
Published 12 Jan 2018

This also includes boundary conditions for the project in terms of budget, time, and other resources (and beyond). Often, however, you will not be approached with a perfect brief. Rather, people might have identified more of a rough starting point; an unmet need, a wish, a problem, or a seemingly brilliant idea like “We need to reduce the call volume in the call center by 10%,” “Develop that new service idea,” “We have this new technology, come up with something so we can sell it,” “Create new innovative business ideas,” “Fix the 20% drop in our NPS score,” “Improve the conversion rate of our online sales channel,” “Redesign the employee onboarding,” and so on.

…

To make them more probable, you need to look behind the perceived problem or opportunity; to understand the needs; to generate, prototype, and test concepts; and to iterate. That’s not one workshop. The purpose of the workshop needs to be clear to the sponsor and (usually) to the participants. 18 If you decide to tell them, tell them clearly: “We are here today to find out what really goes on in this part of the call center.” Planning the work Group facilitation takes place over various time frames, which we can think of as the project scale (months, weeks) and the session scale (hours, days). Planning the facilitation will be a matter of choosing activities and allocating resources along this timeline. Project-level planning will usually follow whatever innovation or design structure the organization and facilitator choose, such as the typical iterative process of research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation. 19 Within a single session there might be less ground to cover, and thus more freedom for the facilitator.

…

However, this requires a corporate strategy that includes a commitment on service design; long-term management buy-in; internal service design competence; a shared language of service design; and a working process that is adapted to corporate structures, processes, and culture. If not, you might raise expectations that you probably cannot deliver with your first round of projects. Name individual project teams according to the subject of their project, such as “call center improvement team” or “work group for online shopping experience.” These unsuspicious names do not reflect the underlying method and help to reduce prejudices and barriers. Mentioning the subject matter also helps to generate a common understanding and identity. Members of the service design core team will usually not name service design as the underlying approach.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

“Investors will not come if their supervisors and managers can only guess what our workers are saying,” the prime minister explained. “Poor English reflects badly on us and makes us seem less intelligent.” The Philippines fell, too. Despite Manuel Quezon’s quest to establish a national indigenous language to dislodge it, English remains both an official language and a constant presence. The Philippines has more call-center workers than any other country. It’s also an international center for teaching English, a place where aspiring speakers can learn the language cheaply, with a clear mainland accent. English’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the domain where Anglophone powers promoted their language. It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia.

…

It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia. But in 2004 its prime minister, a Harvard graduate, announced that English would replace Russian as the first foreign language in Mongolian schools. He hoped to turn Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, into a hub for call centers. “Conquer English to make China stronger”: Li Yang, the media personality who is China’s most popular English teacher, claims to have taught millions in his campaign to turn China into a global hegemon through the mastery of English. The most remarkable conquest by English has been China. In 1978, under the reformist premier Deng Xiaoping, China restored English as a permissible foreign language and encouraged it as part of China’s path to prosperity.

…

Conrad, and Alma Rubal-Lopez, eds., Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990 (Berlin, 1996). “Investors will not”: Goh Chok Tong, quoted in Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew, Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language (New York, 2009), 141. call-center workers: Funie Hsu, “The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico,” L2 Journal 7 (2015): 124, 139–40. Mongolia: Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (New York, 2010), 15.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

The technology is already being tested to assist doctors in processing the enormous volume of medical literature to better diagnose patients, which in fact was the system’s original purpose. But it is also being released as the “Watson Engagement Advisor,” which is intended for customer service and technical support applications. By responding to free-form natural language queries from users, this software could potentially replace the call center workers (many in places like India) who currently perform this work. The review of legal documents, an extremely time-consuming process traditionally performed by legions of junior lawyers, is another promising application of the technology. Another area of rapid advance is robotics, the interaction of machinery with the physical world.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

They’re on the lookout for a lonely, broken-hearted person who will believe any hare-brained idea about heaven, and right now that person is you. If they’re not coming to you, don’t go to them: Psychics are off limits. So are palm-readers and tarot-card readers. In fact, for the first six months after your loved one dies, you aren’t even allowed to watch Dr. Phil. REMEMBER: It’s okay to reveal your weakness, but only to people in a call center in india. Morternity Leave: You Deserve at Least Six Weeks Off After You Give Death To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when the hospital sends your loved one home to die, believe them. Hospitals don’t like to admit defeat. They want your loved one alive as long as possible, until no more med students can learn from them.

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders
by Mariya Yao , Adelyn Zhou and Marlene Jia
Published 1 Jun 2018

Customer Support Customer support has become increasingly important, with analysts predicting that it will overtake product and price as the number one way for a business to differentiate itself by 2020.(91) About 64 percent of consumers now expect real-time responses at any time, and 65 percent say they are likely to switch brands if they receive inconsistent customer service across platforms (online, in-store, phone, text, or via email).(92) However, customer care is expensive. Call centers house hundreds of thousands of agents at a cost of four to twelve dollars per service request.(93) Though customer service has traditionally relied on human empathy to resolve issues, the pressure to keep costs down has made some degree of automation an imperative. We believe that customer experience is one of the most fruitful areas for the application of artificial intelligence, and machine intelligence can be used to better understand what customers need and to deliver consistently amazing experiences for them.

Mongolia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Alan Sanders
Published 1 Feb 2016

Consulting for its help in researching and developing the concept for this series. CultureSmart!Consulting creates tailor-made seminars and consultancy programs to meet a wide range of corporate, public-sector, and individual needs. Whether delivering courses on multicultural team building in the USA, preparing Chinese engineers for a posting in Europe, training call-center staff in India, or raising the awareness of police forces to the needs of diverse ethnic communities, it provides essential, practical, and powerful skills worldwide to an increasingly international workforce. For details, visit www.culturesmartconsulting.com CultureSmart!Consulting and CultureSmart!

Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Published 1 Jan 2008

I’d heard of a new, popular guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He has long, silky black hair and a serene smile. He is a mainstream guru, if such a thing is possible. Sri Sri’s ashram is located just outside of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. Bangalore is New India, the India of call centers and shopping malls—“India Shining,” as one political party calls it. Many of the city’s software engineers and call-center workers—cybercoolies, as they’re called—escape to the ashram whenever they can. New India turns to Old India for salvation or, at least, for a bit of downtime. Driving to the ashram in a taxi, we pass cows, dogs, meat hanging from hooks, tailor shops, a gleaming office building for Oracle, a sign for “Speak Easy English.”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

By the final, most complicated set, the extroverts were much more likely than the introverts to abandon the task altogether. Introverts sometimes outperform extroverts even on social tasks that require persistence. Wharton management professor Adam Grant (who conducted the leadership studies described in chapter 2) once studied the personality traits of effective call-center employees. Grant predicted that the extroverts would be better telemarketers, but it turned out that there was zero correlation between extroversion levels and cold-calling prowess. “The extroverts would make these wonderful calls,” Grant told me, “but then a shiny object of some kind would cross their paths and they’d lose focus.”

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See also John Weinman, “Noncognitive Determinants of Perceptual Problem-Solving Strategies,” Personality and Individual Differences 8, no. 1 (1987): 53–58. 47. Raven Standard Progressive Matrices: Vidhu Mohan and Dalip Kumar, “Qualitative Analysis of the Performance of Introverts and Extroverts on Standard Progressive Matrices,” British Journal of Psychology 67, no. 3 (1976): 391–97. 48. personality traits of effective call-center employees: Interview with the author, February 13, 2007. 49. if you were staffing an investment bank: Interview with the author, July 7, 2010. 50. men who are shown erotic pictures: Camelia Kuhnen et al., “Nucleus Accumbens Activation Mediates the Influence of Reward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,” NeuroReport 19, no. 5 (2008): 509–13. 51. all introverts are constantly … vigilant about threats: Indeed, many contemporary personality psychologists would say that threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait known as “neuroticism” than of introversion per se. 52. threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait: But harm avoidance is correlated with both introversion and neuroticism (both traits are associated with Jerry Kagan’s “high reactivity” and Elaine Aron’s “high sensitivity”).

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

For three decades it squandered those advantages, but there are signs of a turnaround, the most dramatic being the rise of the Philippines as a rival to India in “business process outsourcing”—the industry that provides the operators who answer calls for customer service at almost any major global company. Call centers did not exist in the Philippines a decade ago, and now it’s a $9 billion industry employing 350,000 people. These centers are starting to open outside metro Manila and pop up all over the islands of the Philippines, to the point that some analysts think it may turn into another successful case of Southeast Asian archipelago capitalism.

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W., 177 Bradford, 212 brand management, 53–54, 90, 159, 162, 165, 167 Brazil, 59–72 agriculture in, 64, 66, 232 assets of, 59 banking in, 62, 69–70 billionaires in, 71, 78 budget limits in, 66, 70–71 capital markets in, 69, 70–71 China compared with, 61, 62, 63–64, 65, 66, 68–70, 71 constitution of, 64 consumer prices in, 12, 42, 59–61, 62, 66, 67–68, 71, 138, 232 currency of (real), 12, 13–14, 59–61, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 232, 233 economic reforms in, 62–63, 66–67, 71–72 economy of, 12–13, 28, 61–72, 226 education in, 63, 65 as emerging market, 3–4, 7, 59–61, 63, 65–66, 67, 69–71, 85, 106, 113, 176, 253 factories in, 67, 68 financial crises in, 61–62 foreign investment in, 59, 63, 64, 66, 68–72 foreign trade of, 59, 61, 62, 67–68, 72, 159, 220, 223, 226, 232, 233–34 GDP of, 3–4, 63, 65, 66, 67, 72 in global economy, 68–71 government of, 42, 59, 63, 65, 66–67, 70–71, 72, 210, 248 government spending in, 42, 63, 65, 66–67, 70–71, 72 growth rate of, 3–4, 7, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 61–64, 66, 67, 68–71, 88, 207, 235, 244, 246 health care in, 63 high-context society in, 39–40 hotels and restaurants in, 12, 59–61, 65 housing prices in, 61 immigration to, 95 income levels of, 8, 61, 63, 72, 75, 113 India compared with, 10, 39–43, 61, 70 inflation rate in, 42, 62, 66, 68–69, 248, 249 infrastructure of, 61, 64, 65, 69 interest rates in, 62, 67, 68–70 labor market in, 64–65 leadership of, 59, 61, 63, 66–67, 70–72, 210 loan defaults by, 61–62, 66 media coverage in, 70–71 Mexico compared with, 71, 75 “momento magico” of, 59 national debt of, 61–62, 66 natural resources of, 10, 59, 61, 63, 67–68, 69, 133, 159, 220, 226, 232, 233–34, 235 oil industry of, 63, 67–68 political situation in, 66–69 poverty in, 41, 66 productivity of, 63–64, 68 social stability in, 61–64, 66, 67, 71, 72 stock market of, 10, 59, 69–71, 233 taxation in, 63 transportation in, 64, 69, 85, 212–13 “trilemma” of, 68–69 unemployment in, 64–65 U.S. compared with, 12–13, 61, 66, 72 wage levels in, 42, 62, 65 wealth in, 12–13, 71 welfare programs of, 41, 42, 61, 63, 72 breakout nations, vii–x, 2, 10–16, 38–39, 49, 61, 89–90, 113, 244–46 see also specific nations bribes, 93, 137 BRICS, 253 bridges, 51, 195 bubbles, investment, 2–6, 107, 223–39 Budapest, 97 Buddhism, 199 budgets, x, 66, 70–71, 139–40 Buffett, Warren, 163 Bulgaria, 100, 109, 187 “bulldozer leadership,” 161 Bumiputeras people, 148–49 Burj Al Arab, 219 Burma, 10 Burundi, 209 Busan, 136 Bush, George W., 4–5 business cycles, 2, 5–6, 11, 223 Cairo, 128 Calderón, Felipe, 78, 79–80, 82 California, 24 Çalik, Ahmet, 123 call centers, 141 Cambodia, 188 cameras, 237 Cameroon, 89 Canada, 26, 180, 215, 223 Canal Istanbul, 116 Cape Town, 171, 175 Cap Ferrat, 94 capital controls, 178, 189–90, 252 Capital Economics, 21 capital flows, viii, x, 4, 69, 70–71, 93–94, 107, 131, 178, 189–90, 201, 228–30, 236, 238, 252 capitalism, 8–9, 10, 17–18, 25, 26–30, 38–39, 42, 46–47, 49, 50–51, 58, 62, 69–70, 71, 77, 106, 117, 118–19, 136, 141, 174, 197, 200–202, 218, 228–30, 252 “cappuccino economy,” 182 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 66 cargo ships, 200–201 cartels, 74, 75–76, 79–80, 208 Carter, Jimmy, 248 casinos, 201 Cayman Islands, 160 cement, 75, 135, 137, 139, 213 CEMEX, 75 , 81 Central Asia, 95, 113, 123, 166 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 30 Chaayu Blu resort, 196 chain stores, 53 change agents, 2–3 Chaser, The, 167 Chávez, Hugo, 190, 215 Chechnya, 85, 89, 96 checking accounts, 62 Chery, 161 Chhattisgarh, 46 Chiang Kai-shek, 165 chief executive officers (CEOs), 2, 60, 64, 72, 224 children, x, 21–22, 169 Chile, 41, 75 China, 15–34 agriculture in, 9, 17–18, 21, 22, 27, 41–42 auto industry of, 161 baby-boom generations in, 21–22, 37–38 banking in, 24, 25, 26, 92, 252 billionaires in, 25, 45, 91 Brazil compared with, 61, 62, 63–64, 65, 66, 68–70, 71 capitalist reforms in, 8–9, 17–18, 25, 26–30, 62, 69–70, 71, 106, 117, 118–19, 197, 200–202, 252 Communist regime of, 21–22, 25, 26–30, 117, 202–3, 247 consumer prices in, 16, 18, 22–23, 24, 25, 31–32, 53 credit market in, 32 currency of (yuan), 32–33, 68, 131, 132, 246–47, 254 demographics of, 17–18, 21–22, 37–38, 53 economic slowdown in, 17, 18–21, 32–34, 233–35, 241–42 economy of, 15–34, 197, 204, 227, 236, 241–42 as emerging market, 3–4, 7, 10, 87, 153, 164, 231, 253 emigration from, 82, 95 export-manufacturing zones in, 28 factories in, 17–18, 22–23, 28, 132, 230 five-year plans of, 20, 27 forecasts on, 2, 17, 18, 31–32 foreign currency reserves of, 26, 32–33 foreign investment in, 9, 18, 20, 32, 68–70, 183, 225 foreign trade of, 18, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 120, 148 GDP of, 1, 3–4, 17, 18, 20, 26, 32, 65, 85, 139, 236, 243, 252 “ghost cities” in, 16, 24–25 as global economy, 1, 2, 18–19, 230, 233–36, 241–42 growth rate of, 3–4, 7, 8–9, 11, 12, 16–21, 26, 29–34, 51, 58, 61, 62, 63–64, 68–69, 87, 118–19, 132, 133, 136, 187, 201–2, 204, 223, 224, 233–35, 241–42, 245, 254 Han population of, 53 as high-context society, 41 highways in, 17, 20, 21, 65, 231 housing market in, 16, 18, 24–25, 28–29, 31, 32 income levels of, 8, 11, 16–21, 24–25, 58, 86 India compared with, 1, 10, 19, 25, 36, 37–38, 41, 45, 47, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58 Indonesia compared with, 132–33, 135, 136 inflation rates in, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 248 infrastructure of, 20–21, 62, 65, 236 Japan compared with, 18, 20, 22, 24, 31, 32–33 labor market in, 17, 21–23, 27, 32, 47, 164, 170, 246–47 labor unrest in, 17, 22–23, 32, 47 leadership of, 8–9, 17, 26–28, 32, 33, 47, 71, 132, 200–203, 248 manufacturing sector of, 17–18, 22–23, 28, 132, 230, 235 media coverage of, 21, 22–23 Middle Kingdom of, 199 migrant workers in, 22–23, 27 national debt of, 17, 18, 252 natural resources imported by, 19, 61, 229, 230, 231, 233–36 one-child policy of, 21–22 population of, 17–18, 19, 21–22, 37–38, 53, 56, 57, 82 ports of, 20–21, 62, 65, 200–201 privatization in, 24–25, 252 productivity of, 63–64, 68, 80 public transportation in, 15–16, 20, 21, 22–23, 65, 231 residency permits (hukou) in, 27, 29 rural areas of, 17–18, 21, 22–23, 27, 41–42, 57 Russia compared with, 19, 25, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92 savings rate in, 31, 62, 119 social unrest in, 24–26, 27, 28, 31–32, 47 South Korea compared with, 158–59, 161 state-owned enterprises in, 69, 88, 252 stock market of, 26, 69–70, 88, 189 Taiwan compared with, 155, 164, 169–70 telecommunications in, 207, 237, 238, 239 Thailand compared with, 39 Turkey compared with, 117, 118–20, 122 unemployment in, 32, 62 urban areas of, 21, 22–25, 31, 33, 57 U.S. compared with, 17, 18, 24, 237, 238, 239, 241–42, 246–47 Vietnam compared with, 30, 199, 200–203, 204 wage levels in, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 45, 80, 91, 132 wealth in, 25, 31–32, 236 women in, 21, 24, 31 Chinese language, 53 Chinese Nationalists, 165 Chissano, Joaquim, 195, 206 Christianity, 123, 211 Chrysler, 75 Chung Ju Young, 161 Chung Mong Koo, 162 Churchill, Winston S., 49 Cinnamon Lodge resort, 196 Citibank, 91 Ciudad Juárez, 79 Clinton, Bill, 225–26 CLSA, 238 CNBC, 70–71 coal, 133, 135, 170, 180, 225 Coca-Cola, 75 coffee, 67, 69, 232 Cold War, 86, 87, 134 Coleman, 247 college endowments, viii Collor de Mello, Fernando, 66 Colombo, 191, 192 Commission on Growth and Development, 235 “commodity.com” illusion, 223–39 “commodity supercycle,” 223 Commonwealth Games, 42 Communism, 4, 21–22, 25, 26–30, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 97, 102, 103, 104, 111, 117, 170, 175, 199–200, 202–3, 247 computers, 158, 164, 203–4, 236–39 Confucianism, 199 conglomerates, 125–26, 134, 138, 161–63, 167–69, 178 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 205, 209 Congo, Republic of, 4 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 175, 181 Congress Party, 39, 41–42, 47–49, 55–56, 174, 176 conspicuous consumption, 6 construction industry, 123, 166, 213 consumer electronics, 147–48 consumer prices, 6, 12, 16, 18, 22–23, 24, 25, 31–32, 38, 39, 42, 49, 52–54, 57, 59–61, 62, 66, 67–68, 71, 75–76, 83–84, 86, 87, 94, 121, 126, 137–38, 157, 179, 232, 235 container vessels, 200–201 contracts, labor, 17 Coolidge, Calvin, 39 copper, 19, 120, 141, 223, 224, 229, 231 Cornerstone Analytics, 227 corporate governance, 134 corporate taxes, 63, 76, 126–27, 214–15, 254 corruption, 25, 76–77, 89, 91, 93, 107, 117–18, 134–35, 137, 151, 204–5, 206, 209, 210, 217 see also graft counterrevolution, 111, 118, 125–26 creative destruction, 46 credit, 8, 32, 38, 42, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 49–51, 58, 150, 157, 202 credit cards, 8, 157 Credit Suisse, 50 crime rate, 71, 78, 181, 211 “crony capitalism,” 10, 25, 38, 42, 46–47, 49, 50–51, 58, 131, 139 Cuba, 191 cuisine, 52–53 currencies, 4–5, 9, 12, 13–14, 26, 28, 32–33, 59–61, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 73, 80, 92–93, 100–108, 115, 120, 131, 132, 146–47, 149, 159–60, 178, 179, 196, 209, 232, 233, 243, 246–47, 254 “czarist mentality,” 96 Czech Republic: auto industry of, 103 banking in, 103, 105–7 as breakout nation, 99–100 currency of (koruna), 108 as emerging market, 106, 110 as Eurozone candidate, 11, 99–100, 106–8, 109, 254 GDP of, 100 growth rate of, 97, 99–104, 244–45 inflation rate of, 249 national debt of, 105–6 population of, 106 post-Communist era of, 97, 102, 104, 111 Dae Jang Geum, 167 Daewoo, 160, 162 day traders, 220, 224 debt, national, 4, 5–6, 8, 17, 18, 24, 57, 61–62, 66, 76, 80–81, 85, 86, 92–93, 100, 105–6, 119–22, 134–35, 170, 176, 177, 231, 252 debt, personal, 8, 57–58, 157, 182–83 defaults, 61–62, 66, 252–53 deficits, x, 109–10, 147, 254 Delhi, vii–viii, 43 Dell, 158 democracy, 29–30, 48–49, 50, 55–56, 58, 77, 89, 96, 114, 118, 119, 123, 127, 143, 156, 173–76, 194, 205 Democratic Alliance Party, 175–76 Democratic Republic of Congo, see Congo, Democratic Republic of “demographic dividend,” 37–38, 55–56, 58, 126 demographics, 17–18, 21–22, 37–38, 55–56, 58, 126, 225, 231–32 Deng Xiaoping, 8–9, 17, 25, 26–28, 199, 200–201 dependency ratio, 37–38 Detroit, 162 devaluations, currency, 62, 108, 132 developing countries, vii–x, 2, 7, 10–16, 20, 28, 38–39, 42, 44, 49, 61, 65, 68, 89–90, 113, 123, 158, 184–91, 204–8, 233–39, 242–4 commodity exports of, 204, 223–39 see also breakout nations diamonds, 176, 205 dictatorships, 29–30, 127, 173, 246 Disney, 3 DMK, 48 Dogus family, 125 dollar, 7, 13–14, 18, 32–33, 59, 67, 70, 73, 103, 131, 132, 232, 233, 234, 243 “domestic content” rules, 213 Domino’s Pizza, 53 dotcom bubble, 3, 6, 157, 164, 189, 223–24, 225, 227, 230 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 9, 47 dowries, 145 “Dr.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020