Timing Is Money: Employment Relationships in a Virtual Call Center

• In Event: 2451 - Economic Sociology and the Valuation of Work

Abstract

The paper challenges the dominant view that the ongoing revolution in information and telecommunication technologies inevitably leads to the decline of employment relationships and the rise of spot labor markets. We argue that flexibility in workflow facilitated by technology exposes both, companies and workers, to uncertainty and thus creates prerequisites for an employment relationship, based on exchange of predictability in scheduling for predictability in pay. We theorize four possible ideal-type employment relationships—secure, entrepreneurial, subsistence, and precarious—as combinations pay level (mean) and dispersion (variance). We identify these types empirically in a large virtual call center (VCC), which pioneered a virtual arms-length flexible employment model fifteen years ago. Despite celebrating spot markets and workers’ flexibility, the VCC forms a more secure relationship with a high-mean–low-variance pay with workers on the traditional 9-to-5 schedule. A worker’s consistent delivery on advance commitments to particular work hours increases the mean and decreases the variance of her pay thus contributing to the secure employment relationship as well. The entrepreneurial relationship with a high-mean-high-variance pay is offered to night workers; a spot-market-like gig schedule leads to a precarious low-mean-high-variance pay. We conclude that the common fear of emerging unconstrained spot labor markets is premature; a variety of employment relationships inevitably emerges.

Authors

• Valery Yakubovich, ESSEC

• Roman V. Galperin, Johns Hopkins University

• Mouna El Mansouri, ESSEC