46 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
and Sutton 1987). Thus, Taylor and Bain, from a labour process perspective,
describe operative work in a call centre as comprising
...anuninterruptedandendlesssequenceofsimilar conversations with customers she
never meets. She has to concentrate hard on what is being said, jump from page to page
on screen, making sure that the details entered are accurate and that she has said the
right things in a pleasant manner. The conversation ends and as she tidies up the loose
ends there is another voice in her headset. The pressure is intense because she knows
her work is being measured, her speech monitored, and it often leaves her mentally,
physically and emotionally exhausted. (Taylor and Bain 1999: 115)
Clearly such work design violates the ideas of rational self-determination and
of unimpeded choice which underlie both forms of freedom. Further, Kantian
ethics would deplore the instrumental, not to say exploitative, use of human
labour; Aristotelianism would criticize the failure to provide opportunities
for the development of human potentiality and stakeholder theory might
question whether there was mutuality in the treatment of employee vis-à-
vis either customer or shareholder. This is particularly the case when such
work design is complemented by the use of non-standard contracts (e.g. zero-
hours contracts, subcontracting [‘outsourcing’], agency working [‘insourc-
ing’], temporary, and casual working), which may involve the organization
loosing its bonds of obligation to its workers when their presence is no longer
perceived to be continuously indispensable and, hence, no longer a necessary
fixed cost. Such contracts, particularly prevalent for support staffin the growth
areas of the service sector, are marked by temporal discontinuity and the
treatment of labour as a commodity. Outsourcing and insourcing exacerbates
this commodification of labour because the workers are not directly employed
by the organization whose policies and decision-making directly affects the
quality of their employment. Thus Purcell (1997) cites some overhead trans-
parencies used in a presentation by a major employment agency, suggesting
the key advantages to employers of using agency labour, which encapsulates
the commodification of labour contractually outside the boundaries of the
organization:
- Enhances flexibility (turn on and offlike a tap)
- No legal or psychological contract with the individual
- You outsource the management problems associated with non-core staff
- Greater cost efficiency (on average 15 to 20 per cent).
The commodification of labour suggests the exact opposite to Berlin’s con-
ception of positive freedom: people have been turned into objects rather than
subjects and are the instruments of other people’s acts of will rather than their
own.
Yet some work in the service sector, while it enables the rational self-
determination of positive liberty, is damaging of other stakeholders’ negative