Computers, Customer Service Operatives and Cyborgs: Intra-actions in Call Centres

Citation: Daniel Nyberg (2009) Computers, Customer Service Operatives and Cyborgs: Intra-actions in Call Centres. Organization Studies (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1177/0170840609337955
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1177/0170840609337955
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1177/0170840609337955
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Computers, Customer Service Operatives and Cyborgs: Intra-actions in Call Centres
Download: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/30/11/1181.short
Tagged: Sociology (RSS) cyborg (RSS), call center (RSS), call centre (RSS), computers (RSS), categories (RSS), after ANT (RSS), agentic cuts (RSS), practice lens (RSS)

Summary

In this piece, Nyberg offers a socio-material account of an eight-month ethnography in an Australian call center.

He is, in part, responding to calls from the literature (e.g. Orlikowski 2007, Barad 2007, Suchman 2007) for accounts that focus on practices (Feldman & Orlikowski 2011) that emerge from and produce human-machine intRA-actions (a term coined by Barad), as opposed to intERactions. Nyberg claims that viewing exchanges within human-machine assemblages as intERactions reinforces a variety of occasionally burdensome Cartesian dualisms, e.g. subject/object, person/machine, agency/structure. Viewing these practices as intRA-actions argues more aggressively for a relational ontology - a perspective in which "There are no predetermined, unchanging agents that can cause something to happen: agencies are dependent on their mutual inextricability. The starting point for this type of investigation is thus not the actors that produce practices. On the contrary, it is the intra-actions within practices that produce actors and categories." (p1184)

Nyberg explores the ways in which call center representatives separate (or "cut") themselves from the technology with which they are so deeply enmeshed; he makes causal links here to the reps' desires to blame others for work-related problems. He also shows ways in which these cuts challenge the notion that agency resides in humans only: workers speak of systems' interactions with each other, and they note that a merger of two systems in 2001 "created" new agency in that the system "added" an additional unnamed driver to many customer car insurance records. Nyberg holds that these unnamed drivers exerted a form of agency.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

In short, Nyberg challenges the assumptions embedded in humanist and dualistic accounts. He also attempts a truly relational socio-material account of a complex organizational phenomena. Creating such accounts without falling back on old assumptions is notoriously difficult (Feldman & Orlikowski 2011).