WOMEN'S WORK IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY: The case of telephone call centres

This paper is concerned with the work experiences and career opportunities of women employed in technology-intensive offices known as telephone 'call centres'. Call centres have grown rapidly across Europe in recent years, creating a significant number of new jobs and receiving considerable attention within the media, business and academic communities. However, despite the fact that the majority of call centre jobs have been taken by women, researchers have so far paid little attention to their position in this new 'industry'. The article addresses this research gap. In particular, it is concerned with the question of whether call centre work is offering women new opportunities for skill development and career progression, or whether a more familiar trend is taking place in which women are being drawn into a highly routinized, 'de-skilled' and de-valued area of work. The paper also uses the specific example of call centre work in order to reflect on broader issues about the changing nature of women's work and employment in the so-called 'information economy'.     

The structure of fuzzy preferences: Social choice implications

It has been shown that, with an alternative factorization of fuzzy weak preferences into symmetric and antisymmetric components, one can prove a fuzzy analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem even when the transitivity requirements on individual and social preferences are very weak. It is demonstrated here that the use of this specification of strict preference, however, requires preferences to also be strongly connected. In the absence of strong connectedness, another factorization of fuzzy weak preferences is indicated, for which nondictatorial fuzzy aggregation rules satisfying the weak transitivity requirement can still be found. On the other hand, if strong connectedness is assumed, the fuzzy version of Arrow's Theorem still holds for a variety of weak preference factorizations, even if the transitivity condition is weakened to its absolute minimum. Since Arrow's Impossibility Theorem appeared nearly half a century ago, researchers have been attempting to avoid Arrow's negative result by relaxing various of his original assumptions. One approach has been to allow preferences – those of individuals and society or just those of society alone – to be “fuzzy.” In particular, Dutta [4] has shown that, to a limited extent, one can avoid the impossibility result (or, more precisely, the dictatorship result) by using fuzzy preferences, employing a particularly weak version of transitivity among the many plausible (but still distinct) definitions of transitivity that are available for fuzzy preferences. Another aspect of exact preferences for which the extension to the more general realm of fuzzy preferences is ambiguous is the factorization of a weak preference relation into a symmetric component (indifference) and an antisymmetric component (strict preference). There are several ways to do this for fuzzy weak preferences, all of them equivalent to the traditional factorization in the special case when preferences are exact, but quite different from each other when preferences are fuzzy (see, for example, [3]). A recent paper in this journal [1], by A. Banerjee, argues that the choice of definitions for indifference and strict preference, given a fuzzy weak preference, can also have “Arrovian” implications. In particular, [1] claims that Dutta's version of strict preference presents certain intuitive difficulties and recommends a different version, with its own axiomatic derivation, for which the dictatorship results reappear even with Dutta's weak version of transitivity. However, the conditions used to derive [1]'s version of strict preference imply a restriction on how fuzzy the original weak preference can be, namely, that the fuzzy weak preference relation must be strongly connected. Without this restriction, I will show that the rest of [1]'s conditions imply yet a third version of strict preference, for which Dutta's possibility result under weak transitivity still holds. On the other hand, if one accepts the strong connectedness required in order for it to be valid, I show that [1]'s dictatorship theorem can in fact be strengthened to cover any version of transitivity for fuzzy preferences, no matter how weak, and further, that this dictatorship result holds for any “regular” formulation of strict preference, including the one originally used by Dutta. Received: 13 May 1996 / Accepted: 13 January 1997     

Guest editorial

Statistics and Computing -     

Reordering Spatial and Social Relations: A Case Study of Professional and Managerial Flexworkers

Research on flexible work practices has focused primarily on social relationships, individual identity, work/work–life balance experience and performance. This paper aims to add another dimension by focusing on space and, specifically, the performance of space by professional flexworkers as they reorder their home and work lives through the process of becoming flexworkers. Drawing on Law's ‘modes of ordering’ and Latourian actor network theory, as well as on Beyes and Steyaert's recent contribution on ‘performing space’, the paper considers how flexworkers themselves reorganize space(s) as an ongoing accomplishment. The purpose and contribution is to offer an alternative to the view that the home and work are rigid containers fixed in social structure, to one that views them as self‐referential space(s), reordered by flexworkers as they seek to ‘keep the social moving’. The paper is based on an empirical study of employees in a Canadian subsidiary of a large hi‐tech multinational corporation. It examines organizational policy documents and interviews with managerial and non‐managerial flexworkers to identify how social and spatial relations are reordered and performed.     

Shifting Contexts and Shifting Identities: Campus Race-Related Experiences,Racial Identity,and Academic Motivation Among Black Students During the Transition to College

This study examined Black college students’ (N = 309, 70% women) racial identity beliefs over their freshman year. Using latent class cluster analysis, we identified clusters reflecting patterns of change and stability in students’ racial centrality (importance of race to overall self-concept), private regard (group pride), and public regard (perceptions of others’ views of Blacks). Racial identity change clusters were distinguished by campus experiences (racial discrimination, interracial friendships, and campus racial climate). Racial identity change clusters predicted end-of-year academic motivation (competence, affect, interest/curiosity, and persistence). Findings suggest the importance of examining critical transitions in identity development and highlight the deleterious effects of stigmatizing campus experiences on identity. Findings also highlight ways students’ racial identity beliefs may help promote academic motivation.     

Environmental Policy Attitudes: Issues,Geographical Scale,and Political Trust*

Objectives. This article examines environmental policy attitudes, focusing on the differences in preferences across issue type (i.e., pollution, resource preservation) and geographical scale (i.e., local, national, global). In addition, we study whether an individual's trust in government influences environmental policy attitudes. Methods. Analyzing data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we estimate a series of OLS regression models to examine the public's environmental policy attitudes. Results. We find stronger public support for government action to address pollution issues than resources issues, and stronger support for local and national pollution abatement than dealing with global problems. We also find that Republicans and ideological conservatives are less likely to support further government effort to address the environment, and that more trusting individuals are more favorable to government action to address pollution and global issues. Conclusion. Environmental policy attitudes vary by the nature of the issue; however, political ideology and partisan affiliation are consistent predictors of preferences across issues, even when controlling for an individual's level of trust in government.     

Alleviating linear ecological bias and optimal design with subsample data

Summary.  We illustrate that combining ecological data with subsample data in situations in which a linear model is appropriate provides two main benefits. First, by including the individual level subsample data, the biases that are associated with linear ecological inference can be eliminated. Second, available ecological data can be used to design optimal subsampling schemes that maximize information about parameters. We present an application of this methodology to the classic problem of estimating the effect of a college degree on wages, showing that small, optimally chosen subsamples can be combined with ecological data to generate precise estimates relative to a simple random subsample.