Managerial governmentality among contact centre agents and its transformation in times of pandemic Covid-19

Abstract

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, contact centres had to implement teleworking, rapidly transforming labour management based on new prescriptions for remote supervision and the demand for new work skills to maintain productivity from home. We propose to understand this transformation by reconstructing the characteristics of management before and during the pandemic, describing its effects among contact centre agents, and analysing them in terms of Foucault's concept of "governmentality", defined as an encounter between techniques of power exercised over others and techniques of power that the individual exercises over him/herself, structuring a possible field of behaviours. We conclude that current managerial efficiency is not merely a techno-organisational product, but is essentially linked to self-organising and self-controlling dispositions of contact centre agents (who redefine their relations with others and with themselves), and foreshadows a future of massive governmentality of teleworkers.