Are call centers sweatshops?

A call center is a division that specializes in dealing with customers. Early studies on call centers regarded them as strategically important areas that, despite some negative aspects, were acknowledged to possess a certain level of expertise and to have a high degree of autonomy as interfaces for customers. However, this view gradually changed, with call centers coming to be seen as workplaces typified by harsh working conditions and isolated from the other divisions of the company. Therefore, research in recent years has entirely focused on these negative aspects, while ignoring the positive aspects.


Introduction
A call center is a division that specializes in dealing with customers and can potentially play an important role as a contact point for gathering customer information in a company. Early research on call centers therefore regarded them as performing work that required a certain level of expertise. Certainly, these studies indicated that there were negative aspects, but the general view was that call centers had a high degree of autonomy and were strategically important to their companies by being interfaces for customers.
However, research focusing on these positive aspects gradually decreased as an ever-growing number of studies focused instead on the negative aspects of call centers, such as employee turnover and stress.
This paper considers how the content of discussion changed in prior research on call centers and suggests possibilities for future research.

Early Studies on Call-Center Management
Call centers have been a topic of research since the 1990s. Earlier studies focused on both the negative and positive aspects of call centers.
For example, Frenkel, Tam, Korczynski, and Shire (1998) indicated that call center employees can be considered semiprofessional and empowered workers. These workers need to use information technology to provide customized responses to customers' concerns. In addition, call center workers were portrayed as potentially being key strategic resources because they served as interfaces for customers and were ambassadors in using market information for companies. Batt (2000) pointed out that a call center was an effective customer interface and was strategically important to companies as a base for acquiring loyal customers.
Certainly, these studies did not ignore the negative aspects of call centers, but they still took note of the positive aspects, unlike more recent studies, which emphasized only the negative aspects.
For example, Russell's (2008) review article focusing on call centers notes the focus on call centers as research subjects as shown below.
Much as automobile factories or textile mills were treated as both objects of curiosity and as metaphors for their age, call centres have garnered attention both in their own right as a new means of organizing particular types of work and as an important venue from which to undertake the study of other elements of management practice (Russell, 2008, p. 1).
In addition, Russell asserted that, in an information economy, call centers are treated as important points of customer contact. Russell (2008) discussed call-center management from the perspectives of managerial control, information economy, human-resource management, gender, and globalization. Within this discussion, the work of call centers is positioned as semi-skilled labor; although it cannot be considered knowledge work, it requires more advanced skills than those of blue-collar operators.

Recent Studies on Call-Center Management
This section considers the types of research conducted on call centers since Russell (2008). In addition, 14 of these studies stated explicit reasons for surveying call centers.
The topics covered in these 14 papers can be generally classified into customer contact, human resources, administration, work meaningfulness, and technology, as shown in Table 1 (Raghuram, 2013), start-of-work and work events (Rothbard & Wilk, 2011), and mis-selling (Brannan, 2017).

4) Studies on work meaningfulness include one dealing with
occupational stigma (Shantz & Booth, 2014) and another on employee branding (Brannan, Parsons, & Priola, 2015). (2009)  Conversely, in case of b), these studies are more direct in stating their reasons for studying call centers. For example, Batt and Colvin (2011), who studied the problem of turnover, stated the following as Sato their reason:

5) Finally, with respect to technology, Nyberg
Call centers are an appropriate context for this study because high rates of turnover are a major source of high costs and poor service quality for them (Batt & Colvin, 2011, p. 696).
In other words, call centers are appropriate research subjects because they are workplaces where turnover issues occur easily.
Further, Wang, Liao, Zhan, and Shi (2011), who focused on customer mistreatment, stated the following: Specifically, call-center employees are in frequent contact with customers, giving them plenty of opportunities to experience customer mistreatment (Wang, Liao, Zhan, & Shi, 2011, p. 318).
In this case as well, call centers by their nature are contact points with customers. This makes it easy for customer misconduct to occur, so that call centers are appropriate subjects for studying this issue.
As can be seen from these examples, call centers were chosen for these studies because of these characteristics, and as shown by the use of the term "electronic sweatshop" (Fleming & Sturdy, 2011), the focus is solely on their negative aspects. Sales and marketing divisions are another important customer interface. For research on sales and marketing divisions, see Inamizu, Sato, and Ikuine (2017), Kosuge (2015), Sato (2015), Yamashiro (2017Yamashiro ( , 2018, among others. 2 Sato (2017) deals with organizations' strategic consistency.

Discussion and Conclusion
should not be viewed as sweatshops but rather as having a more important role such as that discussed in prior research.