The author analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Total Quality Management and Self-Managed Teams, as compared to mass production approaches to service delivery, among customer service and sales workers in a large unionized regional Bell operating company. Participation in self-managed teams...

This study examines factors related to within-occupation wage inequality among service and sales workers in the telecommunications industry. The author draws on a 1998 survey of a nationally representative sample of 354 service and sales centers in the industry to examine the importance of...

The last twenty-five years of the twentieth century was a period of extraordinary change in organizations and the economies of the developed world. This continues today. Such has been the scale and momentum of events that, for some analysts, the only comparable periods are the early part of the...

The last twenty-five years of the twentieth century was a period of extraordinary change in organizations and the economies of the developed world. This continues today. Such has been the scale and momentum of events that, for some analysts, the only comparable periods are the early part of the...

There has been a surge of new interest in federal training policy. This momentum has been fueled by concerns with productivity and competitiveness, whereas past federal policy has been more focused upon distributional issues. A wide range of new proposals have been put forth, and high on the...

Using survey data for call centre establishments in eight countries, we examine the relationship between wages and human resource practices. High-involvement work design and the use of performance-based pay are significantly positively related to wages, whereas intensive use of performance...

This case study of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) demonstrates the value of resource dependence and contingency organizational theories—two branches of organization theory, which has most commonly been used to interpret firm behavior—for analyzing union revitalization....

The authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm-level quit rates, then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998...

This study examines the relationship between informal training and job performance among 2,803 telephone operators in a large unionized U.S. telecommunications company. The authors analyze individual-level data on monthly training hours and job performance over a five-month period in 2001 as...

This paper, drawing on a 2003–2006 establishment-level survey of 1,819 call centers in 15 countries, examines effects of industrial relations institutions and employer strategies on wage variation across coordinated, liberal, and emerging market economies. The authors find several...