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Chapter 8 - Emotional Labour in Government Frontline Work: The Burden of Public Call Centre Workers
- Edited by Malehoko Tshoaedi, Christine Bischoff, Andries Bezuidenhout
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- Book:
- Labour Disrupted
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2023, pp 172-184
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
The state is South Africa's single largest employer. In his contribution to this volume, Lucien van der Walt points out that South African labour studies as a field has neglected ‘the role of the long history of unions in the state, of studies of the state as workplace including via labour process theory, and of the distinctive of state activity’. He argues: ‘Understanding the state on its own terms is still neglected in labour movement studies, where the state typically appears as an agent of violence, patronage, or just another employer’. In order to rectify this, he argues for ‘labour process studies [that look] at the past and present of state sector work’. The aim of this chapter is to address that oversight. A secondary aim is to draw on existing labour process theories of white-collar service work, but also to disrupt this perspective by means of a case study drawn from the civil service, where the ‘ client’ is not a consumer based in the private sector but rather the citizen of a country. Call centre work is a type of human interactive service work that requires considerable investment in emotional labour. This chapter discusses the deployment of the emotional labour in the interface between the frontline worker as both citizen and customer in the local government in South Africa. Using the concept of ‘emotional labour’ borrowed from Arlie Hochschild ([1983] 2003), this chapter hopes to expand the concept and application in the public sector.
Emotional labour tends to centralise the customer as the main feature of interactive work. The quality of emotional labour is measured through ‘customer satisfaction’. This means that ‘facial expressions, bodily postures, choice of spoken word, tone of voice and behaviour’ are a central part of call centre duties for the competent performance of work (Huang and Yeoh 2007, 198). Rahmat Omar (2016, 232) tells us that ‘the product of the interactive work is relationship rather than a product’. This intangible nature of the product in service work creates potential challenges in public sector call centres.
The introduction of customer cultures within the public service has transformed service work to include emotional labour, where citizens do not only demand ‘care’ but also emotional labour. This is based on the material conditions under which the emotional labour is deployed in the public sector, which is different from the private sector, where the ‘customer is king’.
Chapter 12 - Decolonisation and Governance at South African Universities: Case study of the Green Leadership Schools
- from PART II - SECTORS AND LOCATIONS
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- By Darlene Miller, Wits School of Governance., Nomalanga Mkhize, Rhodes University., Rebecca Pointer, Wits School of Governance., Babalwa Magoqwana, Nelson Mandela University.
- David Everatt
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- Book:
- Governance and the Postcolony
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 August 2019, pp 258-282
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Resistance by the national #FeesMustFall students’ movement in South Africa placed the governance of university spaces at the centre of public discourse and university policies in 2015/2016. At the outset, this phase of student resistance in South Africa involved a fierce symbolic struggle to remove the statue of colonial imperialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The man and his chair were finally dismantled and moved by crane in 2015. The historical hangover of colonial culture in an African university space, so many years after African independence from colonial rule, points to wider problems of governance at South African universities. Spaces of learning are organised under the gaze of white men and the postcolonial patriarchy. Transformation in higher education has not fundamentally disrupted hegemonic and racialised structures of governance at South African universities.
This chapter focuses on the importance of space and power, and how alternative approaches to higher education learning spaces – the physical organisation of learning, dominant knowledge systems, and the integration of the environment – may allow greater freedom for black Africans in university learning spaces. The premise is that the present university system still constrains the growth of black intellectuals and professionals. We present a radical alternative based in a grounded research method, in which a number of workshops called Green Leadership Schools (GLS) were run by the authors of this chapter. Key social problems and theories made up the curriculum of the GLS – land, gender and leadership – and these were related to crucial environmental issues such as climate change and indigenous knowledge(s).
The format and foci of the different GLS, organised over a two-year period as four residential workshops in 2014 and 2015, experimented with a different kind of learning space that stepped outside the modernist structures of the university learning space. The GLS initiative predated and then overlapped with the #FeesMustFall national students’ movement. The concerns for radical university transformation by these students intersected with the radical pedagogies envisaged by the GLS. The final (and fourth) GLS was organised as a writing workshop for these students. Themes of indigenous environmentalism, matriarchal leadership and green learning spaces informed our idea of green leadership, and were explored in various ways at the schools.