TY - JOUR
T1 - Contesting firm boundaries
T2 - Institutions, Cost Structures, and the Politics of Externalization: Explaining Variation in Contestation over Boundary Strategies for Call Center Jobs
AU - Doellgast, Virginia
AU - Sarmiento-Mirwaldt, Katja
AU - Benassi, Chiara
PY - 2016/5/1
Y1 - 2016/5/1
N2 - This article develops and applies a framework for analyzing the relationship among institutions, cost structures, and patterns of labor?management contestation over organizational boundaries. Collective negotiations related to the externalization of call center jobs are compared across 10 incumbent telecommunications firms located in Europe and the United States. All 10 firms moved call center work to dedicated subsidiaries, temporary agencies, and domestic and offshore subcontractors. A subset of the firms, however, later re-internalized call center jobs, in some cases following negotiated concessions on pay and working conditions for internal workers. Findings are based on 147 interviews with management and union representatives, archival data on restructuring measures and associated collective agreements, and wage data gathered through collective agreements and surveys. The authors argue that variation in outcomes can be explained by both the extent of the cost differentials between internal and external labor and the ease of exiting internal employment relationships, which in turn affected patterns of contestation associated with externalization measures.
AB - This article develops and applies a framework for analyzing the relationship among institutions, cost structures, and patterns of labor?management contestation over organizational boundaries. Collective negotiations related to the externalization of call center jobs are compared across 10 incumbent telecommunications firms located in Europe and the United States. All 10 firms moved call center work to dedicated subsidiaries, temporary agencies, and domestic and offshore subcontractors. A subset of the firms, however, later re-internalized call center jobs, in some cases following negotiated concessions on pay and working conditions for internal workers. Findings are based on 147 interviews with management and union representatives, archival data on restructuring measures and associated collective agreements, and wage data gathered through collective agreements and surveys. The authors argue that variation in outcomes can be explained by both the extent of the cost differentials between internal and external labor and the ease of exiting internal employment relationships, which in turn affected patterns of contestation associated with externalization measures.
U2 - 10.1177/0019793915624088
DO - 10.1177/0019793915624088
M3 - Article
SN - 0019-7939
VL - 69
SP - 551
EP - 578
JO - Industrial and Labor Relations Review
JF - Industrial and Labor Relations Review
IS - 3
ER -