London: The inevitable export of commodity call centre services to India and elsewhere highlights the need to accelerate the UK's shift towards globally successful knowledge-based economy, an industry report said today (Jan 18, 2004).

The performance of the majority of call centres in the UK calls into question the Department of Trade and Industry's boast that they represent “one of our service sector success stories”, said the report titled 'Psychosocial Risk Factors in Call Centres: An Evaluation of Work Design and Well-being'.

Their 400,000 jobs often provide poor value for customers and employees. They also appear to do little for the productivity of the service sector as a whole.

It covered 36 call centres and 1,100 employees and claims to be the largest systematic examination carried out in UK.

Handling calls in a call centre is more stressful than other jobs and well-being is lower, according to the research report for the Health and Safety Executive. Much call centre work is white collar production-line activity - repetitive, fragmented and subject to the iron control of automated systems.

As such, call centres exemplify the fundamental sin of Anglo-Saxon management: the separation of work from decision-making, with consequent disengagement of hearts and minds.

Export in these jobs to Asia just makes the separation explicit: "They are organisationally as well as physically distant," says Warwick Business School professor Harry Scarbrough, head of a national research programme on the evolution of business knowledge.