‘What Happens when the Phone goes Wild?’: Staff, Stress and Spaces for Escape in a BPR Telephone Banking Work Regime
研究金融服务行业在业务流程再造（BPR）工作制度下，员工面临更紧张和高压的工作条件，尽管部分员工欢迎多样化工作体验，但管理对生产率的关注限制了满意度，同时员工自主性有时会破坏企业目标。
This paper explores the experiences of staff working under a business process re‐engineering (BPR) work regime. We examine the nature of work within a team‐based, multi‐skilled and empowered environment within financial services. Despite mixed responses our case study indicates that for those employees who remain in employment after ‘re‐engineering’, working conditions may become more stressful and intensive. Although some staff may welcome those elements of a BPR work regime that facilitate a more varied work experience, the possibilities for satisfaction are often curtailed due to management$apos; preoccupation with productivity and ‘bottom line’ results. In practice BPR is neither as simple to implement nor as ‘rational’ in its content as the gurus would have us believe. Partly for these reasons it is also not as coercive in its control over labour as some critics fear. While managers may only want to encourage employee autonomy that is productive to its ends, we identify a number of occasions where autonomy is disruptive of corporate goals. The paper seeks to add to our understanding of ‘stress’, ‘resistance’ and management ‘control’ by considering the ways in which staff engage in the operation of BPR so as to maintain and reproduce these conditions. This dynamic cannot be understood, however, outside of the relations of power and inequality that characterize society and employment.