Emotional Labour & Quality Processes

Nath 2011. Aesthetic and emotional labour through stigma: national identity management and racial abuse in offshored Indian call centres. Work Employment Society. 25(4) 709–725 

The paper investigates a number of agents experiences of national identity management which includes the following:

• Accent training and modification - to avoid racial abuse, invasive questions, keep call time to minimum, facilitate understanding
• Pseudonyms and location masking
• Racial abuse
• Coping with stigma - Internalize, masked resistance, correction attempts, indifference, diversion, distancing

Some of the issues related to emotional labour that came up in the class discussion included:

• Cultural
• Stigma - MTI
• Workload
• Real problems (depression, alcoholism) 
• Control
• Responsibility 

Keeni, G. (2000) The Evolution of Quality Processes at TATA Consultancy Services. IEEE Software, 17, 79-88.

TATA is the largest software and management consultancy in southern Asia. This article focuses on the measure undertaken to ensure quality. These includes:

• Quality Assurance Groups (QAGs) - late 80's
• Quality Management System (QMS) - early 90's
• ISO 9000 - early 90's
• Institutionalization of audits & project management reviews
• Activity-based costing (cost drivers - value-adding effort vs non-value-adding effort)
• The Integrated Project Management System - Introduced automation of data collection & analysis to encourage employees to document and accept metrics (provided additional training/workshops/meetings to convince them)
• Software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) - Pilots at US West & HP centers resulted in knowledge sharing, mentors & Process primes, and process automation. Key to deployment was staff involvement & TCS Certified Quality Analyst Initiative. 
• The Tata Business Excellence Model

 The results & benefits witnessed include an increase in the following:

• Effort estimation - slippage & rework reductions
• Review effectiveness - increase in early error detection  
• Product Quality 
• Customer benefits - reduced project management effort
• Benefits to the organization - support groups, competitive environment

The article doesn't mention the problems/motivators behind installing these quality processes. It was necessary to go outside of the reading to see what the problems were that encouraged them to implement quality controls. Its clearly evident that TATA is a company that's always stumbling. 

The article itself is just a narrative; there is no written evidence of  the real connections with employees or how the work is done. The article focuses instead on the systems, describing them in a way that is too packaged and polished.

This makes the article impossible to understand or use. How could this narrative be used to add to/help my management processes? The answer is it couldn't.