Page 157 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

‘our mystery shoppers regularly check the quality of our products and service of
our staff’ and on the other side ‘are you standing next to one? our mystery shop-
148 pers ensure you’re getting the best…’ (ellipsis in original). The use of bogus shop-
pers would appear to be quite widespread. When Fuller and Smith conducted
their research into 15 organizations in three metropolitan areas in the USA, only
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two did not use this surveillance strategy and both of them were hospitals. Two
companies actually wired the bogus shoppers so that the transactions could be
heard via a microphone.
A third approach is to enlist real customers in the surveillance of frontline
workers. While ostensibly to do with customer feedback, this approach turns all
customers into supervisors. In Fuller and Smith’s research, the feedback was
frequently concerned to identify how well the individual who served the customer
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performed but with some firms it was at a more general level. Some of the feed-
back questions that the researchers present as examples of the kinds of questions
asked were very much to do with issues that were the focus of the previous chapter,
such as whether the employee greeted the customer graciously, the nature of the
employee’s appearance, and whether the employee was cheerful. Feedback about
particular employees would often be entered into their files to form a part of sub-
sequent performance appraisals. Negative feedback also often resulted in discussions
with management and formed the springboard for the first stages of disciplinary
action. The use of customers in this way is consistent with the customer is king
philosophy that is the raison d’être of many service organizations, but it extends
the mystery shopper approach to surveillance into a context in which frontline
service workers are increasingly governed by their customers as much as by their
managers and supervisors.
The fourth approach is to use hardware in the monitoring of service workers.
Call centre workers have been identified as especially affected by this form of sur-
veillance. Precisely because their work is conducted by telephone and can there-
fore be easily monitored, it is particularly easy for managements to deploy
technology as a means of surveillance. Even two researchers who argued that
forms of resistance to control in call centres should not be overestimated
conceded that:

workers’ output and performance can potentially be measured and monitored to an unprecedented
degree. Additionally, workers may have the expression and intonation of their speech assessed
according to a range of subjective criteria. This performance of emotional labour contributes further
to the intensity of the work. 54

Indeed, customers who telephone call centres are often forewarned that the call
may be monitored for ‘training’ or other purposes. A firm studied by Bain and
Taylor, which was briefly described in the previous chapter, also used mystery
shopper surveillance. 55 In the firm studied by Callaghan and Thompson (2002),
monitoring of calls was undertaken by a ‘Research Department’ which carried out