Articulation Work Skills and the Recognition of Call Centre Competences in Australia Ian Hampson, Anne Junor University of New South Wales, Australia Alison Barnes University of Western Sydney, Australia Abstract: Debates over whether customer service work is deskilled or part of the knowledge economy tend to focus on single issues such as control, emotional labour or information management. Call centre work, however, falls within a spectrum of service jobs requiring simultaneous and multifaceted work with people, information and technology, This activity, which we call ‘articulation work’, is often performed within tight timeframes and requires workers, first to integrate their own tasks into an ongoing ‘line’ of work and second to collaborate in maintaining the overall work-flow. The requisite skills, of awareness, interaction management and coordination, tend to be poorly specified in competency standards that subdivide work into discrete tasks. We compare examples of call centre competency standards with case study accounts of the use of articulation work skills, arguing the need for a taxonomy allowing the recognition of different levels of these skills across the service sector. Keywords: articulation work; call centres; competency-based training; interactive customer service; skills Journal of Industrial Relations © Industrial Relations Society of Australia SAGE Publications Ltd, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi ISSN 0022-1856, 51(1) 45–58 [DOI: 10.1177/0022185608099664] article Contact address: Ian Hampson, School of Organisation and Management, Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia. [email: I.Hampson@unsw.edu.au] 45 3_JIR 51(1) Hampson.indd 45 20/11/08 10:22:55