`WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE PHONE GOES WILD?': STAFF, STRESS AND SPACES FOR ESCAPE IN A BPR TELEPHONE BANKING WORK REGIME* DAVID KNIGHTS University of Nottingham DARREN MCCABE Manchester School of Management ABSTRACT This paper explores the experiences of sta 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 ®nancial 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 sta may welcome those elements of a BPR work regime that facilitate a more varied work experience, the possibilities for satisfac- tion are often curtailed due to management's 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', `resis- tance' and management `control' by considering the ways in which sta 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. INTRODUCTION Much of the labour process literature since the early days of the conferences in the UK has been concerned to expand both empirically and theoretically the various critiques (e.g. Aronowitz, 1978; Edwards, 1978; Elger, 1979; Stark, 1980) concerning the deterministic assumptions in Braverman's (1974) attempted resusci- tation of Marx's thesis. In particular, it has been concerned to demonstrate how capital and management are neither as homogeneous, omnipotent or omniscient as depicted in Labor and Monopoly Capital and that, partly as a consequence, labour is not as degraded and dominated a victim of capitalism as critics sometimes Journal of Management Studies 35:2 March 1998 0022-2380 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Address for reprints: Darren McCabe, Manchester School of Management, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD, UK.