The back office goes global : exploring connections
and contradictions in shared service centres

Howcroft, D; Richardson, H

Abstract

This article explores a neglected aspect of IT-enabled service work: the back office. The
fieldwork study reveals how back-office service work has been identified as suitable for ongoing
reorganization and reconfiguration as firms respond to the pressures of contemporary capitalism.
The article focuses on standardization as a means of facilitating organizational restructuring into
shared service centres as highly skilled back-office work is reframed as routine service work.
Standardization is the vehicle that drives the commodification of the labour process as tasks
are fragmented, quantified and traded in the global sourcing of services, allowing work to be
lifted out of traditional organizational structures and placed elsewhere, or outsourced to other
service providers. The study shows how this ongoing process is fraught with contradictions,
problematically rendering people and place ancillary.

Citation

and contradictions in shared service centres. Work, Employment and Society, 26(1), 111-127. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017011426309

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Feb 17, 2012
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Dec 8, 2011
• Journal: Work, Employment and Society
• Print ISSN: 0950-0170
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 111-127
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017011426309
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017011426309
• Related Public URLs: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/wes