Call centers are rooted in contradictory tensions and structural paradoxes, and confront a number of trades-offs on that basis. These set a context for attitudes towards the organization and can impose conflicting role requirements on agents. A core example is that of the pressure for quantity versus the aspiration for quality, the guiding logic of which is the conundrum of trying to get closer to the customer while reutilizing, centralizing, reducing costs and prescribing standards. It is not completely straightforward, it is important to note. Part of providing quality service from a management perspective is making sure customers do not wait too long for their calls to be answered, even though the push to keep queue waiting times short is typically categorized as part of the pressure towards quantity. An effort to attain what is perceived to be the desired balance between the quantity and the quality of calls presents a perennial challenge. The practice of ongoing work practice modification and target revision as management swings from one side to another of the quality/quantity debate is a major source of stress for call center agents. The practice of putting a 'drive' on particular targets for improvement (for example, the collection of renewal dates, the up-selling or cross-selling of products, the quality of data input, or the intensity of sales push) and continual reprioritization means that the 'goalposts' are constantly shifting. Virtually all of the call center authors who write about work conditions mention the difficulty of dealing with these competing goals. The dilemma is particularly difficult for front-line workers because they may be likely "to identify with embodied individual customers, for interactions with specific customers may be an important arena for meaning and satisfaction within the work". They contrast this customer-as-individual orientation to the managerial goal of balancing customer orientation with efficiency, which they suggest leads management to prefer workers to identify with a generic category, 'the customer', since "such a disembodied image of the customer will encourage workers to deal with individual customers efficiently because they will be conscious of the concerns of other customers waiting in a queue". 3.
Intensity The third central stressor in call center work is its intensity. far from being either in terminal decline or on the wane, with a range of other control mechanisms-is not only alive, well and