Abstract:
This dissertation centres on process and connection. Beyond the popular concept of
‘worklife balance’ it presents an integral and holistic view of how work (including the
‘work’ of research), and life are inextricably connected. Eschewing the more
conventional model of the PhD; it does not develop a question (or set of questions)
about this area of interest, and then proffer answers. Rather, it works with/in an ever
emerging flow of living relationships and experiences, to offer inclusive, constantly
shifting understandings of the embodied dialogical processes that relationally
construct and connect people, our ‘selves,’ in the everyday flow of life, work and
research centred around a particular organisational setting: a large public sector call
centre.
The study rests on the assumption that rich multiply inflected emergent processes and
relationships ‘make’ people and their worlds, including the world of research. Hence
the dissertation is presented as an on-going construction, in which individuals and
organisations are not autonomous entities, but are in-effect, always becoming. The
organisation, its frontline staff, managers, and I (the ‘researcher’) emerge moment-bymoment,
relationally made and remade, within the communicative realm of embodied
language, in many different social, local, and historically inflected ways.
In the field, this everyday becoming is explored using a hybrid form of organisational
ethnography and collaborative action research. On the page, academic prose, stories
and narrative poems combine and interweave to (re)construct and deconstruct the
situated dialogues and relationships.
Narrated in two parts, the first section - “Telling Stories” - works with contexts, scene
setting and character development. Its layered and iterative unfolding begins with a
day-in-the-life story of work, life and research at the call centre. The section then
outlines the attitudes and assumptions that guide relational-responsive becoming,
before detailing the political economic, organisational and personal backgrounds and values influencing this study. With/in the conversations and complications of
collaborative practice I ‘show and tell’ how ‘coming to know what is known’ is a rich
relational emergent process that reworks research away from the more traditional
notion of it as data gathering and retrospective analysis.
Part two - “Stories Told” - is the heart of this study. It brings a sense of emergence to
life by focusing the kaleidoscopic lenses of relationship, identity and reflexivity on
people-in-process within the dynamic interplay of call centre technologies,
organisational systems and human interaction; both at work and outside of the
workplace. The stories interweave the rich multidimensionality of emergent lives, as
they explore the camaraderie and subversion of working in a tightly monitored and
time pressured environment, amidst changing conceptions of what constitutes public
service in New Zealand. Radically reflexive, they unsettle the often taken-for-granted
assumptions, feelings, actions and words that make selves in life, work and research.
In doing so, the stories raise expansive and inclusive possibilities for new ways of
understanding each other, our knowledges, practices and experiences. They also
remind us of the everyday, every moment possibilities for developing more mindful
and holistic understandings of the relational processes and the communicative
practices, within which we make our selves, our organisations, and our worlds.
KEYWORDS: Relational Construction; Emergence; Reflexivity; Identity;
Organisational Processes; Call Centres; Work and life; Public Sector; New Zealand.