'South Africa on-call': Information technology and labour market restructuring in South African call centres

The dramatic global growth of call centres represents a potentially valuable employment opportunity for South Africa, as the country is gaining visibility as a viable site for off-shored business from the USA and Europe. South Africa's growth potential, however, is constrained by low educational levels of potential call centre workers, a lack of customer service management skills, and inattention to the temporal challenges of call centre work, including career trajectories for workers in the industry and evolutionary trends in the industry itself. To address this, the South African government must do more than market the country internationally. It must develop a more comprehensive approach that takes a longer-term perspective and embraces human capacity development as a central element of an economic upgrading strategy.