Description:

This paper analyzes a non-standard apprenticeship system in a financial call centre. The work is organised round two pieces of new technology: an auto-dialler (which cold-calls clients and allocates them to human callers) and a data base which records the human caller's dialogue with each client. New employees learn the art of telephone negotiation through an 'apprenticeship' to these two pieces of software.

Methodology or methods/research instruments or sources used:

The role of the software to which the callers are 'apprenticed' is theorised from the perspective of the socio-cultural theory of tool construction and use. The software mediates the organisation's memory and newcomers learn through their experience of the software's social utilisation scheme.

Conclusions or expected outcomes or findings:

It broadens the concept of apprenticeship by basing it on interchanges between the apprentice and an artefact rather than between an apprentice and a human 'master'. Yet the artefact is essentially human as it is the record of innumerable human-to- human dialogues within this community.