EPISTEMOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE

Personal Epistemology and Tacit Knowledge in Call Centers



Personal Epistemology and Tacit Knowledge in Call Centers

Introduction

The call center tradition has swept the world around. This is the business unit that purely targets customer satisfaction. Call centers are mainly established either to sale a product of service, to provide after sale service or for the purpose of trouble shooting. The philosophy of call centers is very simple yet sophisticated. Almost all of the call centers provide daily targets to be achieved by their workforce. This tradition of the call centers welcome strict management and measurement processes. In call centers managers and leaders often have to take critical steps which are not viewed as favorable to the workforce. Ultimately this process deteriorates the motivation of the workforce and also affects their performance. The environment of the call centers is followed by the targets set by the top management which are to be achieved by the workers. The call centers follow the traditional hierarchal system where decisions flow from top to bottom. There are very few call centers that provide open environment; however, they also have certain targets that are to be achieved. Hence, strict and shrewd management is often observed.

The purpose of this paper is to use epistemological beliefs and trend to suggest better management and leadership process in the call centers. The philosophy of empiricism, skepticism and causality are the different theories of philosophy that can contribute to improve the management and leadership process of the call centers (Hindess, 1977). Empiricism is a theory philosophy that emphasizes on the role of experience, linked to the perception of sensory training in knowledge (Hunt, Sekaran, Schriesheim, 1982). For the most extreme empiricism, experience is the foundation of all knowledge, not only in terms of origin but also in terms of content. The world is sensible to form concepts and how sensitive they are in their justification and limitation. Empiricism, under that name, emerged in the modern age as ripe fruit of a philosophical trend that develops especially in the United Kingdom from the late middle ages (Hunt, Sekaran, Schriesheim, 1982). Today the opposition empiricism-rationalism, and the analytic-synthetic distinction is often not understood in a categorical way, as it was in earlier times, and rather one or another position due to methodological issues and heuristics or attitudes toward life rather than fundamental philosophical principles (Buchel, 2001).

Nevertheless, skepticism is a philosophical position in the epistemology in which the skeptic chooses to critically examine whether his perception of his knowledge is correct, and whether you can ever know real knowledge about a particular topic (Mitroff, Linstone, 1995). The term skeptic is used today to address a critical user to a given situation, usually running the principles of critical thinking and scientific method (scientific skepticism activation) to test the validity of claims and practices (Mitroff, Linstone, 1995). Skeptics refer to empirical evidence is important because they provide the best way to know the skeptics, check the validity of claims (Mitroff, Linstone, ...