Communicative Capitalism and Call Centre Labour

Abstract

This chapter positions the rise of the call centre within the emergence of what the political theorist Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism. Connecting the explosion of call centres to the growing communicativity of firms across the economy, the chapter assesses the two main scholarly traditions in the analysis of this new workforce. While liberal-democratic and management scholars of “knowledge work” have produced apologetic portraits of engaged call centre workers in friction-free informational workplaces, Marxist labour process scholars have tended to serve up the dispiriting image of a subjugated workforce in return. The chapter concludes by proposing an alternate approach to call centre labour which draws upon theories of resistance to constituted forms of power, especially in the workplace. Approaching this new workforce from the perspective of resistance, the chapter argues, requires engagement with a literature that has mostly been ignored in academic studies of call centre work—that produced by call centre workers, labour activists, and union organizers in the sector. The chapter concludes with a review of this literature, zeroing in on applications of the autonomist method—the worker enquiry—in call centres by labour collectives in Germany, Italy, Argentina, and India.