“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control, Self‐valorisation, and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

Abstract

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker "resistance" in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self-governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of "self-valorisation", we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management's control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments. Riassunto: La natura, presente e futura, del lavoro routinario costituisce una crescente preoccupazione, dato l'aumentato utilizzo della tecnologia e date le competenze specifiche ora richieste dal mercato del lavoro. Il presente articolo si basa sulla letteratura sull'autonomia operaia e dimostra come e perch e i lavoratori possano influenzare la continuata esistenza di forme di lavoro importanti. Contribuendo alla ricerca sul processo del lavoro, la quale si focalizza sulla "resistenza" del lavoratore nel contesto lavorativo, sviluppiamo una prospettiva pi u approfondita sul ruolo del lavoratore e del potenziale umano nella creazione di scelte importanti e autonome sulle attivit a lavorative da intraprendere. Considerando la resilienza e la rielaborazione dei lavoratori come forma di "auto-valorizzazione", mostriamo come in diversi ambienti di lavoro routinario vengano sviluppati nuovi valori e nuove relazioni umane che agiscono in opposizione al controllo manageriale e all'evoluzione di ambienti lavorativi sgradevoli.

The Anaesthetic Politics of Being Unaffected: Embodying Insecure Digital Platform Labour

“…While storytelling has a representational dimension through reference to situations and events, through these interview encounters, storytelling also has an important performative dimension since the stories people tell about their life circumstances change their capacities to be affected by those circumstances (Rose 2016). Storytelling could therefore constitute a form of "continual and everyday ... agency which people evoke through routine engagements with the labour market" (Hastings andCumbers 2019:1459). Crucially, while each of these men attest to different kinds of bodily hardship, these narratives also seem to work to anaesthetise certain painful aspects of this work.…”

“…In this regard, concealment, projection and resignation could seem like passive responses to a situation. However, a focus on transforming bodily capacities to be affected provides a more "nuanced perspective on worker agency" (Hastings andCumbers 2019:1456), not in terms of a tactical refusal to act, but as a quieter refusal to feel.…”

“…Attention to fluctuating bodily capacities extends debates on worker agency that rethink economic change in terms of the active capacities of workers in contrast to aggregate accounts of production that overemphasise the power of capital (Hastings and Cumbers 2019;Warren 2019). A prior focus on the power of unions has been supplemented by exploring the practices that workers develop to make life more liveable, inspired by Katz's (2004) typology of resilience, reworking and resistance which involve three magnitudes of activity-from coping strategies, to altering working conditions, to active opposition.…”

“…A prior focus on the power of unions has been supplemented by exploring the practices that workers develop to make life more liveable, inspired by Katz's (2004) typology of resilience, reworking and resistance which involve three magnitudes of activity-from coping strategies, to altering working conditions, to active opposition. Where a decade ago McMorran lamented that "the context-specific, embodied daily practices of work remain overlooked within workplace geographies" (2012:489), recent work has remedied this by exploring the "continual and everyday forms of agency which people evoke through routine engagements with the labour market" (Hastings andCumbers 2019:1459). This work indicates that, rather than being dramatic, resistance can manifest through more subtle activities.…”

Multiplying Labour, Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

“…Nevertheless, despite sustained decomposition, cycles of struggle are recomposing, often from previously unexpected sources, such as migrants, the unemployed, and indigenous groups. Contemporary work on class composition explores these multiple processes, be they taking place in UK call centres (Hastings and Cumbers ; Woodcock ) or among Chinese agricultural workers (Marks ). Importantly, class composition analysis does not apply a pre‐determined class structure to particular contexts, instead exploring the specificities of each situation.…”