Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Since the mid-2000s, the harsh reality of call centre employment for a generation of young workers in Portugal has been impossible to ignore. With its endless rows of small cubicles, where human agents endure repetitive telephone conversations with abusive clients under invasive modes of technological surveillance, discipline and control, call centre work remains a striking symbol of labour precarity, a condition particularly associated with the neoliberal generational disenchantment that 'each generation does better than its predecessor'.
This book describes the emergence of a regime of disciplined agency in the Portuguese call centre sector. Examining the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, this book argues that call centre labour constitutes a new form of commodification of the labouring subject. De Matos argues that call centres represent an advanced system of non-manual labour power exploitation, due to the underestimation of human creativity that lies at the centre of the regimented structures of call centre labour. Call centres can only guarantee profit maintenance, de Matos argues, through the commodification of the human agency arising from the operators' moral, relational and social embedded agentive linguistic interventions of creative improvisation, decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation.
Synopsis
Based on an extended case-study in the Portuguese call centre sector, this book addresses the themes of the neoliberal economic restructuring of Southern European societies (with an emphasis on the emergence of the categories of precarity and the precariat), the historically and morally embedded nature of value-creation in service production regimes and emerging forms of commodification of the labouring subject in the neoliberal service economy. This book contributes towards: a) a broader moral critique of precarity, focused on scrutinising the links between the historical development of precarious neoliberal service regimes and context-bounded processes of moral dispossession; and, b) expanding current approaches to value extraction and subjectification in call centre work by jointly focusing on the alienable and inalienable properties that make a particular form of labour-power exploitable in an historical, moral and relational embedded reality.
Synopsis
This book introduces the concept of disciplined agency as a valuable explanatory tool vis-a-vis new forms of labour exploitation in service realms of production and the material and moral insecurities of capitalism under neoliberal governance.