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- Author: Patrícia Alves de Matos x
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Call centres are a part of the daily lives of most people across the world, as they have become a privileged site of contact between firms and their clients. Drawing on the unusual advantage of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book describes the emergence of a regime of ‘disciplined agency’ within the Portuguese call centre sector. The notion of ‘disciplined agency’ is the guiding thread connecting the book’s account. Departing from a historical examination of the neoliberal economic restructuring of Portuguese capitalism shaping the emergence of the call centre sector, the analysis progresses through the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, and the specific features of the call centre labour process that configure a new means of commodifying the worker. This book engages in a discussion of the particular subjectivities and forms of personal dispossession attached to the value-extraction system of ‘disciplined agency’ deployed in call centre labour, and how it is facilitated by relationally and morally embedded structures of kin, generation and class.
Chapter 5 considers the creation of client sovereignty within call centres, how it shapes the nature of the operator–client relationship and how it contributes to the overall specificity of call centre labour as a regime of disciplined agency. The client, as a figure of authority, shapes the way labour as a service is mobilised within the sector. To promote the everyday realisation of client sovereignty, firms engage in extensive marketing operations and ritualised collective gatherings with the purpose of creating what they designate the ‘transcendent client’. On the shop floor, the morally embedded nature of operator–client interactions mediates the conditions whereby the ideology of the ‘customer as king' comes to be accommodated or challenged by operators. One particular form of contestation that takes place on the shop floor is the construction of the ‘stupid client’ through gossip, humour and rumours.
This chapter introduces the reader to the the Portuguese call centre sector, as well as selected local and national features. The most relevant theoretical frameworks underpinning the book’s analysis and main arguments are mapped. The chapter argues for the relevance of addressing neoliberal precarity as a historically and morally embedded reality, rendered workable by State-led accumulation and ideologies of development, mediated by contingent, relational structures of feeling, and enacted in specific service-labour regimes. There follows a definition of the call centre labour process as a regime of disciplined agency, capable of incorporating into the valorisation process operators’ morally, relationally and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacities of creative improvisation, decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation. The final two sections provide a brief overview of the rest of the book, the methodological options taken during the fieldwork and sources of data.
Chapter three examines further the theme of unfulfilled generational expectations for those working in call centres by exploring how call centre work came to assume the iconic role of the main symbol of precarity in Portugal. A brief discussion is offered on the emergence of the precarity terminology and its associated category of the precariat in the context of European social movements of struggle and activism. This provides the reader with a general view of the phenomenon of precarious work and its particular form of development in Portugal. In the remainder of the chapter the analysis focuses on the politicisation of the sector, demonstrating how became the symbol par excellence of insecure employment in Portugal. In contrast to perspectives that have emphasised either the novel or the structural character of the condition of precarity, this chapter stresses that in Portugal the moral, political and ideological discourses in which the categories of precarity, precarious labour and the precariat are embedded can be a source of both emancipation and stigma.
Chapters 4 to 6 examine how the specific shape of Portuguese flexible capitalism, the disjuncture in historically bounded generational expectations, and the tensions attached to the cultural and social meanings of precarity are expressed in the call centre labour process. These chapters progressively unravel the institutionalisation of a system of labour exploitation designated as a regime of disciplined agency. Chapter 4 explores how call centres present their recruitment, training and job allocation practices to candidates. The set of organisational processes through which young recruits learn to be call centre operators are based on specific procedures that establish specific modes of conduct and behaviour through which subjectivities are organised and disciplined in the early stages of training. The hiring processes, built upon the moral-laden and the nationally institutionalised employment conditions of uncertainty and powerlessness, become fundamental mechanisms by which workers' individuality and skills are linguistically and practically constructed as containers of subordination and agency.
Chapter 2 underlines the historical continuities and transitions of the Portuguese setting that have shaped the emergence of the sector, taking into account broader shifts and tendencies in global capitalism. The trajectories of the generation preceding that of today’s call centre workers are located in this historical landscape by exploring how the social aspirations of upward class mobility that they projected onto their children were embedded in national projects of freedom, modernity and economic progress. The chapter’s aim is twofold. First, it shows how the affinity between precarious labour and call centre employment in Portugal is as much an outgrowth of recent Portuguese economic history as it is the result of global processes of neoliberalisation. Second, it emphasises how the increasing precariousness of employment and deterioration of working conditions attached to the neoliberal turn in the 1980s have made it increasingly difficult for contemporary call centre workers to achieve the social expectations of middle-class distinction, based on educational achievement and stable employment, that were placed on them by the State, the nation and their parents’ generation. This chapter unravels how particular, historically bounded, intra-generational life goals of class mobility become embedded in broader transitions in economic and labour regimes.
Chapter 6 examines how discipline, quantification and surveillance are enacted within the labour process in order to clarify the main distinguishable characteristic of value-creation within call centres. The computer-based mechanisms used by the sector to measure labour output, and the informal and formal strategies of labour surveillance, contain one central paradox that is indispensable for profit maintenance: workers must meet quantitative and qualitative productivity targets. By following these, management achieves two goals: making workers accountable for their performance while inciting their agential intervention in the labour process through linguistic engagement. Call centres present the most advanced system for exploitating a rarefied form of labour: linguistic engagement, or human communicative competence. The call centre labour process emerges as a regime of disciplined agency in which maintaining the tension between quantitative and qualitative targets incorporate into the valorisation process operators’ morally and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacities of decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation.
Chapter 7 concentrates mainly on workers' reports of their sense of dispossession, shame and stigma, based on semi-biographical interviews with forty workers. It focuses on three main aspects: how the uncertainty and vulnerability attached to precarious labour are experienced as dispossession and how this is connected to the experience of downward mobility (‘falling from grace'); social isolation in personal relationships and feelings of shame towards the family; and the interpretation of the stigma attached to call centre operators in Portuguese society. These have an important impact on the way agents constitute their subjectivity and consciousness. Workers' accounts of their circumstances reveal a considerable degree of insight into what exactly it is about the workplace and their working conditions that produces such a profound sense of disenchantment.
The concluding chapter begins by providing a brief overview of the most recent developments in the Portuguese call centre sector, followed by a review of the book’s core argument: the Portuguese call centre labour process as a regime of disciplined agency. It is argued that the notion of disciplined agency aims to capture how the practices of recruitment and training, employment conditions, work organisation, and architecture of value-extraction are mediated by historically and morally contingent dimensions of neoliberal precarity and generational dispossession. The chapter also addresses how the notion of disciplined agency contributes to (a) a broader moral critique of precarity, focused on scrutinising the links between the historical development of precarious neoliberal service regimes and context-bound processes of moral dispossession; (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 embedded historical, moral and relational reality; and (c) enhancing the analytical and emancipatory potentialities of the precarity terminology.