The production of politics in front-line service work: “body work” in the labour process of the call centre worker

Abstract

This article utilises an examination of the labour process of call centre work as a jumpingoff point towards understanding the production of politics, arguing that the properties by which bodies are capable of praxis are becoming central to commodity production. As such, this article contributes to the project of understanding bodies under capitalism and to research on call centres and service work. To read call centre work politically, the article isolates and qualifies “the elementary factors of the labour process” as discussed by Marx in Capital, Vol. I. In light of research on purportedly new forms of labour, this analysis of the labour process points towards the need for a reconfiguration of the concept of body work, which is subsequently deployed in an analysis of the production of politics in service work. By emphasising the reciprocal relationality of processes of the production of bodies, this conceptualisation of body work breaches binary understandings of work/life and therefore has significance beyond labour studies. The article concludes that service work forestalls and limits the potential for politics. Nonetheless, the instrumentalisation of the capacities by which bodies are political can also represent opportunities for the resistance of the pernicious ontological consequences of work.