Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter explores the rich terrain that is opened up to a perspective on call centre labour that begins with resistance by surveying the many manifestations of workplace conflict surfacing within global call centres today. The chapter provides a composite portrait of labour resistance in the call centre, beginning from the least perceptible manifestations of affective disengagement and progressing towards more overt instances of labour conflict. From the refusal of work to traditional union drives, from cross-border organizing to innovative forms of sabotage through to flexible strikes, the chapter argues that labour resistance and collective organization have indelibly marked the call centre’s early history. This overview of the “arts of resistance” displayed by the call centre workforce offers a sense of the many ways in which the process of class formation unfolding in these workspaces has been met with recalcitrance, refusal, and rebellion by its subjects. The chapter highlights the value of informal forms of refusal such as quitting, slacking, and emotional detachment among the workforce, suggesting that these can and have become the foundation for more coordinated, formal, and threatening forms of labour organization in the call centre and beyond. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".