[Book Review] Enda Brophy, Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce

Ray, Aditya (2020). [Book Review] Enda Brophy, Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce. Work, Employment and Society, 34(5) pp. 959–961.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017020913226

Abstract

The article reviews Enda Brophy’s book Language Put to Work, an important book for our times that conveys the centrality of communicativity in today’s world, focusing on its role in shaping the ‘global call centre workforce’ and the different modes of labour resistance that are emerging in its wake. While missing out on a more 'horizontal' framing of workers’ subjectivity and agency, the book still manages to deliver a powerful critique of prevailing modes of the cybertariat’s exploitation by call centre capital, while also bursting some of the popular myths of these being somehow radically different from earlier modes of exploitation of industrial labour.

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About

• Item ORO ID
• 73342
• Item Type
• Journal Item
• ISSN
• 1469-8722
• Keywords
• Call Centre; Cybertariat; Language; Labour; Exploitation; Labour Geography
• Academic Unit or School
• Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)
• Research Group
• Digital Humanities at the Open University (DH_OU)
  Language & Literacies
  OpenSpace Research Centre (OSRC)
  ?? space ??
  Global Challenges and Social Justice
• Copyright Holders
• © 2020 Aditya Ray
• Depositing User
• Aditya Ray