Intimate encounters: Affective labor in call centers

Abstract

By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor draws upon several years of intensive ethnographic field research in call centers in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The authors argue that the affective labor of call center agents is service work but that it t..