"Labour exploitation and resistance(s) in the ground and the cloud: body, call centers and social protests in Argentina"

LISDERO, PEDRO; EYNARD, MARTIN

Bucarest

Conferencia; Mid Term Conference, European Sociological Association (ESA) ? Research Network 18 (RN18) ?Sociology of Communications and Media Research? - Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform or Revolution?; 2014

ESA - University of Bucharest

The rhythms of the global transformations of capital cannot be understood without the particular territorialization of seemingly contradictory realities. This observation is particularly sensitive when it comes to labor conditions, which mutate significantly in different ways, stressing their own understanding categories of labor. Undoubtedly, the incorporation of ICTs in global production processes, as well as the Internet as instance of expression and protest by workers, leads to new questions that strain the traditional categories of collective action, social movements, labor and even capitalist social relations. In this regard, this communication aims to explore the contributions of the sociology of body and emotions, sociology of work, the field of collective action and social conflict and the methodological developments related to Virtual Ethnography, to understand the emerging expressions of social conflict in new scenarios, like a sensible place to trace the structuring processes of capitalist social relations. Particularly, we explore the conflicts associated with the Call Centers sector in Argentina, like a paradigmatic activity to think the scope of the changes and new morphologies that takes place in what we call "neo-colonial" territories, which highlights the location and interaction of ICT in the experience of workers, particularly in regard to the Internet as a privileged way of expression of conflict. Thus, the question of how workers in certain territories build their work and protest experience with/inside ICTs, becomes a central question when thinking processes of building value and valorization in the aforementioned global process of capitalist transformation. According to our objectives, a series of data produced with Virtual Ethnography, which included the participation-observation and recording of On-line protest (Facebook and Blogs) instances is presented, as well as interviews produced "on-line" and "face to face". In other words, we make focus on social protests of Call centers workers, either in ?virtual" and in ?real? contexts. Analyzing the information produced in the frame of call center workers protests in the city of Córdoba (Argentina), in the period 2006-2013, it will link the emergency of (working) precariousness, with "precarious bodies". Moreover, the redefinitions operated in the relationship between surplus and expropriation arising from the analyzed experiences shows the depredation of these bodies-in-work as the expression of a "limit of compatibility of the system".