Empowerment narratives and sticky affects
The workings of affective capitalism in Philippine call centers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4179918 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aileen Olimba Salonga (University of the Philippines , Diliman , Quezon City , Philippines) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 2022 |
| Issue | 276 |
| Pages | 117-143 |
| Publication date | 2022-07-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of the Sociology of Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-2516 • E-ISSN: 1613-3668 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ijsl-2021-0096 |
| OpenAlex | W4285027088 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 49 |
In contemporary work arrangements that are premised on the exchange of information, communication, and services, one dominant instrumentality of affective capitalism is the practice of emotional labor. In this paper, I turn my attention to the promise of empowerment in the workplace and propose that it is another instrumentality of affective capitalism. Specifically, I examine the ways through which positive feelings are evoked and maintained in the Philippine call center industry through the circulation of empowerment narratives that are of particular significance to its Filipino workers. Using Wetherell's notion of affective practice and Ahmed's notion of the stickiness of emotion, I examine the affective-discursive dimensions of the empowerment narratives, trace their repeated telling, and surface the other narratives upon which they draw to show how particular affects become sticky, that is, how they gain recognition and resonance, and are felt and taken up by the same bodies that circulate them. In making explicit the relationship between the empowerment narratives and their sticky affects, I demonstrate that the promise of empowerment in the call centers is as much a discursive practice as it is an affective one. Thus, to make sense of the workings of affective capitalism in the new work order, it is crucial to interrogate not only the affective dispositions that workers are made to occupy in the workplace, but also dominant workplace discourses that are, in fact, designed to evoke, circulate, and maintain the desired affects
Capitalism · Empowerment · Feeling · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Emotional Labor in Professions · Employment and Welfare Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
The Audacity of Affect
The Entrepreneurial Self
Good to Talk?
Down and Out in the New Economy
Who's On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.‐Outsourced Firms
Cruel Optimism
Women's Work in the Information Economy
Happy Objects
High Religion
Fast Food, Fast Talk
The Festivalization of Culture
Communities of Coping
The Managed Heart
The Will to Empower
On Being Included
Affect & Labor
Empowerment as an affective-discursive technology in contemporary capitalism
Linguistic globalization and the call center industry
Thinking through the diaspora
Discourse and affect
Empowerment theory, research, and application
Affect and Emotion
Intimate Encounters
Subterranean Worksick Blues
Trends in the Turn to Affect
Migrant Heroes
Unequal Englishes in the Philippines
Styling the worker
The New Work Order
Affect in sociolinguistic style
Your Grief Is Our Gossip
Language and Agency
Skills and selves in the new workplace
The accents of outsourcing
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |