“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control, Self‐valorisation, and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker “resistance” in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self‐governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of “self‐valorisation”, we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management’s control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments.