This article examines workplace conflict in an Irish call centre. It criticizes managerial and post-structural accounts of resistance for failing to see that workplace conflict continues to be located in structural issues, such as the employment relationship, making pay, productivity and work intensification the source of conflict. In adopting Martinez Lucio and Stewart’s (1997) notion of the collective worker, the article will show that in subordinated work conditions, workers engage in a recipe of informal collective practices that are organically borne out of their daily work experiences.
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