Empowerment narratives and sticky affects: the workings of affective capitalism in Philippine call centers

Abstract 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.