In a work context characterized by cost-cutting, competition, and a strict regimentation of work, such that everything, from dress codes to toilet breaks, is regulated and enforced through multiple forms of surveillance, focus on affect and interactivity in worker-management and worker-customer relations is more conducive to the interiorization of

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Labor is required for value to be produced and capital accumulated, but that labor, as we’ve noted, is all too often likely to rebel against the process. Labor, after all, is us: messy, desiring, hungry, lonely, angry, frustrated human beings. We may be free to quit our jobs and find ones that we like better, as the mantra goes, but in practice tha

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Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs. Security, the watchword of the industrial ethic, where workers spent a lifetime at one job and earned a p

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