CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | van der Naald, Joseph Reynolds |
|---|---|
| Title | Precariat on the Line: Mapping Class Identity in Belgrade's Call Centers |
| Summary | This thesis investigates how call center agents in Belgrade, Serbia’s ICT sector understand their class identities. Due to their relatively well paid jobs, the stability of their work, as well as their consumptive activities, call center agents embody some aspects of the middle class; however, their work is neither fulfilling nor is their pay sufficient to be completely financially independent. In addition, agents’ jobs require them to engage in a negotiation of class politics with their international customers, while they position themselves against call center agents in other countries. I employ a form of class analysis that utilizes biographical interviews, eschewing the use of concrete class positions in favor of interpreting class as a paradoxical set of relations that undergird the work that agents perform. I show that, rather than exemplifying an emerging global middle class or embodying qualities of the precariat as predicted by new capitalist theorists, Serbian call center agents form a complex and contradictory middle class identity emerging through the objective conditions of their work and the particularities of Serbian neoliberalism. |
| Supervisor | Li, Ju; Kalb, Don |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/naald_joseph.pdf |
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