The 'Feminization' of the Everyday: Examining the Gendered Nature of Worker Resistance within the Transnational Call Center Industry

This dissertation explores the complex relationships that exist between gender, everyday forms of worker agency and resistance, and the global political economy. I argue that the gendered division of labour within the global political economy has led to the development of gendered opportunity structures of worker resistance. Further, by gendering James C. Scott’s conception of a ‘spectrum of resistance’ (Tripp 1997, p.5; Scott 1993, p.93-94), I assert that the gendered opportunity structures of worker resistance within the Canadian transnational call center can be usefully mapped and interrogated. With women increasingly taking on some of the most precarious jobs in the global economy it has become more difficult for them to pursue more overt and collective forms of action and resistance. Thus, this dissertation examines the role that everyday forms of worker resistance play in challenging unjust and unfair management practices within the highly feminized transnational call center industry, and what significance these actions have for challenging or even disrupting the global political economy. In doing so, the dissertation builds on Scott's foundational work on 'everyday forms of resistance', as well as existing feminist IR and IPE scholarship concerned with the everyday as a central site of analysis. Ultimately this dissertation suggests that in addition to discussing the ‘feminization’ of certain workforces, it is also necessary to begin discussing the feminization of certain forms of worker resistance as well (Ustubici 2009)—in particular, those forms of resistance which are of a more everyday nature. Additionally, this dissertation presents an explicitly feminist model of ‘everyday IPE’ (which I refer to as a feminist everyday politics of the global economy, or FEPGE, approach) that builds on Hobson and Seabrooke’s (2007) ‘EIPE’ framework, but which allows for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, everyday actions and resistance, and the international to be brought to light.