Interactive Service Work In a Globalized World: Transformations, Challenges and Future Directions

Over recent decades, service work has become an increasingly central component of contemporary economies. The range of occupations grounded in interactions among workers, customers, and users, long neglected within sociological research, now constitutes a key arena for examining transformations of work under globalization. The growing internationalization of markets, the diffusion of digital technologies and AI, the expansion of digital platforms, and processes of international mobility are reshaping how service interactions are organized, monitored, and evaluated. While these developments create new opportunities, they also generate new forms of inequality, precarity, and labour segmentation, affecting occupational identities, working conditions, career trajectories, and workers’ capacities for agency and resistance. This session seeks to foster a discussion of contemporary transformations in service work from a global and comparative perspective. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

1. Globalization and the Restructuring of Service Work

• Tourism, hospitality, and transnational services;
• International call centres and global customer service;
• New international divisions of labour in services.

2. Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, and Algorithmic Management

• Automation of service interactions;
• Digital platforms and on-demand work;
• Surveillance, monitoring, and the datafication of labour;

3. Social Inequalities and Labour Segmentation in Services

• Gender and the feminization of service work;
• Migration and interactive labour;
• Racialization and ethnicization of service occupations;
• Precarity, vulnerability, and new forms of stratification;

4. Agency, Identity, and Worker Resistance

• Individual and collective forms of resistance;
• Unionization and worker mobilization in services;
• Meanings of work and professional trajectories.