The objective of this paper is to understand the context of labor in the so-called information society and the different work forms that grow in it, especially the long distance work in call centers. Facing a new technological paradigm, characteristic of the information era, the different configurations of labor remain to be analyzed. The work in call centers seems to condense the ambiguities of a informaional job with high control, what would put it among the hopes of the post-taylorism and the fears of the neo-taylorism. Axel Honneth's Critical Theory allows us to think of the experience of the work in the midst of what he entitles "paradoxes of the capitalism".The meaning of labor, in its social dimension, gains force when it is shown that the "new capitalism" achieves to produce moral progress, based on the legacies of the Social State and of the taylorist model and fordist labor, and, simultaneously, produces its opposite, by eroding the emancipatory reach of those norms and values. This study analyzes the work in call centers in three Portuguese language countries: Brazil, Portugal and Cape Verde.
paradoxes of the capitalism; informational work; call centers; subjective mobilization in labor and instrumental logic