Invisible work, invisible skills: interactive customer service as articulation work

The concept of emotional labour provides an incomplete account of interactive service work, underplaying its invisible cognitive and non-routine elements. In interactive work, from customer service jobs in the fast food industry to 'knowledge work' and at those levels in between on which we focus here, many jobs involve 'articulation work'—the often unacknowledged management of awkward intersections among the social worlds of people, technology and organisations.