Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)
Return to Contents»
Call Center Cultures and the Transnationalization of Affective Labor / John Muthyala
Abstract: This paper examines how the transnationalization of affective labor has become central to the Information Technology (IT) of our global world. It studies the role of American culture in call centers in India, a crucial sector of the IT industry linking the U.S. to technopolises in several countries across the world. The documentary Diverted to Delhi, which focuses on the setting up and managing of call centers, shows how a particular itinerary of culture gets deployed in order to train potential employees to learn English, become familiar with American culture, develop new professional identities by adopting Western names, and become conversant with the customer’s cultural discourse to create a friendly environment for customers. The biopolitical logic of these transnational cultural flows cannot be adequately examined by using traditional models of globalization such as Westernization or hybridization; rather, this essay investigates the contradictory impact of the transnationalization of affective labor, especially in its gendered dimensions, and demonstrates that call center outsourcing is deeply embedded in global economic flows whose cultural dynamics in some ways work contradictorily, despite institutionalized efforts and structures designed to meet predetermined ends.
Keywords: Culture Studies, Globalization, Postcolonialism, Translation Studies
<1> Call centers, cell phones, visual media, and new Information Technologies are central to the plot of the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The plot revolves around two brothers, Jamal and Salim Malik, and a girl, Latika, who grow up in the slums of Mumbai (Bombay), and, as young adults, attempt to eke out a living in a city by sheer dint of luck, bravado, and street-smarts. Salim ends up working for an underworld Don, Latika is pressured into becoming a mistress, and Jamal finds himself, owing to a series of serendipitous events, on the game show Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), tantalizingly close to answering the final question and winning the grand prize. The plot unfolds in a series of flashbacks and juxtapositions of the past and the present showing how Jamal’s life experiences, not formal education, enable him to answer questions on the game show. Working as a chai wallah (tea server) in a call center, Jamal is asked by an employee to sit-in for him for a few moments and respond to calls. Using the call center phone database, Jamal finds Salim’s phone number, dials it, and connects with him; Jamal’s brief conversation with another employee about dialing-in procedures to become a contestant on the game show implies that Jamal followed his own suggestions successfully to become a contestant. His main reason is to reestablish contact with Latika, hoping that she would watch the show given its immense popularity in India, and he is able to chat briefly with her when Jamal, using the game show’s dial-a-friend option, dials Salim’s number and Latika answers it. The movie ends on a note of social promise and romantic re-union as Jamal correctly answers the final question to win the game and finally meets with Latika at the Mumbai train station, their rendezvous. While call centers, cell phones, and visual media are crucial to the development of this movie’s plot, as a cultural artifact, the movie exemplifies the hopes, aspirations, and problems faced by a significant segment of the Indian populace that is impacted by the nation’s integration into the new information-driven, computer-mediated, knowledge-economy of the contemporary economic, social and cultural global order. Call centers are at the center of India’s emergence as a key player in the new global economy, and they have also become part of Indo-American popular culture in the form of movies, videos, dramas, and novels including Arjun Raina’s play A Terrible Beauty is Born (2003), Roger Christian’s film American Daylight (2004), Sonali Gulati’s documentary Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005), Morgan Spurlock’s reality show 30 Days: Outsourcing (2006), John Jeffcoat’s film Outsourced (2007), Atul Agnihotri’s Hello (a 2008 film made in Hindi, a major Indian language), based on Chetan Bhagat’s best-selling novel One Night @ the Call Center (2005), Kanmani’s Call Center (a 2008 film made in Telugu, a South Indian language), and other videos produced by individuals, groups, and non-professionals which are available on You Tube and Google video.
<2> My focus in this paper is on the cultures of call centers and their role in transnationalizing affective labor. I make the following arguments: in managing affective labor, call centers have a high investment in creating and managing particular cultural ideas and practices; call center cultures do not emerge and thrive in social isolation but directly feed into social and cultural processes in order to self-perpetuate, that is, they are driven by a certain logic of bio-political reproduction; and it would be a mistake to view these cultures only as extensions of a global consumer culture in an Indian setting or as a clear indication of successful American cultural imperialism. I make these arguments in analyzing how, in the documentary Diverted to Delhi, which focuses on setting up and managing call centers, a particular itinerary of culture gets deployed, used, and adopted for various purposes by several players who have some kind of stake in the globalization of the IT industry. I show that the transnationalization of what Michael Hardt (1999) calls “affective labor”—the affects required and codified for the management of information, knowledge, symbols, services—involves setting up a system of intellectual and social surveillance in which ideas and notions of cultural difference are deployed and managed. Such cross-cultural encounters and forms of learning rationalize the biopolitical dynamics of the IT industry: the creation of new social classes whose value to business process outsourcing hinges on their ability to both generate and virtually embody specific affects of tone, accent, language, culture, and identity. But this is not all there is to call centers and affective labor. My central argument is that the biopolitical logic of such transnational cultural flows cannot be adequately examined by using traditional models of globalization as Westernization or hybridization or even a combination of both. Call center outsourcing is deeply embedded in global cultural and economic flows whose dynamics are at odds and in some ways work contradictorily despite efforts and institutionalized structures designed to manage them to meet predetermined ends. This is why they cannot be viewed as a unidirectional, West-to-East manifestation of cultural imperialism and biopower. The range and scope of affective labor in these sectors cannot be reduced to U.S.- driven bio-political reproduction. Rather, we should examine the pulse points of this transnational economy where divergent, contradictory desires and possibilities, appropriations and manipulations emerge and are negotiated by various actors. The ensuing discussion examines specific pedagogical practices of call centers as represented in Diverted to Delhi, and then, by drawing on cultural studies and sociology, it explains how a focus on the gendered dimension of call center work reveals that the transnationalization of affective labor embodies what Arjun Appadurai (1990) aptly refers to as a “globally variable synaesthesia” (p. 10) where identities are manipulated and effects are dislocated. But first, two things need to be amplified: the social and economic context of the rise of call centers in India and an explanation of key terms—immaterial labor, affective labor—used in the discussion.
Call Centers and Information Technology Globalization
<3> This decade has seen an explosive growth of the IT industry: software startup companies, bandwidth technology or DSL (the interface of telephone and internet services), satellites, and the migration of IT workers from around the world to America. This decade also saw a phenomenal increase in outsourcing as companies like Bank of America, Capital One, EDS, 3Com, Autodesk, Siemens, i2 Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Philips, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments began outsourcing to India and China (Hira and Hira, 2005, pp. 103-6; Seshabalaya (2005, pp. 103-6) [1]. Outsourcing is the “contracting out of any service by the IT department (read whatever department you like here), which could range from having all of your development, maintenance and operations performed for you (on a system that could be on your premises or on the vendor’s) to simply contracting an outside supplier to perform one single, simple task such as to write a program or install a piece of software” (Johnson, 2997, p. 6). Outsourcing is, ostensibly, a business paradigm for a twenty-first century world.
<4> At the start of the new millennium, software companies in India were doing business with close to twenty five percent of Fortune-500 companies (Murthy 2000), and, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), total revenue projections for the Indian IT industry were projected to cross 36.3 billion for the 2005-6 fiscal year [2]. Among the “top 25” global software companies are Indian companies like Tata Consulting Services, Wipro, Infosys Technologies, and Satyam Computers. Included in the twenty-five are one each from Germany (SAP) and France (Atos Origin), and the rest are US companies, which underscores the significance of Indian companies in the global IT marketplace (Mann, 2006, p. 53). Over the next decade, it is likely that close to four million jobs worth $150 billion in wages could be outsourced from the U.S. to India as a favored offshore site. IT outsourcing affects lawyers, doctors, accountants, data entry and computer operators, paralegals, diagnostic service providers, medical transcriptionists, architects, call center professionals (Hira, 2005, pp. 2, 47). Michael F. Corbett in The Outsourcing Revolution (2004) emphasizes that outsourcing covers the entire range of business operations since it “will be used not only to drive down costs, but also to increase the speed, flexibility, and level of innovation taking place within organizations of all kinds”(p. xv). The entry of India into this new economy, according to Ashutosh Sheshabalaya (2005), marks a “Great Displacement”: “India’s focus is a full sweep of high-value white-collar services rather than blue collar manufacturing”; “It is therefore clearly no longer a question of IT services, or low-cost coding. India not only has matured as an offshore supplier of skills; these skills now encompass a huge, growing and near-comprehensive sweep of white-collar competencies and jobs” (pp. 5, 57). More to the point, in India, “which is crowned as the outsourcing capital of the world” (Pradhan and Abraham, 2007), call centers are “the fastest-growing market sector in India” (Davies, 2004, p.45). As “housekeepers to the world” (Chengappa and Goyal, 2002, p. 10), they are, Naeem Mohaiemen (2006) notes, the “Ground Zero of the outsourcing debate” [3].
Call Centers and Affective Labor
<5> The debate about call centers is not only economic but cultural. In Indian call centers, especially those whose client firms and customers are from England, the U.S., and Australia, creating a friendly customer service includes demonstrating fluency in the English language and familiarity with customers’ cultures, which often means Americanizing one’s speech and immersion in cultures British, American, or Australian. CCRs (call center representatives) are to make customers feel and think that they are interacting with someone familiar, perhaps someone in their region, state, or nation, and not a person hundreds and thousands of miles away, born and working in different countries. Language classes for CCRs stress the development of accents and speech patterns, especially conversational ones, the kind people might engage in with strangers they meet in unfamiliar or professional settings. Acquisition of cultural knowledge has also meant, in some instances, viewing several episodes of shows like “Friends,” “Baywatch,” and popular films. The goal is to create a customer service atmosphere by an adroit manipulation of affects—tone, accent, language, cultural knowledge—to create a state of well-being, familiarity, pleasantness. These affects are, of course, virtually mediated given the fact that thousands of miles separate customers from the CCRs who work in their call center cubicles, booths, or offices and work on their computers with audio and visual connections, and who can connect themselves or customers in a matter of seconds to other technicians or service providers located in various parts of the world, thanks to phenomenal speeds of connectivity afforded by bandwidth technology and satellites (Poster, 2007; Mirchandani (2004); Chengappa and Goyal 2002).
<6> Call centers are part of the new postmodern economy, which has three important elements, point out Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000): the rapid increase and thorough infusion of computer-mediated communication in industrial settings; the interpretation of symbols and communication; and the production and management of affects which could be actual or virtual (p. 293). Hardt (2007) notes that the term affective labor brings together two major scholarly foci: the feminist (U.S. context) focus on the body and the gendering of work, and the emphasis (French and Italian scholars mostly) on the cognitive and knowledge-oriented nature of the new economy. As he explains, “the term affective labor is meant to bring together elements from these two different streams and grasp simultaneously the corporeal and intellectual aspects of the new forms of production, recognizing that such labor engages at once with rational intelligence and with the passions or feeling” (p. xi). Further, “the challenge of the perspective of the affects resides primarily in the synthesis it requires. This is, in the first place, because affects refer equally to the body and the mind; and, in the second, because they involve both reason and the passions” (2007, p. ix).
<7> But as Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt rightly point out, the term is nebulous: “Designed to improve upon and narrow down ‘immaterial labor’, it lacks conceptual coherence and ends up collapsing entirely different kinds of work and experience. If all work has affective dimensions then what does it mean to say that any particular job involves affective labor?” (2009, p. 15). Hardt and Negri refer to immaterial labor as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (2000, p. 290). This still leaves unclear the extent to which affects are part of immaterial labor, especially when affective labor is used to reference another dimension of immaterial labor: “This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passions” (2000, pp, 292-3). How exactly the “cultural product” of immaterial labor is different from these aspects of affective labor is not clear at all, but perhaps one way to sharpen the meanings of these terms is to stress the role of the computer and the highly mediated nature of information and communication in the production of immaterial labor and the stress on the affective aspects—feeling, satisfaction, etc—as immanent to productive practices.
<8> As noted earlier, Hardt elaborates affective labor as a term that integrates the focus on gender and the body and on the new information and knowledge economy of the present by bringing together the body and the mind, reason with the passions in order to ”grasp simultaneously the corporeal and intellectual aspects of the new forms of production” (2007, p. xi). Affective labor is more expansive in its use and integration of affects than is immaterial labor which might have affective dimensions but may not necessarily form its constitutive elements [4]. In discussing call center cultures, I think the term affective labor is more helpful than immaterial labor because a) it captures a wide range of affects as constitutive of the management of work in call centers, and b) it blurs the boundaries between work and home, official time and leisure time in the sense that the management of affects in call center cultures has significant impact in social and personal spheres outside the workplace. As Winifred R. Poster (2007) points out, “ethnicity and citizenship have become crucial elements of the labor process in globalized services” (p. 299), and in call centers, national and ethnic identity are constantly negotiated and manipulated in the process of providing services mediated through electronic and telematic technology. It is in this context that we can examine the crucial link between culture and affective labor in the daily operations and practices of call centers as represented in the media text Diverted to Delhi.
Transnationalization of Affective Labor
<9> A documentary about customer service jobs being “diverted” from Australia and the U.S. to India, this media text presents a general overview of the kinds of language and culture coaching classes offered to those seeking jobs at call centers, and the psycho-social pressures they have to negotiate as they learn to put on Australian and American identities like names, accents, conversational styles, and cultural “hooks” to make customers feel less anxious about interacting with people outside of the US and Australia. In the film, there is little doubt that Indian graduates exhibit a high degree of enthusiasm in learning things about Australia and the U.S.—their topography, locale, regional cultural differences, accents, public sports, movie and music cultures. Being exposed to and having to learn about peoples and cultures beyond India is a major factor in sustaining their interest in pursuing call center jobs. It is unclear if they had similar opportunities to study such international cross-cultural issues at their universities. It is implied in the film, as students talk and converse, that to be involved in some way with the IT economy enables them to do things they cannot possibly do or know, especially about the world outside India through a semi-institutionalized setting. No doubt most urban youth are heavily exposed to Hollywood, MTV, American and other non-Indian cultural forms and artifacts. But there is a difference between the kinds of insights one can generally obtain from a wholesale exposure to American or non-Indian culture and the kind of insights one gets in a setting in which cross cultural interests are a matter of systematized learning. And this second aspect of learning is what appeals to these students. But important questions arise: What kind of knowledge about cultures, cross-cultural interaction, and global awareness do such institutes offer? In what way does a company’s interests regulate knowledge and learning about culture? Do they offer students an intellectual space in which they can reflect critically on what they are exposed to, asked to learn about, and the entire gamut of pedagogical situations they find themselves in?
<10> For instance, after going through intensive coaching sessions, students participate in a “naming ceremony” in which they choose non-Indian names. In a relaxed class setting, they are asked to come to the front of the class, say their names, and then announce their adopted names boldly and confidently. It runs something like this—“Hello, my name is Rajesh. And my new call center name is Russell,” or “my new call center name is Carol Lopez.” There is one segment that is especially significant since it underscores how the logic of multinational businesses harnesses the ideological power of American exceptionalism in order to further not the interests of the American nation but to cater to the satisfaction of its American customers. Students are asked what seems to be open-ended questions like “What do you think about America,” or “What perspectives do you have about America?” Some of the responses include the following—“The man I am talking about is Columbus. He discovered America. And the spirit of Americans is ‘I can,’” “They are very calorie conscious,” and “America is a glamorous country. Be it the way they play, be it the way they work, be it the way they dress, be it the way they fight.” One student who responds, “You will see the American flag everywhere” but not “Indian flags,” when prompted by a fellow classmate as to what he would like India to be, clarifies that he wants India “to be like America,” presumably everywhere. This segment is punctuated by frame cuts to the comments of a chief trainer who notes that “It picks up on whether people have negative attitudes to the U.S. Because if they do, we have to get rid of it quickly.”
Culture and Biopolitical Reproduction
<11> This particular pedagogical exercise demonstrates the “high-tech and virtualized disciplining of the ‘worker’ in Indian call centers from far away geographies in the West” (Shome, 2006, p. 107), and the overt and not-so-overt ways in which largely stereotypical ideas of America, India, and globalization in general are reified in order to ensure higher profits and customer satisfaction. Almost all of the comments here echo hegemonic narratives of America—Columbus as the great adventurer who epitomizes the classic “I can do it too” character of America; the ease with which the glamour of work and play is extended to violence, which can often justify violence simply because it would be glamorously American; the desire to globalize India like America. The fact that a class session like this is devoted to testing whether students have negative ideas of America and screening out those who express anything remotely “negative” evidences the kind of intellectual policing that is required to purge students of their ability to engage in any kind of critical reflection about their work and their social lives. It is, indeed, a form of brain washing with all the trappings of the glamour of globalization, American style. The more robotic the students are in their learning, the greater the chances they will do the bidding of their employers without questioning, without pausing, without analyzing. The disturbing thing about pedagogy such as this is that the end goal is the complete submission of the student’s intellect to the logic of global capitalism, which validates customer satisfaction as the ultimate horizon of social existence. This can be viewed as an instantiation of the cultural politics of biopower—the creation of multinational businesses in which the success of work and the profitability of labor are judged on the extent to which cultural learning can reproduce entire groups of people with certain ideas, tastes, accents, identities, and world views—in short, to extend Michael Hardt (1999), create a condition of sociality that leads to a new society itself. This is biopower because the flow of power facilitates the recreation and sustenance of groups of people not at the level of specific operations, forms, and patterns of work or labor but at the level of social and cultural behavior, at the level of managing forms of life: “what affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (p. 96). What we are looking at here are not direct flows of power, or even uneven flows of power between nations and economies. Michel Foucault’s (1984) point about the discriminatory procedures that are put into place to manage life is what is at issue:
But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. (p. 266)
<12> Of concern here are the ways in which various social and cultural behaviors are brought into the “domain of value and utility” and how, in that very process itself, the norms are established—pro-business, pro-American, self-effacement, and self-alteration—by systematically marginalizing critical, humanistic inquiry. Indeed, what began as a desire to acquire cultural intelligence in order for businesses to succeed results in a form of learning in which the culture of consumers located in the West is the only thing that is unexaminedly absorbed by future CCRs and regurgitated appropriately in the digitized and telematic spaces call centers set up and manage. Culture as idea, difference, and value is structurally interwoven into the entire field of worker and management relations, business arrangements, and call center infrastructure. Multinational and transnational industries are fully involved in transnationalizing affective labor by creating home-like atmospheres for their clientele—familiar accents, names, and locations. As A.R. Vasavi (2007) insightfully argues, cultural reproduction is directly linked to the production of new subjectivities on the individual and social level as these employees become “subjects who both objectively and subjectively subscribe to the logics of the industry” which “combine[s] education, employment, and entertainment” and “integrates the youth into a world of goods, altered life-styles and personalities” (p. 11). And this is possible only if “the transformation of Indian urban labor into a global proletariat”(McMillin, 2006, p. 235) [5] can be achieved as affective labor becomes, to draw from Ferguson and Gupta’s (2002) notion of “transnational governmentality,” a central component of “a transnational apparatus of governmentality” (p. 994) [6]. It is governmental not in the sense of embodying state power but in the sense of organizing social power through various processes of managing society, and, in this specific instance, culture, cultural intelligence, cross-cultural engagement become central to the productive economy of transnational circuits of affective labor in the IT industry. Raka Shome (2006) puts it well:
Transnational governmentality constitutes transnational mechanisms and organizations through which the conduct (of the third world subject) is regulated and disciplined from macro levels (for example, regime changes, environmental planning) to micro levels of personal behavior and social identity (for example, cultivating a taste for Coke or McDonald’s) in order to maximize profit and efficiency in the global economy. (p. 110)
<13> In Diverted to India, the purging of negative ideas or perspectives about America is a clear instance of regulating and disciplining the call center employees so that they can simulate the consumer’s culture and simultaneously get socialized into a lifestyle whose habits and products of consumption are of a piece with consumer culture. Arguably, the location of consumers in the West is not the only manifestation of the structural imbalance of this global economy. The more relevant point is that this biopolitical reproduction of affective labor is driven by one overarching aim—consumer satisfaction. This is why to Divya McMillen (2006), it is a form of neocolonialism:
Call centers then stand as strong symbols of a neocolonialist environment, where labourers need to enter into the cultural contexts of their employers and clientele based in the US, UK, Germany or the Netherlands, as the case may be, and using their knowledge of the range of customer services available to the client, converse fluently, stripping away as much as possible indicators of their local Indian contexts. . . . What then differentiates a neocolonialist environment from a colonialist environment is the context of globalization where the focus is not on overt force and imposition but on interconnectivity. (emphasis added, p. 237)
<14> This “interconnectivity” gives rise to hybrid cultures in emerging world cities like Bangalore where people employed at call centers and other IT-enhanced businesses become active consumers at Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thomas Cook, American Express, Dominoes, etc., (McMillen, 2006, p. 236). Hybridity in and of itself is neither progressive nor regressive and it simply does not exist or come into being as a natural condition of human existence independent of the convergence of other forces and activities. Rather, the conditions in which a culture gets labeled as hybrid and the socio-cultural processes that grant legitimacy to such a culture are just what need more examination. That these young university graduates look forward to the day when they are eventually hired as Call Center Executives adds more irony to the situation. Vasavi’s point about the formation of new subjectivities and the integration of youth into consumer culture, Shome’s analysis of the regulatory mechanisms of the affective aspects of call center work, and McMillen’s critique of the production of cosmopolitan hybrid culture can be read in tandem with Winifred Poster’s argument that call center cultures manifest not only the surveillance of affects but that such forms of globalized labor “transforms from management of emotions to management of citizenship” (p. 276). This kind of “national identity management,” to use Poster’s phrase, ensures that the culture of consumers located in the West, or in more general terms, the customers per se, gains social and professional legitimacy at the expense of the CCR’s national, ethnic, or local culture. Poster goes further noting that such “national identity management allows these firms to hide the exercise of power on the consuming public. Ultimately, they are managing the consumers’ reality as much as that of the workers” (p. 291). The greater the success of national identity management, the higher the possibility of obscuring, from the consumer public, the material fact of outsourcing: consumers assume that the workers are American and are working in their own country and it is business as usual.
<15> The social and political significance of such identity management cannot be understated. For instance, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign, the Maine Democratic Party released a flier which announced, in a bold red column at the top, that “George W. Bush Has Failed Maine Workers,” and promised, in a dark blue column at the bottom, that “John Kerry Will Protect American Jobs.” In between these columns was information contextualizing the declarations: thousands of jobs were being “shipped overseas” and businesses engaging in outsourcing were getting tax breaks. In campaign speeches, Candidate Kerry urged Americans to work for “a prosperity where we create jobs here at home and where we shut down every loophole, every incentive, every reward that goes to some Benedict Arnold CEO or company that take the jobs overseas and stick Americans with the bill” [7]. Given such public sentiment against outsourcing, companies practicing outsourcing had good reason to provide their consumers a familiar, comfortable interaction with company representatives, an interaction that erased traces of foreignness or signs of otherness. To be sure, call centers were pivotal business processing centers in which the transnationalization of affective labor could be managed to accord with such consumer needs and demands. But as Poster (2007) perceptively notes, “many actors play a role in the national identity management process, whether directly or indirectly. Their actions represent various forms of agency in the process—by setting the rules, innovating the strategies, and carrying them out “(p. 281). To some workers, alternating their identities temporarily for professional reasons and cultivating cultural familiarity with their customers’ societies come at a cost.
The Social Effects of Hybrid Cultures
<16> The transnationalization of affective labor is not without its psychosocial affects as these so-called Call Center Executives begin to grapple with the realties of juggling two different cultural identities, which are often in conflict. They begin to lead double lives—having and working with one kind of cultural identity at work and then going back to another, “original” Indian identity and culture outside of work. S. Mitra Kalita (2005) says that “the emerging subculture of call-center workers reveals that the United States has exported more than jobs and products to India—it has exported values, as well. Call centers have brought new wealth to India, but they are also fostering a cultural backlash, as the country's young, hip BPO workers run up against the traditions of the older generations.” In the film, economist Jayati Ghosh’s comments on the sense of alienation and despair that such cultural clashes engender are worth quoting in full—
I would see the call center phenomenon as a sort of a clear expression of a much wider tendency in urban India, among urban youth in particular. And it is really the exploitation of that combination of part education, part aspiration, which is quite widespread. It’s the exploitation of that combination to suit the needs of cost cutting multinational companies. We have a younger generation that is mesmerized by this so-called American Dream, which doesn’t even exist even in America. And whose expectations are molded along those lines, you know the kind of typical notion of life in you know in American suburbia where you have all the goodies. It really wants to be part of this global elite. So they will be copying the lifestyles in so far as they can; they will be consuming the same products; they will be going to the shops that have Nike and Benetton. I have seen examples where it creates another peculiar kind of conflict. The same young woman who works in a call center, pretends that her name is Karen and lives in Arkansas etc., etc., the same woman will actively become excessively religious. I have seen some young students observe the most regressive kinds of social practices as a reaction to the fact that in other aspects of their life they are succumbing completely to a sort of modern Western notion of existence.
<17> The urbanization of Indian youth in the context of the growing integration of the Indian economy with the global IT economy is slowly creating new classes of people whose cultural tastes have a lot in common with those who live in America. What links such classes of people are common desires and patterns of consumption—of music, food, popular culture, etc. It is around such practices that a global consciousness emerges; in other words, being a participant in a global world is intimately linked to how well one can demonstrate, through one’s practices of consuming global goods, that he or she has the required cultural wherewithal to be a part of the global elite. Here “elite” connotes not education, wealth, power, knowledge, or access to capital or other kinds of fungible assets. It is specifically about becoming active consumers while being positioned at particular nodal points in the global circuits of commerce and exchange that enable one to develop and sustain patterns of consumption.
<18> Ghosh’s point that “regressive” social tendencies emerge as these graduates struggle to cope with the demands of juggling two identities and cultures is telling. Becoming overly religious or subscribing to increasingly non-democratic ideas and practices in other spheres of life leads to another paradox of globalization—becoming active participants within a specific and localized conjuncture of the flows of globalization, without a simultaneous or concomitant engagement with any kind of humanist discourse or mode of inquiry that can enable one to draw from personal experience and develop the critical tools to critically examine the conditions of one’s own locatedness in a global world, leads to a profound loss of personal and social worth. While functioning as alternate sectors of employment in newly emerging IT-focused economies, and developing a cultural cachet for their high salaries, technological modernization, and symbolic association with Western culture, call centers develop, train, and employ new knowledge workers under conditions of control and surveillance where the celebration and learning of cultural difference is predicated on the intellectual docility required for effective participation in the new economy.
<19> Let me be clear here. It is not the fact that these graduates are living “double lives” that is of concern as if to assume that they all possessed some kind of happy, monolithic cultural identity prior to their integration into this new IT network; rather, it is that the entire process of becoming part of the IT sector via the call center, the process of learning in and acculturating to the ethos of call centers that requires, evaluates and measures as a pre-condition of employment the creation of a mental tabula rasa on which can be inscribed singularly pro-business, pro-American, pro-globalization, and pro-Western ideas and attitudes that becomes a problem. The business of call centers, especially in their outsourced manifestation, is not business as usual; it is more than that. While on the one hand call centers constantly encourage and police the acquisition of a cultural persona deemed acceptable and even necessary for profitable business, they also become “site[s] where a simultaneous construction of the two interlocking figures of producer and consumer is taking place” (Krishnamurthy, 2004, pp. 3-4, 11) [8].
<20> In the documentary, when a few students, after going through an intense coaching course for call center jobs, end up not being selected, the film ends with scenes of a different India, one that is outside of the IT economy—people in a boat, paddling, and a large tract of land being plowed—with the voice-over suggesting that those who are unable to find work in such IT sectors have little else to fall back on. There are two problems with this framing of scenes: one, rural and urban Indias are contrasted as mutually exclusive social spheres and the fateful choices presented are of being mired in a traditional, rural India or plugged into a fast-paced, competitive Indian international economy; two, such a representation of contending Indias simplifies the systematized forms of cultural manipulation and socio-economic marginalization within the IT call center industry. Over the last decade, it has become clear that rural India is just as much impacted by globalization as urban India, albeit with, in some instances, deadly consequences. Rural India is far from an idyllic place with a stable agricultural economy grounded in ancient indigenous practices. Over the last decade, more than twenty five thousand farmers took their lives unable to face the challenges of pervasive drought, corrupt money lending practices, inept state bureaucracies, callous police personnel, a lumbering judiciary, and shoddy policy planning and implementation by local, sate, and national governments. It is noteworthy that the highest rates of suicides were in just those states that were seeing phenomenal urban growth as a direct result of Information Technology globalization: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala (Kamdar, 2007, p. 148).
<21> According to Vandana Shiva, farmer suicides coincided with the liberal trade policies pushed by the national government. Seed saving by natural pollination was replaced by hybrid pollination and farmers had to purchase these hybrid seeds produced by multinational companies and soon went into debt due to factors such as drought, excessive rains, etc. The advantage to natural seed saving is that it becomes possible to save seed annually through natural means which helps the seed retain its vital elements; there is a significantly high chance for seed variation to occur in this process although it is hard to create more yield and control growth. Hybrid seeds offer more yield and are standardized for growth but need fertilizers and pesticides, which have to be bought by the farmers. Hybrid seeds also do not remain the same even when saved; that is, they do not contain the same essential traits for them to be used in a second cycle. Pressured to buy such seeds, dependant largely on seasonal rains, lack of access to bank loans, borrowing money and exorbitantly high interest rates, and with high rates of illiteracy, farmers faced formidable challenges. All these factors clearly show that Diverted to Delhi’s juxtaposition of rural and urban Indias with the latter advancing rapidly towards high growth rates and the former mired in timelessness and a stable agricultural economy skews the profoundly uneven impact of various practices of globalization on individuals, societies, and businesses. The rapid growth of call centers in India is but one facet of Information Technology, which is itself a specific but integral dimension of a whole range of global practices. For a documentary, Diverted to Delhi tends to have a very limited focus on call centers and is not able to examine its growth in India as it relates to other forces and practices of economic liberalization that are having a disproportionate impact on various societies and regions across the country.
<22> On the other hand, the non-rural, urban, and high-growth sectors of the informational economy like call centers, and their bio-political reproductive practices, while engendering new hybrid cultures of identity management and life-style changes, offer limited professional advancement opportunities for call center employees resulting in a very high rate of turnover. It is possible to get perplexingly mired within the new technopolis and become part of a labor force that has little control over its work conditions and can be easily co-opted into hierarchical systems in the industry. The initial glamour of working in fast-paced environments—imposing buildings, new architectures, sophisticated, state-of-the-art computer and electronic machines; clean, well-maintained office spaces; exposure to peoples and cultures beyond the local and nation; markedly high salaries compared to those paid in other sectors in the state or region—soon reveals the patina of a new division of labor and its social hierarchies. As the IT industry expands, call centers are doing most of the low end, back office work of the industry like data entry, accounts payable, customer service, survey collection and management, medical billing and coding, etc, even as the industry is taking on more specialized, high end work including research and development, pharmaceutical manufacturing and patenting, complex software programming, medical testing, tax filing, application processing, all of which involve huge financial investments, infrastructure, complex skills and high salaries (Pradhan and Abraham, 2005). For this reason, Carol Upadhya (2006) contends that “software services outsourcing appears to be just another chapter of an old story, in which the international division of labor is being redrawn to accommodate the interest of dominant economic actors” [9].
<23> Babu P. Ramesh (2004) goes to the extent of calling call center workers “cyber coolies,” because, he notes, “the technology-induced efficiency at work requires the agents to submit to a highly controlled work regime. . . . work is monitored on the spot and after the working hours, with the help of specially designed software, computer networks and closed circuit cameras. The degree of surveillance required at work is even comparable with the situations of nineteenth century prison or Roman slave ships” [10]. While needlessly infusing hyperbole in an otherwise reasonable critique, Ramesh emphasizes the degree to which companies seek to create workplaces in which every minute and hour can and should be accounted for and documented; the fact that national holidays are not observed except, of course, American holidays since the majority of clients are U.S. companies; and work-weeks of forty-eight hours. Issues of privacy, control over one’s work, flexibility, and transparency of management are difficult to address given the pressure to develop a highly competitive orientation towards work. He further observes, “It is widely internalized among the call centre agents that salary is a personal matter, which should not be shared with peers in the workplace. The firms in the code of conduct highlight that discussing salary and related matters with fellow-workers would invite warning and disciplinary action.” Worker’s rights, unionization, pay equity, checks and balances to handle capricious management behavior and policies become increasingly difficult to observe or institute. The inflexible, closely surveilled work environment and interaction reflects the kind of cultural policing discussed earlier—the inculcation of cultural knowledge about others; the intellectual purging of any counter perspective to what is being inculcated; and the altering of names and performing of new identities for the sole benefit of customers and company interests.
Entanglement and Appropriation
<24> However, viewing call centers as just another form of global economic domination where profits, goods, and services flow along predictable channels from East to West presents a partial picture of the impact of this IT sector on Indian societies. Countering such a view by positing and examining hybridization as central to IT globalization would be equally reductive. Globalization cannot be reduced to a fundamental dialectic between homogenization and fragmentation, uniformity and diversity, or foreign and native because the texture of daily human activity resists such a dialectic or compartmentalization. Vasavi (2007) underscores this point well noting that such a transnational economy embodies “multiple logics. . . of entanglement and appropriation” in which even as IT businesses closely police the acquisition and use of cultural knowledge and identity, the youth actively appropriate certain benefits from this economy and engage in subtle subversions of surveillance procedures in the workplace (p. 10). Donald J. Winiecki (2004) refers to such acts of subversion in call centers as “shadowboxing with data,” an activity in which “contained secondary adjustments are made” that do not necessarily undermine systems of monitoring and performance but manipulate them for personal benefit or to serve other interests (p. 88) [11].
<25> For instance, the high rates of attrition at call centers, something commonly acknowledged, have a lot to do with the marketing and operational practices of these businesses (Krishnamurthy, 2004, p. 15). Companies market call center employment as affording a space in which young people can, while earning significantly more than in other employment sectors for similar skills, have fun, mingle with future-oriented upstarts, and be part of a new economy that is taking India into the twenty-first century. This latter point is almost redundant given the government’s public and massive investments in this sector, of which potential employees are very well aware. But the very thing that seems the most promising aspects of call centers—easy employability, high salaries, the glamour of working in multinational business offices—also encourages workers to become more mobile and less attached to any specific company, which results in high rates of attrition. When other factors such as the stress of working long night shifts, altering sleep patterns, acquiring professional personae, and familial and societal attitudes are added to this mix, attrition rates grow higher (Krishnamurthy, 2004, pp. 13-6). Rather than assuming a global plan to subjugate employees at call centers to become Western subject or viewing these workers as lacking any kind of agency or desire and thus mindlessly succumbing to the power of hybrid, global consumer cultures, Mathangi Krishnamurthy (2004) points out that it would be more helpful to examine them as “agentive moments” which are “staccato bursts of reconfiguration and reorientation—mechanisms of habit-change or adjustment that often have very little to do with the public discourse of benefit and obstacle, acquiescence and rebellion” (p. 11). Proceeding from an analysis of the complexly intertwined layers of social and cultural impact, and the different ways in which people position themselves and are positioned by the structures they inhabit yields a richer picture of the variegated processes in which all kinds of compromises and resistances come into play at work, at home, and the larger social arena.
<26> Another example that demonstrates the “multiple logics of entanglement and appropriation” is the attempt to consciously manipulate the acquired cultural persona to deflect work-place criticism and stress. In many instances, the inculcation of Western or client culture in CCRs is incomplete and partially realized. Whatever the intention of the teachers or coaches, the cultural learning that call centers afford and often require are viewed less as necessitating a wholesale transformation of subjectivity and more as a game in which cultural identities can be performed. Such a view tends to treat immersion in client cultures as a mode of professionalization, something that comes with the job and as such can be let go just as one can choose to stop working at call centers. The adoption of different personae also helps CCRs deflect abusive or cantankerous calls, rants, innuendos, threats, and groundless complaints by viewing them as directed not towards themselves but to the created persona who interacts with callers. This distancing from a personal, more intimate sense of self from the customized, work-required identity enables CCRs to develop strategies for coping with job stress, while solidifying the notion that work identity is more a matter of professional demeanor, style, or a work-related requirement than a clear assault on or perversion of one’s social and cultural tradition or sense of self: “it is their professional identity that is traumatized while their personal identity still remains intact” (Pradhan and Abraham, 2005). The emergent use of such skills in manipulating cultural identity should be seen in the context of high attrition rates in call centers owing to the significant level of stress created by adjustment challenges to night employment and to the tension generated in a performance oriented work culture.
<27> In a country where other economic sectors find it difficult to compete with the IT economy, the national and state governments are actively implementing new policies and funding infrastructure to woo foreign companies and businesses to set up operations in India. The social and cultural impact of call centers in certain segments of Indian society presents a complicated picture in which women’s insertion into the new IT industry via call centers leads to both familial economic betterment and a kind of individual agency through financial independence or earning and to, in some instances, a greater subjection to established social strictures on female behavior which also overlap with the regimentation of work behavior in call centers. Pradhan and Abraham (2005) point out that “in India’s patriarchal society, the emergence of call centers is nothing less than a social reform movement as far as economic, social and cultural empowerment is concerned.” The emphasis on education to improve one’s chances as a bride in the marriage marketplace and the pressure on women to view marriage as a form of maturity at the expense of pursuing other interests and professional careers, etc., are offset by the actual salaries female call center employees bring to the family. Call centers are appealing to families and women as a means of earning a second income or even single income. Compared to opportunities in other economic sectors, call center employment is appealing, especially to unmarried, young women because, as Preeti Singh and Anu Pandey (2005) point out, “there appears to be no other area of employment in India which gives its employees an attractive pay package at such a young age and with minimum qualifications” (p. 686) [12]. Jobs such as teaching, nursing, office administration, etc., were traditionally viewed as favorable occupations for women and call center work is “non-traditional employment” with pay scales that compare favorably with traditional jobs. They further note:
Call centers are one of the most sought after workplaces for young graduates and undergraduates as it provides them with a good environment to work in, decent emoluments and financial incentives, transportation both during day and night, and meals and refreshments. No other job allows the entry of employees with minimum education (school pass) at such attractive perks. (p 687)
<28> Vasavi (2007) also notes that “for a large pool of graduates with basic degrees, who lack opportunities to be integrated into professional or higher education programmes or to be absorbed into regular and established employment, ITES [Information Technology Enhanced Services] flags their employability” (p. 7). To women from low income families that cannot support their pursuit of higher education, and to women interested in supplementing their spouses’ incomes, call centers represent promising opportunities. The fact that most families are accommodating of women working in call centers stands in sharp contrast to the high level of reluctance prevalent in the period before the sharp growth of the IT industry because it was “taboo for girls to travel alone out of the house after dark” (Singh and Pandey, 2005, p. 687). Given the largely negative social value placed on women working late nights or primarily in the nights, call center employment for women comes with the risk of being “sexually stigmatized” (Pradhan and Abraham, 2005). A common tendency is to view night employment as creating opportunities for high earnings but accompanied by the risk of an increase in female assertion in domestic affairs, and as creating situations requiring frequent interaction with male co-workers, which could also induce them to relax moral inhibitions or at least make them more vulnerable to male advances. Night work for women also signals the inability of families or spouses to fully monitor female behavior outside of the home, and not surprisingly, female employees at call centers have to reckon with greater pressure to adjust to prevailing social mores as their entry into these jobs generates social anxieties. For instance, in Hyderabad, an important technopolis, the city’s major English newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle, reported in early 2006 that several Taxi-operating businesses petitioned the police and call center managers to mandate a dress code for their women workers. Reasons for such a petition included the ostensibly provocative nature of women’s clothing, and their naiveté in seeking to work into the night, which could be easily misconstrued as a sign of lax sexuality. In response to such calls, many call centers have started providing taxi service to pick up and drop off the agents. But such arrangements also tend to reduce the amount of control women may have over their working lives, since from the time of their departure from the house till their return, they are susceptible to be scrutinized for their interaction with other agents or people and their sartorial styles or habits in order to ensure compliance to prescribed modes of female behavior.
<29> Women’s position in the IT labor market is fraught with socio-cultural and economic contradictions. While these jobs certainly enable them to complement the men’s income, they continue to face significant social pressure to conform to codes of behavior whose transgression would invite familial opprobrium and unwanted amorous interest in public spaces. The idea that her new role as a wage earner is a clear indication of an increase in social status, which would eventually lead to greater female empowerment, financially and socially, cannot account for such fundamental contradictions in the gendered and classed nexus of IT globalization. However, the argument about the biopolitical dimension of the transnationalization of affective labor and its careful management of American culture is not rendered moot. To the contrary, what we have here is a “complex hieroglyphic” of a “hybrid contemporaniety” (Krishnamurthy, 2004, pp. 16, 10) whose social and cultural morphologies are shaped by the disjunctural dynamics of global cultural flows, which create what Arjun Appadurai (1990) aptly refers to as a “globally variable synaesthesia” with emerging dislocations of effects, mis-management of desire, manipulations of identities, appropriations to suit local or personal needs (p.10).
<30> In conclusion, to grapple with the complex changes engendered by globalization, examining the role of culture in international contexts is urgent and necessary. As this analysis of call centers demonstrates, culture is hardly the icing on the cake of business work, or something people engage in after doing their work or after gaining financial security, or once the organizational structures for businesses are set up. Also, it would be a mistake to view culture as the aesthetic dimension of economic activity, one that has a dependant, subordinate relationship to labor and business. To the contrary, the notion of the Other or the idea of cultural difference and how this difference can be examined and understood to enhance work management and productivity have become increasingly central to business practices, especially as their operations are stretched and mediated electronically across barriers of time and space, and across borders of nation and ethnicity. In a transnational economy, as various itineraries of culture get deployed, used, and adopted for various purposes by several players with a stake in the globalization of Information Technology, a noteworthy aspect of global cultural flows is their ability to engender large-scale social transformations, and call center cultures are but one important manifestation of the bio-political dimension of such changes.
<31> One promising way in which we can both examine and counter the psychosocial effects of such IT globalization is to draw and develop models, concepts, and ideas from the fields of literature, history, philosophy, or, more generally, the humanities. They can not only enable us study the new information economy in larger socio-cultural contexts, but can help us develop a humanistic orientation towards global conditions and processes so that the question of human dignity, the labor of human activity, and the work of human imagination can avoid becoming “cultural manicure” (Readings, 1996, 172) for those practices of globalization that are organized primarily around principles of profit and values of customer satisfaction generated by market needs and desires [13]. While the biopolitics of transnational cultural flows continue to be central to the operations of call center sectors, the crucial point is that any critique that reduces the range and scope of affective labor in these sectors to nothing but the direct result of U.S.-driven biopolitical reproduction can do so only if it downplays those pulse-points of this transnational economy where divergent, contradictory desires and possibilities, appropriations and manipulations are registered.
Notes
[1] This should be more technically called “offshore outsourcing,” which is when “a company purchases a product or service from a supplier that operates overseas.” (Hira, 2005, P. 201); this particular product or service, which is itself a part of a larger assortment of services, is then reintegrated into the larger field of services and then processed and commodified (Friedman, 2005, p. 114). The difference between outsourcing and offshoring is important: “Outsourcing of work is across organizational borders, while offshoring of work is across geographical borders” (italics in original, Chakrabarty, 2006, p. 19). There is also “insoucring”—foreign companies setting up operations in the US and catering to a US clientele, as for instance, when an Indian corporate giant like Tata purchased a call center to service Expedia, a travel company, in Reno, Ohio. Rather than outsourcing this call center work to India or other places, Tata hires Americans in order to offer a “culturally fluent, less frustrating 1-800 experience” (Yang, 2007).
[2] That the IT economy has become a vital part of current governmental plans for large-scale economic restructuring is borne out by the fact that in the India Vision 2020, the report issued by the Planning Commission of India in 2002, the second chapter is about the knowledge economy and the IT industry and their importance to India.
[3] British Telco recently announced that it was moving around 4000 customer service jobs back from India to England. While a depressed British economy and the need to provide jobs in the company’s country are cited as main reasons, complaints about customer service and difficult accents were also considered (“BT Returns Call Center Work From India.” Business Week. July 16, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2009, from http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090716_304942.htm. Companies like Delta and Sallie May have also announced relocating jobs from overseas to the US (Delta stops using India call Centers: report.” Reuters.com April 18, 2009. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE53H1PN20090418
[4] Brian Massumi (2002) points out that affects are different from emotions in that “an emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.” There is an “irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature” to affects; they can also be viewed as “a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality in a sink of what might be called “passion,” to distinguish it from passivity and activity” (p, 28). The meanings of these terms are far from settled and it is beyond the scope of this paper to review or synthesize them. For further discussion linking these terms to operaismo, autonomia, socialized worker, precarity, Marx’s “real subsumption,” and Tronti’s “social factory,” see Nicholas Thoburn’s Deleuze, Marx and Politics (2003), and Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt’s “In the Social factory?: Immaterial Labor, Precariousness and Cultural Work (2008).
[5] This ethnographic study is based on direct observation of two call centers and detailed interviews with forty employees working in six locations in Bangalore, India, a burgeoning global technopolis. Seeking to counter the inordinate emphasis on individual agency in discourses of globalization that celebrate IT globalization as unproblematically signifying individual and social empowerment in developing countries, McMillin contends that agency is “structured within domination” since the systemic functions of call centers in the global IT economy position call center employees in distinctly disadvantaged positions—professional excellence requires effective manipulation of another adopted identity which is not required of the clients or customers whose needs these offices are set up to service (236-7). This is a good instance of the imbalanced positioning of customers and call center representatives in the IT-enhanced network of work interaction.
[6] This point is made in the context of examining the procedures by which the state legitimizes vertical encompassment, a hierarchical and horizontal mode of governance. Instead of understanding civil society as a sphere little influenced by the state, to Ferguson and Gupta, civic and non-governmental organizations often reify, in their modes of operation in civil society, state sanctioned models of social organization.
[7] CNN Live Event/Special. Jan 27, 2004. Transcript # 012702CN.V54
[8] With its focus on “identity management,” Krishnamurthy’s study is based on field work and interviews with call center employees in the 18 to 25 age bracket and working in Pune, Bangalore, and Gurgaon, India.
[9] She states this in her liner notes to her three-film documentary with Gautam Sonti titled Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry which examines the differences in workplace cultures in an Indian-owned software company, an offshore outsourced office of an American company, and an Indian startup company. These films present a nuanced approach to study IT globalization as they attend not just to culture as a variable category but in terms of how these companies’ “positions in the global economy and to the kinds of work they perform” create specific workplace cultures that “shape the subjectivities of employees and managers.”
[10] Ramesh bases his analysis on data gathered from six call centers in the technopolis of Noida near Delhi.
[11] Winiecki’s focuses on US-based call centers. In a related context, Peter Bain and Phil Taylor (2000), in their analysis of Telcorp UK call centers, part of a US multinational, make a good case for questioning the absolute power of the electronic panopticon by studying how, for instance, worker resistance via unionization was possible in Telcorp; union-management negotiations became more transparent by use of recording technology; and the interests of supervisor and supervised overlapped, making it less likely in some instances for established protocols to be followed.
[12] Their observations are based on a study of several call centers in Delhi, Gurgoan, and Noida in India and on the participation of 100 female employees. Most of the women were in the age range of 18 to 25.
[13] Readings makes this point in The University in Ruins when he elaborates on the idea of dwelling in the ruins of the university rather than pining for the return of the traditional one. He writes, “The question that is raised by the analogy is how we can do something other than offer ourselves up for tourism: the humanities as cultural manicure, the social sciences as travelogue, the natural sciences as the frisson of real knowledge and large toys” (172). By using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the various roles, levels, and impact of cultural practices in a global environment, the humanities can help us re-imagine ourselves as scholars and citizens able to intervene substantially at the level of political economy.
Works Cited
Appadurai, A. (1990). “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2 (2), 1-14.
Bain, P., & Taylor, P. (2000). “Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre.” New Technology, Work and Employment. 15 (1), 2-18.
Chakrabarty, S. (2006). “Making Sense of the Sourcing and Shoring Maze: Various Outsourcing and Offshoring Alternatives,” in Outsourcing and Offshoring in the 21st Century: A Socio-Economic Perspective (Kehal, H.S. and Singh, V. P, Eds). Melbourne: Idea publishing Group.
Chengappa, R., & Goyal, M. (2002, November 18). “Housekeepers to the World.” India Today International.
Corbett, M. F. (2004). The Outsourcing Revolution: Why It Makes Sense and How To Do It Right. Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing.
Davies, P. (2004). What’s this India Business? Offshoring, Outsourcing, and the Global Services Revolution. London: Nicholas Brealey International.
Deccan Chronicle (2006, February 13). “Taxi firms want dress code for BPO staff.” Retrieved February 13, 2006, from http://www.deccan.com/home/homedetails.asp
Diverted to Delhi. (2002). New York: Filmakers Library, Inc.
Ferguson, J., & Gupta, A. (2002). “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist, 29 (4), 981-1002.
Foucault, M (1884). The Foucault Reader. (Rabinow, P, Ed). New York: Pantheon Books.
Friedman, T. L (2005). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Gill, R, and Pratt, A. (2008). “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture and Society 25 (1), 1-30.
Hardt, M (1999). “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26 (2), 89-100.
Hardt, M and A. Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Hardt, M (2007). “Foreword: What Affects are Good For.” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley. Durham: Duke University Press, ix-xii.
Hira, R, and Hira, A (2005). Outsourcing America: What’s Behind Our National Crisis and How We Can Reclaim American Jobs, New York: AMACOM.
“Indian IT Industry: NASSCOM Analysis.” NASSCOM : Indian IT Industry
Fact Sheet. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=2374
India Vision 2020 (2002). Planning Commission of India. Retrieved September 1, 2006, from http://planningcommission.nic.in/
Johnson, M (1997). Outsouring. . . in Brief. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Kalita, S. M (2005). “Hope and Toil at India’s Call Centers.” Washington Post December 27, A01. Retrieved July 16, 2009, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/26/AR2005122600852_pf.html
Kamdar, M (2007). Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World. New York: Scribner.
Krishnamurthy, M. (2004). “Resources and Rebels: A Study of Identity Management in Indian Call Centers.” Anthropology of Work Review, 24 (3, 4), 9-18.
Mann, C. (2006). Accelerating the Globalization of America: The Role For Information Technology. Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affects, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
McMillin, D. (2006, January 21). “Outsourcing Identities: Call Centers and Cultural Transformation in India.” Economic and Political Weekly.
Mohaiemen, N. (2005, January 25). “India: The Dark Side of the Outsourcing Revolution.” CorpWatch. Retrieved February 14, 2006, from http://www.corpwatch.org/print_artcile.php?id=10048
Mirchandani, K. (2004). “Practices of global capital: gaps, cracks, and ironies in transnational call centers in India.” Global Networks 4 (4), 355-373.
Murthy, N.R. (2000). “Making India a Significant IT player in This Millennium” in India: Another Millennium (Thapar, R, Ed). New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Poster. W. R. (2007). “Who’s On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americas for U.S-Outsourced Firms.’ Industrial Relations 46 (2), 271-304.
Pradhan, J. P., & Abraham, V. (2005). “Social and Cultural Impact of Outsourcing: Emerging Issues from Indian Call Centers. Harvard Asia Quarterly ix. 3. Retrieved March 31, 2007, from http://www.asiaquarterly.com/com/content/view/155/40/
Shome, R. (2006). “Thinking through the diaspora: Call centers, India, and a new politics of hybridity.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. 9 (1), 105-124.
Thoburn, N. (2003). Deleuze, Marx and Politics. New York: Routledge.
Ramesh, B. P. (2004, January 31). “‘Cyber Coolies’ in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non-Standard Work” Economic and Political Weekly. Retrieved March 31, 2007, from http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=01&filename=6784&filetype
Readings, Bill. (1996). The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Sheshabalaya, A. (2005). Rising Elephant: The Growing Clash with India Over White-Collar Jobs and its Meanings for America and the World. Monroe, ME, Common Courage Press.
Singh, P., & Pandey, A. (2005, February 12). “Women in Call Centers.” Economic and Political Weekly.
Thomas, D. C. and Inkson, K. (2003). Cultural Intelligence: People Skills for Global Business. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Upadhya, C. & Sonti, G. (2006). Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry. Bangalore, India: National Institute of Advanced Studies.
Shiva, V (2004). “The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalization.” Countercurrents.org. April 5, 2004. Retrieved on April 10, 2007, from http://www.countercurrents.org/glo-shiva050404.htm
Vasavi, A. R. (2007). “‘Serviced from India’: The Making of India’s Global Youth Workforce” in In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry” (Upadhya, C., & Vasavi, A. R). New Delhi: Routledge.
Winiecki, D. J. (2004). “Shadowboxing with data: production of the subject in contemporary call centre organizations.” New Technology, Work and Employment, 19 (2), 78-95.
Yang, J. L. (2007, April 7). “Indian call center lands in Ohio.” CNNMoney.com Retrieved September 25, 2007, from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/08/06/100141303/index.htm
Return to Top»