1-800-Worlds: The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy

182 History and Sociology of South Asia 12(2) References Falconer, John, ‘Photography in Nineteenth Century India’, in C.A. Bayly, ed., The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1990, pp. 264–77. O’Shaughnessy, William Brooke, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Kolkata: Asiatic Society Library, August 1839). Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury 45 Suhasini Ganguly Sarani, Kolkata, India E-mail: deepkanta@gmail.com Mathangi Krishnamurthy, 1-1800-Worlds: The Making of Indian Call Centre Economy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 234, `795. DOI: 10.1177/2230807518776384 Indian call centre industry is now slightly more than two decades old and there have been many research reports, journal articles and a few monographs chronicling different dimensions of the booming economy of call centres and the workers in this new generation service sector work. Prima facie, the book under review, written by Mathangi Krishnamurthy appears as yet another addition to the extant stock of literature on this subject. But, due to several counts, it deserves a serious reading by students, scholars, researchers and policymakers. In this urgent and incisive study, the author offers a brilliant insider account of the works and lives of young call centre workers. The methodology engaged for this work is that of a corporate ethnography, involving in-depth interviews of 60 call centre employees, 5 voice and accent trainers and 3 consultants, in the educational city of Pune, during 2004–07. Along with this, the author also relies on the insights gained from her own work experience as a voice and accent trainer in one of the call centres in Pune for a period of four months. Apart from providing a broad overview of evolution and growth of call centres in India and explaining the political economy that facilitated the emergence of this new segment in the service sector, the book contains in-depth thoughts on select aspects of call centres, such as: recruitment, night work, accent training, production and management of effective (emotional) labour, and so on. Flexibility is a central theme that connects the discourses in the book. Through detailed ethnographic narratives of call centre workers, the researcher demonstrates how difficult and complicated the process of being flexible is. Accordingly, flexibility in its varied manifestations (e.g., flexible approaches followed in sourcing, inducting and retaining workforce; flexibilities attained through managing daily lives and nightly works; flexibilities realised through disciplining voice, accent and etiquette and flexible treatment of emotional labour) are captured and analysed in this research. Book Reviews 183 By keeping catchy titles for the volume as a whole (‘1-800-Worlds’) and for each of the chapters, the book is presented in an innovative and appealing way. Including the introductory and concluding chapters, the book is schemed into six chapters. The first chapter (‘A call centre story’) gives an overview of advent and expansion of call centres in India and some of the core changes that brought in the economic and labour scenarios. Accordingly, labour flexibility, gender implications and the creation of a new middle class are among the major aspects that are highlighted in the chapter. Besides narrating the political economy of call centres in India, the chapter also explains the rationale and details of the methodology engaged for data collection. The second chapter, ‘Trespassers will be recruited’, deliberates on the creation of a new set of working class for the call centre industry, by providing thick ethnographic narratives on recruitment drives, selection processes and orientation activities. As the title suggests, the third chapter (‘Nocturne’) is about the night life in call centres. Accordingly, it contains telling accounts on varied aspects of nightly worlds of call centre workers, such as chaos and charms of night work, sleep deficits, issue of adjusting body clock with atypical work schedules, women’s safety, and so on. The spatial and temporal contradictions of working through night and sleeping through day are portrayed in a skilful manner. As a by-product, the chapter also briefly portrays some glimpses from the work lives of cab drivers who are in charge of ferrying the call centre employees, mostly during odd hours. The fourth chapter, ‘Eliza Doolittle’ explains the similar experiences of modern Elizas, who undergo voice coaching and rules of etiquette in Indian call centres. Through meticulous qualitative narrations, the chapter explains how transnational call centres transform the young and English-speaking populations into service labour. Apart from deliberating on the issues related to creating an ideal workforce for the call centres, through voice and accent training, the chapter also offers a brief and succinct account on the language politics in India. Given the author’s own experience in the training field, the descriptions are often tilted towards the woes and worries of trainers and recruiters, rather than strictly confining to the training experience of the agents. The fifth chapter ‘Affective Cooperation’ is about production and management of affective/emotional labour. Accordingly, how affections are created for customer care and how such care providers are supported and cared by team leaders and human resource managers is a central question addressed in this chapter. Finally, the chapter titled ‘Afterword’ concludes the dissertation, by bringing together the essence of findings and arguments in various chapters. On the whole, the book under review is an important contribution in the area of corporate ethnography. It is rich in terms of qualitative narratives, which are duly connected to relevant conceptual discourses. In her methodological journey, engaging an interdisciplinary perspective, the author leaves no stones unturned. Accordingly, every possible bit of information (e.g., billboards, advertisements, casual conversations, anecdotes, photographs, newspaper clippings, fictional characters, and so on) is used for understanding the context and details of the transforming societies around call centres. 184 History and Sociology of South Asia 12(2) The author exhibits commendable skills in connecting the field-based interviews to the analyses for this volume, by adding appropriate quotes from the respondents and by vividly portraying the specific contexts of interview venues and workplaces. Quotes like ‘show me a person with bags under his eyes and I’ll show you a call centre worker’ have really converted the reading into a more intimate process, besides bringing in the voice of the subjects directly in the text. The methodology followed by the researcher is quite unique and is not very easy to follow for conventional researchers and doctoral students. It is evident that pedestal to this present study is the author’s own four-month stint as a voice and accent trainer. The experience thus gained by the researcher provides a strong platform for her to elaborate the working and living worlds of young call centre workers. Usually, gaining insider views through working along with the subjects is a difficult proposition for a research scholar pursuing an academic degree. Often, this method will find the researcher eventually becoming an employee or activist in the field chosen for research, which is a rare but not a very uncommon trend observed in social sciences. Luckily, in this particular case, the researcher could eventually detach herself from call centre work and resume her doctoral studies! One major methodological dilemma that comes up in the volume is the researcher’s claim that she had ‘suspended’ the field work for some time and took up a short stint as a voice and accent trainer. But, contrary to this claim, throughout this research, the author’s own experience as a call centre employee is central to all discussions and analyses. This raises an important methodological question. Can not the author’s working in a call centre be considered as a field work? (as even mentioned at some places in this volume!). If yes, will it amount to be a breach of ethical norms to be followed by an academic researcher? Obviously, these questions warrant extended debates, which is beyond the scope of the present review! A core concern addressed in this study is the scarcity of competent workers and thus the struggles of human resource personnel to identify, induct and retain suitable workers. While attrition of workers is a major issue and worker retention measures are core to the HR strategies, there are also cases of forced expulsions, through which less productive as well as ‘not-so-preferred’ workers are pushed out from call centres. The focus of the present study, however, is not extended to these dimensions of push-attrition. Here, it also needs to be highlighted that many other core and tough concerns pertaining to call centre jobs are not adequately addressed in this research. These concerns include: the quality of employment (e.g., employment insecurities connected with temporary, contract based and project based work), wage/income inequalities, absence of social securities, (in) efficacy of extant labour laws and welfare frameworks, representation insecurity, and so on. While we cannot expect all these from a book, which is not essentially designed to study such aspects, what we can wish for is yet another volume by the author addressing the above mentioned aspects! Babu P. Remesh Professor, School of Development Studies Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), Delhi, India E-mail: babu@aud.ac.in