ABSTRACT
India’s call centre industry: the sunshine sector, hotbed of sexual liberalism, bound by professional agreements, ripe for discussions of postcolonial subjectivity, evoking the guilt of Empire. This book is a discussion of how agency is experienced by women working in Delhi’s transnational call centre industry, seeking out truncated spaces from within which identity is articulated. Over the last decade we have witnessed a steady rise in the outsourcing of
call centre and data entry work from the UK to India, a trend that has proved irresistible to popular commentators.1 In pairing these two quotations together one can appreciate the contradictory impression left upon Guardian readers and the British liberal Left concerning the relocation of call centre work. With one side arguing that call centre relocation is retribution for colonial exploitation (Monbiot 2003), the other retaliates by claiming that commodification
of self-identity is too costly to naively identify as reprisal (Seabrook 2003), demonstrating a tension that reflects the contradictions in the agency/structure dynamic engulfing discussions of globalization, labour and identity. This analysis of Indian call centre workers is itself located within a wider
context. The popular perceptions of colonial exploitation (Caulkin 2002; Denny 2003a), retribution (Denny 2003b; Flanagan 2003; Monbiot 2003) and the compulsory commodification of identity (Seabrook 2003) have dominated British media discussions of India’s transnational call centre industry. These reports demonstrate an oversimplification of the discussion and the quotations from Monbiot and Seabrook that opened this chapter indicate a sense of guilt emerging from the liberal Left – what Said (1993: 22-24) has referred to as the ‘contemporary residue of imperialism’. Indo-UK bilateral relations evolving out of the context of British colonial
rule have created an unmistakable discursive wrinkle within which this discussion takes place: the postcolonial condition.2 It is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate contemporary social, economic and cultural relations from colonial relations; the postcolonial condition produces subtle hostilities, or subtle forms of racism. This is not to suggest that any reference to socio-historic contexts is to be read as an act of imperialism. Rather, it is important to understand, first, the contemporary discourse surrounding the outsourcing of service work to India and, second, that the very nature of call centre work demands that Indian employees have voice-to-voice interaction with UK customers. This may be up to 300 exchanges per agent per day, and many include references by UK customers to these former colonial contexts. Proclamations regarding the exploitation and the commodification of self-identity are not only presumptuous and without strong evidence, they negate the experiences of Indian call centre workers. The empirical research for this book is in part concerned with globaliza-
tion: the globalization of production, particularly in the service sector, and the globalization of cultural identities. It goes some way towards deconstructing the notion that call centre work outsourced to India is simply ‘electronic sweatshop’ work (Kjellerup 1999; Holman and Fernie 2000) and looks at the way in which such employment has also empowered and given greater agency to those who work in it, both socially and economically. In presenting an ethnographic case study of women working in some of the transnational call centres of Delhi, this book explores how identity is produced through global and national discourses and examines the way in which agency functions in the construction of these identities. Second, it looks at the challenges and opportunities for women brought about by the relocation of call centre work, arguing for a closer examination of social, cultural and historical contexts in researching the globalization of service work. In doing so, it contributes to ‘transnational feminist research’ by critically examining women’s experiences in transnational Indian call centres, linking it analytically to different places, thereby enhancing women’s common struggles (Moghadam 2000; Nagar 2002, 2003).
