ABSTRACT
Just as academic studies had come to terms with the development of the call centre as a distinctive form of work organisation within developed countries, the emergence of a globalised dimension to the location of this telemediated customer servicing function presented fresh challenges to the research community. Over the last few years the extent of offshoring – to use the term which increasingly entered business parlance in the US in the 1990s – of voice services to India, by companies based in the Englishspeaking geographies, has accelerated (see Srivastava and Theodore, this volume). For example, since 2002 the roll call of UK-based organisations to have migrated call centre jobs includes Prudential Assurance, Aviva, HSBC (in three separate tranches), Lloyds-TSB, British Telecom, National Rail Enquiries, Reality and Client Logic. These decisions seemed to signify an unstoppable tide of offshoring, leading many to predict the extinction of the call centre industry in the UK. Sensationalist media speculation was often based on the technologically deterministic assumption that call centres could be located anywhere, so long as the requisite infrastructure was in place (see for example the London Evening Standard 11 September 2003).
