Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to A. Aneesh, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Bolton Hall 710, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201;
Tel: 414 229-2234/414 229-4266 [e-mail: aneesh@uwm.edu].
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By 2010 Indias international call centers employed more than 300,000 agents
(Nasscom, 2011).
The emergence of global call centers portends an important turn in practices
of globalization. For the first time in history, the ordinary everyday customer
interaction can occur across continents in real time. This long-distance cultural
encounter raises a question: how can cultures talk? This study begins with a simple
premise: in order for global processes to integrate culturally and geographically
remote locations, there must be a certain neutralization of differences. To bring
different cultural identities, accents, and time zones together, there must emerge
certain processes of integration that push persons involved to adapt to global
demands. How are such demands coped and dealt with by call center workers?
I discuss two specific kinds of adjustments resulting from this leveling. The
first relates to cultural adjustments, seeking to reduce cultural specificity enough
for global communicative integration to take place. The second highlights the
requirement of somatic adjustments to night work in order for the workers to serve
their global clientele located in remote time zones.
In popular discourse and some theories of the media (McLuhan, 1994;
Negroponte, 1995), it is often assumed that once data-communication links have
been established, global integration (e.g., the global village) will of necessity follow. Such assumptions ignore the social psychology of integration, which is a
cultural achievement based on long periods of place-based, face-to-face socialization creating the possibility of common culture in which actions, gestures, or
symbols come to acquire similar meanings for participants. The development of
personality is deeply dependent on such processes of socialization. Thus, communication with another person is not a simple response to an external stimulus.
In every act of speech, George Herbert Mead (1922, p. 160) points out, the individual assumes the attitude or uses the gesture which another individual would
use and responds to it himself, or tends so to respond. Thus, linguistic communication has constitutive significance for psychological as well as sociocultural
dimensions of life: In man [sic] the functional differentiation through language
gives an entirely different principle of organization which produces not only a
different type of individual but also a different society (Mead, 1922). Between
Indias call centers and their overseas clients, however, there is no preexisting
common lifeworld of mutually comprehensible values, norms and expectations
or even immediate visual cues and body language. In view of few mediating
mechanisms to facilitate conversations, this article focuses on the worksocial,
psychological, and physicalthat goes into projects of globalization.
Methods
To study the globalization of the lifeworld, I conducted ethnography of
call center work in the city of Gurgaon (India), a city with the largest
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cluster of Indias international call centers in 20042005. There were two major
components of this ethnography: participant observation and qualitative in-depth
interviews.
Participant Observation
Participant observation, as Burawoy (2002) argues, is a reflexive model of
research that embraces engagement as the road to knowledge, deploying multiple
dialogues to reach explanations of empirical phenomena (Burawoy, 2002). The
reflexive model is particularly useful in social research as the objects of the social
world, unlike the objects of physics, are what Hacking (1999) calls interactive kinds
where humans interact with their classification through what Mead (1922) called
internal conversation, modifying their behavior accordingly. In such a situation,
longer dialogues become essential to allow for a careful analysis of reflexive
interaction. I conducted participant observation at one midsize international call
center, GoCom, which at the time of research employed about 1,000 employees
(note: the names of firms and individuals have been changed in order to protect
their identities). Located in Udyog Vihar, a business district in Gurgaon where
many software and service firms are based, GoCom provided services for clients
based in the United Kingdom and United States, specializing in telemarketing
services, mostly pertaining to mobile phone connections. I worked at GoCom
for several months, starting as a voice, accent, and process trainee to making
telemarketing calls on the floor. Initially, my research assistant, a 25-year-old
female graduate student in New Delhi, and I went to four to five recruitment
sessions two of which were organized by specific recruitment agencies where we
observed the interview process as well as the behavior of prospective candidates.
Sessions ran at full capacity and offered enough opportunity for us to engage
in separate conversations with many candidates who were quite open about their
motivations and aspirations. I also interviewed for several positions. Later, I joined
GoCom as an agent, attending lectures and hands-on sessions with other trainees
pertaining to voice and accent as well as process training. I participated in mock
calls, later barging in on live calls made on the floor by trained agents. Being part
of the telemarketing campaign, these calls were initiated at our end (employeeinitiated or dialer-initiated), carrying an incentive for a successful sale. While my
personal experience was limited to such outbound calls, I interviewed agents who
were in charge of inbound calls as well. This brings me to the second component
of ethnography.
Qualitative Interviews
This research included 50 in-depth formal interviews with 40 agents, 5
team leaders, and 5 managers from five different call centers, including GoCom
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by her trainer. Global accent was often used interchangeably with neutral accent by
trainers and agents alike. One may debate whether the above training constitutes
accent neutralization but the reason call centers termed it neutralization is due
perhaps to their focus on certain key features of English speech that persist, to
a degree, in all dominant accents: British, American, Canadian, and Australian.
By focusing attention on these common features, the trainer is able to mitigate,
not eliminate, the effects of local and regional influences on the agents speech.
Neutralization allows the unhinging of speech from its cultural moorings to connect
with purposes of global communication.
Further, agents employed for American processes were given common, putatively neutral, names from the United States. So, Sumit served as Tim while Geeta
became Tina in a world where their identity was supposed to mimic generalized
identities of cultures they were serving. It allowed for trust to build, especially
when such sensitive matters as finances, debt, late payments, and shame were involved. Such pseudonyms became permanent features of their personality; agents
tended to keep them even when they moved to work in another call center in Gurgaon. Curiously, the agents working for British processes were not given aliases at
GoCom. Perhaps, Indian names were better known in Britain and less of a cultural
hazard.
Cultural Mannerisms
The transformation of lifeworld processes of cultural reproduction into processes of the global system goes beyond accents, affecting everyday cultural
understanding and modes of conversation. Agents needed to take account of their
cultural, often semiconscious, habits of conversation and learn a different style of
interaction. They were encouraged to unlearn culturally specific ways of speaking, including gender and age-based socialization in humility and hierarchy. Their
behavioral training emphasized polite assertiveness while adopting a neutral
stance toward gender or age of their American customers. For instance, Sumit,
an agent in his early twenties, was reminded by his team leader about being too
polite. He was working for the debt collection process and received the following
note from his team leader: Assume. Dont ask. Need to take control of the talk.
Just ask who you are talking to, then start asking the first name of the person.
This style of speech with its undertones of culturally direct speech was something
not known to call center employees from their north Indian upbringing where one
revered the elderly and advised the young. The psycho-social change in personality was needed only at work, raising an important but hard-to-answer question:
whether such shifts in personality spilled into nonwork situations of family and
social life. This study could not include nonwork situations to the extent necessary
for reliable conclusions.
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United States. Following Casey (1993), we can argue that our existential coherence is dependent upon a sense of place. In the case of Tarun, one can clearly see
how the modernist divide that places self in the realm of consciousness while
assigning place to the physical world is only a theoretical divide. In experience,
the body and place are integral to, and constitutive of, selfhood with no absolute
boundary between physical and personal identity (Bachelard, 1994; de Certeau,
1984; Merleau Ponty, 1962). In effect, there is no place without self and no self
without place (Casey, 1993), and therefore, for Indian agents the idea of American
neighborhoods remained an abstraction partly derived from Hollywood films and
imagination, a reality quite different from what is experienced by immigrants.
Participant observations at GoCom also led me to believe that their organizational culture was quite different from what we see in American corporations. For
instance, despite flattened hierarchies in Indias call centers, the respect accorded
to team leaders was far in excess of their actual authority. The reason for this
respect was partly due to the respect for age in Indian culture, and team leaders, in their thirties, were frequently older than agents who were mostly in their
early twenties. Agents never called team leaders without adding sir or madam
in every sentence. The language of hierarchy with Western customers was also
clearly audible in every conversation. Despite the trainers warning, the trainees
kept using sir in every sentence to address the mock customer, and later the
actual customer. The use of sir in India has connotations of compliant hierarchy
that may sound off-key in the ideological frame of equality.
Emotional Communication
For global communication to take place there are cultural adjustments required in addition to accent neutralization. Call center agents must also learn
appropriate emotions for the communication to succeed. Vikas, an agent in
his 20s, worked at a call center that used a performance evaluation chart where
three out of six variables pertained to emotions, namely, Be polite and friendly;
Demonstrate emotions; and Tone/Attitude, in addition to such informationseeking variables as Solicit information about the debtor or Thinking ahead
and counter questioning or Ask assumptive questions. Most of the motivational
banners vertically hanging from the ceiling at GoCom also encouraged traits that
were conducive to global communication. For instance, motivational slogans about
selfhood (believe in yourself) or time (Make use of time, let no advantage slip)
were attempts to inspire new, globally compatible, habits of the mind that were
slow to take hold among the agents who believed in groups with no concern
about time as a resource to be exploited.
The use of emotions was one of the most important aspects of both telemarketing and debt collection calls. It was clearly visible in cases where agents were
trained on how to react to negative responses from consumers; how to quickly
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I did notice that more experienced agents on the floor had adopted over time a
much slower speech pace with a reasonable gain in communication and they surely
had a slight advantage over my less experienced team members.
As long as conversation stayed within the framework of a business transaction,
contingencies were kept at bay. But communication stumbled, I discovered, when
it turned social, and spilled over the provided channels. It failed when quotidian
culture crept into conversations. Indian agents were often destabilized by the
behavior of their American customers who sometimes communicated nationalistic
or racial judgments in conversation. From his experiences working for various call
centers Sanjay, Geetas 25-year-old colleague, realized that he was required to
call Americans during their evening meal hours or leisure time. What he did not
know was the fact that the scripted version of American identity he had come to
know during his training left out, for obvious reasons, strict American notions of
private and public time, notions that are not necessarily shared in the same way by
British, Australian or Indian forms of sociality. He could hear their anger at this
invasion of privacy and experienced culture shock without ever having visited the
United States.
Conversations also failed when a few Americans, in calmer moments, would
open up and describe their life stories, dreams, desires, and worldview. During
those very moments when these potential customers threatened to sound real
in either their rudeness or openness, agents experienced them as wasting their
precious talk-time. While rudeness was a personal affront their openness was also
vexing. Ranjana, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, recounted
her experience at a call center where she had worked the previous year. She was
not allowed to hang up on the customer even if it meant losing time and financial
incentives for other possible sales. She noted: Sometimes, they start chatting with
you as if they have nothing else to do and you made a free call. They will talk and
say I am watching this movie, I have to go to a party, what should I wear, and you
have to entertain them. You cannot hang up. So, there was this man I spoke to . . . I
spoke with him for three hours, three hours straight, in one of my sittings, and
after that, he said, oh my wife is back. I said, wow! He said, I was getting
bored, I do not work. Its my wife who is working and I just get bored at home. As
Ranjana, Sumit, Geeta, and all others were not allowed to hang up on customers,
long and half-followed life stories only wasted their precious call hours.
Contingencies also arose due to problems of human-machine interface. Global
communication lacks the social context of speech and what takes its place are customer relations databases and dialer software programs that target select database
profiles. For example, if Tarun sold mortgages the dialer would not dial old-age
or poor-credit profiles that were unlikely candidates for a loan. However, the
machine-dialed conversation was not free from contingencies. Tarun offered an
example: There was this interesting incident . . . People say I have a gift of gab
but this was the first time I couldnt answer. He was an old guy, he just picked
up the phone. I had to sell him the same thing. I had to ask whether he wanted
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a swimming pool in his house . . . The moment they want a swimming pool, they
need a loan and we are there to provide them a loan. So we were going to put
needs into his head . . . So, he answered, see, I am blind and I am eighty. I have
a house . . . .What will I do with a swimming pool? Why do I need a swimming
pool? I dont need a swimming pool, his voice rising to a crescendo of anger.
Tarun could only mutter, Thank you, sir. Such dialer originated calls to wrong
profiles were as common as the ones to correct profiles.
Disconnections in global communication often led to failed conversations or
worse, no conversation when two parties talked past each other, a situation I heard
frequently on the floor. In telemarketing or collection calls the failures were marked
and, indeed, countable through the differences in average revenue generated by
each caller every month. On several occasions, I was informed how some American
companies did not renew contracts with their Indian call centers on perceived
deficiencies of quality, which probably stood for failures of communication. Yet,
communicative efforts of this sort, failures aside, have been sufficiently successful
to experience a dramatic rise in recent years and the new global communicative
regime is an undeniable reality, generating continuous debates about outsourcing
in the United States (Bhagwati, Panagariya, & Srinivasan, 2004).
Call center agents, however, needed to make not only cultural adjustments
to their integration into a global labor regime, they also needed to make somatic
adjustments.
Somatic Adjustments
Indias call center workers live in two different worlds. While their days are
dedicated mostly to sleep and rest, their nights come alive in a transnational space
where the rules of the day do not apply. Clients of call centers reside mostly in
the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and to a much smaller degree
in non-English-speaking countries. The time-zone difference between overseas
clients and call centers ranges from 5 to 12 hours making night hours the crucial
time of work. While night work has been prevalent among nurses, security guards,
and police officer among many others, its extension to Indias call center workers
is intriguing for reasons of time-zone asymmetry in the real-time globalization of
services.
Social Ramification
In my conversations with call center workers, the topic of the night shift came
up frequently and they often referred to the implicit shock to their biological clock
after continuous night work. Working night in and night out, their circadian
rhythm lost its rhythm; they felt chronically sleep deprived. One of them, Tarun,
literally considered himself a walking ghost. Combined with the biological
shock was a social shock: Hardly anybody recognizes you, nobody recognizes
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you, he ruminated, you come in when nobody sees you. When you wake up in
the evening, you see all your newspapers. At 8 PM, you pick up your newspapers
when its your good morning. You browse through the news for the day that
happened yesterday . . . After a while you stop listening to the news, then you stop
reading the newspapers. All you want to do is get your pillow and sleep; get up, go,
make your calls, come back, and sleep. You dont want to know whats happening
in the world. The daytime social life loses its relevance for nocturnal working life
where one fields 250300 calls a night reminding us that the 24-hour economy is
now a global phenomenon.
Although the global labor regime tends to treat night and day differences as
mere noise for its operation it is becoming clear that the growing neutrality toward
temporal differences may not be conducive to the functioning of other aspects
of life. The somatic shock of nightwork is a deeply-felt, though less discussed,
phenomenon. It captures well the stress resulting from a combination of conflicting
reality: nocturnal labor and the diurnal body. While working across a linguistic
divide results in cultural stress, nocturnal labor results psycho-somatic stress.
Although the story of globalization is often a story of integrations, connections,
and flows, it is difficult to ignore disintegrations, contradictions and divides that
constitute the experience of globalization to a similar degree. I will explain the
conflicts between different realms of reality with an analogy of an alarm clock to
explain the experiential space of conflict.
The alarm clock operates in two separate domains at once. On the one hand, it
follows the functional logic of schedules and time tables, connecting persons to the
economic system; it wakes us up to catch a flight that takes us to a business meeting
in another city at a specified time; it connects us to the economic system in a
network of functional integrations (e.g., businesses, employees, project deadlines,
or how the latest iPhone must ship before a new school year to maximize sales,
connecting corporate actors with ordinary consumers in a long chain of systemic
integration). On the other hand, the alarm clock also converses with the body
through a loud ring that wakes the body from its slumber oftentimes jolting the
sleeper out of slow-wave or delta sleep. When the clock integrates the economic
system and the biological system the experiential consequence is usually that
of a somatic shock or dissonance. This is why the snooze button is universally
available on all alarm clocks! Although the logic of the global economic system is
neutral to the day-night distinction for working hours, its neutrality has experiential
consequences for the worker.
Sex, Gender, and Night Work
It is noteworthy that in many countries around the world women were not
allowed in the past to work at night for reasons of patronizing patriarchy as
well as somatic effects on reproductive health. Starting in the 1990s, however,
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reported, Cab drivers often overspeed to save on the penalty imposed by BPOs if
they delay on reporting times.
During my own commutes at night between Gurgaon and Delhi when I worked
for GoCom I had an odd experience of extreme hurry in the middle of nocturnal
calm, a war zone of rushing Toyota Qualises aggressively weaving around slower
Tata trucks. The roads offered a visual feel for how global currents reframe the
so-called local life disconnecting it from itself. To use an analogy, the disconnect
appeared similar to a situation when individuals on mobile phones appear both
engaged and neutral, engaged with the party at the other end and neutral to the
immediate social space around them and thus prone to crashing their cars.
The speed of call center taxis indifferent to their surroundings was a matter
of concern in Delhi and Gurgaon. In 2007 a call center taxi mowed down seven
people in Delhi, a widely reported event in the newspapers. As The Economic
Times (2007) reported Even in the past there has been a spate of incidents of
rash driving by BPO cabbies, which have caused fatal accidents. Theres a thought
within the BPO industry that cab drivers, who are often on duty almost 16 hours
a day, have little time to catch up with sleep or family.
But perhaps more crucial than the number of work hours were the hours of
work. Night hours have important connections with accidents in general. Major
disasters in recent memory occurred at night from fatigue-related human inattention: Valdez, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, the Rhine Chemical spill. One
could add to the list more frequent automobile and trucking accidents to assess the
consequences of neutrality toward the difference between day and night. Studies
show that shift workers have a much higher rate of highway accidents compared
to day workers (Richardson, Miner, & Czeisler, 1990; Smith, Folkard, & Poole,
1994). But the global techno-economy has not only managed to remain neutral
to the day/night difference; its neutrality has grown in the global age. As the
global economy integrates previously separated regions of the world it comes into
conflict with recent understandings of chronobiology, according to which spatial,
temporal, and seasonal differences are not external but embodied.
Discussion
In recent years the scale of many business servicestechnical support, telemarketing, debt collection, and all other forms of customer interactionhas become global. Indias call centers are increasingly part of the emerging global
communication regime. This development, however, raises the question how such
cross-cultural communicative integration is experienced at the personal level. The
notion of culture shock, frequently used to explain initial immigrant experiences, or the notion of hysteresis effect (Bourdieu, 1984), describing events
when socialized expectations are not met, may now be extended to persons not
co-located in the same geographic space. While physical proximity allows for a
certain harmonization of expectations to emerge in regular settings it is difficult
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to see such harmonization in the experiences of call center agents who operate in
the context of real-time global services. I hope to have shown in this article the
mechanisms by which global processes enter into culturally and geographically
separated lifeworlds. In call centers, global communication is facilitated through
recalcitrant and messy micro processes that are quotidian in nature but global in
importance seeping into the personality of individuals through accent neutralization, formal training in informal expressions, learning norms and values of other
cultures, smiling to a person one would never see in person, and working at night
to serve the day clientele of other places. In the micro experiences of call center
workers one can witness the macro processes of globalization (Marsella, 2012).
Based in long-term, cumulative ethnography, this research also generated several insights that would not have been possible in a formally focused investigation.
While my initial, formal interviews with agents and executives strengthened the
popular notion that call center agents, particularly women, are a satisfied and
liberated group of urban India as depicted in the media (Friedman, 2004; Slater,
2004), it was later during participant observation when I quietly worked as an
ordinary agent and shared experiences with other agents that it became clear that
journalistic accounts of liberation were off the mark. Agents wanted to leave this
industry as soon as possible. For most of them, it was a conscious stopgap arrangement before they moved on to what they often called a real career, even
if for some of them call centers might end up being the only career available. I
realized that agents perhaps performed for the interviewing journalists just as
they did on the floor for their clients, masking from view, to borrow from Smith
(1997), intensified, decentered, and destabilized work.
Most accounts of globalization are accounts of integrations, connections,
and flows. Since the 1990s the world has appeared as a unity, integrated and
engaged. But, as this research underscores, a fast globalizing world, will have
its accidents which may not look like industrial accidents with visible physical injuries but whose effects are felt in the psychological realm of individuals
(Diaz, Schneider, & Pwogwam Sante Mantal, 2012; Jensen & Arnett, 2012). A
limitation of this research was the lack of interview data on call center agents
mental health and personal life, and how they were affected by this specific work
practice. As scholarly investigations begin to address the questions of how people
make sense of and respond to globalization (Chiu, Gries, Torelli, & Cheng, 2011),
future research may need to focus on psychological problems and fragmenting
effects of global integration.
By focusing on specific features of call center training and work I hope this
study underscored out some general features of globalizing lifeworlds: essentially that global integration is also a disintegration of the self from its place of
socialization and meaning. Just as industrial society developed extensive regulation, insurance, and compensation schemes against its accidents, global information society will need to develop its own global institutions, practices, laws, and
arrangements. Globalization will have to overcome, for instance, its problematic
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relationship with mental health programs in many countries (Diaz, Schneider &
Pwogwam SanteMantal, 2012). It will not be sufficient to focus on the digital
divide, still existing isolated parts of the world, or failures of integration. It will
be of equal importance to focus on the problems associated with the success of
integrations, of digital connection, of an expanding global network.
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