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Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 68, No. 3, 2012, pp. 514--533

Negotiating Globalization: Men and Women of Indias

Call Centers

A. AneeshUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Most accounts of globalization are accounts of economic integration and culturalflows. There are few studies, however, of the ways global processes enter intoan individuals personality. Based on a yearlong ethnographic study of Indiasinternational call centers in 20042005, this article examines how global inte-grations are felt, experienced, negotiated, and embodied by call center agents.Reformulating the thesis of system and lifeworld, this study aims to examine theglobalization of the lifeworld, uncovering the effects of global system integrationon the lifeworld. As sites of real-time communicative integration across conti-nents, Indias call centers are revealing of the ways in which concrete social andpersonal lives are subordinated to global system imperatives, integrating in realtime two different linguistic worlds in radically different time zones.

In recent years a number of studies have explored and examined the processes

of globalization in a variety of realms: finance, media, labor, culture, religion,

nongovernmental organizations, and human rights (Abdelal, 2007; Aneesh, 2006;

Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, 1998; Hardt & Negri, 2000; Lechner & Boli, 2005;

Stiglitz, 2002; Rantanen, 2005; Van der Veer, 1996) among many others. Thereare few studies, however, of the way global processes enter into everyday life.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study of international call centers located in

Gurgaon, India in 20042005, this article examines how cultural and geographic

integrations are felt, experienced, negotiated, and embodied by call center agents.

Reformulating the thesis of system and lifeworld (Habermas, 1988), this study

aims to examine what we may call the globalization of the lifeworld, uncovering

the effects of global system integration on the lifeworld. As sites of real-time

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to A Aneesh Department of So


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Indias Call Centers 515

communicative integration across continents, Indias international call centers are

particularly useful places to investigate globalization in action.

Notions of lifeworld and system allow us to conceptualize society in twodifferent ways. In the lifeworld perspective, society emerges as a symbolically

structured space of social interaction, understanding, and experience, responsible

for three processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization.

In the systems perspective, however, society is a set of self-regulating systems

where actions are coordinated through functional interconnections of action con-

sequences. In modern economies, for instance, the market is one of those systemic

mechanisms that coordinate actions by action consequences, penalizing or re-

warding certain kinds of behavior. The goal-directed, profit-seeking behavior of

a company executive is not just a result of socialization and cultural values (life-world); it is also the functional requirement of a competitively structured field of

capitalism, in which nonprofit orientation is rendered unviable through adverse

action consequences. Although higher levels of system complexity enhance soci-

etys capacity to steer itself for material reproduction and survival, they may also

leadas they have in the modern worldto the colonization of the lifeworld by

the system as the lifeworld structures responsible for social integration are increas-

ingly subordinated to the system imperatives of functional integration (Habermas,

1988).

Indias international call centers are revealing of the ways in which con-crete social and personal lives are subordinated to global system imperatives,

integrating in real time two different linguistic worlds in two radically differ-

ent time zones giving new meaning to traditional psychological notions of how

individuals negotiate immersion in cultures difference than ones own (see also

Jensen & Arnett, 2012). Owing their emergence to Indias economic liberalization,

Indias call centersan important part of the business process outsourcing (BPO)

industryhave registered remarkable growth in the last decade. The outsourcing

of business processes includes such services as data processing, billing, telemar-

keting and customer support (the last two being performed through call centers).In 1991, on the verge of default on external payment liabilities, the Indian gov-

ernment under the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Raos, embarked on an

economic liberalization program, opening Indias relatively insular economy in a

phased manner to the global economic system. It was not until 1999, however,

when the New Telecom Policy ended the state monopoly on international calling

facilities with the introduction of IP telephony that the call center industry took

off. Within a decade, the combined value of Indias information technology and

BPO industry reached US$70 billion in 2009, accounting for 5.8% of Indias

GDP. The BPO sector grew by 14% to reach US$14.1 billion in 2011 (Nasscom,2011). While Indias information technology sector has a history going back to


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516 Aneesh

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 practicesof 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. Thefirst 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 fol-

low. Such assumptions ignore the social psychology of integration, which is a

cultural achievement based on long periods of place-based, face-to-face social-ization 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, com-

munication 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 in-

dividual assumes the attitude or uses the gesture which another individual would

use and responds to it himself, or tends so to respond. Thus, linguistic commu-

nication has constitutive significance for psychological as well as sociocultural

dimensions of life: In man [sic] the functional differentiation through languagegives 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


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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, unlikethe objects of physics, are what Hacking (1999) calls interactive kinds

where humans interact with their classification through what Mead (1922) calledinternal 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 GoComfor 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 traineespertaining 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 (employee-

initiated 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


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518 Aneesh

where I also conducted participant observation. These interviews1-hour long

on averagewere recorded in a variety of settings. Interviews with managers

were typically conducted in their offices while interviews with agents and teamleaders were recorded in coffee shops and their apartments. Interviews were later

transcribed and coded to cover several broad categories: nightwork, family life,

job satisfaction, identity, language, accent, and attitudes toward their clients and

cultures.

Ethnography as an anthropological research method requires contextual inves-

tigation that includes cumulative, serendipitous, and unique encounters to produce

an understanding distinct from other genres of inquiry (Bradburd, 1998). Thus, I

also engaged in casual conversation with other employees as they practiced their

accents and memorized different elements of new processes and culture. I fol-lowed these agents to their shared apartments in Gurgaon and sat around soaking

and poking in Richard Fennos famous phrase (Fenno, 1978, p. 247) while they

discussed their training experiences. I ate with them in the cafeteria where lunch

was served at two in the morning. The observational situations allowed time for

conversation and I took advantage of this opportunity to talk with agents about

their commitment to, and perceptions of, this career and about their own back-

grounds and goals in life. I also collected materials such as training manuals and

class notes from my own participation as well as from two other call center agents.

While this study may be called a workplace ethnography, it goes beyond thesite to include external factors that are formative of such workplaces, keeping in

mind Dorothy Smiths (1987) feminist directive to locate extra-local determinants

of participant experiences. Indeed, Indias call centers or software firms, connected

to their global clients in real time, are by definition global sites of production and

communication.

The structure of the remainder of the article is as follows. First, I discuss the re-

sults of this research under the category cultural adjustments, a set of personal(ity)

adjustments that call center agents need to make in the absence of common culture

before they can engage in global communication. I discuss and analyze culturaltraining and its occasional failure in order to highlight psychological ramifications

regarding identity and relationship to the other within the lifeworld context of

the call center phenomena. Second, I discuss physical and somatic adjustments

demanded of workers in the absence of a common time zone between them and

their clients. Indias international call centers operate at night to serve their day

clientele dispersed in the United States, England, Canada, and Australia which

makes the night shift their primary work shift.

Cultural Adjustments


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in speech and accent of employees, an area of communication which must be

addressed before any dialogue between Indian workers and their foreign clients

is possible. It becomes important to train the agents in the pace, emphasis, andintonation of their second language, i.e., English, while also seeking to neutralize

the thickness of regional accents. Voice and accent trainers in most of the call

centers engage in what they call accent neutralization, seeking to mitigate the

influence of regional accents on their English, and reflecting a recalibration of

sociocultural particularity to the requirements of global integration.

India has many regional languages belonging to several linguistic families,

including the Indo-European languages (72% of the population), the Dravidian

languages (spoken by 25% of people mainly in southern India), the Austro-Asiatic

and Tibeto-Burman language groups. Individually, major languages are: Hindi41%, Bengali 8.1%, Telugu 7.2%, Marathi 7%, Tamil 5.9%, Urdu 5%, Gujarati

4.5%, Kannada 3.7%, Malayalam 3.2%, Oriya 3.2%, Punjabi 2.8%, Assamese

1.3%, Maithili 1.2%, other 5.9% (CIA, 2011). While preparing the agents for

global communication, accent neutralization programs are geared toward reducing

the effects of agents first languages on their English.

In numerous interactions, agents and trainers frequently brought up the term

neutral accent. Indeed, my first interview for participant observation as a voice

and accent trainer at Datys revealed the importance of this term. During the job

interview, Payal, a senior trainer in her 30s, asked me, Could you stop using thatAmerican accent? . . . Can you stop rolling your Rs as Americans do, and start

using a neutral accent, instead? She explained that it was very important for the

firm to train its employees in neutral accent. I protested that there was no such

thing as a neutral accent, and Payal replied, Well, there is. Do you hear how

Im speaking? Plain and neutral English. When I clarified, You mean plain,

Indian English, she proudly exclaimed, Yes, Indian English is global English.

It is neither American nor British. While it might be easy for a sociolinguist to

fault her stance, Payal did bring to light an important sociological aspect of call

centers: the creation of a neutralized space for communication across cultures, away to bridge the gulf between different lifeworlds. What Payal meant by Indian

English was a kind of English where it is hard to detect the influence of such

regional Indian languages as Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam, or Hindi while

also staying free from British or American influences.

Voice and Accent Training

Voice and accent training has evolved into a business of its own. Kiran Mo-

hanti, the chief executive of DialAct, a firm that trained call center agents inmatters of language and accent, revealed in an interview that accent neutralization


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centers in Mumbai (India), Manila (Philippines), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

in addition to Gurgaon and Noida near New Delhi. A global endeavor, accent

neutralization was a technical solution because it arose, not out of social needsfor cross-cultural understanding, but out of demands for an uninterrupted flow

of services based in what may be termed a global labor hierarchy (Mirchandani,

2005; Poster & Wilson, 2008). While a technical solution, accent neutralization

imposes certain psychological demands on agents who must consciously focus on

their accents, and mentally adjust to the success or failure of their effort.

To illustrate I provide the experiences of a few agents starting with Geeta,

an agent in her early 40s, who was unusually old for the youth-oriented work

culture of call centers. A self-described outsider to the call center culture, she

was happy to share with me her carefully taken notes in training sessions. In thecontext of accents, Geeta admitted that she was unaware, before her training, of

the fact of a predetermined emphasis on one or two syllables in all English

words. Indeed, the notion of syllable, she mentioned, was new to her, prompting

her to take detailed notes during training.

Hailing from a middle-class background Geeta, along with her many peers,

seemed comfortable conversing in English, a language that has been a marker of

class in India since the colonial period. Lord McCaulay, in his famous Minute on

Indian Education delivered as early as in 1835, encouraged the British to do our

best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whomwe govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in

opinions, in morals, and in intellect. While it is not clear if McCaulays project

succeeded in India, it is clear that English is not just another language. Not knowing

English, or not knowing it well, carries a certain stigma with no other linguistic

parallel in India; facility in English is a probing measure of personal worth.

The social pressure for fluency in English language made even college-

educated agents feel insecure in their English skills. Faced with the trainers push

for including emphasis in their accents, agents often appeared embarrassed,

for instance, about not knowing that in idea it is the middle syllable that isemphasized, not the first to which they were accustomed. Often, agents rewrote

English words in Hindi, a common yet curious practice because English and Hindi

languages sound quite different and, for the most part, do not share sounds for

vowels or consonants. Yet, the reason was easy to decipher. Hindi uses a highly

phonetic script, Devnagari, which makes it easier to memorize the pronunciation

of certain English words in Hindi that are traditionally pronounced incorrectly, or

too differently, in Indian English. For instance, in her class notes, Geeta wrote the

pronunciation for the word laboratory in Hindi script; what she wrote in Hindi

was actually its British pronunciation, as the word is pronounced quite differentlyin America.


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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 dueperhaps 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, puta-

tively 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 generalizedidentities of cultures they were serving. It allowed for trust to build, especially

when such sensitive matters as finances, debt, late payments, and shame were in-

volved. Such pseudonyms became permanent features of their personality; agents

tended to keep them even when they moved to work in another call center in Gur-

gaon. 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 pro-

cesses 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 speak-

ing, including gender and age-based socialization in humility and hierarchy. Their

behavioral training emphasized polite assertiveness while adopting a neutralstance 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 person-

ality 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


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522 Aneesh

The difference between two sets of identitiessocial identity derived

from primary socialization and system identity attained through cultural

neutralizationled to what has been termed identity dissonance (Costello,2005). In this new identity, neutral to their sociocultural world, agents sought

to adapt to a way of speech that was more common in American culture, partic-

ularly in the telemarketing culture largely invented in the United States. While

some of this knowledge and training is generic to telemarketing or call center

industry worldwide, its basic ingredients derive from social norms and values of

North American culture that are foreign in India.

It would be inaccurate to consider the processes of neutralization as unique

to global call centers or to uniquely define global communication. In many ways,

immigrant language training programs as well as diversity training programs inAmerican workplaces are global processes taking place in national territories with

the attendant problem of communication across cultures. Yet, there are also cru-

cial differences between such intercultural training programs (Brislin & Yoshida,

1994) and call center communication, pertaining to physical presence and long-

term acculturation. The immigrants physical presence allows many other factors,

including body language, facial expressions, and cultural features of a physical en-

vironment to emerge as crucial to communication. No call center agent at GoCom,

my field research revealed, had ever visited the United States in person. The other

aspect that makes this process different from immigrant language training pro-grams is that immigrants typically desire to either assimilate or accommodate to

the host culture because of their long-term objectives. Attempts at cultural adapta-

tion and immigrant acculturation, as discussed by Jensen and Arnett (2012) allow

durable ways of negotiating multiple cultures to take shape. Call center workers,

on the other hand, have only short-term instrumental objectives, separating the

process of cultural training in call centers from the rest of their life. Call center

agents also avoid, for similar reasons, charges leveled against immigrants who

are often accused of self-segregating and of lacking loyalty to the host nation, as

identified by Shimpi and Zirkel (2012) in the case of Chinese Americans.Training someone out of their culture and into another is never a simple task.

One or two months of short training cannot replace years of socialization. Train-

ing often failed when basic cultural understanding was required. While providing

directions to the customer, an easy question could unsettle the ongoing commu-

nication. To illustrate, when Tarun, an agent working for a Citibank process, was

asked a simple question: how many blocks away was their head office from a

certain intersection of an American city, the agent failed to understand the very

meaning of blocks. Tarun noted, We do not have any idea what exactly they

measure by blocks. . .

two blocks away, three blocks away, and things like that.We know mohallas. You talk about mohallas, we are three mohallas away from


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United States. Following Casey (1993), we can argue that our existential coher-

ence 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 whileassigning 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 organiza-

tional culture was quite different from what we see in American corporations. Forinstance, 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 lead-

ers, 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 hierarchythat may sound off-key in the ideological frame of equality.

Emotional Communication

For global communication to take place there are cultural adjustments re-

quired 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 information-

seeking 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 telemar-


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employ readymade phrases wrapped in suitable emotions to keep the conversation

going and avert the premature end of the call by the customer. They had to acquire

the habit of showing authentic emotions on the phone without losing track ofthe conversation.

Much of this work falls within the scope of emotional labor (Hochschild,

1983) while also extending it to a cross-cultural context where the meaning of

particular cultural expressions may not be clear to the agents adopting them. For

instance, when a debtor reasoned during a debt collection call that his wife had met

with an accident, the agent was supposed to express empathy. The agents had to

memorize many ready-made phrases to express appropriate emotions during a call.

Such training in emotional expression is perhaps common to all call centers around

the world. Hochschild (1983) predicted that a commercial logic will penetratedeeper and deeper into what we used to think of as a private, psychological, sacred

part of a persons self. What is crucial to understanding Indias call centers is that

this logic bridges immense spatial, temporal, and cultural gulf between agents and

their overseas customers.

One general emotional requirement was an upbeat mood. Radha, another

agent, was advised to keep a smiling face while talking on the phone for she

otherwise sounded too formal. When she argued that her clients could not see

her face on the phone she was quickly corrected with general advice that friendly

voices can only proceed from friendly faces. Smiles do convert into talk and therewere remarks to this effect on her performance evaluations.

The construction of a new, performative, mimetic identity is in step with

feminist discussions on the management of identity and emotion (Bolton &

Boyd, 2003; Hochschild, 1983; Leidner, 1993; Poster, 2007). Hochschilds idea

of emotional labor is a good example of how the process of transmutation allows

emotions to be performed as labor while still keeping an appearance of sponta-

neous occurrence. The case of Indias call centers goes a step further by training

agents in foreign cultures whose basic frameworks often remained inaccessible to

agents.Cultural adjustments also emphasized learning new cultural expressions.

Long sessions were devoted to learning American or British informal expressions

through formal training. Although the language of communication was English, it

was clear that agents did not have any prior knowledge of such common informal

expressions as dude, jerk, nuts, or geek as they had not grown up hearing

these expressions in India. Excerpts of Geetas notes, where she carefully listed

common colloquial terms, support the assertion that global integration requires

training in the micro details of everyday American language and requires that

agents memorize colloquial terms such as nut, geek, and dude with whichthey may not be familiar.


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they agents, were supposed to be in relation to these clients. As Indians posing as

Americans, what were their attitudes toward society, government, work, leisure

and life? A new culture is difficult to acquire without physical encounters butthese agents did their best by memorizing the scripts of American traits offered to

them in their training curriculum. Let me quote from Geetas notebook: American

Attitudes to Authority, Government: They are very aware of their rights. They are

very law abiding and patriotic. They pay their taxes, etc. and their government also

gives them a lot of facilities in return, like free education till the 12th and subsidized

higher education. They are neat and clean in their habits. They dont litter the

public places, etc. The example makes it clear that these agents performed in a

global hierarchical order as cultural adjustments are at work only in one direction.

There is no pressure on American or British cultures, in action-theoretic terms, forcommunicative adaptation; they are not required to simulate Indian cultural traits.

This one-way characteristic of cultural adaptation is an example of the hegemonic

globalization discussed by Marsella (2012) and an example of how countries in

the seat of global economic power dictate the terms of the relationship between

the global north and the global south (Diaz & Zirkel, 2012).

Despite the extensive cultural training demanded of Indian agents, the cultural

seams of global talk seemed to assert themselves frequently highlighting the

unresolved contingencies of global integration. In the following section I highlight

situations when cultural adjustments fail to materialize.

Contingencies of Cultural Adjustment

Accents turn out to be embodied forms of culture (Bourdieu. 1986) difficult

to relinquish or acquire in a short period. Despite long training sessions, all agents

found it difficult to change or neutralize their accents. It was not easy to turn

a socially sculpted identity into a set of manufactured events, for accents are

seamless expressions of the body, linking movements of the larynx, tongue, teeth

and neural wiring. Recent brain imaging results suggest that language experienceliterally tunes the cortex (Tan et al., 2003), the untuning of which is an improbable

task. In the case of language, the social seems to affect the biological in a physical

way. Most agents seemed to imitate their team leaders accent and style of speech

but few could successfully do so. Tarun admitted: You tend to ape him [team

leader], you tend to do the way he talks, the way he speaks but hes got a lot more

experience than what you have; so you may pick up a few lines from whatever he

converses but it may not add up to entire communication.

The partial failure of accent neutralization was clear to me while barging in

on calls on the floor when agents and customers could not fully understand eachother. It became clearer when my research assistant, an American graduate student


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526 Aneesh

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 toknow 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 theirprecious 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, andafter 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 cus-

tomer 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, themachine-dialed conversation was not free from contingencies. Tarun offered an


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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 havea 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 Americancompanies 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 crucialtime 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 clockafter continuous night work. Working night in and night out, their circadian


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528 Aneesh

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 thathappened 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 aspectsof 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 thesleeper 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


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processes of globalization have changed this practice. The International Labor

Organization (ILO) revised its prohibition contained in Convention 89 of 1948

in its Protocol of 1990 to the Night Work (Women) Convention, providing newexemptions from the prohibition of night work by leaving it to local representatives

of the employers and workers to reach an agreement. The European Union took

a step further when its Court of Justice issued a ruling in 1991, declaring the

ILO Convention to be incompatible with the principle of the equality of the sexes

proclaimed by community directive 76/207. India followed suit by reframing

night work as a matter of equal opportunity, instead of equal exploitation, and

of womens freedom of work, brushing aside the notion of freedom from night

work. In contrast to a century of protests against long hours of work around the

globe and corresponding labor regulations, the growing relaxation of regulationsagainst night work signifies an important global transformation. The globalization

of night work is sure to require somatic adjustments at a much larger scale than

what we witness currently.

Yet, the problem of night work is not lost on global institutions. The ILO

continued its prohibition on night work for women workers during a period

before and after childbirth of at least 16 weeks, of which at least eight weeks shall

be before the expected date of childbirth, a difference toward which the ILO

could not allow neutrality as the work of reproduction could be carried out by only

one half of the human population. In India, the law requires additional safeguardsfor womens dignity, honor and safety and their transportation from the factory

premises to the nearest point of their residence. The clause on transportation was

an implicit recognition of different implications of night work for men and women

as factories and offices could not be isolated from the world around them. In order

to provide protection against unequal nights and male aggression outside the

premises, call centers in Gurgaon began transporting their employees from their

homes to the work site resulting in an unprecedented development of call center

nighttime cabs that are leased in the hundreds and thousands by international call

centers in Gurgaon.

Collisions of Nocturnal Labor and Diurnal Body

As nights of Gurgaon are hitched directly and unavoidably to the days of

other places (i.e., Seattle, London, or New York), the taxis speeding between

Gurgaon and Delhi driven by needs of a digitally interconnected have turned the

streets into a strange clash of the local with itself; the local as simultaneously

belonging to Gurgaon and to New York. The combination of a strict call center

schedule decided primarily by the business hours of, say the United States, andthe relatively tranquil nighttime streets of Gurgaon have made call center cabs


17/21

530 Aneesh

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 workedfor 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 sevenpeople 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 inatten-

tion: Valdez, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, the Rhine Chemical spill. Onecould 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, tele-

marketing, debt collection, and all other forms of customer interactionhas be-

come 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 experi-ences, or the notion of hysteresis effect (Bourdieu, 1984), describing events


18/21


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 geographicallyseparated 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 neutraliza-

tion, 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 sev-

eral 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 ar-

rangement 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. Irealized 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 physi-

cal injuries but whose effects are felt in the psychological realm of individuals

(Diaz, Schneider, & Pwogwam Sante Mantal, 2012; Jensen & Arnett, 2012). Alimitation 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: essen-

tially that global integration is also a disintegration of the self from its place ofsocialization and meaning. Just as industrial society developed extensive regula-


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532 Aneesh

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 willbe 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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A. ANEESH, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at

the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Previously, he taught in the Science

and Technology Program at Stanford University (2001 2004). Author ofVirtual

Migration: the programming of Globalization(Duke, 2006), his scholarship inter-

sects a plurality of research realms: globalization, migration, and technology. With

a wide background in the social, cultural, and technological landscape of India and

the United States, Aneesh has spent more than a decade researching and writing

about nationalism, global software development, and about the world of immigrantprogrammers. Over the years his scholarship has included awards and grants from

the McArthur Foundation Social Science Research Council Population Council


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