The Indian call center experience: a case study in changing discourses of identity, identification, and career in a global context.

This study examines the processes by which workers in a particular Indian call center located in Kolkata expanded on, negotiated, and chose among an array of possible, especially new, identities and identifications and the ways that these choices affected changing social discourses. Our case study depicted a workplace that was simultaneously casual and urgent, temporal and spatially free and constrained, situated in both Indian and U.S. cultures, and oriented toward business and nightclub ambiances. Within this particular workplace, call center employees (re)constructed and negotiated among an array of discourses that bracketed opportunities for particular identities and identifications. Through these negotiation processes, they (a) engaged in strategic identity(ies) invocations and (b) reframed work, career, and family discourses and practices.

Keywords: call centers in India; identity; identifications; discourse; organizational communication; work; career

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Organizational communication researchers increasingly focus on organizations' adaptations of their internal structures and processes to market pressures and how communicative processes adapt to and alter these changing organizational structures (Jones, Watson, Gardner, & Gallois, 2004; Taylor, Flanagin, Cheney, & Seibold, 2001). Nowhere are these communicative and structural challenges more evident than in contexts where local practices meet globalization imperatives. In cases such as these, workers' accounts of their work and organizational culture provide entry points for seeing how identity constructions unfold and shift based on competing micro- and macrodiscourses.

This case study of one particular call center in India explores the identity(ies) constructions and communicative challenges associated with globalization in a transnational workplace culture. Call centers are unique workplaces and organizational cultures because they belong to multiple geographical spaces (e.g., North Atlantic and Asian, domestic and overseas, high and low technology, and particular country, city, organizational, and workplace spaces; see Shome, 2006). Their spaces and cultures offer arrays of possible structural positions (i.e., locations within work and nonwork networks) and discursive as well as sociocultural resources (i.e., linguistic, historical, and cultural devices that guide individuals' interpretations of events and action and influence their representations of self) on which employees can draw when they choose their different identifications and (re)position their identities (S. Hall, 1996; Kuhn, 2006; Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). Intersections of space, identifications, and identity(ies) become evident in the ways in which work is enacted and described.

Indian call center work involves employees' providing voice-to-voice service to clients dialing toll-free numbers primarily in North America. They learn American accents, work at night to cater to U.S. time zones, and adjust to an altered social and family life. They are expected to be conversant with day-to-day American issues to the extent that they are able to carry on casual conversations with clients (Mirchandani, 2004; Shome, 2006). Although the global clientele is spread across Europe and Australia, our case study focuses largely on U.S. clients associated with a number of different companies, including British Airways, TechneCall, Swiss Air, Dell Computers, America Online, GE Capital, American Express, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and AT&T (Mirchandani, 2004; Shome, 2006). Call center employees make telemarketing calls and cater to customers on insurance claims, credit cards, computer hardware, network connections, banking, and financial plans. So cost effective and productive are these centers that the call center industry grew 59% to $2.3 billion between 2002 and 2003 (Sharma, 2003), and the number of foreign companies outsourcing to India increased from 60 in 2000 to 800 by the end of 2003, an increase of more than 1200% (Mirchandani, 2004). Dell alone has a 30-site call center network located in four major Indian cities and an expected 15,000 workers by 2008 (Ribeiro, 2006). With its high growth potential, total industry employment is expected to reach 600,000 by 2007, according to International Data Corporation, India (Sharma, 2003).

The call center industry is well situated within India's global leadership with its offshore information technology and business process outsourcing industries increasing at an annual rate greater than 25% and generating export revenues of $60 billion by 2010 (NASSCOM, National Association of Software and Service Companies, 2005). Indian call centers represent a new form of organizational process that embodies complex spaces at the intersections of "globalization, telecommunications and the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics" (Sassen, 2000a, p. 146). The experiences of employees do not involve transnational migration beyond national boundaries, yet they embody multiple geographical spaces. In other words, call centers represent new structures, where "organizational capabilities are increasingly developed through intensely social and communicative processes, which may not be tied to physical resources or locations" (Jones et al., 2004, p. 733). The ways in which communication underlies the structure of the organization and shapes workers' experiences and identities (and vice versa) ensure that the processes of globalization get reified (Mirchandani, 2004). Hence, an examination of discursive constructions at a call center in India is an engagement with "dialectic of micro-practice and macro-thinking" (Stohl, 1993, p. 384; see also Stohl, 2005) that, Stohl argues, needs to be taken up as a challenge for scholars.

Our study centered on call center employees' discursive and material (re)constructions of their different identities and identifications in light of changing corporate demands and clientele. Through the case study, we explored how workers select and negotiate among an array of possible identities, particularly new identities, and make sense of the ways these emerging identities change their relationships with coworkers, family, friends, and themselves in terms of their day-to-day practices and expectations of work importance and career.

KOLKATA CALL CENTER CASE STUDY

Case Study Method: Participants and Procedures

We explored call center identity, identifications, and cultural constructions through a case study because this method displays changing communicative phenomena within a singular context to highlight the fuzzy boundaries between context and phenomena and to offer practical solutions that may be case specific (Deetz, 1990; Kreps, 1990; Mier, 1982; Sypher, 1997; Yin, 2002). Our case study relied primarily on focus group interviews, but these data were supplemented by ongoing conversations with an acquaintance of the first author who worked at the call center, company documents, Web site details, and observation of the call center and surrounding city and global milieu to build an appreciation of the different spaces in which workers constructed their identities and workplace culture. We used focus groups because organizational culture, meanings of work and globalization, and identity(ies) constructions are created and maintained through groups (Krueger, 1998; Morgan & Krueger, 1998; Patton, 1990).

The first author gathered data from 20 individuals in four focus groups of 5 participants each. These 20 people were between the ages of 19 and 48 years with the average age of 21. All of them had at least high school degrees; a majority reported that they were pursuing undergraduate degrees, and some participants said they were pursuing MBA degrees. Several (40%) had work experience in marketing (n = 4) or in other call centers (n = 4), and less than 15% said they were married. Two people said that they had at least one child. There were 15 men (75%), and 5 women (25%). All focus groups contained members of both sexes.

In accordance with recommendations by focus group experts (e.g., Greenbaum, 2000), we developed a brief set of focal questions centering on the nature of call center work, changes in their work context, day-to-day practices, and feelings about making cultural adaptations. The first author traveled to Kolkata to recruit and interview research participants employed at a particular call center company in Kolkata. She set up focus group meetings with the first 20 (out of 35) individuals who indicated their willingness to participate. On completion of all focus groups, both authors worked together to transcribe the data for analysis and changed participants' names to pseudonyms. All interviews were conducted in English, the language of business in India, and all transcriptions were checked against the audiotapes. Transcriptions yielded 42 pages of single-spaced typed data.