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

The employees were mostly young men between 19 and 25 years of age. Although jeans and trendy T-shirts of Benetton, MTV, Nike, and Reebok predominated, the traditional salwar kameezes for women and kurtas for men were noticeable as well. (1) In front of a flat desktop computer monitor with their black headphones on, the employees were either attending to or making calls. All workstations had multimedia support and 17-inch color monitors. Employees would work for a couple of hours at a time, get up to stretch, and step out to attend to different needs--from bathroom breaks to social encounters. They occasionally took breaks for carbonated sodas, mostly Coke and Pepsi, or snacks available at the canteen on the same floor. They also stopped for casual chitchats. As the first author walked past groups of two to four people talking in the hallways, she caught fragments of conversations--school, weekend plans, relationship issues, movies, trivia, and sometimes anecdotes about their U.S. clients.

A sense of both casualness and urgency pervaded their work and the overall call center ambiance. There seemed to be a degree of freedom for the employees insofar as they could take their own breaks when and how they wanted. They were also eligible for perks that ranged from the "employee of the week" award and weekly happy hours to getting rides to and from their office. However, their work routines were dependent on time--numbers of calls completed in an hour, number of successful calls, amount of time to solve problems, and amount and type of purchases by clients--hence the sense of urgency. Though for inbound services (clients making calls), employees were generally expected to problem solve, for outbound services (employees making calls), they had to complete a certain number of calls depending on the product they were selling.

In a sense, then, urgency was juxtaposed against a relaxed ambiance and the latter could be attributed to the absence of a clear hierarchical dimension. They had team leaders, who largely supervised and clarified questions. The team leaders, the first author was informed, held group meetings in the conference room once every month to evaluate the overall performances of different groups of employees and to set new goals for them. Meetings were accomplished in a manner that did not clearly demonstrate the power dimension. Team leaders held the meetings in the same conference room where the first author conducted her focus groups. With a white board lit up by lights from above, a television, and a computer, it was much like a university classroom in the United States. There was no fixed setup for the conference room, which was organized depending on the nature of the meetings. When the first author was there, wooden chairs with desks attached were organized in a semicircle in the center of the room. Unlike the main workplace with its colors and movement, this room seemed subdued with white walls, lack of wall decor, and windows overlooking the grounds.

The first author greeted focus group participants as they entered the conference room. Purposeful sampling method was used to guide the study. The criteria of selection flow logically from the objective of the study (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002), which was achieved by the snowball method. The objective in this case was to understand the experiences of people who typically represent a call center. The first author's acquaintance helped in recruiting focus group participants. Our sample was largely representative of the typical profile of call center employees, consisting of young, male, college students. At the same time, we attempted to diversify our sample to a certain extent by including women and older employees.

Participants were given hour-long breaks from work by their team leaders. The first focus group started at 10:00 p.m., and the last ended at 3:00 a.m. Barring a couple of participants in their 40s, the participants represented an energetic group of young employees. All the participants were students and between 19 and 21 years of age, except Gautam and Rabin, who held college degrees and were older (see Table 1).

The participants walked into the conference room 5 min. before their session started and greeted the first author in the American style, saying, "Hi? How are you?" The participants' formal training in behaviors, such as voice and accent usage and competency in U.S. mannerisms, was evident. These organizational behaviors were essential for employees' fulfillment of the call center requirements for inbound and outbound services.

CASE STUDY ANALYSIS

It was within a workplace ambiance of casualness and urgency, freedom and constraints, Asian and Western cultures, and business and nightclub orientations that workers operated. As noted earlier, we were interested in the discursive processes that were central to the workers' experiences in this particular Indian call center.

During the process of conducting and transcribing the focus groups, the process of analyzing data began. The data analysis started with open coding to identify discrete concepts that could be labeled and sorted. Afterward, the concepts that were related to the same phenomenon were grouped together under conceptual categories. Our open coding was followed by axial coding involving the formulation of relationships within and among the categories. Finally, through selective coding, the relationships among the distinct categories were established at a more abstract level and then validated by returning to the data and finding evidence to support or refute the relationships (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Following these guidelines, the authors worked together using face-to-face, e-mail, and handwritten correspondences to generate themes. We jotted notes in the margins of transcripts, highlighted key phrases, compared and interrogated categories using generative questions about what data represent, and wrote memos about preliminary findings (Charmaz, 2000; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We reread transcripts independently to see what conceptual categories surfaced repeatedly within each and across interviews (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and audiotaped our discussions. As one example of our data analytic process, we began by noting and sorting through specific examples of behavioral changes based on work, gender, culture, and other factors (e.g., changing names from Indian--to U.S.-sounding names) reported by participants about themselves and others. We pulled these details together along with participants' evaluations of such behaviors into increasingly broader themes (e.g., from "switching identities," "meanings of work," and variations on these preliminary themes to our current findings) through multiple iterations of memoing--that is, documenting our thoughts, questions, and analysis; returning to data; and meeting to refine codes, ideas, and findings' labels (see Table 2).

Over the course of several meetings and e-mail exchanges, we refined two themes and returned to the data for support and confirmation. The two main themes that captured workers' identity, identification, and career (re)constructions were (a) strategic identity(ies) invocations and (b) refrained work, career, and family discourses and practices (see Table 2). Each of these themes is discussed below.

Strategic Identity(ies) Invocations

In much organizational communication literature, questions of agency and structure predominate such that the processes by which workplace members' identification choices shape and are shaped by valued identity(ies) constructions are of central concern (Kuhn, 2006; Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). These identities are but "points of temporary attachment to the subject positions" (Hall, 1996, p. 6) to which individuals "are hailed to assume by organizational discourses [that] are prestructured to facilitate actions that are ideologically productive" (Taylor, 2005, p. 124; see also Weedon, 1997). The individual becomes the site of "often-conflicting ideological narratives seeking to reproduce their associated interests through the interpellation of subjectivity" (Taylor, 2005, p. 124). Discursive constructions exert power to determine reality frames, minimize other interpretations, and shape individuals' embodied experiences with their worlds (Calas & Smircich, 1996; Weedon, 1997, 1999), but individuals also exert power in the processes by which they select among discursive resources offered by specific sites and organizational practices (Kuhn, 2006). In our case, the Kolkata Call Center employees described diverse ways in which they (a) invoked particular identity markers that were consistent with work priorities (i.e., their call participants' cultural expectations) and (b) noted not only the visible ways in which their own and other workers' identities shifted over time but also that they (and others) desired and/or enhanced their new emergent identities.

Identity Markers