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

Deb's comments captured the general mood of the workplace expressed by others. The young employees exuded high enthusiasm and energy while relating their workplace experiences to other focus group participants and to the facilitator. Specifically, participants who were young and students tossed around terms such as fun, party, just like college, and friendly in describing the center's ambiance. Their linguistic choices were consistent with the ways they moved around their workplace space, decorated their cubicles to match the decor of the office, and joined others for breaks and chitchat. Their excitement with the decor, in particular, became evident in Sunil's statement: "The moment we walk into the office, it is like a party atmosphere. With all its colors and vibrance, it is not your regular office." Their happiness and positive attitudes about their work culture were reiterated in their talk and expressed feelings. Ravi further said, "The office has such a party atmosphere that if I am not coming to work one day, I miss work." Others joined in to support Ravi's view. Raj said, "I have forgotten my school friends and college friends. Even over the weekends, I hang out with my friends in office." Gautam provided a rationale for the creation of this ambiance: "it's so lively that it keeps you awake ... so the ambiance is very different, it's fun, which is created deliberately so that people don't feel they are made to work in the nights." Gautam suggested that management, along with the workers, created a fun workplace atmosphere to enhance productivity and morale.

However, other employees were not convinced by Gautam's argument. Their comments indicated that they might be trying to simulate what they missed in their nonwork lives with friends and family, but they did not see any management strategy in creating such an ambiance. A sense of denial seemed to surface when Jayanta said, "It's not that we don't have rainy days, but mostly it's sunny side up." The same view was expressed by Maya: "There are challenges ... and we do have targets, but we are pretty satisfied." Echoing the same thought, Ravi said, "It's not that we do not have pressure." But these realizations about the urgency and pressures of work appeared more in spurts that were overshadowed by the general happy and appealing ambiance of this particular workplace. In other words, they seemed to have identified so much with their workplace culture that the disconnect between the casual or nightclub-like environment of the call center and the urgency or business goals of the corporation seemed lost on our research participants. These dilemmas and disconnections resonate with Kuhn's (2006) argument that it is not merely the nature of occupation that determines particular identity formation but a complex amalgam of context-specific discourses.

Finally, the Kolkata Call Center employees seemed to privilege their new and emergent social, familial, and cultural identifications. The young workers described their daily routine as a balancing act between their education, sleep, and work, but they rarely complained and, if they did, they tempered their comments with positive aspects of their workplace and coworkers. Their denial of any sort of loss, including free time and former friends, was somewhat evident when Jayanta talked about "bringing back your school life, college life together," or in Maya's words, viewing the call center as "an extension of college life" rather than a job. Employees also referred to the call center organizing processes through discourse of the family, one of the most important institutions of traditional Indian society. They often described the friends in their workplace as their family and the office as their second home. They never referred to anyone as coworkers or colleagues. Sunil pointed out, "It is like family actually ... everybody knows what is happening in everybody's life." Inherent in this discourse was their desire to reconstruct or reframe their family as being in the workplace. The disruption of traditional social and cultural commitments might prompt this reconstruction, but even so, younger workers still spoke of longing for familial interactions, as indicated by Jayanta:

You really miss out on a lot of quality time with family ... what

makes up for it is the atmosphere at work ... and nothing can make

up for the lost time with the family ... because you miss out on

that time with family, you have to have certain friends to make up

for that time.

Jayanta's articulation brought forth a sense of loss that could be lessened, in part, through quick interactions with family and workplace friends. His views suggested urgency in making up for "lost time with the family." This sense of urgency also was apparent in Pritha's words:

Communication with parents has drastically fallen. I treat my house

like a hotel. Come home, sleep, eat, get ready and leave for work.

Probably catch a few words over the weekend ... hardly any

communication ... but I am not complaining ... we have to make an

effort to make a conversation because we miss out on so much.

In catching up with parents and defining their friends as "family" and the office as "home," workers sought assurance by reconstructing family, or stability in their social and cultural environment. However, the discourse of family that was manifest prominently among the younger workers was missing from the other, older workers. For the young participants, family consisted of parents and siblings; for middle-aged participants, family was comprised of a spouse and children. The older participants seemed to have found a way to strike a balance between work and home. For instance, Rabin admitted that there was a change in his social pattern, but he did not appear perturbed. "It's fine ... Saturday to Sundays, we spend time together, we go out for dinner, friends come over ... earlier, when I was in marketing, I used to be traveling most of the time ... so it's the same thing." In sum, Kolkata Call Center workers, especially for the younger workers, seemed to be more or less constructing new and emergent identifications with their workplace practices, members, and outcomes such that their prior (traditional) modes of work, family, and career engagement and expectations were changing.

DISCUSSION

We were interested in the processes by which workers in a particular Indian call center located in Kolkata expanded upon, 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.

The importance of this line of work is manifold. Through the case study method and examination of workplace discourses influencing identity and identification constructions, we present identity and identification as active processes imbued with agency (Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). We also attend to Monge's (1998) International Communication Association presidential appeal to communication scholars to respond to global changes in their research (p. 144). The discourse and related practices of Indian call center employees provide a rendering of the complexities these Third World transnational workers experience in the context of the global cultural politics.

Furthermore, as one of our reviewers points out, call center employees share many of the same challenges that all service employees face, particularly emotional labor, juxtaposition of urgency with casualness, and tensions between freedom and constraint. The commonality of challenges may indicate paradoxes, including paradoxes of structure, within these experiences that fulfill the interest of transnational corporate power (Stohl & Cheney, 2001). In other words, the findings may lead to broader research questions, such as the following: How do organizational practices within the service industry produce or maintain corporate power?