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.
All researchers are positioned by age, gender, race, class,
nationality, institutional affiliation, historical-personal
circumstance, and intellectual predisposition (Chiseri-Strater, 1996).
Being reflexive of the positionality is part of the methodological rigor
that involves reflecting on our journey as researchers and disclosing
the same. Jameson (2004) uses metaphors of vision and voice to explain
the challenge of communication for the researcher. Jameson argues that
vision refers to the reasoning guiding the text, which depends on
one's perspective on and distance from the text. Voice refers to
the writer's linguistic choices that determine the meanings the
writer offers to the text. Hence, it is this complex interaction between
voice and vision that brings multiple possibilities to the
interpretation of the text in a research study. In a sense, it is this
complex interaction that Suchan (2004) calls "authentic,"
which he argues gets clouded in "the perception that we must be
objective, clear, and in control. As a result, often the self or the I
must disappear" (p. 309), which is not desirable. Rather than doing
research, we think of our process as writing. The obligation of social
science to maintaining authority, objectivity, and generalizability
brings "heavy baggage" (Suchan, 2004, p. 308) to the writing
process. Rather than being burdened by the "heavy baggage," we
admit our situatedness in the text, which merits some measure of
disclosure (Chiseri-Strater, 1996).
In our case, disclosures begin with the first author's
association with call centers, which began 5 years ago while working as
a journalist writing articles about economic and organizational changes.
Her journalistic stint provided her opportunities to interact with call
center employees, NASSCOM executives and call center trainers in
Bangalore, a city in South India regarded as the Silicon Valley of the
country. Those firsthand experiences provided the author an introduction
to an emergent new age work culture and identity constructions in India.
As a result, she was already exposed to call center and American
cultural socialization techniques, such as requiring workers to view
sitcoms like Friends to become acclimatized to U.S. popular culture,
adopting American names in workplaces, articulating concerns about
issues such as racism, and learning how to manage safety and health
hazards posed by new work conditions such as night shifts and other
changes from traditional Indian workplace experiences. She also
remembered the sense of euphoria that call centers generated as
corporations promised substantial revenues and solutions to problems of
educated unemployment in India.
Moreover, the first author grew up in Kolkata, which enabled her to
observe call center phenomena within the nation's cultural and
historical contexts. Because of her background, she could note the shift
in the cultural milieu of India that is commensurate with Western
practices such as the Indian call centers' affinity with gizmos or
gadgets that they could buy, their dressing style, their lingo, and
their different talk about family and friendship network involvement.
The second author, a specialist in organizational communication in
general and changing career and work-family processes in particular,
collaborated in study design, data analysis, and manuscript preparation.
Although the first author's observations and past experiences were
integral to the content of this case study, the second author's
expertise and experiences in organizational scholarship and her
questioning of the first author's assumptions and language offered
a critical lens on the subject matter and research process. Moreover,
the American background of the second author complemented the Indian
background of the first author in such a way that somewhat mitigated
against cultural bias.
Kolkata Call Center Case Overview
Our focus group participants all lived and worked in Kolkata, the
capital of the state of West Bengal--the left-dominated intellectual
capital of India that had shied away from foreign capital in the 1980s.
A late entrant in embracing capitalism, Kolkata took longer than the
rest of India to welcome information technology (IT) and IT-enabled
services and is gradually gaining the confidence of the IT community.
Today, almost all the big IT companies in India have set up shop in
Kolkata. These companies account for 5% of the Indian IT and business
process outsourcing market. Kolkata's operations are 12% to 13%
less expensive than Delhi and Mumbai and 11% cheaper than Bangalore and
Hyderabad, the traditional locations for call centers (McCue, 2005).
Like the rest of India, Kolkata is increasingly taking part in
market-based economic reforms. At the same time, it is home to a large
number of poor people. Coexistence of BMWs and hand-pulled carts, plush
apartments and slums, shopping malls and people begging on the streets
reflects the widening economic disparities. The call centers, however,
synergize India's globalization initiative and are housed in modern
office spaces. The call center studied for this project is no exception.
With a capacity of 150 seats operating in three shifts 24/7, this
call center is spread over a sprawling internal area of 20,000 square
feet and is equipped with state-of-the-art technology. These
technologies include intelligent call routing, highly reliable edge
switches ensuring excellent voice clarity, a fully digital voice logging
platform, a data network built on Compaq servers, Nortel switches, and
Compaq and IBM workstations among a host of other features (company Web
site). The office complex, where the call center is housed, consists of
a cluster of buildings in the quieter outskirts of the city earmarked
specifically for IT corporations. Nested within shades of green foliage,
the complex is brightly lit up in the night. The call center in our case
study is located on the fourth floor of an eight-story building
representing a contemporary architectural design.
The entrance of the complex is crowded most of the time as
employees come out at random to take cigarette breaks. Only a few women
are seen smoking in public, but they claim to feel secure outside the
buildings at the main entrance anytime during the day and night as tight
security is ensured in the technology park.
When she approached the Kolkata Call Center, the first author was
greeted by a security guard at the main gate of the complex, and once
the visitor record was entered in a log book, she was directed to the
fourth floor. As the elevator reached its destination, the first author
was greeted by another security guard doubling as a receptionist sitting
fight across from the elevator door. Lavish couches were available for
visitors opposite the receptionist and on both sides of the elevator.
Because it was 9:00 p.m., the regular receptionist was gone. (The call
center did not anticipate official visitors after 6:00 p.m.). It was
only the employees who were expected in the evenings, and they needed
only to swipe their attendance cards at the reception area to enter
their workplace rather than signing a log.
Seated below a wooden panel carrying the company name in glowing
letters, the security guard recorded the visitor's details in a log
book and phoned the author's acquaintance from inside. Unlike in
the United States, no badge was given to the visitor. But the wooden
door to the call center workplace, which could be seen from the
reception area, remained closed. Because aurality involved in the call
center job was important (Shome, 2006), the workplace was separated from
the reception area.
The first author's acquaintance ushered her into the call
center workplace. One might expect a "typical" Indian
white-collar workplace--desks in cubicles with solitary people working
at their computers in a medium-sized, white-walled room. Instead,
hundreds of cubicles screamed an array of loud colors, each one painted
a different color--pink, green, red, yellow, blue, and all shades in
between. On the dark blue walls along the perimeter walls were a few
posters on customer service tips ranging from witty to wise. These
posters encouraged employees to treat customers "royally,"
reinforcing the call center's mission of "guiding the customer
and working with the customer," a mantra inculcated from day one.
The first author was told that all the calls made to or received from
customers were recorded and evaluated for quality assurance.
The extreme end of this large workspace was occupied by a team of
around six men working in a glass enclosure. In formal business attire
of suits and ties, they were busily maintaining the center's
technology. They looked up briefly and then quickly returned to their
tasks. These were the software professionals, responsible for ensuring
the technical support, without which the call center could not function.
Loads of modem-like machines