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This chapter, written by Ann Kristina Hultgren and Deborah Cameron, is concerned with questions in telephone interactions between customers and service personnel (“agents”) in a Scottish call center that is part of a large insurance company; the data involve inbound calls initiated by the customers. The company imposes standards on the agents relating to both efficiency and customer care, applying the same closely controlled strategies to both. The inherent tension between the two sets of objectives puts agents in the position of constantly trying to determine what balance will be acceptable to their superiors. The chapter considers how these conditions affect the use of questions between agents and customers. The authors conclude that power in this interaction belongs to neither of the participants but is located rather in the call center system. [129 words]

This chapter argues that organisational control and accounting’s role in it has become an increasingly digitised and technologically enabled process. New centres of calculation have emerged within post-industrial organisations which, in turn, are facilitating more disembedded and intensified forms of accounting control. This post-industrial phenomenon of organisational control is examined by drawing on a case study of an Australian call centre.

This chapter examines organizational restructuring in major telecommunications firms or corporate groups, along with their implications for employees working across networked call centers. Telecommunications employers have used restructuring measures such as outsourcing, subsidiary creation, and consolidation of jobs in both the United States and Germany to reduce costs, often with the effect of weakening or avoiding collective agreements. Managers either moved work or sold locations to call center subcontractors with substantially lower union density, few collective agreements, and in Germany, weaker works councils. Using a number of case studies, this chapter compares the strategies adopted by labor unions and works councils at major telecommunications firms toward organizational restructuring, and their effects on management strategy and worker outcomes. It shows that organizational restructuring not only had a disorganizing effect on industrial relations institutions in the telecommunications sector, but also has made it more difficult for unions to establish new institutions across the more decentralized “production networks” used by companies to organize their call center work.

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.

This chapter examines the strategies employed by U.S. and German telecommunications firms and their subcontractors to reorganize call center jobs in hope of improving the productivity and quality of customer service and sales. Matched case studies in these two industries show that despite similar strategies and objectives, managers in each country established very different employment systems. Labor unions in the United States were unable to prevent managers from intensifying monitoring and discipline to increase productivity. In contrast, unions and works councils in Germany used their strong codetermination rights to promote a more professional, or high-involvement, model of work design that safeguarded employee autonomy and discretion. This chapter highlights the importance of strong institutional supports for workplace democracy in encouraging management to adopt high-road approaches to reorganizing jobs and motivating workers.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the current practices and issues relating to English language and communication, based on research in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry since 2004. It also discusses call center discourse in the Philippines, describing preliminary findings relating to features of these interactions and communication problems commonly faced by customer service representatives (CSRs). It also considers what the language implications are of this globalized movement offshore, and what kind of research could inform the development of language support programs for its workforce, initiatives that can better respond to and accommodate the diversity and complexities of the BPO context.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore the activities that human beings, in their roles of service providers and customers, engage in to supply and demand a service over the phone. It looks at the way in which language, understood as a cultural tool, mediates action and how this, in turn, reflects socio-cultural practices. It discusses service encounters over the phone, call centres and intercultural communication, and the ordinary-institutional continuum. The chapter then considers previous research on openings and closings in institutional calls.

This chapter provides an analysis of the sequences found in the openings of the inbound and outbound calls, using Zimmerman's (1984, 1992) model as a point of departure. The calls in question are nonemergency calls, that is, they are calls in which a telephone agent aims to sell a specific commodity, in this case a holiday unit, to a (prospective) client. Given the more negotiable nature of the institutional setting examined and the fact that, in most cases, there is, or has been, an existing relationship between the client and the company, the participants' orientation to pattern the interaction as quasi-formal or informal should not come as a surprise. The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first presents the analysis of the inbound calls; the second analyzes outbound calls. In both cases, the in-house rules for receiving and placing calls are discussed before offering the structural account of the calls themselves. The chapter concludes with a summary of findings.

This chapter examines the extent to which the case studies discussed earlier are representative of broader trends in the U.S. and German call center industries, as well as of international developments. Survey data show that Germany's call centers were more likely to adopt high-involvement practices, but take-up of some of these practices was strongest where both labor unions and works councils were present. At the same time, patterns of inequality were similar. Average pay and working conditions differed between call centers, with subcontractors having low pay and low collective bargaining coverage in both countries. A comparison of survey results from other countries in North America and Europe also show within-country variation in wages and working conditions, but countries varied somewhat in the structure of union and works council representation as well as in patterns of outcomes.

This chapter examines the economy of familiarity that runs through constructions of customer service workers in India. Like the economy of difference, the economy of familiarity occurs when familiarity is put to work by “involving circuits of production, exchange and consumption.” In the case of the Indian customer service industry, familiarity works to create an “imagined kinhood” between workers in India and those in the West. Such a kinhood is enacted through the notion of professionalism, which is actualized in work processes in India through processes of control. This chapter explores the labor processes through which Western work norms are enacted in Indian call centers. It shows that becoming an ideal transnational customer service worker involves a constant process of enacting, revisioning, and resisting distinctions between the West and India, modern and backward, progressive and traditional. Finally, it argues that Indians are positioned as a model workforce for transnational service work through a well-orchestrated public relations machinery.

This chapter outlines the research perspective adopted and describes the ways in which the data for this study were collected. The data for this book was obtained from the Latin American call centre operations of a multinational holiday exchange company, which is run along similar lines to time shares organisations worldwide. The discussion covers data and ethics, documentary analysis, non-participant observation, interviews and telephone conversations.

This chapter examines transnational customer service work as a new touchstone of globalization and situates it within contemporary social configurations of race, gender, nationalism, and class. It first provides an overview of several histories that provide elements of the “map” to account for the remarkable growth of the Indian call center industry; these histories include the establishment of schooling infrastructure during colonial rule, state economic and immigration policies, and capital investments in the West aimed at cultivating opportunities for lower labor costs. The chapter proceeds by considering the recent growth of India's technology-related service industry in relation to the broader trends of the transnationalization of service work. It explains how the globalization of service work offers a window into the microprocesses of global economic capitalism. It also analyzes the lived experiences of call center workers and how they straddle three kinds of borders: class borders, citizenship borders, and the borders between production and social reproduction.

This chapter examines how cultural cloning is facilitated through time, with particular emphasis on the ways in which customer service agents are required to occupy the same temporal space as their customers. In call centers, time is controlled via notions of professionalism that are closely associated with the clock. Due to their long shifts and night work, customer service agents often perform their duties in a state of physical exhaustion. Given the synchronous nature of transnational customer service work, agents' jobs follow Western clocks, and many of them cite their night-time shifts as the most challenging feature of their jobs. This chapter discusses the social and organizational responses to the challenges involved in working at night. It shows how time norms like punctuality and time management are presented to agents as universally superior naturalized dimensions of Western work cultures. It also considers the gendered nature of time in relation to night work.

This chapter examines the ways in which national interests are defined and nationalisms exercised through calls between Indian customer service agents and Western customers. Through training and work process, the difference between India and the West is enacted to allow Indians to be “understood” by Westerners. Overall, this difference is constructed not only in terms of language and culture but also in terms of nationalist policies and histories. Before discussing how nationalist discourses are expressed in relation to Indian customer service work at call centers, this chapter considers how Indian customer service workers are distanced in terms of their physical location. It also looks at the dramatic shift from locational masking to the open acknowledgment of work in India in the context of Western debates on outsourcing occurring between 2003 and 2004.

This chapter examines the emotion work of deference and caring among Indian customer service agents. Deference and caring are central to call center work; emotion work involves the enactment of femininity for both male and female employees. Workers serve and care for Western customers by reproducing hierarchies present in many traditionally feminized service occupations such as nursing and domestic work. This chapter explores gender and racism in relation to the feminization of emotion work and how emotion work enables call center agents to learn to not take the rude behavior of customers personally, thus maintaining self-worth in the face of abusive customers. It shows how aggressive and abusive behavior is normalized in the context of encounters between Westerners and Indians, which provide a forum for a continual process of racialization.

This chapter examines how the neoliberal economy permeates into everyday practices of local lives, enabled by the support of local infrastructures. As India defines its place in the global economy as the high-tech solution center for business operations, new forms of work and work environments have emerged in the communication and information-technology sectors. The media in the United States and India glamorize these jobs and depict the employees as enjoying their fiber-optic journey into a new identity. Indeed, a popular thread of reportage claims that call-center jobs have liberated Indian youth and turned them into avid consumers, thereby providing a necessary push to the traditionalism of Indian society, especially with regard to women. However, the ways in which gender issues are set into motion by globalization are far more complex. The chapter thus assesses how new media technologies are reorganizing labor practices and everyday life for women in India.

This chapter examines the language training undertaken by prospective customer service agents in India before they are allowed to interact with Western customers. Language training is justified in terms of the need for Western clients to understand and be understood by workers, but it also serves to establish a starting point of difference, where all Indians, irrespective of their location, background, or education, are deemed deficient in their use of English. This chapter considers the processes through which India's customer service workers are constructed as “different” from Westerners. It explains how Indian call center agents are embodied through their voices, and are known as those who speak a strange and corrupted form of the English language. It argues that becoming a transnational customer service worker involves “sounding right”; this has been termed “aesthetic labor.”