Abstract
Based on an ethnographic exploration of the lives of call centre workers who are young (18–25 years old) and work through the night to serve the 9 am to 5 pm time zones of developed countries, this eloquently written book on the call centre sector in India has two important vantage points. First, middle class-ness and second, flexibility as a contributing attribute that brings new lifestyle and meanings for the middle class youth in India. The book locates the call centre economy, its workers and their lives with the socio-political context of the new middle classes in India. The author has presented the call centre world as a set of symptoms that helps to understand the changing forms of urban Indian middle classes. In addition to this, the study also highlights that for young and labouring subjects in urban India at call centres, flexibility has been noted as a necessary condition for upward mobility. This flexibility of time, space, body and identity provides new meanings of middle class-ness to this urban youth that had been hitherto unemployed and unemployable. This upward mobility is a transition from existing and historical markers of the middle class to an aspiring middle class, a category which has new forms of professional and social etiquette along with economic mobility.
The Introduction provides a thick description of the history, construction and maintenance of call centre corporations and the working of late capitalism in the context of middle classes in India. The second chapter discusses recruitment processes that seek to attract and invite potential fresh graduates from the middle classes and then train them to be suitable workers in a globalised work world. This chapter highlights the deconstruction of night time and safety for the workers and challenges the middle class imaginations of secure jobs, devoid of the idea of shift-based work. Through bodily practices and cultural changes the author has examined how middle class-ness has been mandated with the tension and demands of this employment sector which is operational during the night hours. Middle class as a social construct functions through its habits, rituals and learned daily life. The discussions on the recruitment processes explain to the readers how—in the context of middle class life— an unprecedented sector of employment such as the call centre was normalised.
The third chapter focuses on labour during the night hours as one of the main characteristics of call centre employment. The time zone difference between India and the western countries was bridged by inverting the relation between day and night as workers navigated, negotiated and sometimes succumbed to working the night shift. This section explains how night was constructed for the employees through training, lights, food, coffee, recreation and most importantly security. This chapter also touches on some gender issues as well: the deterrent to work for women that is created both by household responsibilities and men’s objection to women working a nightly routine, and of how the gendered conditioning of temporality had to be broken in order to work in a call centre. Despite the demanding nature of labour, the book explains well that it was not only the financial reward that contributed to the tenability of call centres in India but it was rather a strong promise of new middle class-ness that contributed to the continuous labour supply in this sector.
The fourth chapter of the book highlights how the most suitable sections of middle classes are recruited for call centres—those who have the cultural capital of the English language and those who can harness this capital at call centres. This chapter provides a chronological explanation of the emergence and expansion of English language in India, right from the legacy of British rule and how that legacy created the middle class in India. While discussing the English language in the context of the call centre industry, this chapter discusses how workers struggle with English as the business of the call centre largely depended on their abilities to communicate in smooth and accented English.
Through the theories of affective labour the fifth chapter focuses on how work practices produce collective subjectivities and a society at the workplace. The main highlight of this chapter is an interactive relation between workers and workplace. The workers are constructed by the demands of the workplace but the intimacies and relations at the workplace also create a social system—a form of community, love and kinship within the corporate family.
The author lucidly concludes with an honest confession that by the time this book is read, the call centre industry would have shifted to another location in Southeast Asia. The book also critically examines the assumptions of spatial and temporal separation of this section of workers from its surrounding urban spaces as their lived experiences have been posited to be quite local through narratives of crime, violence, sleeplessness and anxiety. In the late capitalist service economy the repetitive and monotonous call centre work becomes the anchor around which all other aspects of workers’ lives are ordered.
As mentioned earlier, the book frequently argues that in addition to various technologies, flexibility is also one of the techniques which made the call centre a site of labour, aspiration and desire. The author rightly argues that this flexibility was contested through a collective declaration and facilitation by the state, corporation, urban space and bodily efforts but here the author inadequately discusses the role played by the middle class families of these call centre workers, especially of women workers. The night space has always been constructed as a space belonging to the private in the context of the Indian middle class, but when parents allow their children to work in a sector like the call centre, what kinds of negotiations and risks were evaluated by them, especially in the backdrop of middle class morality?
In the literature on the new middle classes, the culture of servitude within middle class homes has also been discussed as an important aspect of contemporary middle class-ness in India (e.g. Ray and Qayum 2009). This book’s main focus is the middle class but the idea of middle class is not only upward aspiration; it is also constructed through its interactions with the lower classes. Call centre organisations also employ people belonging to the lower classes in the social hierarchy. An analysis of the presence of staff members such as security guards, cab drivers, cleaning staff and the staff in the cafeteria would have given a fuller picture of classes within call centres and how middle class youth interacts with this section of employees within their workplaces.
In summary, the book locates the labour politics of late capitalism, wherein young urban middle class workers are selected, trained, constructed and maintained through a regime of temporal, spatial, bodily, cultural flexibilities and attractive remuneration that further promise the lifestyle of the new middle class.