Abstract
In Neutral Accent, A. Aneesh brings us into the world of virtual cross-cultural communication through his in-depth ethnography of GoCom, a call center located in Gurgaon, India, that caters to clients in the United Kingdom and the United States and specializes in telemarketing, reselling mortgages, and mobile phone services. Using interviews, observations, and participation as a GoCom worker, he shows the unintended consequences of globalization—how even in places thought of as emblems of cross-cultural communication, cities and people’s identities, languages, and bodies are increasingly disconnected from their immediate surroundings.
Two of Aneesh’s most important contributions in this book are his theoretical advances in language and identity construction. First, he unravels the puzzle of how workers and customers, who are disconnected from one another not only in terms of physical space, but also in cultural knowledge, references, and logics, communicate with one another. Communication is able to occur, he argues, because call center workers are trained in two processes: neutralization, or “attempts at pruning unwanted cultural particulars,” and mimesis, “simulating desired cultural elements” (p. 54). Rather than try to imitate particular regional accents, call workers cultivate a “neutral accent” of the English language that cannot be identified with a particular location. They attempt to erase any place-based signifiers in their speech, while also recoding colloquial terms they are unfamiliar with to something they understand (e.g., “john” for the toilet) and mimicking appropriate cultural responses to common situations. For example, they “had to acquire the habit of feeling sorry, for instance, for someone whose spouse had met with an accident but without losing the track of where the conversation was supposed to go” (p.65). By disentangling these processes of neutralization and mimesis, Aneesh provides a nuanced account of how global communication actually works. Communication is not just the diffusion of a hegemonic English language. Rather, English is curated in a particular way. This view of a curated English language, with particularities pruned away and everything else recoded into familiar, local understandings, provides an exciting lens through which to understand the diffusion and use of language worldwide.
The second major contribution of Aneesh’s work involves the construction of a system identity based on “algocracy,” or electronic codes attached to an individual. These identities are constructed through electronic information and differ from bureaucratic or social identities because system identities are created without a person’s conscious awareness and they are constantly being reconstructed with each electronic footprint a person makes (for example, a credit score is one such identity that is constantly being recreated). These identities are not for personal consumption. Rather, they are for others: advertisers, banks, hospitals, insurance companies, and the like. Aneesh shows how call centers use predictive electronic dialers to connect workers to people with a particular set of system identities. This development of a “system identity” has far-reaching consequences not just for call centers and their client bases, but for a wide range of researchers interested in globalization, surveillance, consumption, and work. It provides a framework for understanding the unintended consequences of the electronic-fication of our everyday lives and the proliferation of mobile devices, applications, and credit and debit card use.
Aneesh also identifies Gurgaon as a place disconnected from its surrounding community. It is a city—or a set of “mini cities”—unto itself, an affluent island with residential and commercial properties and a special economic zone that is considered “foreign territory” as it relates to economic laws of the land. It was a “nonplace on the cultural map of India” prior to its development, andnow it continues to be a “nonplace” (p.13). However, its current character as a “nonplace” is because of “its evasion of memory and roots” (p.14). The built architecture of the city is meant to mimic Western countries, rather than its own local and national Indian history. Aneesh argues that this new version of Gurgaon “has not evolved from old to new; it has kept no features of the old,” and contrasts the former open bazaars to the current malls that occupy the space (p.24). Yet, a transformation from open bazaar to mall does not seem as though no “features of the old” were kept. A city of malls is a different form of open bazaars, one that more heavily controls who enters, who shops, and who leaves—indeed, he finds no beggars in the “new” Gurgaon.
Yet, it’s not such a transformation that the purposes of the space cannot be linked. It also raises questions: were none of the stores in any of the malls of Indian origin? Were signs only in English or were they in Hindi or another Indian language? Were the residents and shoppers all non-Indian? I ask for more information because we should keep in mind the multitude of actors in a society who have their own sets of interests. In addition to catering to foreigners, does Gurgaon cater to elite Indians? I also wonder whether place does matter, but in a different way—does the fact that these call centers have British and U.S. clients and are located in an Indian city, as opposed to a city in another country, matter? Do the historical connections and legacies of British colonialism facilitate their successful creations?
Aneesh also weaves together natural and social science empirical research to analyze the unintended consequences of call center work hours, which are in line with the time zones of their customer bases, including restrictions to family life, transportation problems, and physical effects. Aneesh points out at the end of Chapter Five that these problems are not something limited to call center employees. Yet, it is also not something that is necessarily “new” in this era of increasing interconnectedness. Many people with lower socio-economic status have engaged in varied forms of night work—whether prostitution, janitorial services, security/police work, volunteer social services (e.g., hotlines), or fast food—for decades. On one hand, the increasing speed and interconnectedness of the current age of globalization involves the proliferation of such work to new realms and increasing numbers of jobs, as Aneesh contends. On the other hand, to what extent have poor, minority, and women workers experienced such night shifts and their unintended consequences while also maintaining families? Do the call workers of his study represent a shift of this type of work to the relative middle class and more educated in India? How might this align with shifting priorities with regard to balancing work, family, and ambition?
In Neutral Accent, Aneesh has produced a well-written, clear, and concise manuscript that unravels how communication actually works in so-called centers of cross-cultural interaction. He provides several important and creative contributions to our knowledge about globalization, inequality, identity construction, and work, and does so by locating the multiple disconnections that are reproduced when people of different groups virtually meet.