Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans-and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans-and for each other. Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between-between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface: On the GroundAcknowledgments Introduction: Answering the Call1. The Rhythm of Ambition: Power Temporalities and the Production of the Call Center Agent in U.S. Popular Culture2. “I Used to Call Myself ‘Elvis’”: Suspended Mobilities in Indian Call Centers3. “I Interact with People from All Over the World”: The Politics of Virtual Citizenship4. “I’m Going to Sing It the Way Eminem Sings It”: India’s Network GeographyConclusion: Returning the Call NotesBibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Aimee Carrillo Rowe is associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Northridge.

Review :
"Answer the Call takes on the investigation of call centers in India and uses that case study to help us to theorize, in more supple and nuanced ways, the multiple shifts in consciousness and social imaginaries that contemporary globalizing forces enable." -Jane Desmond, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "This engagingly written book is an innovative analysis of the work that is done in call centers in India. The authors offer a careful academic examination of the time-virtual space issues connected to workers at these centers by asking readers to think about call-center work as a form of migration. The book draws on a number of disparate academic areas, demonstrating the strengths and necessity of interdisciplinary thinking in the social sciences. Readers will never think about call centers in the same way again." -Kum-Kum Bhavnani, University of California, Santa Barbara "A very relevant and timely work that addresses the issues of inclusion and exclusion in relation to globalization."-CHOICE  "The persistence of call centers and India’s active participation in the global market make Answer the Call highly relevant for understanding of these communities."-Oral History Review "An important inquiry into how conceptions of national identity, the nation-state, and the borders between them are still present and defended in a globalized context."-Pacific Affairs