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This dissertation is concerned with the everyday lives of transnational Indian call center workers when situated within the global politics of voice -based outsourcing . The call center economy gained impetus in early 2000 -2001 , when multinational corporations began to train young men and women in India to mask their spatial and temporal location , in order that they could serve customers in the US and the UK . Taking calls through the night to serve the work day of Western consumers , these customer service agents were asked to assume a different name , location , and cultural and language markers , as part of the requirements of work . I explore the ways in which these young , middle -class workers located themselves within practices , contentious representations , and material outcomes of this transnational outsourcing economy . Through ethnographic research in Pune , a prominent university town and call center hub in western India , I investigate (1 ) everyday life in and out of the call center , (2 ) labor management practices within call centers , and (3 ) the socio -economic and cultural transformations that accompanied and framed the development of the urban Indian call center economy .
This research engages with the machinations of multinational corporations as they incorporate large number of labor forces worldwide into transnational work . It builds on three main bodies of theory - flexible or late capital and flexibility , the South Asian postcolonial nation -state , and affective labor . Through these , I provide a thick description of the history , construction , maintenance and disruption of this site , as also the ways in which this particular story of capital was stabilized . I engage with questions such as , what complex negotiations underlie the ostensible success of new service economies in India ? What are its cultural , political and economic determinants and ramifications ? What grounds are the claims of state , capital and culture being contested or reified upon , and what do such negotiations mean for service workers within the landscape of urban India ?
This dissertation shows how the practice of everyday life in this transnational milieu is best explained as the collusion and tension between the contested socio -economic spaces of the new Indian middle -classes and middle -class -ness , and an ungrounded discourse of mobile and flexible capital . The stories of call center workers in this analysis are the stories of particular subjects called upon and striving to be constantly flexible in order to successfully become middle -class and global in the same breath , one often seamlessly overlapping the other . |
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