Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2018. xiv, 232 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-7059-8.
Recent years have seen a sizeable increase in the number of studies dealing with call centre communication, both in the United States and overseas. The approach to such studies has varied greatly, from the technological and managerial to the linguistic and sociological, although a typical flaw of many studies has been the failure to connect with the frontline of research in their disciplines, not least in the social sciences and humanities. That, however, is not a failing of this engaging and well-written study by Jan M. Padios, a US-based scholar of Philippine heritage. Her multi-disciplinary approach in this study utilizes the methodologies of anthropology and ethnography, as well as insights from gender studies and postcolonial theory, in delivering a theoretically rich and multi-layered volume on international call centres in the Philippines.
The volume, which is based on the author’s doctoral research, includes five substantive chapters, book-ended by an introduction and conclusion. The author’s methodology in this study has relied very heavily on ethnographic techniques, with extensive fieldwork in the Philippines, interviewing human resources staff and call centre agents, and observing recruitment and training at a leading Manila call centre. This was also supplemented by spending time with call centre workers off-duty. Call centre jobs, often experienced as personally aspirational and empowering, might be more critically interpreted in terms of (post)colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism; Padios describes call centre agents as being “at the forefront of the country’s postcolonial struggle and thus fac[ing] its contradictions and complexities head-on” (22).
The introduction provides a good deal of background to the current study, with a summary of Philippine colonial experience, under both the Spanish (the mid-sixteenth century until 1898), followed by the US (1898 to 1946), before moving on to a discussion of call centres and BPO (business process outsourcing) operations in the US and abroad, and the notion of call centre work as “relational labour.” Chapter 1, “Listening between the lines: Relational labor, productive intimacy, and the affective contradictions of call centre work” discusses call centres as post-industrial workplaces, impacted by the pressures of relational (in some senses, “emotional”) labour. Chapter 2, on “Contesting skill and value: Race, gender, and Filipino/American relatability in the neoliberal nation-state,” discusses the tendency of call centre work to reproduce patterns of racialized and feminized labour, that ultimately hinder the development of Philippine society.
Chapter 3 presents a detailed account of the author’s first-hand observations of recruitment and training procedures at a leading Manila call centre. Padios describes the interaction of (white male) American managers and trainers and aspirational Filipino workers, which in turn highlights the issue of the “relatability” of Filipino and US people.
Chapter 4, on “Service with a style: Aesthetic pleasures, productive youth, and the politics of consumption,” sets out to question “the emerging perception of Filipino call centre workers as upwardly mobile consumer subjects” (133), and to challenge the view that call centre work has been a source of economic prosperity for increasing numbers of young call centre workers. Chapter 5, on “Queering the call centre: Sexual politics, HIV/AIDS, and the crisis of (re)production,” examines the politics of sexuality in Philippine call centres, which, in recent years, have been characterized in the media to be sites of sexual permissiveness or deviance. One reason for this has been the fact that the call centre industry has generally provided a non-discriminatory and tolerant workplace, open to cross-dressing and to gay and lesbian workers.
In the conclusion, Padios summarizes a number of her arguments and findings, and also argues strongly for the need for unionization in the call centre industry, suggesting that call centre agents should embrace the term “call centre worker” in order to recognize the need for collective organizing. Ultimately, (and consistently throughout the book) Padios is highly skeptical about the effects of the call centre industry on the Philippines, suggesting that its benefits at best might only be “short-term prosperity” rather than “long-term development,” and arguing that “while call centre work may offer opportunities for mobility for those on the margins of the middle class, the call centre industry as a whole has always been tipped in favor of those workers with already existing social, cultural, and financial capital” (185–186).
Overall, Padios is to be congratulated on an insightful and well-written account of Philippine call centres and the links between the BPO industry, international capitalism, and Philippine-US relations. My only caveat is that the author’s desire to explore a central line of argumentation highlighting the ills of global capitalism and “the increasing hegemony of neoliberalism as an economic philosophy” (8) essentially precludes any wider discussion of the possible benefits of BPOs in Philippine society. As has recently been pointed out by commentators such as Steven Pinker and the Roslings (Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, New York: Viking Penguin, 2018; Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), whatever the disadvantages of capitalism, it is nevertheless true (however inconveniently) that the last twenty years have seen dramatic decreases in real poverty throughout the developing world, not unconnected with the spread of free-market capitalism and economic globalization. The available data suggests that absolute poverty in the Philippines is also in decline, although not as dramatically as in other Asian countries. Here, it is surely relevant whether the BPO industry has made a positive contribution to economic development, and to consider the wider context of development in a country where so many working-age adults seek employment overseas. Developmental issues in the Philippines are further complicated by such localized domestic issues as oligarchical cronyism, political violence, and widespread corruption in the government, police, and other public institutions. In this context, there may be another side to the story of call centres, one which might explain the perception of BPO work as a “sunrise industry” more sympathetically. Leaving this reservation to one side, this is an excellent and intelligent book, and (from a humanities and social sciences perspective) arguably the best study of Philippine call centres available today.
Kingsley Bolton
Stockholm University, Stockholm