Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xiv, 242 pp. US$75.00, cloth, ISBN: 978-0-8166-8938-5; US$25.00, paper, ISBN: 978-0-8166-8939-2.
In Answer the Call, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sheena Malhotra, and Kimberlee Pérez attempt to situate, and make sense of, Indian call centres in economies of neoliberal outsourcing projects, and the labour and time arbitrage they solicit. They claim that uneven compressions of time and space are always and already unequal and contested relationships that open new modes of access while also furthering forms of exclusion. The title adeptly refers to Althusser’s discussion of “interpellation” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Monthly Review Press, 1971) to describe the “hailing” of “US power and global capital” ensconced in the phone calls of Americans to customer service centres in India, that materializes call centre agents as particular types of subjects (19). Answer the Call takes particular interest in how “the call” of these neoliberal projects are “answered,” how people negotiate these experiences, and what processes emerge that are defined by, and redefine, these global relationships.
The authors draw from call centre literature and migration studies to trace the impact of call centre labour on workers and suggest new ways of thinking about the categories and geographies naturalized in these discussions. They focus on how the international interactions and virtual movements involved in this labour actually remake workers’ lives, desires, and subjectivities. They pay particular and innovative attention to the ways in which call centre agents reorient their temporal, relational, and material lives towards the United States to serve the demands of a globalized market economy and the often more privileged global subjects calling from across the world. Because of virtual connections to other places, agents’ labour both permits and constrains travel, forming “virtual borderlands” where callers and agents meet but where there remains a conceptual and territorial boundary between national belongings. According to the authors, this sense of movement creates migrant workers who become a diaspora community living inside, rather than outside, the homeland (142).
In chapter 1, Carrillo Rowe, Malhotra, and Pérez develop the concept of “power temporalities” which is central to their theoretical contribution. Time can be structured differently and unevenly and imbalances legitimize particular hegemonic influences. The authors use several American documentaries and reality TV shows on Indian call centres to show how power temporalities are normalized through developmental time structures based on racialized, gendered, and Westernized narratives of modernity (33). The way these programs portray call centres and workers situate India in a traditional past that is behind the United States in its progress towards modernity. Moreover, white, male narrators are contrasted with brown, Indian femininity, reiterating racial and gendered power relationships that give moral power and authority to America (50). The authors suggest these productions are intended to alleviate anxieties towards perceived threats to America’s identity and global position of power.
Chapter 2 turns to workers’ experiences in order to explore the implications of call centre labour for their sense of embodied self and how it reconfigures their connections and desires. Call centre agents often imagine alternate identities in order to interact with American callers, manipulating their bodies, interests, and communicative practices to perform and embody these identities. Agents also work night shifts to use the time difference between India and the United States. Such processes estrange many employees from relationships and daily life in India, effectively orienting them towards America and preferencing the realities of consumers. While social mobility achieved from good pay and increased confidence does occur, some agents also feel diasporic loss or experience physical sickness as the long hours and stresses of this labour are manifest in the body, testing the limits of global subjectivities (174).
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the anxiety that these interactions and movements incite, not only in the United States, but also in India, focusing on the politics of citizenship and national identity. In chapter 3 the authors argue that even though market capitalism, globalization, and new forms of entitlements redefine territorialized notions of citizenship, current conceptions still include the national as well as the transnational. Agents are “caught in politics of recognition” where both statements congratulating authentic assimilation as well as overtly racist exclusions (embodied racialization also occurs through aural registers) serve to reify a cohesive concept of “Americanness” that is rearticulated and monitored by callers (31). However, workers also contest national exclusions by asserting their position as global players.
Expressions of national anxiety do not occur only in virtual space, nor are they reserved to American national ideologies. Chapter 4 explores the implications of the “spilling” of American identities into the daily lives of call centre workers, and thus, into Indian society. This process causes concern regarding Indian national identity and its stakes for India’s future. Workers, families, and managers expressed feelings of cultural loss that are often in tension with desires for social mobility and global involvement. Call centre agents are seen as participating in nation building while also disrupting and Westernizing the nation (174).
Answer the Call both challenges space- and place-based geographies and problematizes the universalization of the discourse on globalization and interconnectivity. It shows how such discussions often ignore power relationships inherent in globalized space-time relations that privilege the experiences and time of some people over that of others, silencing the experiences of those whose labour produces and facilitates these connections. It is 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 of continual physical and virtual migrations across territorial lines. The authors do crucial work to tie these discussions to the demonstration of how difference, including gender, racial, and sexual difference, is created in a discourse of national belonging. They also take a step forward in addressing the role of technology in those processes.
More attention could be given to the material artifacts and procedures involved in call centres, however, as well as the technologies themselves, which are drawing attention from the bourgeoning field of science and technology studies. Future works addressing the call centre industry would do well to look more closely at how the devices, codes, and production of technology, as well as their underlying ideologies, participate in difference- and similarity-making and are significant mediators and actors in forming the identities of call centre agents and the customers who call them.
Eileen Sleesman
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
pp. 689-692