Labour Geographies of India's New Services: The Working Lives of Agents in the ITES-BPM Sector

虽然印度“面向国际”的呼叫中心员工是it支持服务/业务流程管理（ITeS/ BPM）部门的一个关键“基于语音”的部分，一直是许多研究印度作为“世界后台”增长的研究的重点，但对其国内市场对类似服务日益增长的需求所知不多。事实上，印度多样化和多语种的“面向国内”呼叫中心行业正越来越多地为新兴城市区域的年轻人提供就业机会，特别是在一些较小的城市中心（“二线和三线”）。然而，关于这一快速增长的劳动力的学术研究普遍缺乏，这与“跨国”ITeS-BPM经济中主导就业的“说英语的精英”很不一样。这种知识的缺乏使我们无法全面了解在快速变化的印度社会经济背景下构成增长和发展的新形式的工作、劳动和生计。为了解决我们在知识上的这一显著差距，并对发展中经济体的工作和劳动力的当代转变建立更全面的理解，我的博士研究探索了浦那市国内呼叫中心座席工作生活的不同方面。浦那是一个快速崛起的“二线”大都市，也是印度的ITeS-BPM中心。我的研究采用定性的“人种学案例研究”方法，从2015年11月至2016年10月期间在浦那进行的参与者观察、实地考察和100多次深度访谈中得出结论。基于对数据的综合分析，我的研究显示了国内呼叫中心是如何成为中下阶层背景的受过中等教育的年轻人的理想场所的，他们中的许多人表现出对这种就业形式的积极支持，并对他们整体无能为力、在工作或角色选择方面缺乏选择的主流主张提出质疑。其次，该研究处理了国内呼叫中心的“专业主义”概念，揭示了这些概念在实际呼叫中心的技能培训和任务表现中传播和吸收的不同方式。根据观察和员工自己的叙述，这里的研究表明，“自上而下”的专业主义观念是如何经常受到员工“自下而上”的挑战和改造的。最后，该研究探讨了国内呼叫中心员工劳动力市场经历的广泛多样性——他们的就业途径的“连字符”性质和一些员工打造的跨部门职业阶梯，强调了员工自己的中介在这些经历中的作用。总的来说，我的研究结果丰富地反映了印度“低端”新服务工人的普通工作生活和日常代理的多样性，突出了它使社会向上流动的例子，但也展示了它受到限制的场合。在这样做的过程中，我的研究扩展了“混合”（经济/发展）地理学议程，试图从“新兴”全球南方未开发和/或“偏僻”地方的角度，立即“空间化”和“人性化”不稳定和不稳定工作的当代经验。ESRC奖学金将寻求建立和扩展这项研究，同时提高我在博士期间发展的技能，为学术生涯做准备。

Whilst India's 'international-facing' call centre workforce, a key 'voice-based' segment of the IT-enabled services/ Business Process Managmet (ITeS/ BPM) sector, has been the subject of focus in many studies researching the country's growth as the 'world's back-office', not much is known about the workforce that serves the growing appetite for similar services in its domestic market. Indeed, India's diverse and multi-lingual 'domestic-facing' call-centre industry is increasingly providing employment opportunities to young people across new urban-regional geographies, specifically in some of the smaller ('Tier-2 and Tier-3') urban centres. However, there is a general lack of scholarship on this fast-expanding workforce, which is quite unlike the 'English-speaking elite' that dominates employment in the 'transantional' ITeS-BPM economy. This lack of knowledge prevents us from gaining a holistic understanding of new forms of work, labour and livelihoods that are constitutive of growth and development in the fast-changing socio-economic context of India. To address this marked gap in our knowledge and build a more integrative understanding of contemporary transformations in work and labour in developing economies, my PhD research explored different aspects of domestic call centre agents' working-lives in Pune city - a fast-emerging 'Tier-2' metropolis and a ITeS-BPM hub in India. Adopting a qualitative 'ethnographic case-study' approach, my research drew from participant observations, site-visits, and more than 100 in-depth interviews in Pune between November 2015 and October 2016. Based on the combined analysis of the data, my research showed how domestic call centres constituted sites of aspiration for the moderately educated youth from lower-middle class backgrounds, many of whom demonstrated an active espousal of this form of employment and contest mainstream assertions of their overall powerlessness and lack of choice in work or role selection. Second, the research tackled ideas of 'professionalism' in domestic call centres, revealing the different ways in which these notions were transmitted and imbibed during skills-trainings and task-performance on the actual call centre floor. Relying on observations and workers' own narratives, the research here demonstrated how firm-enforced ideas of professionalism 'from above' got regularly challenged and reworked 'from below' by workers. Finally, the research explored the wide diversity in domestic call centre workers' labour market experiences - the 'hyphenated' nature of their employment pathways and the cross-sector career staircases that some workers forged, highlighting the role of workers' own agency in these experiences. Overall, my research findings provided a rich representation of the diversity of ordinary working-life and everyday agency of 'low-end' new services workers in India, highlighting instances when it enables upward social mobility, but also showcased occasions when it got constrained. In doing so my research extended the 'hybrid' (economic/ development) geographies agenda, seeking to at once 'spatialise' and 'humanise' contemporary experiences of precarity and precarious work from the standpoint of under-explored and/or 'out-of-the-way' places in the 'emerging' global South. The ESRC fellowship will seek to build on and extend this research along with enhancing the skills I developed during my PhD, in preparation for an academic career.