Doctorial Dissertation Research: Understanding Transnational Labor Formations in the Indian Call Center Economy

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Under the supervision of Dr. John Hartigan, graduate student Mathangi Krishnamurthy will carry out an ethnographic study of business call centers in India, with a particular focus on the high rates of worker turnover. Since early 2000, businesses in the United States increasingly have outsourced their customer support centers to India as part of global business expansion and optimization practices. Stakeholders in business and government view the international call center industry as an advanced economic solution for both corporations and developing nations. Indian and international media, on the other hand, criticize this emerging service sector as surreptitiously replacing workers in the west with maltreated and culturally alienated Indian youth. By exploring the high rate of labor turnover in Indian call centers, this project seeks to understand how Indian call center workers portray and live their own lives in relation to the practices, representations, and material effects of the transnational call center economy. Ethnographic fieldwork will be carried out in Pune, a prominent university town and call center hub in Western India. The researcher will work in a call center; she also will interview current and former workers, as well as those who train and supervise them. The research will examine workers' experiences in relation to 1) labor management practices within call centers, (2) contentious international and local debates on the call center industry, and (3) socio-economic transformations that accompany and frame the development of this urban call center economy. The project also will incorporate content from the public domain such as newspaper articles, documentaries, news presentations, and online forums to contextualize the experiences of workers within the debates surrounding the industry. The research approach is integrative and applies methods and theory from socio-cultural anthropology, urban studies, and critical business management analyses in order to contribute to knowledge on the ramifications of global capital movement.