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劳动力是IT服务/业务流程管理(ITES/BPM)部门中一个关键的“基于语音的”部分，但在许多研究该国作为“世界后台”的增长的研究中，他们一直是重点关注的主题，但人们对服务于国内市场对类似服务日益增长的需求的劳动力知之甚少。事实上，印度多元化、多语种的“面向国内”的呼叫中心行业正越来越多地为新的城市地区的年轻人提供就业机会，特别是在一些较小的(二线和三线)城市中心。然而，人们普遍缺乏对这一快速增长的劳动力的研究，这与“跨国”经济中主导就业的“讲英语的精英”非常不同。由于缺乏知识，我们无法全面了解在快速变化的印度社会经济环境中构成增长和发展的新形式的工作、劳工和生计。为了解决我们知识中的这一显著差距，并建立对发展中经济体当代工作和劳动力转型的更全面的理解，我的博士研究探索了浦那国内呼叫中心代理商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BPM枢纽。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、实地访问和100多次深度访谈中得出结论。基于对数据的综合分析，我的研究表明，国内呼叫中心如何构成了来自中下阶层背景的中等学历青年的理想场所，他们中的许多人表现出对这种就业形式的积极拥护，并对他们总体上无能为力、在工作或角色选择上缺乏选择的主流断言提出异议。其次，这项研究探讨了国内呼叫中心中“专业精神”的概念，揭示了在实际呼叫中心的技能培训和任务执行过程中，这些概念的传播和吸收的不同方式。根据观察和员工自己的叙述，这项研究展示了坚定不移的职业化理念是如何经常受到员工的挑战和自下而上的修改的。最后，这项研究探索了国内呼叫中心员工在劳动力市场上经历的广泛多样性--他们的就业途径和一些员工打造的跨行业职业阶梯的“连接”性质，强调了员工自己的中介机构在这些经历中的作用。总体而言，我的研究结果丰富地展示了印度“低端”新服务工作者的普通工作生活和日常机构的多样性，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情况。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“新兴的”全球南方未被开发和/或“偏僻”的地方的角度，同时“空间化”和“人性化”当代的早熟和不稳定的工作体验。ESRC奖学金将寻求建立和扩展这项研究，同时加强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.