Negotiating Globalization: Men and Women of India's Call Centers

Abstract

Most accounts of globalization are accounts of economic integration and cultural flows. There are few studies, however, of the ways global processes enter into an individual's personality. Based on a yearlong ethnographic study of India's international call centers in 2004–2005, this article examines how global integrations are felt, experienced, negotiated, and embodied by call center agents. Reformulating the thesis of system and lifeworld, this study aims to examine the globalization of the lifeworld, uncovering the effects of global system integration on the lifeworld. As sites of real‐time communicative integration across continents, India's call centers are revealing of the ways in which concrete social and personal lives are subordinated to global system imperatives, integrating in real time two different linguistic worlds in radically different time zones.

Going Global: New Pathways for Adolescents and Emerging Adults in a Changing World

“…Or to give another example, Dutch college students in Holland have recently started camel farms to sell camel's milk to Moroccan and Somali immigrants, a career path greeted with puzzlement by their college professors (Heingartner, 2009). Also, as Aneesh (2012) discusses, young adults in India's call centers balance the norms of their own culture with the economic demand to internalize the norms of the distant cultures of their phone customers. One important similarity between ethnic and cultural identity formation pertains to the issue of dominance.…”

Psychology and Globalization: Understanding a Complex Relationship

“…Within the United States, these changes manifest themselves in a number of ways with important psychosocial implications and consequences: corporate and small‐business downsizing, mergers, monopolies (e.g., oil, banking, airlines, agriculture), automatization, bankruptcies, progressive layoffs, outsourcing, temporary hires, pension defaults, free trade compacts, and the extensive relocation of both production and clerical services (e.g., manufacturing, information and technology services) to foreign countries which offered the cheapest labor and the least control (e.g., Central America, China, India, Philippines, Vietnam). Aneesh (2012) describes the psychological and cultural dislocation created by the use of off‐shore call centers; Christens and Collura (2012) discuss how the economic practices of globalization have placed the primary burden of economic risk on individuals and families as opposed to society.…”

“…Norasakkunkit and Uchida (2011) point out that the impact of globalization can vary by region within one country. Aneesh (2012) eloquently describes the culturally discordant experience of, on the one hand, the call center work in India and, on the other, the customer she is speaking with in the United States. Thus, it is important to grasp that the impact and influence of globalization changes according to context and setting; we cannot assume that the process or consequences of globalization will be the same for each individual and each community (Diaz & Zirkel, 2012).…”

“…In some instances, the events, forces, and changes associated with globalization may be welcome in any setting; but it is also possible that they can be imposed directly or indirectly , as often occurs when Western cultural values, products, and ways‐of‐life penetrate a culture and challenges traditional ways of life (e.g., Aneesh, 2012; Jensen & Arnett, 2012; Marsella, 1978, 2006). It is notable that many Muslim cultures and nations have seen this process as a “cultural invasion” undermining their religion and cultural values.…”

Globalization, Psychology, and Social Issues Research:An Introduction and Conceptual Framework

“…The research and analysis presented is descriptive as well as analytical and uses a variety of research approaches. The various manuscripts take us to the lives of adolescents throughout the world (Jensen & Arnett, 2012), to the economically impoverished homes of rural Haiti (Diaz, Schneider, & Pwogwam Santé Mantal, 2012), to the bustling world of call center workers in India (Aneesh, 2012), to the world of activists in Middle America (Christens & Collura, 2012;), to the political ideology of U.S. citizens as regards globalization (Breckenbridge & Moghaddam, 2012), to the attitudes of White America towards Chinese Americans in the United States (Shimpi & Zirkel, 2012) and to the college classrooms of Germany and the United States (Swim & Becker, 2012). The researchers invites us into places where Starbucks and McDonald's do not exist and where the impact of globalization is manifest through the unseen hand of economic forces.…”