‘Who is Grace?’: Affect, Work, and Gender in Bangalore Call Centres

Abstract

Call centre workers are expected to 'listen' and provide both practical assistance and emotional support to customers across the world. At the same time, they are supposed to subscribe to cultural and social traditions that ensure that they remain within family and societal control. This article discusses gender and work transformations of call centre workers in the context of the networks they create in their engagements, not only with their managers and co-workers but with their invisible clients and families and communities.

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

“…CCs have been studied in various industries and countries which demonstrates their importance. For example, previous studies have examined a diversity of international and national industries including: health (Guillot and Fung, 2010; Rohleder et al , 2013; Malm et al , 2013; Liebow et al , 2012; Bowers and Fish, 2013), pharmaceutical and medical, mobile telecommunications (Anaman et al , 2008), water utilities (Olstein, 2009), academic libraries (Murphy and Cerqua, 2012), car rental (Takeuchi et al , 2007, 2009), Amazon.com (Keblis and Chen, 2006), banking (van Dun et al , 2012; Hakan Özkan, 2012; Surana and Singh, 2012), telecommunications (Tate and van der Valk, 2008), internal IT helpdesks (Padmanabhan and Kummamuru, 2007), telecom service providers in Europe (Visweswariah et al , 2010), the service industry (van der Aa et al , 2012) and call centers in Bangalore (Ghosh, 2013), India (Surana and Singh, 2012; Poster, 2013; Taylor et al , 2013; Das et al , 2013; Aneesh, 2012; Nandialath et al , 2012), the Philippines (Hechanova, 2013), Germany (Gerpott, 2012), South Africa (Hunter and Hachimi, 2012), Hungary (Dezső et al , 2010), Australia (Owens, 2014), Malaysia (Abdullateef and Salleh, 2013), Egypt (Kamel and Hussein, 2008), and the Netherlands (van der Aa et al , 2012).…”

South Africa’s Call Centre Industry: The Emerging Challenges of a Growing Destination in the Global South

“…It is observed that the phenomenon of call centres "has been tackled from many dimensions and perspectives in an attempt to explain this relatively new and different part of the world of work and employment" (Paulet 2008, p. 306). A number of issues have been scrutinised with research across a range of countries and contexts with the Indian experience among the best documented in recent writings (see Ramesh, 2004;Penter et al 2009;Agrawal et al 2010;Kuruvilla & Ranganathan, 2010;Mishra, 2011;Vira & James, 2011;Suchet, 2012;Valdyanathan, 2012;Aziz, 2013;Ghosh, 2013;Taylor et al 2013).…”

“…The influence of call centres upon changing the lives and identities of young workers is a further investigatory issue. In Indian research Ghosh (2013) traces the gender and work transformations of call centre workers in Bangalore. From a further Bangalore-based study Mishra (2011) unpacks the impacts of call centres upon young women subjected to the experiences of a western world in a global milieu in both real and virtual ways.…”