| Call centres are high on the list of service industry jobs that have been outsourced and relocated to India. Conditions of employment in such call centres are unique. Though call centre employees live and work in India, they are required to organise their lives in terms of American or European time, celebrations and communication styles to put their customers "at ease". Moreover, these call centres advertise a Western lifestyle combined with a handsome salary to the young adults, luring them to join the industry. Once on the job, the employees are trained to work in an environment where they not only adopt English language pseudonyms and talk with the "right accent", but also experience glimpses of the advertised Western lifestyle through training, the office atmosphere and various socialisation practices. Hence, the working hours, training processes and work ethic all encourage a particular way of life not the norm in Indian workplaces in particular, nor Indian society, at large. Such labour expectations influence the lifestyles, social behaviours and identities of these employees. Based on the qualitative analysis of information collected from fieldwork conducted with 70 New Delhi call centre employees and ten employers (between November 2004 and March 2005), in this thesis, I argue that international call centres in India are active sites of globalisation causing the various socio-economic changes and influencing the identities of their young adult employees. Hence, this thesis provides an in-depth micro-level analysis of the role of service sector workplaces---active participants in the process of globalisation---as vehicles for socio-economic change among young adult employees, in India. |
