Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centres ed. by Kiran Mirchandani, Winifred R. Poster (review)

The lead editor of this fascinating collection of articles on call centres, Kiran Mirchandani, is a professor at the University of Toronto (UoT). The collection was facilitated by the UoT Visiting Speaker Program. Canada is noted as a location that may have received re-homed call centre activity from places such as India but beyond that there is no other explicitly Canada-based contributor, no Canadian case study and no overall (place) index. Instead the book focuses, interestingly, on call centres based in places (other, that is, than India) such as Guatemala or Guyana that are less well known for such activity. The base lines still appear to be low wages and passable English language skills. Transparently, for the customers of call centres, the question of where that centre is located is a major source of interest, frustration, anger, and even amusement: ‘and how is the weather where(ever) you are’? Professor Mirchandani herself had presciently noted some years ago that anger at being redirected to an overseas call centre may link to a perception of jobs that are assumed to have been stolen. Such a pity then that timing did not permit closer links to the most vivid current example of such anger-based economic nationalism – the tweets of Donald Trump. Will the existing millions of generally routinised, low paid, call centre workers in the US soon be supplemented by even more re-homed call centres’ activity – as is presently being driven in the production sectors?

Naturally the major focus of this collection of articles on call centres is the lived experience of their employees and is approached from an interesting mix of disciplinary perspectives. The – contested – arena is national(isms) in call centres and ways in which they can, if permitted, be enacted. The editors identify 2000 (the year of the dot.com bubble) as the one when such centres began to be offshored and outsourced. Hence bringing us back again to Trumpism. Of course, call centre work exhibits regional variations but rarely carries the risks of, say, the garment sweat shop such as Rana Plaza where over 1,000 workers paid a lethal price for supplying Western fashion stores with cheaply-produced goods. Indeed, we might wonder about the potential penalties had Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant in India been re-homed to the USA before its chemical leak that, on some accounts, may have killed up to 15,000 nearby residents. The much-delayed payout there was paltry in contrast to the US$ billions rapidly paid by global energy giant BP (persistently and patriotically referred to in the US media as British Petroleum) following the Deepwater Horizon incident that killed zero nearby residents.