Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

1. The Rhythm of Ambition: Power Temporalities and the Production of the Call Center Agent in U.S. Popular Culture

1 The Rhythm of Ambition Power Temporalities and the Production of the Call Center Agent in U.S. Popular Culture 33 “Welcome to customer care. Welcome to customer care.” Indian call center agents sound out each syllable in careful U.S. American accents to greet their customers with a well-honed professionalism. So the 2006 PBS WideAngle film 1-800-INDIA introduces the Western viewer, perhaps for the first time through a visual medium, to the Indian worker at the other end of the line. The verbal “welcome” repeats as a disembodied voice-over against a barrage of disparate images: headset-wearing Indian agents sit in sleek office cubicles and nod conversationally; a crowded, narrow street market is peopled with cycle rickshaws, pedestrians, scooters, and vendors; women in brightly colored saris pass before the camera, their heads covered . “In this dusty suburb of India’s capital, New Delhi,” a narrator’s voice informs us, “old traditions are colliding with new opportunities.” This chapter orients the Western reader to the politics of representation through which the figure of the Indian call center agent is rendered intelligible in the West. We rhetorically analyze the truth-telling genre of documentary film, which serves as the primary genre through which the West comes to know the Indian call center industry. We chart the formation of this highly mediated call center figure through competing discourses of time and space and of nation and globalization. Our intertextual reading of popular documentaries and reality television shows reveals how these texts manage Western anxieties over outsourcing by recirculating familiar relations of race, gender, and heterosexuality. Our reading situates these power relations within developmentalist notions of time, or what we call power temporalities. Power temporalities attend to the uneven structuring force of time on the lifeworlds of differently located global subjects. As 34 the rhythm of ambition globalization theorists have argued, time and space have become accelerated and compressed under late capitalism. Attending to the unevenness of such realignments requires a careful examination of how space and time are constructed. Building on Doreen Massey’s (1994) notion of power geometries,whichexamineshowglobalizationgeneratesunevenmobilities for differently located subjects, power temporalities extend her insightful concept to critique the global production of time. Our focus on power temporalities is not meant to decouple examinations of time from those of space, but to more fully theorize the intersection between these intertwined forces. Our reading of documentary films reveals how U.S. documentary and realitytelevisionproductionsnaturalizedevelopmentalistnotionsoftime— notions of time that privilege the West and construct the developing world as always already inferior, out of step, behind. Difference is produced and managed through a familiar developmentalist script, written onto the bodies of differently located global subjects: Indian women in call centers stand in for progress, or a movement toward development, while white men signify a temporal point of arrival, or a telos of progress. These figures are linked through an implicit heteronormative bond that overcomes, even as it reinscribes, spatial and temporal distance. Thus heterosexuality is the conditionofpossibilityforimagininga(trans)nationalfutureandthehinge that sutures previous colonial discourses to current imperial relations. Our reading reveals how U.S. anxieties about globalization and outsourcing are managed through a developmentalist rhetoric, or power temporalities. While the call center industry is quickly developing India, India’s growth is outstripping America’s, and the Indian call center agent is modernizing; India is always safely behind America. Depictions of agents who strive to emulate Americans reassure the U.S. viewer that he or she, like the white male hosts and protagonists of these shows, will always represent the ideal of development and thus can never be surpassed. The geography of call center labor was a tightly held secret in the early years of the industry. Secrecy was said to maximize operational efficiency: accents were neutralized, long Indian names gave way to Johns and Janes, and, most importantly, those in the West never saw who was doing the laborious, monotonous work “over there.” So when NOW with Bill Moyers aired the first television news magazine segment on outsourcing in August 2003, the entire industry—and how viewers in the West would imagine it—was radically transformed. The call center agent quickly ascended as a the rhythm of ambition 35 global spectacle, an embodied marker of an impossible collapse of time and space under globalization, as the anticipated truth behind global capital ’s latest smokescreen: outsourcing. From this moment forward, the call center agent became a...