1-800-Worlds
The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy
Price: 995.00 INR
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ISBN:
9780199476053
Publication date:
11/12/2017
Hardback
256 pages
Price: 995.00 INR
We sell our titles through other companies
Disclaimer :You will be redirected to a third party website.The sole responsibility of supplies, condition of the product, availability of stock, date of delivery, mode of payment will be as promised by the said third party only. Prices and specifications may vary from the OUP India site.
ISBN:
9780199476053
Publication date:
11/12/2017
Hardback
256 pages
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1-800-Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies.
Rights: World Rights
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Description
Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1-800-Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of symptoms that can help read changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness.
About the Author
Mathangi Krishnamurthy is assistant professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. A Call Centre Story
2. Trespassers Will Be Recruited
3. Nocturne
4. Eliza Doolittle
5. The Affective Corporation
6. Afterword
References
Index
About the Author
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Features
- An ethnographic study of the labour practices and lives of Indian call centre workers.
- Locates the socio-economic and cultural transformations that accompanied and framed the development of the contemporary urban Indian call centre economy.
- Author’s employment in a call centre.
- An attentiveness to the joy and pleasures of call centre work.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Review
‘From its surprising forms of intimacy to varying forms of violence, and from the sensuous properties of its particular mode of transnationalism to its distinct temporal rhythms, Krishnamurthy expertly brings to life the personal stakes of “never enough flexibility” in contemporary capitalism.’
—Jacob Copeman is senior lecturer of social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK.
‘1-800-Worlds is a sensitive ethnographic portrait of those working the phones for multinational corporations—their anonymous voices, embodied experiences, aspirations, and disillusions. Fleshing out generic abstractions about the global economy, Krishnamurthy’s ethnography offers a richly textured, deeply empathetic understanding of what it actually feels like to work in the global service sector.’
—Ara Wilson is associate professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, USA.
Global capitalism can sometimes appear amorphous and immaterial. But 1-800-Worlds shows how dependent socioeconomic formations are on the fostering of particular embodied desires—desires for affluence and security, desires for social connection, and desires for an imagined, elusive, flexibility. Krishnamurthy’s ethnographic intimacy with employees of Indian call centres and her own work history help to demonstrate how rooted capitalism is in the lives of individuals. 1-800-Worlds shows how ideas about personal, community, and national futures shape the labour experience of workers through inspiring flexibility. Call centres may seem a world away, but 1-800-Worlds shows how they—and the lives of their workers—are emblematic of early 21st century global capitalism and its everyday logics; not amorphous, but deeply corporeal; not immaterial, but made and remade through our local, daily practices.
—Matthew Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, USA.
Description
Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1-800-Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of symptoms that can help read changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness.
About the Author
Mathangi Krishnamurthy is assistant professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India.
Reviews
‘From its surprising forms of intimacy to varying forms of violence, and from the sensuous properties of its particular mode of transnationalism to its distinct temporal rhythms, Krishnamurthy expertly brings to life the personal stakes of “never enough flexibility” in contemporary capitalism.’
—Jacob Copeman is senior lecturer of social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK.
‘1-800-Worlds is a sensitive ethnographic portrait of those working the phones for multinational corporations—their anonymous voices, embodied experiences, aspirations, and disillusions. Fleshing out generic abstractions about the global economy, Krishnamurthy’s ethnography offers a richly textured, deeply empathetic understanding of what it actually feels like to work in the global service sector.’
—Ara Wilson is associate professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, USA.
Global capitalism can sometimes appear amorphous and immaterial. But 1-800-Worlds shows how dependent socioeconomic formations are on the fostering of particular embodied desires—desires for affluence and security, desires for social connection, and desires for an imagined, elusive, flexibility. Krishnamurthy’s ethnographic intimacy with employees of Indian call centres and her own work history help to demonstrate how rooted capitalism is in the lives of individuals. 1-800-Worlds shows how ideas about personal, community, and national futures shape the labour experience of workers through inspiring flexibility. Call centres may seem a world away, but 1-800-Worlds shows how they—and the lives of their workers—are emblematic of early 21st century global capitalism and its everyday logics; not amorphous, but deeply corporeal; not immaterial, but made and remade through our local, daily practices.
—Matthew Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, USA.
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. A Call Centre Story
2. Trespassers Will Be Recruited
3. Nocturne
4. Eliza Doolittle
5. The Affective Corporation
6. Afterword
References
Index
About the Author
