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11%OFFAimee Carrillo Rowe - Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers - 9780816689392 - V9780816689392
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Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

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Description for Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers Paperback. Num Pages: 280 pages. BIC Classification: 1FKA; 1KBB; JFFS; JFS; JHB; RGC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 140 x 216 x 17. Weight in Grams: 372.

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each ... Read more

Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future.

However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”

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Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2013
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press United States
Number of pages
280
Condition
New
Number of Pages
280
Place of Publication
Minnesota, United States
ISBN
9780816689392
SKU
V9780816689392
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Aimee Carrillo Rowe
Aimee Carrillo Rowe is associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Northridge.

Reviews for Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers
"Answer the Call takes on the investigation of call centers in India and uses that case study to help us to theorize, in more supple and nuanced ways, the multiple shifts in consciousness and social imaginaries that contemporary globalizing forces enable." —Jane Desmond, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "This engagingly written book is an innovative analysis of the work that ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers


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