Phone Clones by Kiran Mirchandani

Author:Kiran Mirchandani [Mirchandani, Kiran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Business & Economics, Labor, Political Science, Globalization
ISBN: 9780801464140
Google: Uf2tDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-04-17T04:27:37+00:00

Consuming Work as Fun

There are two ways in which consumerism structures customer service workers’ experiences. First, workers often self-brand and brand one another as India’s new middle class recognizable by their patterns of consumption. Second, their work is itself packaged as “fun” in order to be consumed alongside parties and games. These strategies facilitate the continual inscription of Western professionalism as modern and progressive. Workers do not unanimously endorse this link between work and fun, and many draw attention to the construction of work as fun as having discursive power to highlight as well as mask aspects of their jobs. They do this, however, by reifying the assumed connection between the West and the culture of fun and argue instead for recognition of Indian traditions and cultures. In this way, the professionalism enacted through construction of work as fun serves as another arena where the dichotomy between the progressive West and backward India is brought to life.

Call center workers are part of India’s new middle class, which is a social group defined primarily by its practices of consumption that mirror Western consumer culture.39 New middle-class lifestyles are characterized by the focus on leisure and service activities such as restaurants and nightclubs. As Mathangi Krishnamurthy summarizes, “the call center is . . . the site where a simultaneous construction of the two interlocking figures of producer and consumer is taking place.”40 This link between production and consumption is more pronounced than in most other occupations in India given that a majority of call center workers are young, and many are reputed to spend a high percentage of their incomes on entertainment and leisure. One worker highlights the consumption power of many call center workers by saying that they “can spend a very lavish life, luxurious and chill out in every pub in the weekends and have couple of drinks, can go on for dates.”

As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, call center workers are marketed by the Indian media and business elite as an ideal transnational workforce because they “wear this brand” of the consumer worker on a daily basis. Wearing a brand takes work because employees have to maintain “daily practice at expressing the brand’s conceptual attributes,”41 and this affects how they experience their jobs as well as conceptualize themselves. One worker describes his social life: “[I] go out for parties, chill out, go for movies. It is good earning and spending. Earnings of five days and spending on the weekends. It is U.S. culture, I would say.” Ideal workers are expected to have “an amiable personality, a childish playfulness, a happy-go-lucky frame of mind and an extroverted and carefree demeanor.”42 This juxtaposition of earning and spending is seen both as characteristic of U.S. culture and as related to professionalism. As one agent notes, “It is cool; we don’t feel like getting out of there because one of the things is that you are working with the very young crowd and you are part of it, who has just passed out of the college, and the people who have same thoughts, you are working with them.

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