Abstract
Telephone-based customer service work is often conceptualized as disembodied. Automatic dialing systems direct callers through menu-driven options, and eventually to a distant customer service worker. Interactions are scripted, and workers have little job discretion to deal with out-of-the-box customer requests. Yet, although the bodies of call center workers and their customers do not come into contact, this article considers whether their interactions are in fact disembodied. Based on interviews with transnational customer service workers in India, I argue that bodies matter in remote customer service interactions. Part of the job of a customer service worker is the transmission of bodies through voice. This involves making sense of how ideal workers are embodied in callers’ eyes and using their voices to emulate these imagined ideal workers. I argue that exploring the embodiment of ‘voice workers’ extends analyses of embodiment to date, which have focused primarily on whole bodies in physical contact with others. The findings presented here highlight the importance of interpellation—specifically the work of ‘reading bodies’ which is a significant part of service work, especially work which crosses national borders. Bodies are ‘read’ based on social and historical contexts within which people are immersed and these contexts are influenced by social stratification, state policies, and colonial histories.
While telephone-based customer service work is typically conceptualized as disembodied, images of customers talking on the phone and workers wearing headsets and sitting at computer terminals are widely used in public media, organizational literature, and advertising. My research with call center workers in India servicing customers in the West reveals that workers often think about the physical characteristics of their customers, as well as measure their own bodies in relation to the ideals presented in training curricula, organizational propaganda, and the media. In this sense, while workers and customers may not ever see or touch one other, their interaction is not disembodied. In this article, I explore the embodiment of voice workers by drawing on data discussed in my book Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy. The book describes the ways in which call center workers perform the emotional labor of dealing with customer racism and anger as part of their jobs. In order to deal with this racism, workers strive to become the types of people who can be experienced as familiar to customers in the West (they try to speak in ‘neutral’ accents, know about local social contexts, and become cosmopolitan and Westernized). At the same time, workers negotiate their construction by both trainers and customers as permanently different (and deficient) in their status as second language speakers of English, and colonial subjects who rely on Western capital for their livelihoods. Workers reconcile the need to be familiar yet automatically different through forms of emotional labor, specifically, ‘authenticity work’, and this allows them to establish their legitimacy as ideal transnational service workers.
Left unexplored in Phone Clones is systematic reflection of how bodies are implicated in authenticity work, and in the labor which workers engage in in order to establish themselves as ideal transnational customer service workers. Yet, interviews revealed that bodies were certainly on workers’ minds—they imagined the ideal bodies for their jobs and attempted to transform their own bodies (and their voices) to become these ideal workers. They reconciled the bodily consequences of their night work with customers’ expectations of rested, responsive service providers. Speaking to workers, it was clear that the characterization of call center work as disembodied fails to capture the work involved in transmitting bodies during voice-based interactions. This work occurs in the context of interpellation—that is assumptions made by customers, co-workers, employers, and workers about appropriate embodiment. I propose ways in which the perspectives of transnational customer service workers can advance knowledge and scholarship on the widely used and vital notion of embodiment in organization studies.
Researchers have noted that despite the frequently assumed dualism between mental and manual work which is based on fragmented bodies valorized within Taylorism, workers in a wide variety of jobs influence and are influenced by the social meanings attached to their physical bodies (Hall et al., 2007; Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). In addition, embodied knowledge, which is acquired through one’s bodily experience in the world, is an important part of both paid and unpaid work (DeVault, 1991; Vachhani and Pullen, 2011). The concept of embodiment highlights the ways in which whole bodies are constructed, as well as how workers support or resist norms in the context of work (Coy, 2009; Derton and Phoenix, 2001; Wainwright et al., 2010). The focus on the whole body embedded within social contexts also facilitates an exploration of the relationship between touch and the normative hierarchical ordering of jobs (Wolkowitz, 2006). Jobs involve the continual negotiation of closeness and distance between bodies. Thinking about embodiment has allowed theorists to conceptualize work not in terms of labor practices or occupational divisions but through a relational understanding of how bodies exist in proximity with others in work contexts. Such an approach has served to highlight the micro practices through which inequality, segregation, and discrimination are exercised through the notion of ideal bodies for particular jobs (Dyer et al., 2010; Hall et al., 2007). As will be discussed in the next section of this article, notions of wholeness and touch form the two cornerstones to social and organizational theorizing on embodiment. Many of these insights have been developed through ethnographies of service work in which customer and provider come into physical contact with one another. A part of this literature, to which this article contributes, explores the relationship between embodiment and interpellation (Batnitzky and McDowell, 2011; Braun, 2011; Coy, 2009; McDowell et al., 2007; Nadeem, 2011; Zamudio and Lichter, 2008). I argue that these debates, in relation to the recent proliferation of telephone-based service work, generate provocative questions about the nature of embodiment.
Serving customers now not only occurs in face-to-face contexts but is increasingly done over the telephone, both within nations and across national contexts. In the past decade, call centers have emerged as a significant sector in numerous countries around the world, with some, such as India, serving 73% foreign clients (Holman et al., 2007). Four million Americans and 800,000 people in the United Kingdom work in call centers. In Australia, 75% of customer contact occurs via call centers (Russell, 2009: 6). As Glucksmann (2004) has observed, ‘call centers represent not only the most rapidly expanding forms of work and of business organization but also one of the most researched’ (p. 795). Noronha and D’Cruz (2009) summarize this extensive research on the experiences of working in call centers, noting that automation and continuous surveillance lead to high levels of employer control over workers’ activities, although workers may also exercise resistance through forms of emotional labor. Emotional labor involves feeling and expressing empathy for customers, ‘smiling down the line’ (Russell, 2009: 125) and at times maintaining detachment. Researchers characterize call center work as ‘machine-like’ (Murray and Mills, 2009: 24) and have noted that workers report high levels of job stress because of the intense pace of work, target-based monitoring, and frequency of irate customers. Although there has been some research on the health-related effects of call center work (Noronha and D’Cruz, 2009: 23), there is relatively little on the ways in which the body is structured and impacted in telephone-based encounters. Despite a wealth of knowledge on call center work processes, worker control mechanisms, skills required, and training, there has been little reflection on how this work is embodied. On the contrary, much of the literature on call center work focuses on the alienation (and disembodiment) workers experience as a result of the repetitive and heavily monitored nature of their work, processes which make workers feel like machines rather than whole people (Bain et al., 2002; Fernie and Metcalf, 1998). In a study of electronic surveillance in call centers, Clement (1992), for example, notes that ‘detailed surveillance of adults by whatever means is considered degrading and an affront to human dignity… Using a machine to do the watching adds an explicit depersonalizing element …’ (p. 27). The assumption that labor processes in call centers lead to the decoupling of the person from the tasks being performed, and facilitate the treatment of agents as machines, masks the ways in which workers’ bodies continue to structure and be structured in job interactions.
I argue that extending the literature which explores the links between embodiment and interpellation allows for useful insight on how workers who interact over the telephone are embodied. Such an approach allows for an investigation of how socially located, nationally situated ‘flesh’ are conveyed and evaluated through voice, as well as how understandings of these workers’ lives enhance analyses of embodiment to date. These issues are explored through a discussion of interviews conducted with 78 transnational call center workers working in India and providing customer service for clients in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia (Mirchandani, 2012). I highlight the work which workers do to transmit their bodies through their voices. Workers interpret visual images of their work, as well as customers’ words, in order to make sense of how they are embodied in callers’ eyes. Workers then evaluate customers’ understandings of ideal bodies for their jobs and attempt to use their voices to try to represent their bodies as those of these imagined ideal workers. Voice-embodied workers extend analyses of embodiment to date which have focused on whole bodies in contact with others by highlighting the important work of ‘reading bodies’, which is a significant part of service work, especially work which crosses national borders. Bodies are ‘read’ based on social and historical contexts within which people are immersed and these contexts are influenced by social stratification, state policies, colonial histories, and media debates.
Embodiment in service work
The notion of embodiment has had a significant influence in organizational studies. Examining labor market stratification through the concept of ‘embodiment’ has illuminated the practices which so systematically and pervasively support the hierarchical ordering of jobs. Focusing on ‘bodies at work’ reveals that ideal bodies are implicitly required in certain types of work, and people continually use their bodies in order to perform their jobs effectively and resist the dehumanizing aspects of their work. As McDowell (2009) summarizes, embodiment, or ‘the fleshy characteristics of weight, gender, age and appearance … is now the center of economic life and how bodies connect (or do not) is a key issue in the service economy’ (pp. 223, 225). Much of this writing on embodiment traces the relationships between work and the physical (and whole) body of a person who is socially located within race, class, and gender hierarchies. The focus on the physical body has enabled a deeply embedded material understanding of social life.
The whole body
While workers may be required to use particular bodily functions more than others for their jobs – such as hands to write, feet to stand, arms to lift, or legs to walk – such fragmentation masks the material, everyday ways in which the body always exists as a whole. As Thapan (2009) summarizes, we experience our bodies as ‘lived and communicative’ (p. 2) rather than fragmented and fixed. Slum dwellers in Jahangirpuri, for example, earn their livelihoods through their bodies by doing paid and household work, develop social interactions via voice and gestures, use their bodies for childbirth which can bring about status and recognition, as well as treat their bodies as ‘weapons’ to resist demeaning gender norms (Thapan, 2009). Workers not only exercise agency through their bodily actions but also use their bodies in their day-to-day jobs. Medical professionals working in operating theaters communicate their expertise and interpret one another’s needs by using often subtle bodily movements, conveying their knowledge by combining verbal, visual, and tactical cues (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). This notion of the body acting as a coordinated whole has been termed ‘the sensorium at work’ where workers ‘move, see, hear, feel, touch and smell during the routine performance of daily work’ (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2009: 222). While organizations reimburse workers only for the tasks which they perform using particular parts of their bodies, workers’ whole bodies in fact have to be maintained, cleaned, fed, and looked after on a daily basis – this is the unpaid and unrecognized work which goes into social reproduction (Bakker and Gill, 2003).
Bodies are located in social contexts within which not all are equally valued. Coy (2009) describes the ways in which the bodies of poor women carry visible signs of their status due to the clothes they are wearing or scars from repeated domestic abuse they have been forced to endure to ensure their livelihoods. She notes that the ‘bodies of the poor are produced as sites of moral and intellectual lack and of chaos, pathology, promiscuity, illogic and sloth’ (Coy, 2009: 1663). Coy remembers being read ‘like a text’ during a bus ride to a shelter as she sat in mildly blood-stained clothing, with bruises and broken teeth after experiencing violent domestic assault. The bodily labor of poverty not only necessitates dealing with the public repulsion toward poor bodies but also involves engaging in hazardous jobs such as selling one’s ovum, frequent blood ‘donations’, and other income-generating endeavors which result in bodily injuries. Looking at work through the lens of embodiment also reveals how workers deal with dehumanizing employment conditions by distancing themselves from their bodies. Coy (2009) notes that sex workers, for example, are both empowered through the use of their bodies and feel alienated from their bodies due to the abuse they experience. In this sense, while bodies are lived as whole, working conditions and social norms structure how workers experience and construct the relationships between their bodies and their identities.
This relationship between bodies and identities has been explored by several theorists through organizational and occupational case studies which have highlighted the micro practices through which normative assumptions about ideal bodies structure the gendered and racialized divisions of labor. Binns (2010) shows that hegemonic masculinity in leadership is maintained not through the total absence of female bodies in senior management positions but rather through the discursive construction of female bodies in leadership as visibly deviant. Braun’s (2011) study of student teachers and Trethewey’s (1999) interviews with professional women reveal that women and men read organizational expectations and manipulate their dress and grooming to convey professionalism and authority. Monaghan (2002) explores the ways in which doorstaff possess as well as form solidarities on the basis of their ‘bodily capital’, which includes physical size. In a similar way, women working as sales assistants in mass market and high-end clothing stores engage in consumption behaviors to meet the requirements of their jobs that they look a particular way (Pettinger, 2005). Hall et al. (2007) study gender-segregated occupations such as hairdressing, real estate, and firefighting, and document the ways in which men continually enact as well as resist hegemonic notions of masculinity within these professions. These theorists suggest that workers may use or transform their bodies to enact gendered performances. Pullen and Rhodes (2010) delve further into the relationship between bodies and the gendered enactments of worker identities. They argue that gender itself is a mask, and embodied performances of gendered norms constitute (rather than simply cover up) identities. In these studies, the focus on the whole bodies of workers at work has allowed for detailed analyses of norms which define the characteristics of ideal workers for particular jobs as well as insight into ways in which certain workers are systematically excluded from professions and occupations on the basis of their bodily traits.
Touch embodiment
The physical body is lived and used in all jobs. Some service sector jobs, however, are also embodied in the sense that they involve working in and with not only one’s own body but also on the bodies of clients. Wolkowitz (2006) terms this ‘body work’ where the body is the site of work. Occupations such as childcare, occupational therapy, sex work, nursing, hairdressing, and massage involve intimate contact during the provision of service (Twigg et al., 2011). McDowell (2009) terms this high-touch work and observes that ‘in embodied interactive service work, the closer the contact between service providers and purchasers, the lower the status of the work, and, usually, the lower the financial reward’ (p. 49). This divide between high-tech and high-touch jobs is deeply gendered as the latter draws on traditionally feminized skills such as caring, empathy, and providing service.
Body work requires learning to both work on others’ bodies and regulate one’s own. Wainwright et al. (2010) explore the experiences of mothers training for careers in health, beauty, and childcare. In addition to skills related to their work tasks, students learn how to change their own ways of dressing, speaking, and moving their bodies in order to emulate professional norms. They also learn to maintain bodily boundaries with clients and hide their repulsion of customers’ bodies. Wainwright et al. (2010) summarize, ‘these tasks take on greater urgency the closer in you get to the body and working with other bodies’ (p. 224).
Body work involves touching while simultaneously maintaining a professionally sanctioned distance between bodies. Gynecological educators who teach medical students how to perform pelvic and breast exams using their own bodies, for example, distance themselves from their bodies and practice ‘strategic dualism’ (Underman, 2011); they simultaneously draw on their embodied knowledge for their work and talk about their bodies as objects. Sex workers and massage therapists similarly maintain boundaries between professionally appropriate and inappropriate touch (Derton and Phoenix, 2001). In service work where part of the work involves making clients feel a particular way, appropriate ways of touching are inextricably tied to bodies who are perceived as ideal for high-touch work.
Ideal bodies and the importance of interpellation
Touching and being touched is associated with intimacy, and for customers to feel comfortable with this intimacy workers in service occupations are required not only to perform their jobs in particular ways but also to ‘look right’ in the eyes of customers and employers. Albin (2010) notes that hiring employees on the basis of looks is not seen as discriminatory in British or European Union labor law as organizations are perceived to have the right to control their brand image via the workers they hire. Gottfried provides the example of Japanese temporary agencies who hire only workers who mirror hegemonic and sexualized conventions of femininity. Jobs to promote or market products are filled by ‘young attractive women whose uniforms may consist of short skirts and high heels’ (Gottfried, 2003: 266). Workers’ appropriate embodiment for their jobs has been explored through the notion of ‘aesthetic labor’ which is the ‘mobilization, development and commodification of embodied “dispositions” [which] … are to some extent possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment’ (Witz et al., 2003: 37).
Part of workers’ regulation of their own bodies involves attempting to become the ideal bodies which they imagine customers desire. They may do this by altering the way they move their bodies or dress themselves. Through interviews with student teachers, Braun (2011), for example, shows how female teacher-candidates use dress and grooming to compensate for the fact that women are assumed to lack authority, while male teachers emphasize heteronormative masculinity to avoid becoming targets of homophobia. Aesthetic preferences in the labor force can also be used to exercise discrimination, as was the case with Filipino migrant nurses to the United Kingdom who, on the basis of their race, were deemed to be inappropriately embodied for, and therefore systematically excluded from, training which would allow them to become nurse managers (Batnitzky and McDowell, 2011; Dyer et al., 2010). These studies of ‘embodiment’ have documented the micro-processes through which workers occupying certain age, race, and gender positions have been systematically filtered into low status and low paid jobs. These jobs are often filled by people who are most marginalized by virtue of their gender, race, or class positions.
Analyses of embodiment which trace the ways in which certain bodies are deemed as ‘ideal’ for certain kinds of work trace the processes of interpellation at play. In a study of the hotel sector in the United Kingdom, Dyer et al. (2010) note that particular workers occupy a privileged position in clients’ perceptions of ideal service workers. This privilege is closely tied to workers’ gender, ethnicity, and migration histories. Customers evaluate the quality of service in light of their pre-existing stereotypes, and employers hire workers who will be successful in satisfying customer needs. As a result of this, White migrants who are perceived as ‘cosmopolitan’ are given front office jobs in hotels, while African or Caribbean migrant workers are seen as most suitable for doing repetitive and unpleasant cleaning work. Workers from certain countries are constructed as hardworking and passive, while others are less suitable because they are perceived to have a propensity to make demands. Hiring decisions are made on the basis of such racist and sexist stereotypes. As Dyer et al. (2010) summarize, ‘attributes based on supposed national characteristics construct workers as more or less eligible for different types of work’ (p. 653). This is the process of interpellation where ‘managers and customers construct and act on imaginaries of idealized workers, to which workers themselves then respond’ (Dyer et al., 2010: 637). The notion of interpellation suggests the importance of workers’ attempts to tailor their own bodies as well as interpret bodies around them in light of hegemonic norms. It suggests that imaginaries of bodies are extremely important in structuring bodily labor. While much of the literature on embodiment has largely ignored types of work which have been deemed ‘disembodied’, my starting point for this analysis is precisely this assumed ‘marginal’ site for studies on embodiment. I explore how work which does not involve bodily contact between the whole bodies of customers and workers can be embodied.
Methods
As noted in the section above, many of the analyses of embodiment to date have been based on the notion of bodies in physical contact with one another. Telephone-based service workers have often been conceptualized as disembodied because whole bodies are not in contact with one another during service interactions. Bolton and Houlihan (2005) observe, for example, that customers calling in are seen as standardized disembodied objects. Smith et al. (2008) similarly note that for call center workers, knowledge is located ‘within the machine and not within the worker’ (p. 582). As noted earlier, my interviews with call center workers in India reveal that while workers may not see or touch their customers, bodies are evoked and manipulated as part of their work.
This article is based on interviews which I conducted with transnational customer service workers located in three cities in India. A total of 78 workers (43 men and 35 women) were interviewed during multiple trips between 2002 and 2010. These frontline call center workers were employed with transnational organizations and provided voice-based customer service support in a broad range of sectors. Most workers received calls from customers who had dialed toll free numbers in the West, and a few made sales calls to prospective customers in the West. Some calls were short, and involved providing support on credit card payments, catalog sales, lost baggage, and so on, while others involved longer conversations with customers to resolve technical difficulties, set up mortgages, or process insurance claims. During confidential interviews which were held at a nonorganizational site, workers were asked to describe their work histories, experiences of training and on the job, interactions with co-workers, customers and managers, and career aspirations. The aim of the interviews was to explore how people recounted their work histories and made sense of the decisions that they made as they navigated their personal and professional lives (Maynes et al., 2008). As part of these conversations, workers reported the ways in which impressions of their own bodies were conveyed through the way in which they spoke. They also shared accounts of the work they did to convey appropriate bodily dispositions. These reflections are the focus of this article.
Flesh in voice: Indian bodies imagining and being imagined
Workers engaged in telephone-based service work interact with their customers only through voice. Although their customers do not ‘see’ them, the process of interpellation continues to play a central role in their recruitment and work. Like other migrant workers, virtual migrants such as transnational call center workers, negotiate boundaries of class, ethnicity, and gender as part of their service work. During calls, voices are heard and words are spoken. At the same time, however, bodies are imagined, evaluated, and monitored. Bodily pleasure and harm are exercised. Based on call interactions, as well as organizational and media images, call center workers make sense of the ways in which their own bodies are being imagined by their customers in the West. Evaluating customers’ perceptions of ideal workers, customer service agents use their voices to emulate this ideal by projecting images of their own body. In this embodiment, through voice, both workers and customers enact hierarchies within which their service encounter is situated.
Images of call center workers pepper national and international media, recruitment advertisements, and organizational propaganda. Indians from all walks of life are surrounded by large billboards promoting the software and software services industry; many of these advertisements include depictions of workers. These images typically profile light-skinned young women and men professionally attired and housed in front of computers. A decade ago, India’s premier newsmagazine India Today ran a cover story about India’s customer service workers. The story, entitled ‘Housekeepers to the World’ described the phenomenal growth of the transnational call center industry. The image shows a well-groomed woman with fair skin and Anglo-Saxon features. She has perfect gleaming white teeth and a radiant smile. She looks boldly at the camera and shows no hesitation in, or discomfort with, speaking to customers. Her black hair is neatly tied up behind her headphones and a large contemporary hoop earring is visible. A similar type of worker is depicted in campus recruitment materials. One such poster covering the walls of a university campus in Pune shows a young man in a suit and tie looking up at the sky. In the accompanying text, students are informed that a placement officer from a large Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company is visiting the campus – ‘If you wish to become part of the 19,500 employee strong organization, meet the Wipro BPO Campus Relationship Manager at your campus’. The man in the photograph is fair skinned, has sharp features, and wears a black tuxedo. He looks confidently upwards. These images provide visual cues to workers about how ideal workers should look. Although not literally enforced (in the sense that workers who do not fit this image are frequently employed as call center workers), the uniformity of these images has an impact on all employees. Right from the recruitment stage, respondents note that rather than a particular formal qualification or prior work experience, sought-after workers are those who look and sound like Westernized, convent-educated, modern, urban Indians.
During interviews conducted for this project, respondents provided detailed descriptions of how they were recruited for their jobs. In many cases, this involved multiple rounds where they underwent voice tests, aptitude tests, and evaluations of their computer and communication skills. All respondents recognized that they held sought-after jobs for which they had competed with dozens of applicants. In this context, workers frequently used the term ‘they were selected’ to describe how they obtained their jobs. As part of the interview, I asked workers why they were selected, that is, why they thought they were perceived to be suitable for transnational customer service jobs. In responding to this question, workers referred almost unanimously to the fact that they were able to understand the requirement that they look and sound right for the job. Despite the voice-based nature of their work, workers are keenly aware that one’s bodily comportment is part of the recruitment criteria used by firms. One woman describes her experience of her job interview: They find dudes and babes better than people like me, normal people like me. That’s what I’ve seen, you know, many places where I’ve been, these people, the dudes who are like actually wearing rings in their ears, or had those funky … They were picked up. Then, the girls who were wearing like really less clothes … these people used to be called in first. Like, we were standing in a line. It was long queue … it was a very hot day. We were standing outside and these people were like, ‘come, girls, this, this, this, this, you come in, you come in’. Just by looking at them, and I was like, what is happening? So, should I wear less clothes and come from tomorrow for giving interview [laugh]? That was one thing which came in mind. Because they need people who are dudes, because the people who look like that can speak better English. I think that’s what their point of view is … they prefer girls who are like babes, who can … maybe they think these people adjust more … better.
Workers are not ‘seen’ by customers. The preference for workers who look Westernized is guided by assumptions that these workers can sound a particular way. One respondent explains, [They prefer] those guys who are smoking and sitting in the canteens and smoking. And they are wearing jeans which are so low, they fall in any second. But then, they have got that personality, you know, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t find these people very stylish or something. I better feel that they are the spoiled generation, or who are aping the West rather than having a style of their own. That’s what I call this generation. But then, these are the people who are picked first.
Like citizens of many countries with a history of colonialism, Indians have an ambivalent relationship to the West. While some theorists have characterized colonialism as a ‘state of mind’ (Bomett, 2012; Nandy, 1988), workers in call centers recognize the political economy of customer service work and observe that they are benefited and simultaneously exploited through transnational customer service offshoring. Respondents recognize both the social prestige associated with being Westernized and the mechanisms through which their emulation of the West can never be complete. Even workers who are young, convent educated, and middle class are defined as deficient non-native speakers of English. Irrespective of how they look, or their prior education, all workers undergo voice and accent training which serves to correct assumed deficiencies in Indians’ ways of speaking English. This training names common ‘errors’ such as speaking too fast, occasionally using a word from a local language, or pronouncing words with ‘mother tongue influence’. A worker describes the training, The training is basically divided into 2 parts, one is communication skills training, and the other is process training. Communication skills, basically it means that you have to develop, it is basically getting the American accent, because we as Indians, we have to have a neutral accent. If somebody has an MTI-Mother tongue influence, it is getting out of that to a neutral accent, and then into an American accent. It’s basically to get you know, if you are talking with your customers, the customers should not feel that they are talking to an Indian, that’s why we change our names also. We use names like John and Jack.
Ideal bodies are carried through voices. These ideal bodies, which customers in the West can experience as helpful, empathetic service workers, are those with ‘neutral’ accents without ‘mother-tongue influences’. A worker summarizes the qualifications needed to work in a transnational call center: The only must is a good communication skills and you need a neutral accent, because in some companies you need to speak in UK accent or some you need to have a US accent. So, it’s a bit difficult if you have some kind of accent. You need a neutral accent. No mother tongue influences. Some people in India, you find there are many castes, many religions so if you are a Gujrati, maybe at times, you speak, you have some Gujrati accent or some mother tongue influences. So, you need not to have any kind of mother tongue influences. Neutral accents. These are the musts.
Regional diversity is deemed a liability, and recruitment procedures as well as training serve to convey the ideal worker as captured in the images discussed in the beginning of this section. The uniformity of the neutral, universal Indian (who is in fact the Westernized, convent educated, urbanite) is promoted because it is assumed that this worker is easiest for those in the West to understand. The key role of understanding customers and being understood by customers, however, is much less clear-cut in practice. One worker reports, The basic idea is that those people should understand you … So this was the main motive behind learning all accent skills … Many a times people are very happy, and those people [say] how is it possible that staying in India you can speak such good English? … But at times people are so rude—‘Oh, let me talk to someone who can speak English! I just cannot understand you’. We get customers like this also. One call, the customer is saying, ‘oh you have fabulous English, you speak so well’. And other call you get, ‘oh my God! Let me talk to someone who can speak English’.
Voice training does not therefore focus simply on talking with a particular accent or at a particular speed. Rather, the notion of ‘sounding right’ extends these technical facets of speech. In their extensive field work with call center workers in India, Taylor and Bain show how voice training serves to convey bodily dispositions. They quote an ex-expatriate trainer who corrects agents saying, There was a lack of empathy in the voice. Your speech tells us you want to get off the phone as soon as you can … you have to spend time with the customer and concentrate on the softness of the sounds. (Taylor and Bain, 2005: 275)
In a similar way, a respondent interviewed for this project reports being fired for being rude to a customer. As per company policy, he refused a customer request for an increase in credit limit. The call was monitored by a supervisor, who evaluated it negatively. The supervisor claimed that he was rude because his manner of speaking showed that he did not want to help the customer. The worker reflects, ‘It was not I was rude. I was just setting back myself’. Setting himself back, in this case, was an inappropriate way to sound.
The requirement to look and sound a particular way is accompanied in this way by the need for workers to be a particular type of person, and to present one’s body in a particular way. One woman shares the ways in which she fashioned herself as the type of worker who would be successful in call center work by responding to the cues she received about how she should look, sound, and conduct herself: I was very shy when I just joined my new organization. And saw how people didn’t agree with people who were shy. How they make you nervous, and you know when you speak you were asked to do projects, and you know you were asked to stand in front of so many people and everybody is judging you … So I did see that you have to be a certain way … somebody who comes across to be very bold. I don’t know what to say—wouldn’t say provocative behavior, but I did see a lot of girls who were that and they’d manage to you know. I had to change, I realized that if I was going to be shy, people are just going to eat me raw. They are going to have fun at my expense, and I had to, I was left with no choice but to change. It was kind of realizing, about what people are all about. You’re respected if you’re a certain way, you’re not respected if you’re a certain way … since I’ve come here, I’m a totally different person. Ever since I’ve come to this industry I’m a totally different person.
Across the 78 interviews conducted, it is striking how much both women and men focused on the labor involved in identifying and then becoming the ‘correct-sounding’ and ‘correct-looking’ worker for their profession. Like many other service workers around the world, workers noted that their bodies were ‘read’ as appropriate or inappropriate for their jobs during the extremely selective recruitment processes and by managers and co-workers while they were on the job. However, workers’ primary interaction was with customers on the telephone and they noted that their ‘bodies’ were conveyed as well as evaluated during their voice-based interactions.
Despite their attempts to look, sound, and become particular kinds of people, workers’ efforts at embodiment are frequently interrupted by the social and political context in which their industry is situated. This context includes the mobility of transnational corporations, which can easily shift contracts from country and country. This mobility facilitates the vulnerability of Indian operations, many of which are subcontractors, and workers in India bear the brunt of industry contraction. Transnational service workers’ jobs are also affected by fact that many customers experience long wait times and have a strong preference for service encounters which are more tailored to their individual needs (Bishop et al., 2005; Korczynski et al., 2000). This preference, in conjunction with the widely circulated public discourse against outsourcing in the West, leads to frequent customer abuse during calls (Mirchandani, 2013). Workers describe their typical interactions over the phone: The main thing is to understand the person’s mentality in the first minute of the call itself… the voice of the customer, the pitch. Starting from the high note that means he’s irate. You don’t need to be on an irate note if the customer is on the irate note. Calm him down. I have had lot of irate customers. They would just call up and say I want to discontinue the service. And that’s like when you know that you have a very irate customer and you really have to be down on your knees. Just go cool. They’re gonna eat your head out. Like, how much you want to hit me, hit me, but I’m going to do my job.
While clearly affected by the prevalent images of call center workers, workers are also significantly impacted by such interactions with customers on the telephone. Workers report frequent verbally abusive encounters with customers which are directed at them not only as customer service providers but also as Indians, which Nath (2011) refers to as the ‘stigma of nationality’ (Poster, 2007). One woman working for a credit card process refers to Americans as racist and says, ‘The minute you say India, they use all kinds of words that you can’t even imagine—“You’ve taken our jobs, I’ve lost my job”’. Workers note being conceptualized as incompetent, job thieves, and terrorists. An agent recounts, ‘some customers [used to] hate India. You guys are terrorists, you know?’ In this way, racialized differences are in fact created through the equivalences made between particular ethnicities (Indians) and disagreeable acts (terrorism). Another worker who deals with lost baggage claims comments on how US customers, unlike Indians, see aggression as normal. She notes, If they start blasting, they’ll blast like anything. They just simply call to give bad words … They don’t take the people in India as human being mostly. They don’t treat them as human beings. They say that the Indians are like, down market or something like that. They have that idea in their mind.
In attempting to bridge the gap between how workers are encouraged to see their own bodies (as Westernized and neutral) and how they are often seen by customers on calls (as incompetent Indian thieves), customer service agents work on their voices to attempt to convey an ideal body in their interactions with customers. Despite the irrational and often violent customer calls often encountered, Indian call center workers stress the importance of sounding confident on the phone. One woman describes her career in marketing and her background in public speaking, noting that this experience allowed her to know that she has to dress in a business suit and speak in a way that masked her nervousness during her interview. She reflects that she was being assessed for how confidently she would be able to answer customer questions. Being confident involves remaining calm and unflustered by difficult or aggressive customer responses: You should be remaining calm, trying to make the customer understand … If the customer is just giving bad words and he is using foul languages, you can’t use foul language. Right? You can’t answer back and if he is using the foul language, you can’t use the foul language. In turn, you have to remain calm.
While remaining calm in the face of aggressive customers involves emotional labor, it also necessitates particular work on one’s body. Workers note that one of the biggest challenges of their jobs is managing irate customers while they themselves are often tired, hungry, or facing health issues related to their night work. Given the synchronous nature of customer service work, Indian customer service agents dealing with US customers work through the night. Those dealing with UK or Australian clients have partial night shifts. Their shift timings rotate weekly and without exception workers note the impact of their timings on their bodies. Some workers smoke or drink excessive amounts of caffeine in an attempt to stay both awake and alert enough to deal with angry customers. Other workers express anger at those lower in the service chain (such as auxiliary workers): Sometimes it’s get very difficult in speaking. Sometime, if you go for the water, and you don’t find the water at place, then you get, you like to get angry on the people because, the housekeeping people, it’s their job to bring the water for us. They have keep the bottle water at our work stations, it’s their job. Sometime they don’t do their job and because of them, we get pissed off. If you are speaking for four hours continuously, you have to drink lot of water.
Workers also do considerable work to mask the tiredness of their bodies in their voices. Health hazards resulting from the pace and stress associated with call center work (Taylor and Bain, 2005) are exacerbated by the pace and time of work. One respondent notes, It was totally against the nature. So I faced a lot of problems. Like I have a heat problem. I faced bad ulcers. [They] used to come in my mouth. So I faced that problem when I started working in the night shifts. So that was a bad impact from my point of view.
Workers are explicitly told that their voices need to conceal the fact that they are often tired, hungry, or unwell. Yet this bodily state is often reflected in their work. One worker notes, ‘sometimes when we are feeling sleepy, we have to ask them, “sorry, what did you say?” That time, the marks goes down (snaps)’. Another recounts instructions from his manager, For the customer who is calling when you’re actually logging out, that can be your last call for the day but for the customer, it’s his first call and you have to sound your best. You should not be sleepy at all.
While workers are required to mask their bodily state, their experience of their work is powerfully structured by the way their bodies feel. One woman notes, Every two months, [our times] will get shifted. When it’s a graveyard shift, you can’t do anything. And you feel very irritated. I had to wake up at 2.30am. The cab comes to [my] home. You have to sleep and go. And again, you [come back] at 12:30pm and you can’t sleep once you reach home, because of the chores going on in your home, sound. So, you can’t get a good sleep, if you do a graveyard shift. Your health is spoiled.
In these ways, workers’ labor in transnational call centers involves not only sounding like confident, Westernized service providers but also conveying confident, calm, resilient, and awake physical bodies who can appease angry and often racist customers. Despite their physical disconnection from customers, their bodies continue to shape their work interactions. Part of the work of being a transnational service worker involves conveying a particular body through voice-based interactions and managing the gap between this ideal body and their own.
Conclusion
Much of the literature focuses on the repetitive, routinized, rationalized, and monitored nature of customer service work. Brandth (2006) notes that these conditions lead to ‘processes of disembodiment in service organizations whereby workers are not concerned by bodily considerations’ (p. 18). However, it is clear that bodies continue to matter in virtual settings. The analysis in this article suggests that embodiment does not just involve being in one’s body but also requires a continuous labor of interpreting both one’s own and others’ bodies. Workers do not just work on and with bodies but give meaning to the social location of bodies with which they make contact. The approach to the body as a physical entity, rather than one that is ‘continually read’ even in its physical absence, has left aspects of embodiment unexplored.
In their analysis of high-end retail shops, Williams and Connell (2010) note that ideal service employees are typically middle class, emulate typical feminine physical traits, and are ethnically white. They pose a provocative question—should aesthetic labor (the work of looking and sounding right) be remunerated, rewarded, recognized as part of work? If yes, this would bolster the often discriminatory stereotypes based on which customers exercise their preferences and would justify race- or gender-based recruitment. If no, then an important dimension of labor which workers do in fact perform on a daily basis would remain unacknowledged.
Focusing on voice workers provides a possible response to this provocative question as it reveals that bodies require continual interpretation. In all service encounters, customers, co-workers, managers, and employees themselves make sense of the bodies with which they make contact. In this process of ‘making sense’, however, individuals draw on the social contexts within which they exist. This includes, for Western customers, their experiences of declining quality of work life, automation of service provision, and media and public policy objections to offshoring. For Indian workers, their social contexts include colonial histories through which they are seen as inferior, poor job prospects within local industries, and the marketing of transnational information technology (IT) jobs as the ladder toward individual and national prosperity. Embodiment is about enacting hierarchies, which is made amply clear when considering the ways in which voice workers interpret and convey bodies through the telephone. Rather than a recognition or dismissal of the work involved in embodiment, worker-centered activism needs to focus on strategies to shift these forms of stratification which are based on nation, class, and gender. This would involve challenging states which decry offshoring while signing free trade deals, lobbying for anti-harassment legislation which outlaws customer aggression during service encounters, and creating enriched service jobs which allow workers and customers to interact on equal terms.