Labour Geographies of India's New Services: The Working Lives of Agents in the ITES-BPM Sector

Whilst India's 'international-facing' call centre workforce, a key 'voice-based' segment of the IT-enabled services/ Business Process Managmet (ITeS/ BPM) sector, has been the subject of focus in many studies researching the country's growth as the 'world's back-office', not much is known about the workforce that serves the growing appetite for similar services in its domestic market.

Indeed, India's diverse and multi-lingual 'domestic-facing' call-centre industry is increasingly providing employment opportunities to young people across new urban-regional geographies, specifically in some of the smaller ('Tier-2 and Tier-3') urban centres. However, there is a general lack of scholarship on this fast-expanding workforce, which is quite unlike the 'English-speaking elite' that dominates employment in the 'transantional' ITeS-BPM economy. This lack of knowledge prevents us from gaining a holistic understanding of new forms of work, labour and livelihoods that are constitutive of growth and development in the fast-changing socio-economic context of India.

To address this marked gap in our knowledge and build a more integrative understanding of contemporary transformations in work and labour in developing economies, my PhD research explored different aspects of domestic call centre agents' working-lives in Pune city - a fast-emerging 'Tier-2' metropolis and a ITeS-BPM hub in India. Adopting a qualitative 'ethnographic case-study' approach, my research drew from participant observations, site-visits, and more than 100 in-depth interviews in Pune between November 2015 and October 2016.

Based on the combined analysis of the data, my research showed how domestic call centres constituted sites of aspiration for the moderately educated youth from lower-middle class backgrounds, many of whom demonstrated an active espousal of this form of employment and contest mainstream assertions of their overall powerlessness and lack of choice in work or role selection. Second, the research tackled ideas of 'professionalism' in domestic call centres, revealing the different ways in which these notions were transmitted and imbibed during skills-trainings and task-performance on the actual call centre floor. Relying on observations and workers' own narratives, the research here demonstrated how firm-enforced ideas of professionalism 'from above' got regularly challenged and reworked 'from below' by workers. Finally, the research explored the wide diversity in domestic call centre workers' labour market experiences - the 'hyphenated' nature of their employment pathways and the cross-sector career staircases that some workers forged, highlighting the role of workers' own agency in these experiences.

Overall, my research findings provided a rich representation of the diversity of ordinary working-life and everyday agency of 'low-end' new services workers in India, highlighting instances when it enables upward social mobility, but also showcased occasions when it got constrained. In doing so my research extended the 'hybrid' (economic/ development) geographies agenda, seeking to at once 'spatialise' and 'humanise' contemporary experiences of precarity and precarious work from the standpoint of under-explored and/or 'out-of-the-way' places in the 'emerging' global South.

The ESRC fellowship will seek to build on and extend this research along with enhancing the skills I developed during my PhD, in preparation for an academic career.