India services - job hopping, careers, skills

Labour geographies of India’s new service economy
Al James*,y
and Bhaskar Vira**
*School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London E1 4NS, UK
**Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK
y
Corresponding author: Al James, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End,
London E1 4NS, UK. email 5a.james@qmul.ac.uk4
Abstract
The last two decades have seen a profound shift in how labour is spatially
conceptualized and understood within economic geography, based on a recognition
of workers’ abilities to fashion the geography of capitalism to suit their own needs.
However, the bulk of work in labour geography fails to examine worker agency beyond a
narrow focus on the trade union movement, largely divorces workers’ activities from the
sphere of social reproduction, and rarely looks beyond the ‘core’ capitalist economies
of the Global North. In response, this article presents findings from a regional labour
mobility survey of 439 call centre workers in India’s National Capital Region (May
2007). Here, previous work has heavily criticized the ‘dead-end’ nature of call centre
jobs offshored to India from the Global North, yet has done so based on an intra-firm
focus of analysis. By taking an alternative cross-firm worker agency approach, our
analysis documents for the first time some Indian call centre agents’ abilities to
circumvent a lack of internal job ladders and achieve career progression through lateral
‘career staircases’, as they job hop between firms in pursuit of better pay, improved
working conditions and more complex job roles. In the absence of widespread
unionization within this sector, the article also discusses the productive and social
reproductive factors that underpin these patterns of Indian call centre worker agency,
and their mediation by a complex nexus of labour market intermediaries beyond the
firm. In so doing, the article ‘theorizes back’ (Yeung, 2007) on ‘mainstream’ (Western)
theories of the limits to call centre worker agency and career advancement.
Keywords: Labour geography, external labour markets, career staircases, call centres, India,
Global South
JEL classifications: J40, J60
Date submitted: 9 March 2011 Date accepted: 5 March 2012
1. Introduction
In a very real sense, there is a clear ‘core’ within economic geography that theorizes and studies
the core economies of developed capitalism. . . Seldom do those that work in the core recognise
the particularities of their own geographies. . . I think that we lack a truly ‘global’ economic
geography. (Olds, 2001, 133)
The last two decades have seen a profound shift in how labour is spatially
conceptualized and understood within economic geography. In contrast to earlier
Journal of Economic Geography 12 (2012) pp. 841–875 doi:10.1093/jeg/lbs008
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neoclassical notions of labour as a passive factor input to production, more recent work
has demonstrated workers’ abilities to fashion the geography of capitalism to suit their
own needs, in revolutionary and non-revolutionary ways (Herod, 2001). The resultant
‘labour geographies’ literature represents a flourishing and constantly changing field
within the discipline. Problematically, however, labour geography continues to suffer
from a number of ‘biases and blindspots’ (Castree et al., 2004), which include a
tendency to overlook worker agency that is not articulated as collectively organized
political strategies (Lier, 2007; Rogaly, 2009) and its limited theoretical and empirical
focus beyond the ‘core’ capitalist of economies of the Global North (Lier, 2007). While
recent work has begun to address the former blindspot (see, e.g. Coe and Jordhus-Lier,
2011; Rogaly, 2009), an engagement with the latter continues to lag. In this article, we
argue that this continued neglect of the Global South impoverishes our understanding
of the diverse contemporary economic geographies of labour, not least because ‘what
happens to workers, and what workers do in response, is ineluctably context specific—
that is, conditional on how place and space articulate in particular cases’ (Castree et al.,
2004, xvi–xvii). To this extent, we need to make room for a South whose contemporary
economic geographies of work and employment are not entirely constituted through its
relationship with the North (Raghuram and Madge, 2006, 274). Moreover, it is also
imperative that labour geographers grapple with the complex ‘stretched-out geogra-
phies’ of globalized service chains between North and South (see also Massey, 1994;
Power, 2003). Ultimately, these diverse border-crossing flows of labour serve to disrupt
the neat self-centrist geographies of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Lee and
McIlwaine, 2003), which have come to inform the peculiar ‘geography of labour
geography’.
This aim of this article is to begin to address these peculiar biases and blindspots
within the extant labour geography literature. This is articulated through a case study
focused on the accelerating overseas migration of voice-based service work from the
UK, USA and Australia to India. This case study is a useful one for an expanded labour
geographies research agenda, because it raises important geographical questions around
the ‘exploitative’ export of thousands of low-paid, ‘dead-end’ jobs with a lack of
opportunities for career advancement and a lack of training in transferable skills (see
Ramesh, 2004; Bhagat, 2005; Vira and James, 2012). Specifically, we ask whether there
are any opportunities for call centre career development and pay progression through
internal job ladders within India’s IT-enabled services/business process outsourcing
(ITES-BPO) sector? Are they as limited as in the Global North? And if so, are there any
alternative labour market mechanisms for call centre career advancement and improved
pay and conditions over the course of agents’ working lives? While economic
geographers are potentially well placed to answer these questions, they remain
conspicuous by their absence from the nascent research literature on emerging forms of
call centre work and employment in the ‘Global South’,1
which, in the Indian case, is
dominated by scholars from management studies (see e.g. Batt et al., 2005b; Budhwar
et al., 2006, 2009; Noronha and d’Cruz, 2006; Taylor and Bain, 2004, 2005).
This literature is also striking in its predominantly intra-firm focus, variously
1 Important exceptions include Chris Benner’s work on labour market restructuring through the growth of
call centres and ICT in South Africa and Mauritius (e.g. Benner 2003, 2006).
842 . James and Vira

exploring: management styles and HRM practices; and the social and technical
architecture of the call centre labour process.
We argue that this intra-firm analytical focus is problematic in its privileging the firm,
reducing call centre agents towards mere factor inputs to the production process, and
downplaying workers’ abilities to improve their position vis-a` -vis employers. In
response, this article adopts a longitudinal employment history approach to track
patterns of individual worker agency and career advancement amongst call centre
agents in India’s National Capital Region (Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon). Drawing on a
regional survey of 511 ITES-BPO workers and ex-workers (May 2007), combined with
42 in-depth interviews with workers, ex-workers, recruiters, training agencies, and
placement agencies (July 2006–August 2008), we document empirically for the first time
a set of cross-firm ‘career staircases’ which have been hitherto ‘invisible’ to previous
firm-centric analyses. The case study demonstrates the ways in which some Indian call
centre agents are able to circumvent a lack of internal job ladders by job hopping
between firms in pursuit of better pay, improved working conditions and more complex
job roles, in an industry context that is widely characterized as constraining mobility
and providing limited opportunities for personal advancement. In so doing, they are
able to exercise individual agency to rework their own reward structures, albeit without
necessarily challenging the more fundamental relations between labour and capital
which characterize the ITES-BPO industry itself. The article also documents the
multiple economic and social rationales which motivate the cross-firm mobility of
agents, as well as identifying a nexus of ‘labour market intermediaries’ (LMIs) external
to the firm which broker and mediate call centre agents’ experiences of upward
mobility. Based on this empirical analysis, the article concludes by fleshing out three
important avenues for future economic geography research on labour in the Indian
national context.
2. Towards an expanded labour geographies research agenda
Recent reviews have usefully traced the evolution of labour geographies through
various iterations, documenting significant shifts in how labour is spatially con-
ceptualized and understood within economic geography (Castree, 2007; Lier 2007; Coe
and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Rutherford, 2010; see also Martin, 2000). The dominant
conceptualization up until the 1970s was of a ‘geography of labour’, in which workers
were analysed as an inert factor input to production similar to capital, equipment or
raw materials, with workers simply understood to be affected by the dynamics of
economic change. These ideas were a cornerstone of neoclassical industrial location
theory, primarily concerned to understand how firms made locational decisions in
response to spatial variations in the cost and quality of ‘labour power’, measured
abstractly in terms of wages, skills levels and union membership (see Herod, 1997, 5–6).
While subsequent critiques by Marxist geographers in the 1970s moved beyond
neoclassical conceptions of space as ‘container’ to demonstrate instead how capital
produces space to facilitate accumulation, scant attention was paid to the role of
workers in actively shaping the economic landscapes of capitalism to their own
advantage (Herod, 1997). Rather, the spatial structures of capital took analytical centre
stage, with working-class people reduced to ‘variable capital, an aspect of capital itself’
(Harvey, 1982, 380–381).
Labour geographies of India’s new service economy . 843

In response to the limits of these earlier ‘geography of labour’ analyses, subsequent
scholars have sought to bring workers from the analytical fringes of mainstream
economic geography to its core, codified in particular by the work of Andrew Herod.
Beginning in the 1990s, this shift to a critical ‘labour geography’ is characterized by an
expanded focus on worker agency, resistance and spatial praxis—in short ‘an effort to
see the making of the economic geography of capitalism through the eyes of labour’
(Herod, 1997, 3; Coe et al., 2007; Cumbers et al., 2008). Within this framework, studies
have demonstrated empirically how workers are capable of fashioning the geography of
capitalism to suit their own needs and self-production, and have identified geographical
possibilities and labour market strategies through which ‘workers may challenge,
outmaneuver and perhaps even beat capital’ (Herod, 2001, 17). Studies have also
demonstrated how place matters in shaping patterns of ‘constrained worker agency’
(Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011), focused on the ‘specific spatial settings and contexts—
‘‘local labour markets’’—that workers seek employment and employers hire and fire
workers, that particular forms of employment structures evolve, that specific employ-
ment practices, work cultures, and labour relations become established’ (Martin, 2000,
456; see also Peck, 1996, 2003).
Despite these intellectual advances, however, there remain a series of peculiar biases
and blindspots within the extant labour geographies research agenda. Recent critiques
are outlined below and used to frame the empirical analysis developed in the main body
of the article.
First, while geographers have empirically demonstrated workers’ abilities to reshape
economic geographies in an active manner rather than watch passively from the
sidelines (Coe et al., 2007; Cumbers et al., 2008), labour geography tends to overlook
worker agency2
that is not articulated as collectively organized political strategies (Lier,
2007; Rogaly, 2009). It is therefore imperative that economic geographers theorize a
broader political economy of labour agency (see Kelly, 2002, 397), which explores the
full range of collective and individual strategies through which workers negotiate better
wages and working conditions with employers. This might include, for example,
geographical studies of the ways in which individual workers respond to adverse
employment outcomes within a particular firm through alternative strategies of ‘exit,
voice and loyalty’ (Hirschman, 1970).
A second—and related—blindspot concerns the relatively limited attention paid by
geographers to the activities of a diverse range of LMIs in establishing connections and
brokering employment outcomes between workers and employers; reducing transaction
costs of job search; mediating risk; and potentially enabling some workers to move up
from entry-level jobs to better-paid jobs as they gain skills and experience (Benner,
2002; Fitzgerald, 2006). While unions represent one important type of LMI, other LMIs
that actively make the geographies of labour markets—yet remain significantly
under-researched in labour geography—include recruiters, trainers, labour contractors,
professional associations and temporary staffing agencies.3
2 Worker agency is understood as both the intention and the practice of taking action for one’s own
self-interest or the interests of others: the capacity to act, to change, to challenge and to resist (Castree
et al., 2004, 159–160).
3 Important exceptions include work from ‘The Manchester School’ on temporary staffing agencies (e.g.
Peck and Theodore, 2002; Ward, 2004; Coe et al., 2007).

Third, commentators have also criticized the predominant focus within labour
geography ‘on the employment aspect of a person’s or group’s life, as if this can be
separated analytically and ontologically from their wider existence’ (Castree, 2007, 859),
and the need to develop a more holistic approach that connects worker agency in the
productive sphere to reproductive concerns and rationales across the work-home
boundary (Mitchell, 2005; see also Kelly, 2009). The point is that local labour markets
must be conceived beyond the narrowly economic, as spaces of social reproduction
(Martin, 2000). Herein lies the wider relevance of ongoing debates around ‘work-life
balance’ to an expanded labour geographies research agenda (see e.g. Perrons, 2003;
James, 2011).
And fourth, very little attention has been paid to workers as active agents in the
making and shaping of the geographies of capitalism outside the Anglo-American
world (Lier, 2007; Castree et al. 2004; see also Yeung and Lin, 2003; Murphy, 2006,
2008; Hess, 2009; Pollard et al., 2009, 2011; Vira and James, 2011). There remains an
urgent need to apply a labour geography perspective to cases in the Global South,
where worker agency takes on different forms and meanings (Tufts and Savage 2009;
see also Mellahi et al. 2012).
Examples of work that begins to disrupt these biases and blindspots, and which does so
through a focus on the Global South as a site for labour geographies research include
Kelly’s analysis of worker agency and the politics of labour market change in Southeast
Asia (Kelly, 1999, 2002); Mullings’ (1999) analysis of everyday strategies of workplace
resistance rooted in wider family support networks by which female information-
processing services workers in Jamaica resist the oppressive and tedious nature of their
work environments; Hale and Wills’ (2005) collection of work on female worker
organizing strategies in garment factories in the Global South; Lier and Stokke’s (2006)
analysis of community unionism in post-Apartheid South Africa; and Rogaly’s (2009)
analysis of the agency of unorganized temporary migrant workers in India’s agricultural
sector. But much remains to be done in expanding our analytical focus to new sectors
(particularly services) and new geographical domains (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011, 214).
In response, this article seeks to contribute empirically and theoretically to an
expanded labour geographies research agenda, by ‘theorizing back’ (Yeung, 2007) on
mainstream accounts of the limits to worker agency and career advancement in call
centres through a focus on India’s new service economy. Building on the four critiques
outlined above, the article documents how, in the absence of widespread unionization
within India’s ITES-BPO sector, call centre workers are able to exercise individual
agency to rework their own reward structures in ways which challenge dominant
accounts of offshored, dead-end call centre jobs with limited scope for advancement.
The article also identifies a nexus of LMIs which mediate Indian call centre workers’
patterns of upward job mobility between firms, and also connects these patterns of
upward mobility in the productive sphere to workers’ concerns around social
reproduction.
3. Re-theorizing offshored call centre promotion opportunities:
from internal to external labour market pathways
Call centres have become a core pillar of service delivery in the new economy and have
garnered widespread attention as an important means of organizing new types of

‘flexible’ work and employment (Russell, 2010). Yet, call centres have also been widely
and generally criticized for the low quality and poorly paid service work and
employment opportunities they offer (Gorjup et al., 2008). The call centre labour
process is defined by the integration of telephone and VDU technologies and the
Tayloristic sub-division of conversations into an assembly line of discrete, standardized
tasks through which customers pass (Bain et al., 2002; Taylor and Bain, 1999). Agents’
interactions with customers are characterized by the pursuit of pre-set measurable
objectives, controlled and processed by an automatic call distribution and predictive
dialling system, geared towards minimizing labour costs by maximizing the amount of
time workers are engaged on calls during any single work shift (Bain et al., 2002; Taylor
and Bain, 1999). As a function of this regimented labour process, the requirement for,
and development of, transferrable skills by agents is argued to be minimal (e.g. Belt
et al., 2002). Call centres have also been widely characterized in structural terms as
having flat organizational hierarchies and hence severely limited opportunities for
career progression through consolidated internal labour markets (e.g. Richardson et al.,
2000; Belt, 2002).
However, there is conflicting evidence as to the precise quality of call centre jobs and
employment arrangements being offshored from the Global North to the Global South.
Scholars have identified significant variations in the types of exchange between call
centre operator and caller (Taylor et al., 2002; Holman et al., 2007) that call centre jobs
roles presuppose varying degrees of knowledge, training and discretion in dealing with
clients/customers (Frenkel et al., 1999; Glucksman, 2004) and that call centre managers
differently impact job quality through a wide range of operations management choices
around the use of technology, performance measurements, extent of employee
involvement in work process and choice of incentive systems (Batt and Moynihan,
2002; Halliden and Monks 2005). Recent studies have also examined the specific factors
that support higher rates of internal promotion in some call centres over others,
documenting variations by vertical market, organization size and use of sophisticated
selection techniques (see Holman et al., 2007; Benner and Mane, 2009). Thus, Gorjup
et al. (2008) argue that ‘even though the use of promotion is not widespread among call
centres, we cannot go so far as to say that the lack of promotion is a defining
characteristic of the sector as a notable number of call centres do employ promotion’
(p. 57).
Nevertheless, there remain surprisingly few studies of advancement
opportunities through internal labour markets within call centres (Benner and Mane
2008). Even more striking is the almost total absence of any systematic empirical studies
of call centre worker promotion across firms, through external call centre labour
markets:
It would be ideal to have a longitudinal record of individuals to truly measure advancement. . .
to be able to track individuals who leave one firm and move to other firms. There is anecdotal
and survey evidence that employees are building career ladders across multiple call centers,
moving from lower-paid to higher-paid and more complex positions over time. More research
along these lines might help explore. . . the factors that allow call center workers to build
cross-firm advancement opportunities. (Benner and Mane 2009, 30)
This article explores the cross-firm career trajectories of call centre agents in India,
which represents the prime global destination for call centre work offshored from

English-speaking countries in the Global North (Nasscom-Everest 2008).4
Call centres
in India are classified under the broader ITES-BPO category, of which ‘60-65% of
services fall within the call centre space and 35-40% are back office activities’ (Taylor
et al., 2008, 38).5
High rates of employee turnover have been documented in Indian call
centres (40% against a global average of 20%), with almost 60% of Indian call centre
agents having 51 year of tenure at work (Holman et al., 2007; see also Kuruvilla and
Ranganathan, 2010). Estimates suggest attrition is highest (at 60%) for agents in
low-end voice processes (Hay Group/Manpower India, 2006, 29) and also for agents
within the first six months of the start of their call centre career (Bhatnagar, 2007). In
addition to a lack of opportunities for internal promotion (Ramesh 2004, 18; Hay
Group/Manpower India, 2006; see also Bhagat, 2005), studies have also explained these
high levels of agent attrition in terms of high stress levels; high levels of monitoring;
poor management; and low levels of employee discretion (Taylor and Bain, 2005; Thite
and Russell, 2010; Budhwar et al., 2006, 2009). Crucially, however, there remains rather
limited and mixed evidence on where call centre workers go when they leave a particular
call centre. Some accounts suggest 50% of agents move out of call centre employment
altogether (e.g. Taylor and Bain, 2005 c.f. Thite and Russell 2007, 2010). Other
accounts suggest 85% move to competing call centres (Anant et al., 2005; see also
Bhatnagar, 2007), yet offer no systematic evidence of the potential pay increases that
accrue to workers as a function of such job hopping, nor whether it is followed by
further call centre career development based on subsequent moves to other call centres.
We argue that our understanding of call centre worker agency and external labour
markets in India’s ITES-BPO industry is currently constrained by a methodological
reliance on managerial reports of worker attrition (e.g. Batt et al., 2005a; Kuruvilla and
Ranganathan, 2010), or analyses of completed employee exit interview forms for
reasons of turnover within a particular firm (e.g. Bhatnagar, 2007). When an agent
leaves a specific firm, they are therefore lost from the analysis. As such, firm-centric
analyses say very little about Indian call centre workers’ lived experiences of ‘attriting’,
of where they actually ‘attrite’ to once leave a particular firm; nor of the benefits that
potentially accrue to workers. Instead, the dominant language of ‘attrition’ and ‘quit
rates’ directs attention primarily to the costs incurred by employers in replacing trained
workers; its implications for service quality as embodied skills and experience are lost;
and of management strategies to combat this ‘severe problem’ (see e.g. Batt et al.,
2005a; Budhwar et al., 2006, 890; Russell, 2010, 212). To be clear, our aim is not to
reject these firm-centric analyses nor to deny the important contributions that these
studies have made in furthering our understanding of call centre work organization,
labour processes and call centre HR management strategies in the Indian ITES-BPO
4 The attraction of India lies in its large pool of English-speaking graduates and lower labour costs
supporting overall operating cost savings of 25–50% (Nasscom 2007; Nasscom-McKinsey 2005). Also,
since the early 1990s, the Indian government has implemented a raft of economic liberalization strategies
to encourage foreign direct investment. This has been reinforced by the abolition of India’s former
telephony monopolies which, alongside significant global expansion in bandwidth, continue to reduce unit
costs for telephony. Growth has also been supported institutionally through the activities of Nasscom (the
National Association of Software and Service Companies) which promotes the ITES-BPO industry as
India’s flagship sunrise industry.
5 Despite the use of the shorthand term by some commentators in the Indian context, it is recognized that
rather than there being a call centre ‘industry’, call centre operations are found in a wide range of sectors
(e.g. banking, financial services, health, public administration, transport and communication)
(Glucksman, 2004, 796).

context. Nor is it to deny the insights from other worker-focused studies of the stresses
and indignities experienced by some Indian call centre agents (see Mirchandani, 2004;
Singh and Pandey, 2005; Taylor et al., 2008); and of agents’ perceptions of the
implications of those work stresses in generating high attrition rates (Budhwar et al.,
2006; Ramesh, 2004). Rather, it is to compliment these existing analyses with a
cross-firm, worker mobility analysis that measures call centre agents’ labour market
histories of career progression across multiple call centre employers.
4. Methods and evidence base
Fieldwork was conducted in India’s National Capital Region (Delhi, Noida and
Gurgaon) in five phases: July 2006, December 2006, May 2007, November 2007 and
August 2008. In total, we conducted 42 in-depth interviews (each 1–2 hours) with call
centre agents, managers, ex-call centre agents, labour organizers and economic
development officials, as well as representatives from different LMIs (Table 1). In
addition, this article draws on Phase I of a regional survey of 511 ITES-BPO workers
conducted in Noida and Gurgaon in May 2007 [Phase II was conducted in August 2008,
and the results are presented in a separate article: see Vira and James (2012)]. The
survey sample was stratified in the following way: 20% freshers (51 year experience);
50% early to mid-career (1–4 years experience); 15% 44 years experience; and 15%
ex-call centre workers (left the call centre ‘industry’ no earlier than 2004). Respondents
were also stratified 50% males and 50% females. The survey explored: (i) workers’
educational and social backgrounds; (ii) career trajectories (prior, during and
subsequent to call centre employment); (iii) use of different LMIs (recruiters, culture
trainers, accent trainers, etc.); (iv) health issues arising from ITES-BPO work; and (v)
labour organizing preferences.
A series of access constraints prevented us from administering the survey directly in
the field.6
To overcome these constraints, we used an experienced local team of
fieldworkers from the Indian Market Research Bureau (15 males and 5 females) whose
demographic characteristics allowed them to circumvent many of these barriers to
access.7
To ensure integrity of the data, we were present in Delhi for meetings with the
data collection team during the setup of Phase I, and for the setup, piloting and data
collection during Phase II. Follow-up calls to research participants further verified data
quality. To minimize potential snowballing problems, a maximum of 30 research
participants was allowed from any single current employer. Employers were selected on
the basis of two well-known call centre clusters in Noida and Gurgaon, focused on
multiple types of call centre employers (MNC captives, MNC third parties, Indian third
parties and domestics) working in a range of vertical markets. Our concern was
independently to capture worker experiences of as broad a range of call centre
employers as possible.
6 Access constraints resulted from corporate security outside call centres in the wake of labour poaching by
rival firms, increasing concerns about corporate confidentiality due to documented cases of agent fraud
and the Mumbai terrorist attacks in July 2006 (see Vira and James, 2011 for a full discussion).
7 Fieldworkers waited outside call centres and approached workers during break times and shift changes.
None of the fieldwork team had worked previously in the ITES-BPO industry, and none of the
respondents were known to field agents previously.

Table1.SummaryoffieldworkandresearchparticipantsampleinIndia’sNationalCapitalRegion(NCR¼Delhi,NoidaandGurgaon:July2006–August2008)
TargetedcohortJobrolesincludedincohortsampleEmployertypescoveredbycohortsample
CallcentreworkersinITES-BPOsector
7interviewswithcallcentreagentsand
2callcentremanagers
Freshersandagents(varioustitles),team
leaders,manager,director
7differentcurrentemployers:includinglarge
(1000þseats)MNCcaptivesandIndianthird
parties(UK,USAustralianandEuropean
customerbases);andsmallerIndiandomestics
(250seatsandless)
434surveyparticipantsITES-BPOworkersatrangeoflevelsinthe
employmenthierarchy
53differentITES-BPOemployersinNCR
(spreadacrossMNCcaptives,MNCthird
parties,Indianthirdparties,anddomestics;
inboundandoutbound—seeTable2)
Ex-callcentreworkers
6interviewsFormercustomercareexecutives,Teamleaders
andprocesstrainers
Large(1000þseats)third-partyandin-house
multinationals;andsmallerthird-partyand
in-houseIndiandomestics
77surveyparticipants
LabourorganizerstargetingITES-BPO
8interviewsDelhi-baseddirectors,financialdirector,lead
organizers,secretary
UNITESPro,ITPF,NewTradeUnion
Initiative(NTUI)
Recruitmentandplacementagencies
7interviewsRegionalmanager,assistantmanagerquality
andtraining,resourcingexecutive,recruiters
(varioustitles)
Voiceaccent/languagetrainers
8interviewsLanguagetrainer,seniorlanguagetrainer,voice
trainer,zonalmanagerchannelsales,ceo,
seniortrainercorporateMixofsmallindependent‘momandpop’shops
servingdomesticandinternationalmarkets,
andlargerlocalsubsidiariesofmultinational
companies
LocalresearchersfocusingonITES-BPOsector
4interviewsResearchersinlocaleconomicdevelopment
agencies,labourresearchorganizationsand
NGOs

The survey generated pre-ITES-BPO and ITES-BPO employment histories for 511
ITES-BPO workers (including 77 ex-workers) in India’s NCR, the majority of whom
had been born and schooled in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh or Bihar (Figure 1).8
The survey identified these 511 workers job hopping between 192 different
ITES-BPO employers across 886 total jobs over the course of their ITES-BPO careers
till that point. The characteristics of our survey sample are shown in Table 2.
Importantly, these are consistent with the Indian results from the recent Global Call
Centre Industry Project (Batt et al., 2005b),9
along with other call centre studies in the
NCR (Ramesh, 2004; Budhwar et al., 2006; Bhatnagar, 2007), and in other Indian cities
(e.g. Kuruvilla and Ranganathan 2010), in terms of average age, gender composition
and educational qualifications.
Figure 1. Mapping the major origins (birth and schooling) of ITES-BPO workers in the May
2007 NCR survey cohort (N ¼ 511).
8 NCR survey ITES-BPO worker sample (N ¼ 511): major places of birth by state: Delhi, 192; Uttar
Pradesh, 102; Bihar, 40. Major places of schooling by state: Delhi, 210; Uttar Pradesh, 90; Bihar, 40.
9 Batt et al.’s (2005) study involved an on-site survey of 60 call centres in Bangalore, Bombay, Chennai,
Delhi, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, covering a total core workforce of 31,698.

Table2.Summaryofresearchparticipantcharacteristics(May2007NCRsurvey)
MeasuredcharacteristicMNCcaptive
(N¼181),n(%)
MNCthirdparty
(N¼106),n(%)
Indigenousthirdparty
(N¼183),n(%)
Domesticplayers
(N¼42),n(%)
Total
(N¼511),n(%)
Gender
Male75(41)53(50)106(58)29(69)262(51)
Female106(59)53(50)77(42)13(31)249(49)
Education
Undergraduatedegreeheld169(93)83(78)139(76)24(57)414(81)
Postgraduatedegreeheld21(12)10(9)20(11)2(5)52(10)
Contractualstatus
Permanentcontract148(82)98(92)164(90)38(90)447(87)
Temporarycontract33(18)8(8)17(10)4(10)64(13)
Natureofcurrentworka
Combinedvoice/non-voicework41(22)8(8)28(15)5(12)82(16)
Voice-basedworkonly110(61)75(71)139(76)34(81)358(70)
Non-voice-basedworkonly30(17)23(22)16(9)3(7)72(14)
Inboundcalls(sales,technicalsupport,customerservice)146(81)90(85)108(59)12(29)352(69)
Outboundcalls(telemarketing,sales)35(19)16(15)75(41)30(71)159(31)
Nightshifts123(70)54(51)103(56)10(24)289(57)
N(mean)N(mean)N(mean)N(mean)N(mean)
Age(years)(timeofsurvey)181(25)106(24.1)183(23.7)42(24)511(24.3)
Monthlyhoursworkedb
166(190.3)86(201.2)149(192.6)34(186.8)434(191.7)
Dailycommutetoandfromworkcombined(min)181(77.5)106(70.3)183(71.8)42(61.2)511(72.5)
Note:Datarefertoworkers’currentpositionatthetimeofsurvey,orelselastheldjob(forex-ITES-BPOworkers).Asfaraspossible,labelsmimicthosein
Tayloretal.(2008,38–40)toenablecross-comparison.
a
Orelseforex-workers,mostrecentITES-BPOjob.
b
Basedonarestrictedsamplerange(85%)whoprovidedcalculableresponses.

Overall, 86% of respondents in the survey (N ¼ 511) were engaged in call centre work
or a mix of call centre work with ‘back office’ work. Given our focus in this article on
call centre workers specifically, the 72 workers engaged only in non-voice-based,
back-office work are excluded from subsequent calculations (hence N ¼ 439). Of the
voice-based cohort, only 25 (6%) had worked in other jobs prior to becoming call
centre workers. Also, the vast majority (93%) of the voice-based cohort had entered the
ITES-BPO industry at the call centre agent/customer service associate level (the
remaining 7% typically entering with ‘senior agent’ or ‘team leader’ titles). Our detailed
analysis is based on this May 2007 survey dataset of 439 call centre workers in
India’s NCR.
5. Worker agency and career progression in India’s ITES-BPO
industry
Drawing on the NCR survey dataset, we trace workers’ pay and progression from
labour market entry to cross-firm promotion, while also exploring the multiple strategic
rationales and institutional mediation that shape the experiences of work and careers in
this sector.
5.1. First rung on the Indian call centre career ladder: who gets onto it and
how well paid is it?
Over the last decade, employment growth in India’s ITES-BPO industry has been
impressive, increasing from 180,000 workers in 2003 to 704,000 workers in 2008
(Nasscom-Everest, 2008, 28), to 1.29 million workers in 2010 (Nivsarkar, 2010). Against
this backdrop, our survey documents a distinctive social demographic of call centre
labour market entrants in India’s NCR, consistent with other studies in other call centre
locations in India (Batt et al., 2005a; Mirchandani, 2004; Taylor et al., 2008). Call
centre labour market entrants in the NCR are young and well educated, and the
majority (86%) speak Hindi as their first language.10
The average age at ITES-BPO
entry is 21 years 10 months (N ¼ 439),11
80% have undergraduate degrees with the
majority having attended Delhi University,12
and 9% also have a graduate degree.13
On
average these call centre workers entered the ITES-BPO industry 1 years 10 months
after graduation. Call centre labour market entrants in the NCR sample also come from
families in which the parents are similarly well educated: 72% have fathers who have a
Bachelors Degree or higher and 43% have mothers with a Bachelor’s Degree or higher
(Table 3). The majority (69%) of call centre workers in the survey sample identified
their father’s profession as ‘businessman’, or ‘officer/executive’ and 89% identified their
10 First language/mother tongue (N ¼ 439): major group Hindi, 379; other significant groups: Bengali, 13;
Punjabi, 12; Gujarati, 12; English, 11 and Urdu, 9.
11 C.f. ITES-BPO industry average entry of 21 years 11 months for whole survey cohort (N ¼ 511,
voice-workers plus non-voice workers).
12 Top five universities attended by call centre worker sample with undergraduate degrees (N ¼ 345): Delhi
University (195); Chaudhary Charan Singh University (19); Kanpur (12); Lucknow (8); and Kurukshetra
(7).
13 Indeed, 91 (26%) of voice-based agents with degrees graduated after BPO entry, and prior to BPO exit—
that is, they were working in call centres alongside studies, for varying lengths of time: for 1 year: 41; for
2 years: 19; for 3 years: 16; for 4 years: 14.

mother’s profession as ‘full-time homemaker’ (Table 4). In short, the majority of
workers who enter the call centre labour market in India’s NCR are members of India’s
urban-middle class youth.
To explain the willingness of India’s young, highly educated middle classes to enter
this apparently low paid, ‘dead-end’ sector, it is important first to understand the
position of call centre employment vis-a` -vis broader employment opportunities in
post-liberalization India. The average annual rate of growth of India’s national income
over the past two decades is 5.6% (Nayyar, 2006). Whilst high by world standards, this
growth has not been accompanied by an expansion of employment, which in contrast
grew by only 1% p.a. from the mid to late 1990s. Indeed, employment growth actually
slowed down over the decade 1993–2004 compared with 1983–1993 (Unni and
Raveendran, 2007). Against this backdrop of ‘jobless growth’, India’s ITES-BPO
industry shines out with an impressive employment growth rate of 15% p.a. during
2003–2004 and 2005–2006 (Hay Group/Manpower India, 2006), outpacing national
income growth and employment growth many times over. In other words, it is a new
industry providing jobs for graduates with limited alternative opportunities for ‘decent
work’ (see e.g. Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2007).
Table 3. NCR call centre worker survey (May 2007)—parents’ highest educational qualifications
(N ¼ 439)
Highest qualification Father Mother
No formal education 0 17
Primary school—up to fifth standard 2 9
Middle school—8th standard 6 23
Secondary school—10th standard 31 92
Senior secondary school—12th standard 58 98
Graduate 245 162
Post graduate 72 28
Other 25 10
Table 4. NCR call centre worker survey (May 2007)—parents’ occupations (N ¼ 439)
Occupation Father Mother
Skilled manual worker 15 0
Petty trader 11 0
Businessman/businesswoman 187 4
Self-employed professional 9 0
Clerical/salesman 43 13
Supervisor 31 14
Officer/executive—junior level 38 2
Officer/executive—middle/senior level 80 8
Full-time homemaker 0 391
Other 25 7

At the same time, the attractiveness of Indian call centre employment must also be
understood in relation to the kinds of entry level salaries it provides for young
graduates and the local purchasing power it affords them. Our May 2007 survey found
that the mean entry-level wage for call centre agents to be Rs 9272 per month,
consistent with a figure of Rs 10087 per month for the ‘typical call center worker’ as
identified by Batt et al. (2005b). While Rs 9272 per month is 43% higher than the
average monthly pre-BPO wage (Rs 6477 per month) earned by the 25 workers in our
sample who had been in paid employment prior to becoming call centre agents, these
entry-level salaries for Indian agents might nevertheless be perceived as exploitatively
low by UK standards: Rs 9272 per month converts to only £1416 p.a., or 5% of the
UK’s per capita. However, we argue that it makes (more) sense to compare call centre
pay levels in India with other locally available employment opportunities in India.
Crucially, Rs 9272 per month equates to almost three times the monthly Indian per
capita income, and twice the earnings of an entry level high school teacher, accountant
or entry level marketing professional with a graduate degree (UPI, 2005). These pay
levels powerfully shape how young graduates perceive call centre jobs and the local
purchasing power they offer:
I don’t think there is any other industry which is providing you salaries in 8000, 10,000, 12,000
[Rs per month] in such a big amount on just your basic high school 12 qualification, or after
graduation also. (Male agent, fresher, Delhi)
The last six years, it’s just brought about a revolution. A lot of middle-class people, plain
graduates who earlier wouldn’t have had a job are now working in the BPO industry and doing
very well – earning a lot more than what they could have with their qualifications outside the
BPO industry. (Female agent, 5 years experience, Noida)
Consistent with our in-depth interviews, the May 2007 survey documented ‘good
starting salary’ as the most highly ranked motivation for joining India’s ITES-BPO
industry amongst the fresher cohort (N ¼ 83) and all worker cohorts combined
(N ¼ 439) (see Table 5).14
Table 5. NCR call centre worker survey (May 2007)—most important motivations for entering the
ITES-BPO sector (N ¼ 439)
Motivation Rank 1 Rank 2 Rank 3
n n N
Good starting salary 253 56 45
Stop-gap job 36 20 21
To fund studies 25 52 31
To help out parents 24 84 57
To gain international business experience 40 134 138
BPO as long-term career 50 80 127
No other alternatives 10 13 18
14 The survey sample was stratified: 18% freshers (51 year’s experience); 18% early career (1–2years); 33%
mid-career (2–4 years experience); 15% 44 years experience; and 15% ex-call centre workers (left the
sector no earlier than 2004).

Our point, then, is that mainstream accounts which position offshored call centre
work as exploitatively low paid do so by means of a technically correct but socially
inaccurate comparison of Indian entry level call centre wages with those in the Global
North. Such analyses fail to contextualize adequately the ways in which call centre work
is locally reconstructed in India as skilled and professional high status ‘white collar’
employment (Vira and James 2011).15
We argue that India’s ITES-BPO industry
actually offers well-paid entry-level job opportunities for Indian urban middle class
youth, in a national employment context of jobless growth. In other words, the first
rung of the typical call centre job ladder in India’s NCR is set at a higher level than in
the Global North, forcing us to question one key component of generalized arguments
around the offshoring of low-quality, exploitative call centre work to India. But beyond
call centre labour market entry, what opportunities are there for Indian call centre
workers subsequently to secure improvements in pay and job quality over time and to
develop careers in the ITES-BPO industry?
5.2. Offshored opportunities for Indian call centre career advancement?
Consistent with previous studies which document a lack of consolidated internal career
ladders in call centres in the Global North, our analysis documented a similar absence
of internal job ladders in Indian call centres. Only 42 (9.5%) respondents in the
voice-based agent sample (N ¼ 439) had been promoted internally within their current
call centre (or else in their last call centre firm for the ex-worker cohort).16
Indeed, only
44 (10%) of agents had documented any internal promotions over the course of their
entire call centre careers to date. These figures are consistent with a figure of 13.9% of
Indian call centre employees promoted internally by the Global Call Centres Project
(see Benner and Mane 2009).17
Our analysis found no significant difference in internal
promotions by call centre employer type (MNC captive, MNC third party, Indian third
party and domestic). Reinforcing this general picture, the NCR survey also asked
voice-based agents to indicate the top three major issues facing workers within India’s
call centre industry (N ¼ 439). ‘Flattened job hierarchies with limited promotion
prospects’ was listed by 270 (61%) of call centre workers as one of the top three
problems.
However, internal ladders are but one element of a much more nuanced reality of
promotion possibilities for Indian call centre workers, on which previous studies have
been strangely silent. While our survey documented limited prospects for internal
promotion, consistent with existing studies from the UK (Belt, 2002) and India (Batt
et al., 2005b), our survey also indicates considerable scope for agents to gain upward
mobility by moving laterally between firms and negotiating improvements in pay
15 Other studies have also documented graduate perceptions of call centre jobs in India as desirable, skilled,
and high-status professional service occupations (d’Cruz and Noronha, 2006; Cohen and El-Sawad,
2007). We discuss the political implications of these constructions for organizing call centre agents in a
separate paper (James and Vira, 2010).
16 Of those 42 workers internally promoted, 9 are in MNC captives, 11 in MNC third parties, 18 in Indian
third parties and 4 in domestics. The average duration of agent position prior to subsequent internal
promotion was measured as 13 months. The modal internal promotion was from ‘customer service
agent’ to ‘senior customer service agent’/‘team coach’/‘team leader’ position (yielding an average pay
increase of Rs 4566/months).
17 For captive call centres, the Global Call Centre Project (Holman et al., 2007) also documented 0.9% of
call centre employees promoted externally: from the call centre to other parts of the company.

and/or working conditions on that basis. These inter-firm ‘career staircases’ (Benner
et al., 2007) are premised on an acute call centre skills shortage within the Indian
ITES-BPO context, reinforced by a rapidly expanding industry. India has sold itself as
the leading global location for BPO offshoring on the basis of its large pool of
English-speaking graduates.18
Crucially however, it is clear from our results that formal
English qualifications are not necessarily indicative of proficiency in English commu-
nication or ‘soft’ skills required by employers (see also Taylor and Bain 2005, 276):
It’s not just about their English – their English can actually be fine – it’s that sort of general
communication skills and culture gaps, of not realising someone’s being sarcastic, or whatever.
(Manager, BPO Language Training agency)
Thus, as new applicants filter through the various recruitment rounds of screening,
testing and training, only 1 in 10 secure a call centre job (Figure 2).19
As an outcome of
this talent crunch, successful Indian call centre workers exhibit relatively high individual
levels of bargaining power vis-a` -vis employers once they have trained and gained
experience ‘on the floor’.
The NCR survey documented that entry levels agents receive an average 25 days of
training before hitting the floor, the content of which ranges from immersion in
Western popular culture, to voice and accent training, time management techniques,
nature of product and process, selling skills, confidence and assertiveness. For
employers, investment in call centre agent training represents a double-edged sword,
underpinning more highly skilled yet potentially more mobile agents:
Suddenly you produce a skilled individual, you don’t want to lose them at that point. But
nothing can really stop them from moving off if they don’t want to stay because they’ve had a
lot of investment. (CEO, BPO language training, NCR, previously UK)
Some people stay, some for the six months, some for one year. But the average is around 4–5
months, then they leave, they join another BPO. We provide them with one month of training,
then they’re live on the floor. We’re not going to hike their salaries before one year. But after
three to six months of experience on the job they can definitely get better salary somewhere
else. We cannot stop them. (Manager, domestic call centre, Noida)
Thus, while some firms have sought to implement a wide range of on-site facilities in
an effort to retain trained and experienced workers,20
the response of many workers to
18 For example, Nasscom lists annual tertiary education labour pools for its major ITES-BPO hubs as:
Delhi (99,000–102,000 students); Bangalore (48,000–51,000 students); Pune (47,000–50,000 students) (see
NASSCOM-Everest, 2008, 23).
19 This low conversion rate also explains the relatively high-entry-level wages that the ITES-BPO industry
offers to successful call centre agent hires, reinforced by an employer preference for—and recognition
of—the need for agents to demonstrate ‘articulation work skills’, based on ‘a blend of emotional,
cognitive, technical and time management skills, performed often at speed and at varying levels of
complexity and autonomy’ (Hampson and Junor, 2005, 176). Much more than in non-virtual
customer-facing roles, these skills are necessary in order that call centre agents effectively coordinate
multifaceted interactions across people, information and technology; and in the face of contingencies,
maintain a flow of conversation with the customer whilst processing data accurately, managing emotion
and balancing conflicting demands for efficiency and quality of service (Hampson and Junor, 2005, 178;
Hampson et al., 2009).
20 Of the 55 call centres identified by respondents as current employers at the time of our May 2007 survey,
78% provide in-house restaurants and door-to-door taxis to and from work, 73% provide stress
counselors, 65% diet counselors, 80% banking facilities, 74% gym facilities, 53% shopping facilities,

the general lack of consolidated internal job ladders is to vote with their feet, facilitated
by their proven experience and completed training in the context of an ongoing skills
shortage within an expanding industry:
If you’re working at American Express, and Dell wants to hire you, you don’t necessarily have
the process knowledge skill set that Dell need. But what you do carry with you is your extended
language ability. . . English communication is the skillset that allows you to go from one place
to another. It’s like changing your phone carrier without changing your number. That
language skill, all of a sudden everyone becomes really hungry for you. (Male CEO, BPO
Language Training LMI, NCR)
It all depends on the training, in [name of firm] it’s one month voice-accent and technical
training. In case we do not clear the training in the first month then we get another chance, two
or three. So I was selected and cleared all my trainings and I was on the floor, started taking
calls and I was one of the best technicians with a good technical background in ISP. So then I
applied for [name of different firm], I got through, I got a better position, better salary package,
and it’s very near my house in Noida. (Female call centre agent, 4 years experience, NCR)
To understand the sheer scale of this phenomenon, the NCR survey indicates that
annual rates of employee turnover within respondents’ work teams average 54.4% (see
Table 6), consistent with a national average turnover rate of 60% for voice-based
ITES-BPO workers as documented in previous research (Hay Group/Manpower India,
2006). In other words, in any one year, call centre employers are having to replace
almost two-thirds of their workforce.21
Figure 2. Understanding the skills shortage in India’s ITES-BPO industry: rejection rates of
applicants at different stages of the recruitment and training process (Source: HayGroup/
Manpower India 2006).
78% games rooms, 76% employee sports teams and 62% employer head-leased residential accommo-
dation for workers.
21 Some firms have responded by requiring call centre workers to sign non-compete agreements, but such
agreements are difficult to enforce. Others are also developing ‘codes of conduct’ to restrict labour
poaching: Wipro Spectramind have entered a mutual non-hire agreement with IBM Daksh eServices,

Of the agents who exit these call centre work teams, our NCR survey documented
95% moving to competing call centres.22
The NCR survey dataset also measures the
frequency of cross-firm job-to-job hopping by worker cohort. As shown in Table 7,
within 1 year almost one-third of the fresher cohorts have moved to a second employer.
For mid-career agents (with 3–4 years experience), three-quarters have moved to a
second call centre employer, with one-third also having moved again to a third call
centre employer.
The kinds of pay increases that workers are able to negotiate through these cross-firm
job-to-job moves are impressive. These were first revealed to us through the in-depth
interviews:
In call centres, why people move is because of money. Once you join a company, you join as
fresher, so the minimum amount you get is 10,000 Rupees [per month] from an international call
centre. So once you are there for three months, complete the training, know who the people are,
then you get to know about other companies. Three or four months experience and then they
shift to another company. So 14,000 there, then to another company, 16,000. So within a span
of one year, they are in a better offer of more than 16,000. At the moment, 19,000–20,000 [Rs
per month] is the maximum package. (Female call centre agent, 3 years experience, Noida)
There’s a lot of arrogance you see here, people think they’re better than what they are, you
know, I’m changing job as per industry standard and I expect a 30-40% salary hike. So there’s
a lot of these situations arising, people say ‘oh look this is happening let me try too’. (CEO,
BPO language training, NCR, previously based in the UK)
Table 8 documents the regional prevalence of such pay increases as revealed in the
NCR survey of call centre workers (N ¼ 439). For the 60% of workers surveyed who
Table 6. Measuring turnover in call centre work teams in India’s National Capital Region (May 2007
survey excluding non-voice agents and ex-call centre agents)
Measure of employee turnover MNC
captive
(N ¼ 117)
MNC
third
party
(N ¼ 74)
Indigenous
third
party
(N ¼ 146)
Domestic
players
(N ¼ 32)
Total
(N ¼ 369)
Work team departed in past week (%, mean) 3.1 3.0 2.7 2.9 2.9
Work team departed in last month (%, mean) 7.6 4.1 7.1 6.0 6.5
Work team departed last 3 months (%, mean) 13.0 11.5 15.1 13.2 13.6
Estimated annual turnover rates for these
work teams
52.0 46.0 60.4 52.8 54.4
Mean average work team size 22 22 23 23 23
Note: N numbers indicate total respondents minus non-voice agents and ex-workers for each current
employer type.
AMEX, Dell and ICICI Prudential have already in this regard (India Times 2003; see also Budhwar,
2009, 152). For human resource managers within India’s ITES-BPO sector, addressing call centre agent
attrition remains a major challenge but has not yet translated into retention packages that are able
successfully to incentivize employee loyalty above the temptations of job-hopping.
22 Survey participants were asked to name the destinations of colleagues who had left their work teams in
the last week, month and 3 months.

had successfully moved to a second call centre employer, on average they were able to
increase their income from Rs 9272 per month to Rs 12,359 per month. This includes,
for example, three-quarters of the mid-career agents (3–4 years experience). And for the
20% of workers who had also moved to a third call centre employer, on average their
monthly income increased to Rs 14,809. This includes, for example, one-third of the
mid-career agents (3–4 years experience). In this way, opportunities for cross-firm
career progression in India’s tight ITES-BPO labour market compensate proficient
workers for a lack of opportunities for internal promotion, allowing them to achieve
improvements in pay towards salaries that are very impressive for young graduates in
their early twenties.
Of course, these aggregate figures conceal a diversity of cross-firm career staircase
pathways, based on different frequencies of mobility and pay increases across different
combinations of employer types.23
We are able to represent this diversity of cross-firm
career staircases graphically, as shown in Figure 4—in which cross-firm job hops are
represented by vertical bars, and internal promotions as dashed vertical lines. In order
Table 7. Cross-firm mobility of voice-based agents May 2007 NCR survey, N ¼ 439
Worker cohort (years call centre employment) N Non-movers
(%)
Ave frequency
cross-firm job hops
(excludes non movers)
(months)
Freshers (51 year) 82 71 4
Early career (1–2 years) 80 40 9
Mid-career I: (2–3 years) 102 39 14
Mid-career II (3–4 years) 43 25 18
Old hands (44 years) 62 15 28
Current call centre worker sample 369 53 23
Ex-call centre worker sample 70 52 15
Table 8. Average pay hikes achieved through cross-firm mobility of voice-based agents (May 2007 NCR
survey, N ¼ 439)
BPO Average pay,
Rs/month
Average pay,
£PPP p.a.
Average
pay increase,
Rs/month
Average
pay increase,
£PPP p.a.
First BPO (n ¼ 439) 9272 31,802
3087 10,588Second BPO (n ¼ 266) 12,359 42,390
2450 8403Third BPO (n ¼ 89) 14,809 50,793
2194 7525Fourth BPO (n ¼ 29) 17,003 58,318
23 For example, the average entry-level wage of Rs 9272 per month conceals variation by employer type:
captives Rs 10,943 per month. MNC third parties Rs 8043 per month. Indian third parties Rs 8796 per
month. Domestics Rs 7272 per month.

to help make sense of these staircase graphs for different worker cohorts, we present
first an individual agent trajectory, selected from the 4þ years cohort because it
approximates to the average pay hikes achieved by the whole NCR worker sample
(N ¼ 439).
Agent 2197 is male, aged 28, and a university graduate. His cross-firm call centre
career staircase is represented in Figure 3. He entered the ITES-BPO industry at age 24
as an entry level call centre agent on 1 January 2004 at Rs 8000/month. Six months later
(July 2004), he moved to his second BPO employer as a ‘customer adviser’ on an
increased monthly salary of Rs 10,000/month; and again 12 months after that (July
2005) to a ‘team leader’ role in a multinational captive call centre paying Rs 12,000/
month. His final cross-firm job hop came in April 2007 to another ‘team leader’ role in
a MNC third-party BPO. Overall, his call centre career history to date comprises four
separate BPO employers (hence three cross-firm job hops), such that within the space of
3 years, he has increased his entry-level salary 2-fold from Rs 8000/month to Rs 16,000/
month. Crucially, the documented series of cross-firm career staircase trajectories in
Figure 4 show how Agent 2197’s experience is far from unique.
Overall then, in contrast to the rather generalized picture of dead-end call centre jobs
in which the majority of India’s well-educated graduate call centre workers stagnate in
the context of an absence of consolidated internal call centre job ladders, our data
instead force us to situate that static intra-firm picture within a more dynamic
cross-firm reality, on the basis of which workers themselves recognize the growth
prospects offered by India’s call centres:
Overall BPO offers good growth prospects, you get to grow pretty quickly compared with
other sectors, if you’re a good performer. But it becomes stagnant, the most top level – and
where do you go further? Then you hop your job, you start moving to different BPOs who are
still setting up and have an acquisition to offer you. (Female former call centre agent, Delhi)
0
5,000
10,000
15,000
20,000
01/11/0601/11/0501/11/0401/11/03
DATE
MONTHLYSALARY(Rs
‘Customer Adviser’,
Indian Third Party
BPO, Delhi
‘Customer Adviser’,
Indian Third Party,
Delhi
‘Team Leader’,
MNC Captive BPO,
Delhi
‘Team Leader’,
International Third
Party BPO, Delhi
Figure 3. Illustrated example of a cross-firm call centre career staircase as documented in
India’s NCR (May 2007).

(a)
0
5,000
10,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
30,000
35,000
40,000
45,000
50,000
55,000
01/01/199701/01/199801/01/199901/01/200001/01/200101/01/200201/01/200301/01/200401/01/200501/01/200601/01/200701/01/2008
DATE
CALLCENTRECAREERSTAIRCASESININDIA’SNCR
OLDHANDSCOHORT(4+YRSBPOEMP,N=63)
MONTHLYSALARY(Rs)
Figure4.EvidencingcallcentrecareerstaircasesinIndia’sNCRacrossdifferentworkercohorts:(A)44yearsBPOemployment,N¼63.
(B)3–4yearsBPOemployment,N¼43.(C)2–3yearsBPOemployment,N¼102.(D)1–2yearsBPOemployment,N¼80.(E)0–1yearsBPO
employment,N¼82.

(b)
0
5,000
10,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
30,000
01/04/2003 01/10/2003 01/04/2004 01/10/2004 01/04/2005 01/10/2005 01/04/2006 01/10/2006 01/04/2007
DATE
MONTHYLSALARY(Rs
(c)
0
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15,000
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0
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30,000
01/04/200701/10/200601/04/200601/10/200501/04/2005
DATE
MONTHLYSALARY(Rs
(d)
(e)
Figure 4. Continued.

Significantly, the staircase graphs in Figure 4 illustrate a diversity of cross-firm
pathways, with different steepnesses and numbers of steps, but the general shape of
these graphs is clear. We are also confident that these pay progressions represent an
increased complexity of job roles (vertical mobility), rather than simply the same type of
job role being done in a different call centre (horizontal mobility) (see Benner and
Mane, 2009, 11), based on a general ascendency in seniority of job title. As shown in
Table 9, there is a decreasing proportion of agent roles, and an increasing proportion of
senior agents, team leaders, trainers, supervisors and management roles held by the
NCR cohort as they move from their first BPO employer, to their second and
third BPO employer. This vertical mobility was also consistent with workers’
own accounts of their increased job complexity over the course of their call centre
careers, and of the different responsibilities, hours, and daily tasks required of team
leaders and trainers in excess of entry-level agent roles, as revealed through the in-depth
interviews.
It is also important to note that our analysis did not find any significant differences in
frequency of cross firm job-to-job hopping by male versus female agents, nor in the
overall rates of pay increase that each gender group is able to achieve over the course of
their total call centre career. This is most likely explained as a function of females with
children invariably exiting call centre employment subsequent to marriage and
childbirth (see Singh and Pandey, 2005, 687). Only 5% of the females in the NCR
call centre agent cohort had dependent children.
5.3. Key factors underpinning Indian call centre worker cross-firm job-to-job
mobility
Underpinning the documented patterns of cross-firm BPO-to-BPO job mobility by
voice-based call centre agents in the NCR, workers’ primary stated motivating factor
was ‘higher salary’, accounting for 88% of the total 384 cross-firm job hops recorded.24
Table 9. Evidencing increased job complexity through cross-firm mobility
Job title First BPO
(n ¼ 439) (%)
Second BPO
(n ¼ 266) (%)
Third BPO
(n ¼ 89) (%)
Agent
Customer care executive, customer care officer, customer
service officer, customer service representative, customer
support associate, customer support executive, operation
executive, telecaller, customer care associate, process
associate, technical matter expert, subject matter expert
90 72 56
Senior agent
Senior customer care executive, senior customer care
associate, senior technical support officer, senior
customer service representative, senior customer
service associate
2.5 10 10
Team leader/team coach/trainer/supervisor 4 11 21
Project manager/assistant manager/manager 0.5 5 10
Other 3 2 3

However, this is far from the whole story—not least because of the remaining 12%,
one-third actually involved a pay decrease. In combination, the survey (N ¼ 511) and
interviews (N ¼ 62) reveal a complex trade-off of different push and pull factors
motivating cross-firm worker mobility, and which demonstrate how workers
measure ‘upward’ progression in ways that go beyond an income-maximizing logic
towards a focus on quality of life, well-being and ‘work-life balance’ (WLB, defined
as the ‘satisfaction and good functioning at work and at home with a minimum of
role conflict’ (Clark, 2000, 751; see also Greenblatt, 2002)). The most important set
of WLB factors underpinning cross-firm call centre worker mobility in India’s
NCR concerns the negative experiences of night work as Indian agents serve
Western clients in real time, and concerns to move to day work by moving—for
example—from higher paying international facing call centres to lower paying domestic
call centres, or else to international call centres servicing an alternative Western
location:25
Australia is five and a half hours ahead of us, it’s the most attractive shift, but the US is worse
in terms of shift timings. Australia is the best because it ends by noon, so three or four [pm]
they are home. They can enjoy their evening, nights out, and still come in again on 6:30 am
shift. (Male CEO, international facing Indian third party call centre, Noida)
In addition however, we also found arguments framed around WLB in favour of
night working, articulated by some female call centre workers who undertake the
majority burden of childcare relative to their male partners, further underscoring
the complexity of the rationales motivating mobility, as well as their changeability over
the employee lifecourse:
Before marriage I used to work at [name of firm], so after marriage and after conceiving and all,
I was looking for a job where I could manage my kids as well as my job. So that’s the reason I
joined call centre night shift job at [name of different firm]. For me night work was easier
because daytime I used to be with my kids. So morning hours I used to come back and sleep
and at 2:30 pm when they’re back, I help them with their homework. At night I used to go for
my shift, so it was kind of easy. There are many females who are working in call centres
because they’re getting the ease in the family as well as work. (Female call centre agent, 4 years
experience)
A second set of WLB factors motivating cross-firm worker mobility in the absence of
a pay increase concerns the reduction of everyday work stress: for example, from
target-driven international outbound sales to inbound domestic customer helplines, or
24 ‘Higher salary’ as primary motivation for job hopping: for 88% of hops from first BPO to second BPO
(n ¼ 267); for 83% of hops from second BPO to third BPO job hop (n ¼ 84); and for 90% of recorded
hops from third BPO to fourth BPO (n ¼ 30). Importantly, the primacy of salary as most important
driver for call centre agent exit as revealed in the NCR survey is consistent with the national-scale
findings of the ‘Dataquest India BPO E-Sat Survey’ series, which has been conducted since 2004. The
2007 survey sample covered 1749 BPO workers from 19 companies in Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, NCR,
Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore (Dataquest-IDC, 2007).
25 May 2007 survey current/most recent call centre job: 229 (52%) mix of night and day shifts, and a
further 28 workers working only night shift (6%), c.f. 182 (41%) day shift only (N ¼ 439). Location of
primary customer base: UK 63, USA 172, India 184, Australia 9 and Europe 6.

else to negate previous experiences of racism by call centre agents in international facing
call centres. It is on this latter basis that some firms require agents to adopt Western
pseudonyms as a means of smoothing interactions with customers: the NCR survey
documented 28 agents working in their current role using work name pseudonyms, all
of whom were servicing international clients (USA 16, UK 5, Australia 6, Europe 2).26
Nevertheless, some Western clients dissatisfied at having to deal with a non-native
speaker, or else resentful of job losses surrounding offshoring, engage in racial abuse of
agents (see also Mirchandani, 2004, 2012). One male team leader described his
interaction with recent customers in the USA:
You get verbal harassment, abusive language from customers, like ‘you bloody Indian camel
jockeys, you can’t speak English, go back to school and learn English and then call me back!’.
But I can’t say anything back. One lady you cannot imagine what she said to me. I called her
up in New York early in the morning, she said ‘if I get another single call from your company I
will get your name and give it to Osama Bin Laden!’. (Male Team Leader, 3 years call centre
experience, Delhi)
Reinforcing these problems, Pradhan and Abraham (2005) have also documented the
rise of dedicated websites providing customers in the USA with phone numbers of
Indian call centres and Hindi swear words. It is within this context that we need to
understand the preference of some agents to move from high-paying international
facing roles to less-well-paying roles in domestic BPOs.
Finally, our interview data also highlights the crucial importance of non-
self-motivated job mobility—not as a function of the prevalence of short term contracts
(c.f. Ramesh, 2004) because the majority (87%) of agents in our sample held permanent
contracts (current call centre employer or last call centre employer for ex-agents)—but
as the result of lay-offs, particularly in sales processes where agents do not meet targets:
Target is a key word for any BPO, irrespective of the level you’re at, even if you’re the senior
manager or senior director of operations, you will have some target for your process, then you
go further down, manager operations will have targets for his teams, then you go down to team
leaders, they have targets for their teams, and then the agents have individual targets. The set
target for the month is going to decide your fate, whether you are going to stay in the company
or not, people get sacked very fast!. (Female former call centre agent, Delhi)
Even the rarest of case is not acceptable to us – if he’s not doing well for say a couple of days
that is not acceptable. It’s target based work. Our analysers are listening all the time – we have
a quality supervisor who’s checking the live version of the calls. They are provided with a target
and they have to achieve it. If they fail to achieve it they are issued with a corrective action
plan. And for the week they continue to fail to achieve, they are terminated. (Male CEO,
international facing Indian third party call centre, Noida)
In sum, the interview and survey results highlight a complex set of cross-firm
job-to-job mobility rationales that are irreducible to one single logic, and which
evidence the multiple ways in which Indian call centre agents actively respond to subtle
variations in the everyday lived experiences of the call centre labour process—as a
function of call centre type, sector, complexity, workflow, market segment and
26 Range of pseudonyms used include: Mark, David, Rick, Stephan, Micky, Sam, Suzy, Pam, Mia, Nick
Johnson, Sharon, John, Ruby, Simon, Harry, Alisha, Jack and Peter Parker.

necessary commute—rather than simply being passive recipients of them. These, in
turn, underpin a temporally and spatially diverse range of cross-firm career mobility
pathways as call centre workers move between different BPO employer types, vertical
markets, processes and BPO locations in India’s NCR over the course of their call
centre careers. To some extent, these self-constructed staircases exhibit similarities to
the trajectories of ‘portfolio’ working that have been documented amongst some
self-employed workers in the Global North (see e.g. Gold and Fraser, 2002).
Significantly, the NCR survey data also highlight the activities of a complex nexus of
organizations external to the firm which act to broker (and indeed in some cases create)
those cross-firm worker mobility pathways in different ways. We analyse their operation
and outcomes elsewhere (Vira and James 2008), but for the purposes of this article the
most significant LMIs identified in the NCR survey that broker workers’ cross-firm
mobility patterns include recruiters, placement agencies, voice accent trainers, culture
trainers and head hunters. In summary, these LMIs exhibit a wide range of functional
interventions at different temporal moments in call centre workers’ careers spanning
pre-recruitment consultancy and interview training; walk-in interviews, screening,
testing and placement; post-recruitment in-house corporate training; delivery of train
the trainer programmes and head hunting. These are shown in Figure 5.
Thus, in terms of modes of recruitment to agents’ first call centre jobs, 58% of workers
were placed through a walk-in interview with a recruiter. And in terms of the frequency
of the post-placement LMI interventions that underpin the mobility of experienced
agents, the NCR survey asked ‘how often are you approached by recruiters acting on
behalf of other BPO firms?’. In total, 79% of the voice-based sample is approached by
recruiters at least monthly, with 28% approached at least weekly. In addition to
Figure 5. Conceptualizing the functional diversity of LMIs operating in Delhi’s voice-based
ITES-BPO labour market.

recruiters, referrals from friends in other call centres are also an important driver of
cross-firm worker mobility, explaining how 55% of research participants came to be in
their current call centre job. Hence, in additional to recruitment companies, call centre
agents themselves also facilitate cross-firm job-to-job mobility, typically receiving a
bonus for the successful recruitment and placement of friends to the same company.
The LMIs identified by the NCR survey also exhibit a diversity of size, revenues,
relationships with call centre employers and modes of contacting job seekers and
matching them to employers’ needs. They range from large international MNC
recruiters (e.g. Kelly, Manpower, MAFOI) engaged in job matching (linking workers
interested in new jobs with employers seeking to hire new employees) often with tie-ins
to specific call centre employers; to locally indigenous medium-sized recruitment/
training agencies (e.g. Hero Mindmine) offering full training and placement services
across a diverse range of call centre employer types most commonly through walk-in
interviews held in a variety of locations; to specialized culture, voice and accent training
agencies which provide in-house corporate training for newly hired agents (e.g. Holistic
Training Solutions); to specialized language training agencies (e.g. Inlingua) which
facilitate the movement of call centre workers currently engaged in Hindi-speaking
domestic work to higher paying international facing roles; to small one or two man
‘mom and pop shops’ offering very focused services (such as one agency we visited in
Rohini, North-West Delhi founded by two ex-call centre agents that simply offered
prospective agents the correct answers to common first round BPO interview screening
questions). Other LMIs are also concerned with promoting the mobility of call centre
agents into other sectors of India’s new service economy, such as the Delhi-based Air
Hostess Academy (AHA).
Thus, the survey identified workers’ use of a highly diverse range of LMIs operating
in the call centre labour market in the NCR, many of which are engaged in activities
that go beyond the central (and short-term) job placement function of most LMIs
(‘market-meeting’ function) to focus on the provision of skills training for job-seekers
both pre-employment and post-placement, promoting career mobility as part of their
mission (‘market-moulding’ function) (see Benner et al., 2007, 58–97). As such, the
dominant firm-centric analytical focus within the Indian call centres literature not only
obscures a complex set of cross-firm career staircases invisible to previous analyses but
also the activities of a complex network of LMIs which mediate and broker those
pathways and whose activities must necessarily constitute an important future research
agenda on the development of India’s new service economy.
6. Postscript: ITES-BPO career staircases in the ‘global’ economic
downturn
While call centres are widely characterized for their lack of opportunities for career
progression through consolidated internal labour markets, this article has documented
the development of cross-firm career staircases through which Indian call centre agents
are able to secure pay hikes, more complex roles, and/or an improved work life balance.
This analysis is based on survey data documenting the careers of call centre agents in
India’s NCR between April 1997 (earliest recorded agent entry) and May 2007. These
staircases are premised on an acute call centre skills shortage within the Indian
ITES-BPO context, reinforced by a rapidly expanding industry. This in turn begs the

question: What has happened to the kinds of cross-firm worker mobility we have
documented as a function of the subsequent ‘global’ recession since 2008? Critics might
argue that this NCR cross-firm call centre career staircase phenomenon is no longer
valid in the context of an economic downturn, as a function of lay-offs, salary freezes
and a potential move from attrition to lay-off.
Evidence on the development of India’s call centre labour market from 2007 to 2010
is uneven, varied and continues to confirm Batt et al.’s earlier observation on India’s
BPO sector that ‘heated debate is more prevalent than systematic observation’ (2005a,
335). Early reports predicted potential job losses in the combined IT and ITES-BPO
sectors of up to 250,000 in the first 6 months of 2009 (BPO Industry Association of
India, 2008), as a function of lay-offs of non-permanent trainee workers, and the
recessionary activities of some US-based firms—such as Sallie Mae and AT&T—
relocating or else cutting call centre jobs previously offshored to India (CIO, 2009;
Financial Times, 2009). But despite a widely acknowledged slowdown in ITES-BPO
industry growth through 2008–2009 (see e.g. NASSCOM 2010b), there has since
emerged little systematic evidence of the widespread mass layoffs of call centre workers
predicted in early 2008. Indeed, by April 2010 NASSCOM claimed that ‘in the face of a
global economic slowdown, the IT-BPO exports industry displayed resilience to grow
by 5.5% in FY2010’ (Nivsarkar, 2010, 3; see also Dataquest India, 2009). Within that,
the Indian ITES-BPO sector specifically saw export revenues grow from $US 11.7
billion (FY2009) to an estimated 12.4 US$ billion (FY2010) (Nivsarkar, 2010, 3), with
the addition of 30,000 new jobs (Nivsarkar, 2010, 4).
Anecdotally, the effects of the ‘global’ recession have been highly uneven in the Indian
ITES-BPO context: while some firms scaled back their Indian outsourced call centre
functions, other firms (such as JP Morgan Chase and Encore Capital Group) announced
that they would increase their offshoring of service provision to India in pursuit of
short-term cost savings (The Economic Times, 2009), with 11 new MNC captives set up in
India during the third-quarter of 2009 (Everest Group, 2008a). Moreover, in contrast to
the entire international-facing component of India’s ITES-BPO sector, the market for its
domestic-facing component lies outside the Global North. Accordingly, India’s domestic
call centres displayed ‘healthy growth’ in revenues and employment through the ‘global’
economic slowdown (Nivsarkar, 2010, 4).
Within this dynamic context, we argue that it is too simplistic to assume a
simple decline of cross-firm call centre worker mobility as a linear response to the
apparently ‘global’ economic recession: rather, that response will also be complicated
by the multiple, naunced drivers and institutional mediation of worker mobility
as identified in this article, in which some LMIs actively create their own markets
for worker mobility through labour poaching. With the export-facing industry
showing signs of resilience through the downturn, and with an expansion in the
domestic-facing industry, the cross-firm call centre worker advancement phenomenon
we document in this article is far from redundant. Recent reports suggest
increasing BPO attrition once more after relative dormancy for four quarters
(Deccan Herald, July 2010; see also The Economic Times of India January 2010). The
President of NASSCOM has also recently acknowledged the persistence of call centre
worker job hopping:
There are some employees who join an organization undergo the soft skills and product
training and quit. They then go and join another company and do the same. This practice

should be strictly discouraged. (Som Mittal, President of NASSCOM, speech to the Nasscom
HR Summit 2010, Chennai July 2010)
Indeed, there are indications that such job hopping may even increase in its
significance, in light of NASSCOM’s ambitious aim to increase India’s direct
employment in the IT and ITES-BPO sectors four-fold to 10 million by 2020, coupled
with its eKaliber initiative which aims to tackle the persistent call centre skills shortage
by restructuring India’s educational system in order to graduate students with
ready-made, accredited customer service and soft communication skills.
7. Conclusion
While there now exists a sizeable research literature that explores the emergence of new
forms of work and employment accompanying India’s transition to a globalized service
economy, economic geographers working on labour have been slow to engage with this
important research agenda. One major critique evident in this literature is that call
centre jobs offshored to India from the Global North offer low-paid, dead-end work
with severely restricted scope for career progression as a function of flattened
organizational hierarchies and a lack of internal job ladders. This article has argued
that our understanding of call centre worker agency in India’s ITES-BPO industry is
currently constrained by a methodological reliance on managerial reporting of
experiences of ‘attrition’ internal to firms. When an agent ‘attrites’ from a particular
firm, they are therefore lost from the analysis, effectively rendering invisible a range of
geographical possibilities and strategies for Indian call centre worker agency.
In response, this article has instead used a detailed work history approach to
document the strategic cross-firm job-to-job mobility of 439 call centre agents within
India’s NCR. We explore how some Indian workers are able to circumvent limited
internal job ladders within firms to build career ladders across multiple call centres,
moving from lower paid to higher paid and more complex positions over time, and
thereby exploiting a continuing call centre skills deficit, premised on a subtle yet
powerful disjuncture between formal English language ability versus soft communica-
tion skills. In short, our analysis indicates that within the space of 3 years, a good
Indian call centre agent in the NCR is able to double their salary from Rs 8000 per
month to Rs 16,000 per month. However, while higher pay accounted for the majority
(87%) of the cross-call centre job-to-job hops documented, our research also
documented a series of other factors that motivate cross-firm mobility around
work-life balance, examples of which include concerns to move from night to day
working in pursuit of a more healthy personal and family life, and to reduce everyday
work stress either by moving out of target-driven sales processes, or to a Hindi-speaking
domestic position. These cross-firm mobility pathways are mediated by a complex and
diverse nexus of LMIs, whose crucial activities in shaping the development of India’s
new service economy remain severely under-researched.
In documenting these cross-firm call centre career staircases in India’s new service
economy, this article also seeks to contribute to an important agenda which recognizes
the Global South as a focus for economic geography research, and to ‘theorize back’
(Yeung, 2007) on mainstream theories of ‘dead-end’ call centre work—as apparent in
the ‘core’ Western economies of the Global North—through an engagement with
‘alternative’ economic geographies of contemporary service work and employment in

India. Underpinning this difference, the first rung of the typical call centre job ladder in
India’s NCR is set at a higher level than in the Global North, providing Indian call
centre workers a greater sense of opportunity compared to their Western counterparts,
especially in a wider Indian context of jobless growth since the 1990s. Likewise, the call
centre English communication skills gap which provides good agents with significant
cross-firm career advancement opportunities in India’s expanding ITES-BPO industry
has limited equivalence in established western call centre labour markets. In articulating
our alternative account, our aim is not to deny the negative work experiences of call
centre work for many Indian agents in relation to racism, intensive monitoring, and
monotonous night work. Rather, it is cautiously but optimistically to situate those
negative experiences as part of a larger and temporally dynamic reality of Indian
call centre work and employment, in which some agents are able strategically
to improve their working conditions and/or terms of employment over time, through
cross-firm job hopping in pursuit of higher paying, less stressful and/or more complex
job roles.
Our analysis suggests three avenues for future economic geography research on work
and employment in India’s new service economy. First, future research needs to
document the functional and organizational diversity of LMIs that provide services in
the Indian ITES-BPO labour market and their empirical significance. Recent work has
begun to examine the activities of the Union for ITES Professionals (UNITES Pro) in
organizing India’s mobile call centre agents (e.g. Taylor and Bain 2008, Taylor et al.
2009, James and Vira, 2010—see also Ofreneo et al. 2007), but this is but one of a range
of LMIs external to the firm which broker the relationships between call centre workers
and employers in India’s new service economy. As introduced in this article, these
include recruiters, culture trainers, accent trainers, interview coaches, placement
agencies, headhunters, and trainer the trainer agencies. We need to examine the extent
to which different types of intermediary are used (or not used) by different cohorts of
ITES-BPO workers at different stages of the BPO career; explore the labour market
outcomes of the activities of these LMIs for both workers and firms; and explore the
wider developmental functions of these LMIs in facilitating and/or constraining India’s
transition to a new service economy.
Second, future research needs to extend the focus of this article on cross-firm call
centre worker mobility, to explore cross-sectoral worker mobility. What proportion of
India’s call centre workers move into non-voice-based roles elsewhere in the ITES-BPO
industry when they quit call centre work? What are the sectoral destinations of call
centre workers who leave the ITES-BPO sector altogether? What skills do ex-call centre
agents working in other sectors of India’s new service economy recognize as conferring
an advantage in their new jobs? And hence, to what extent does India’s ITES-BPO
industry represent a cross-sectoral job escalator, providing opportunities for newly
qualified inexperienced graduates to move up in other sectors of India’s new service
economy? These are important development questions.
And, finally, given the striking urban-middle-class demographic of India’s call centre
workforce, important questions remain around the genuine development potential of
this industry, beyond providing well-paying jobs for already well-off young members of
India’s elite. Interesting counter-case studies are beginning to emerge in response to
problems of ‘overheating’ in the seven Tier I cities which currently provide 490% of
India’s total IT and ITES-BPO revenues (NASSCOM 2010b, 9), prompting some firms
to reduce costs by establishing call centres in Tier II and Tier III rural locations in

Haryana and Karnataka (see Everest Group, 2008b; The Economic Times 2008). How
far have less-privileged workers from rural Indian locations been able to successfully
gain employment in these rural ITES-BPO locations? Is there any evidence of social
exclusion in terms of access to jobs within the industry, reflecting India’s persistent
challenges with respect to caste, religion, gender and other forms of identity? And what
role do the kinds of LMIs documented in the NCR play in facilitating call centre labour
market entry—and subsequent career advancements—in these Tier 3 call centre
locations? We argue that economic geographers are particularly well placed to answer
these questions—provided they are willing to head South.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all of the participants whose work-life experiences are documented in
this research. The authors are also grateful to constructive comment and critique from Neil
Wrigley and two anonymous referees. The article also benefited from earlier presentations to the
Second Global Conference on Economic Geography in Beijing (2007), and London Economic
Geography Seminar (2008). Thanks to comments and encouragement from audiences at both of
these events. The usual disclaimers apply.
Funding
This article reports on research undertaken as part of a project entitled ‘Worker Mobility and
Labour Market Intermediaries in the Call Centre Industry: An International Comparison (India
and the UK)’ funded by the Nuffield Foundation (Grant Number SGS 32848), with additional
funding provided by the Smuts Memorial Fund and Isaac Newton Trust in the University of
Cambridge.
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