1-800-Worlds: The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy

Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1–800–Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of symptoms that can help read changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness.