To browse Academia. By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, we argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are co-implicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In our analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor, we draw upon several years of intensive ethnographic field research in call centers in the southern Indian city of Bangalore.
We argue that the affective labor of call center agents is service work but it takes the form of intimate labor provided at a distance. On the one hand, their success at work was contingent on their construction of a relationship of proximity with their clients, eliciting and producing affects that generated intimate encounters. However, although these workers did not engage in physical travel, their virtual and imaginative travel was generative of new modalities of proximity that compel us to review our assumptions about intimacy and distance, and about the relation between intimacy and capital.
Keywords: Affective labor, intimate labor, call centers, India. 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, 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. With their emphasis on digitally mediated performance and illusion, Indiancall centers are an unruly subject for realist modes of documentary.
