Labour geographies of India’s new service economy

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.