Values Subduction: A Critical Examination of the Hyderabad Information Technology Sector

Abstract

Increasingly, there are organizations, industries, and cities worldwide where the "first" and "third" worlds meet in terms of culture, commerce, and politics. Although researchers agree there are significant socio-cultural implications associated with living and working in these dynamic spaces, there is considerable debate about the nature of these implications. Emerging as an example of an industry operating outside traditional parameters of space, time, and culture, the Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry employs Indians to service the needs of clients and customers from around the world without ever having to leave India. Often heralded (or sometimes demonized) as vanguards of an idealized (i.e. Westernizing) Indian middle class, the identities of call center workers are often extrapolated from the goods they consume, and employment in the global workforce is equated with ascension into the global consumer class (Saraswati, 2008). In reality, the deeper socio-cultural implications of working in the Indian BPO industry are as unclear--both conceptually and empirically--as they are contested. In this research, I contribute to our understanding of these issues by examining the ways in which call center work influenced the values and behaviors of my respondents from their unique points of view. Within the empirical domain, I present a critical ethnographic analysis of fieldwork I conducted in "DomesTech"--an Indian-owned, hybrid-focused BPO organization in Hyderabad, India. Calling upon postcolonial theory and the Bhabhaian perspective of "Third Space" as conceptual and analytical guides and focusing on the values of family, materialism, and ecological orientation, my research shows that call center workers do not fit neatly into the aspirational mold often attributed to them. I also argue that the sociocultural implications of contemporary call center work are not sufficiently conceptualized by existing theoretical frameworks. Hoping to contribute to our theoretical understanding of these issues, I engage in a grounded theory approach to data analysis and call upon the geological process of subduction as interpretive metaphor to develop a refined conceptualization of contemporary culture change.