The broader political-economic dynamics driving offshoring and the growth of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in India, particularly its interactive voice (i.e. call centre) component, are reasonably well-known (e.g. Dossani and Kenney, 2007), with cost-cutting and profit-maximisation central to corporate strategies (Taylor, 2010a). Less attention has been paid to emerging global divisions of service labour through the analytical lens of the Global Commodity Chain/Global Value Chain/Global Production Networks frameworks (Taylor, 2010b). Most interest has been in work organisation, labour process and conditions of work, experiences and the identity of Indian employees (e.g. Cohen and El Sawad, 2007; Noronha and D’Cruz, 2009; Taylor et al, 2009).
However, no published work yet has considered the impact of the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and recession on BPO offshoring to and within India. Consequences were inevitable given that 60 % of service value derived from the severely affected US, 22% from the UK and 50% was in banking and financial services (Nasscom, 2009:58). The paper’s account of the disruptions and continuities in global business service flows and the changed Indian BPO marketplace foreground its empirical core, an investigation of the consequences for work organisation, labour process, employment relations and ‘professional’ employee experiences in international-facing BPO.
Industry analysis draws on ‘official’ Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) sources, debates at their 2009-2010 conferences, consultants’ reports and semi-structured and unstructured interviews with senior management. Qualitative employee data comes from two phases, February-June 2009 and then February-September 2010. In the first phase exploratory interviews were conducted with 12 agents in Bengaluru and in the second phase over 40 in-depth semi-structured interviews, 10 in each of Tier I cities – Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai – were undertaken.
While respondents report that the recession’s impact on BPO employment was generally limited, employers used the uncertain environment since late-2008 and a widespread (though not universal) recruitment freeze to pursue their organizational interests, introducing cost-cutting to labour management and HRM practices. Employer actions have included extended working times, stringent performance management to identify and terminate the contracts of ‘underperformers’, inferior contracts, frozen (or even cut) pay, curtailed bonuses and process specific work intensification. The paper evaluates the consequences for employees who, in conditions of greatly reduced attrition, were largely compelled to remain with their employers despite deteriorating work conditions. Finally, we report contradictory findings in respect of changed professional identity, a central element in the constitution of BPO employment in the optimistic pre-crisis conditions of seemingly endless growth.
References
Cohen, R. and El Sawad, A. (2007) Lived experiences of offshoring : an examination of UK and Indian financial service employees’ accounts of themselves and one another’, Human Relations, 60.8:1235-1262
Nasscom (2009) The IT-BPO Sector in India – Strategic Review 2009, New Delhi: Nasscom
Noronha, E. and D’Cruz, P. (2009) Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of Professionalism,
Dossani, R. and Kenney, M. (2007) ‘The next wave of globalisation: relocating service provision to India’, World Development, 35.5:772-791
Taylor, P. (2010a) ‘Remote work from the perspective of the developed countries: a multi-country synthesis’. In Messenger, J. and Ghoshseh, N. Offshoring and Working Conditions in Remote Work, Geneva/Basingstoke: International Labour Organization/Palgrave Macmillan,17-59
Taylor, P. (2010b) ‘The globalization of service work: analyzing the transnational call centre value chain’, in Thompson, P. and Smith, C. (eds.) Working Life: Renewing Labour Process Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave:244-258
Taylor, P., Scholarios, D., d’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E. (2009) ‘Union formation in the Indian call centre/BPO industry’, New Technology, Work and Employment, 24.1:19-42