1) "On the one hand, apocalyptic theories of global imperialism would have us believe that locality is being de-territorialized and subjects rendered into productive and flexible transnational labour by the onslaught of capitalist modernity. Agentive notions, on the other hand, overdetermine the position of the speaking subject and claim the re-territorialisation of the local in specific instances of Cultural Resistance. In this book, I am concerned with neither urban Indian locale, in dialogue with the transnational call centre, I am concerned with the ways in which the practices that signify this dialectic between the ostensible 'local' and the 'Global' are sought to be normalized.
2) "I was in my I late twenties, and I wondered as to why eighteen-year-old men and women went to work. Why did students who should have been lounging in parking lots, or riding motorbikes on the streets, us closing at the back of class go to work? Why did people stay up late in order to go to work at night? What cruel forms of just-around-the-corner desires animated this relentless movement and the will to slay sleep"
3) Flexibility in this analysis is thus not just the' extensive tendency to the temporary contractual neighbour and the high level of fluidity in the job market'(upadhya and vasavi 2006: I). Flexibility in this account is the word that the workers were formed every night or day, even as days and nights turn into weeks, months, and sometimes years in the will to perfect the ability to be flexible"
4) the middle-class population that has been absorbed, and fostered by the call centre economy in India, is perhaps best described as one consisting of this new set, arising breed that forms and Essential foil, and successor to an older, relatively coherent understanding of what " middle class" connoted- classically, a Nehruvian civil Service-oriented salariat, short on money but long on institutional perks (Mazzzarella 2005:13). This new breed was brash, young, consumerist, and unsteady while also simultaneously more voluminous than the older middle class, given that its borders were far more elastic
1)The relation between call centre work and social status: the author argues that in the early 2000s, working in a call centre or BPO or any IT-enabled services is considered as upward mobility to achieve a higher service status, especially among urban youth. in a traditional society like India, where patronisation is an important aspect of social life , the author argues that in the post-call centre economy , parents of middle class and upper class distinguished themselves from their counterparts at poorest sections of society by providing amenities and taking care of the expenses of their 'children' even after they complete their under graduation. They were ashamed to allow their children to earn their own bread because of the social stigma attached to part time work and labour itself. But after the success of call centre economy, this view point had changed. So there is a revolutionary change in the attitude towards employment at least than the ' labour itself.
2) Technology and middle class: the colonial legacy and post-colonial developmental policies nurtured an abstract class of Indians who were diverse in region, religion and caste and had different interests. It has been confusing idea because of the range of people involved in it. The coming of dot com boom, internet networking and IT-enabled flexible economy redefined the Indian middle class. Even though it was still an abstract group, an identity along with its own politics formed in the context of technological innovations and preference for certain jobs. According to author. The key question she is “interested in the ways in which the call centre industry convinced a largely middle class audience about the desirability of this kind of work."
3) Flexibility: what makes the author to quote widely from the works of Marxist geographer like David Harvey is all about the importance of the time and space in the era of late capitalism. According to the author, time is the new currency by which capitalism is running and flexibility is the defining ideology of late capitalism. The technology are aspired to be products of flexibility. It makes things easier and enables to move beyond the factors of time and space. But the author tries to understand the dialectics of space at global and local interaction. According to mathangi Krishnamurthy, flexibility is the key which defined the call centre economy and which is rearranging the social order of Indian urban space and its populace.
This book is all about exploring a way of life embedded in a mode of work which has several forms of complications and entanglements. The book does not come up with any value-oriented arguments regarding call centre work and the economy and lifestyle fostered by it. The alterations happened in the way Indian middle class approached certain kind of labour and its aesthetics is explained very well in this book, especially from the era of the 1990s. According to the author, if we dig out for an argument, she noted that how flexibility became a 'necessary caveat for upward mobility' to an aspiring class of young urban Indians who are at the peak in demography. The author also points out how this flexible economy enabled by IT and BPO related works became historical markers of Indian middle-class-ness. as a cultural and linguistically nation like India, this particular kind of flexible economy unified the dreams and suffering of professional, undergraduate bulk of Indian youth. One of the signifying result produced by the author is regarding the nightlife of these young workers and their class composition, which can be defined as the new middle class. According to the author, one of the key juncture for this techno boom was created by the pressure of the Indian middle class, who are products of the colonial legacy. The author perfectly states that “over the 1990s, this class has also increasingly pushed for economic reform as an antidote to the failures of the Indian state. The resultant increasing pace of development has delivered a paradoxical reward. Even as the Indian middle class now enjoys the consumerist lifestyle afforded by free-market ideology, it must work harder to define its own cultural boundaries that are being rapidly subsumed by socio-economically equal new middle classes. This book is an ethnographic exploration of the material and symbolic processes that underlie this controversial middle-class expansion and locates call centres within this socio-political milieu.
First of all, the way the author wrote this academic work is a good example of how to write a corporate and industrial ethnography. The author actually looks beyond the rigidities of ' Anthropology of work' and it is unusually informative rather than rhetoric’s often seen in those works which claim to be interdisciplinary. From micro to macro, from 'body -politics to political economy, these books help me to bridge the important gaps of my work on labour and technology. For example, the author recreates the lived experience of workers by different analogies rather than monotonous writing without human emotions. This work also helps to picture the manifestation of technology in day to day life and recreates the epistemological break of Indian notion of labour after the boom of call centre economy in the 2000s.
'1-800-worlds' is empirical proof of how science and technology significantly changed the class patterns of society to social imagination about labour and work. Beyond the exaggerations, the call centre economy paved a new economy which is based on 'flexibility' and it shook the basic ideas behind the Indian conventional thinking. For example, it redefined the culture of youth. According to the author, this book is a recreation of her nostalgic experience's comparison with technologically motivated, fast-moving society. she thinks about how a society which defined the class differences based on either indifference or compulsion to do a job by an 18-year-old or undergraduate was redefined by a generation who was eager to do 'nocturnal' call centre job as fun and adventure and questions back their parents about their 'right' to earn in defence to parents offer of we will take care of everything '.
1) Flexible economy: the author made the first attempt to understand the call centre economy and its ideology of flexibility through understanding the various technological innovations that led to globalization and its related social reordering. The author argues that technological innovations that happened during dot com boom and internet networking were critical in defining the neoliberal flexible service-based economy. She clearly points out that 'flexibility' is an achievement only accessed through different kinds of networks which later influenced the social global order.
2) Education, youth culture and Sts: mathangi Krishnamurthy’s approach towards understanding the Indian call centre economy was not merely based on political economy and its social consequences. Even though she criticizes the aspiration of anthropologists in regard to holistic understanding, she talks about various dimensions of social life that are rearranged and reorganised in relation to call centre sociability. she states that " the Indian call centre economy is also entrenched within a fragmented trajectory of state-led technological development and educational policy in India (chakravartty2004,pitroda1993), and I argue, a manifestation of what ashis Nandy has called the post-independence predilection to 'spectacular technology (Nandy,1988)." it gives a great opportunity for upcoming scholars to understand the correlation between science and technology along with flexible economy, especially that emerged from technologically mediated IT-enabled services.
3) Society, political economy and flexibility: the important contribution given by book towards Sts Discourse is twofold. One is understanding how the political economy of a society is determined by the flow of data and how networking redefined the economic transactions in both global and local level via fast technological innovations in the field of IT and ITES. The second is understanding how this technological innovations and so-called scientific progress are reciprocally redefining its own by-product, the flexibility. The author calls this dialectical relationship as one of the complex phenomenon, which is crucial in understanding the new social order after globalization, privatization and liberalization, in the context of rapidly growing technology and artefacts.
It is important to understand the author from the book which she wrote and how systematically done the analytical and methodological part of her book. Mathangi Krishnamurthy gives us a brilliant picture of her training, in both subject-based and interdisciplinary approach, while reading through the lines. her unconventional writing style emphasises the bigger idea of how labour is not just an isolated, overemphasised aspect of the political economy of human life, but it is dialectically and reciprocally related to each aspect of human life. For example, she talks about how the work in a call centre to an extent defined a new Indian middle class and its youth, and on the other hand how certain lifestyles and approach to career and job was redefined by the boom of dotcom’s and call centre labour process. Through this kind of concrete approach in defining various aspects of human life, we can’t call Mathanghi Krishnamurthy as somebody who is doing sociology or anthropology of labour. While coming to formal training and orientation, she had specialized in globalization, anthropology of work, youth cultures, corporate ethnography, consumption and consumerism. in 1800 worlds, we can find a brilliant ethnographer in Mathanghi Krishnamurthy who used all her specializations and training to be asthmatically taken or made involved in her one single book so beautifully without any artificiality.