Kiran Mirchandani. Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kiran Mirchandani. Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. $73.95 he. $23.95 sc. The rapid growth of transnationally outsourced call centre work in India during the first decade of the 21st century has, in the public imagination as it has for scholars, offered a rich symbol of the broader transformations of labour within global capitalism. University of Toronto scholar Kiran Mirchandani's book on call centre labour in India offers us a compelling view of the labour processes and workforce subjectivities being forged at the heart of this shift. Bolstered by a strong command of the burgeoning literature on call centres and the workers driving them, the author's approach is especially attuned to how the experiences of Indian call centre workers shaped by a complex interplay of colonial histories, class relations, and national interests (3). Mirchandani's book draws on a hundred interviews (mostly with workers, but also with managers, team leaders, and trainers) conducted on five separate research visits to New Delhi, Bangalore and Pune between 2002 and 2009--seven crucial years in the expansion of this highly communicative economic sector. Throughout the text, Mirchandani seeks to make frontline workers' experiences the bedrock (27) of the study. Her extensive quoting from the interviews--which were conducted independently of call centre management and thus, for workers, beyond the reach of a gaze that would inhibit openness--enables the reader to access workers' off-the-phone selves (30). In the process, we offered a glimpse of what anthropologist James C. Scott might call the hidden transcript of the Indian call centre labour force that daily tends to the communicative requirements of global capitalism. The worker-focused nature of Mirchandani's research project and its meticulous attention to the of subjectivity occurring within this profession as it plays out in the Indian context give the book its distinct character. The ambiguous nature of call centre labour has been widely noted by researchers. As Mirchandani points out, call centre employees are neither traditional blue-collar workers, even though they work in highly repetitive and controlled jobs, nor they white collar workers engaged in creative knowledge production (23). Inside the call centre, language, culture and subjectivity both the raw materials and the end product of the process, one that is shaped by both old and new forms of domination. In the case of India, its late-twentieth century emergence as a destination for transnational info-service work is a legacy deriving from its genealogy of colonial exploitation. Mirchandani's chapter on language training meticulously recounts the methods through which a deficient Indian worker is constructed, one that must be reshaped by Western nationalism, professionalism, and consumerism. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".