Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

Abstract

managers and young employees, and paternalistic or patriarchal ‘protection’ of female employees become part of professional modus operandi, mediating tensions and anchoring workers in an industry ‘unable to foster and maintain official structures of belonging’ (p. 184). This project of producing suitable transnational worker-subjects inevitably reveals limits and failures. The peculiar middle-class worker-commodity is an interpellation which many workers soon discover is not their calling. Krishnamurthy explains the high dropout rates in the industry by showing how the financial freedom and flexibility that workers gained through the job also gave them the freedom and the licence to quit. Yet, the 1-800-world lives on, embedded in the bodies and subjectivities of workers after they quit and move on to different jobs. The book is worth reading simply for its consummate ethnographic writing. Krishnamurthy’s prose moves easily between fast-paced, evocative and highly readable descriptive passages and more reflective conceptual deliberations. She recreates the ethos of the call centre with humour, whimsy, irony and empathy. But the real life of the narrative is in the way her own presence and personality move in and out of the narrative. Drawing on her four-month stint as a voice and accent trainer in a call centre, interwoven with recollections of her teenage years in Pune, Krishnamurthy’s reflections on her own entanglements, predicaments and commitments lend an immediacy and depth to the ethnography.