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*Shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography 2017* Over a million people in the UK work in call centres, and the phrase has become synonymous with low-paid and high stress work, dictatorial supervisors and an enforced dearth of union organisation. However, rarely does the public have access to the true picture of what goes on in these institutions. For Working the Phones, Jamie Woodcock worked undercover in a call centre to gather insights into the everyday experiences of call centre workers. He shows how this work has become emblematic of the shift towards a post-industrial service economy, and all the issues that this produces, such as the destruction of a unionised work force, isolation and alienation, loss of agency and, ominously, the proliferation of surveillance and control which affects mental and physical well being of the workers.

Call centers --- Call center agents --- Call center customer service agents --- Call center operators --- Call center representatives --- Customer service agents, Call center --- Operators, Call center --- Representatives, Call center --- Employees --- Telephone stations --- Social aspects --- E-books --- Call centers.

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The Language of Outsourced Call Centers is the first book to explore a large-scale corpus representing the typical kinds of interactions and communicative tasks in outsourced call centers located in the Philippines and serving American customers. The specific goals of this book are to conduct a corpus-based register comparison between outsourced call center interactions, face-to-face American conversations, and spontaneous telephone exchanges; and to study the dynamics of cross-cultural communication between Filipino call center agents and American callers, as well as other demographic groups of participants in outsourced call center transactions, e.g., gender of speakers, agents' experience and performance, and types of transactional tasks. The research design relies on a number of analytical approaches, including corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and combines quantitative and qualitative examination of linguistic data in the investigation of the frequency distribution and functional characteristics of a range of lexico/syntactic features of outsourced call center discourse.

Intercultural communication --- Call center agents --- English language --- Germanic languages --- Call center customer service agents --- Call center operators --- Call center representatives --- Customer service agents, Call center --- Operators, Call center --- Representatives, Call center --- Employees --- Cross-cultural communication --- Communication --- Culture --- Cross-cultural orientation --- Cultural competence --- Multilingual communication --- Technical assistance --- Language. --- Usage. --- Anthropological aspects

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Transnational customer service workers are an emerging touchstone of globalization given their location at the intersecting borders of identity, class, nation, and production. Unlike outsourced manufacturing jobs, call center work requires voice-to-voice conversation with distant customers; part of the product being exchanged in these interactions is a responsive, caring, connected self. In Phone Clones, Kiran Mirchandani explores the experiences of the men and women who work in Indian call centers through one hundred interviews with workers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Pune.As capital crosses national borders, colonial histories and racial hierarchies become inextricably intertwined. As a result, call center workers in India need to imagine themselves in the eyes of their Western clients-to represent themselves both as foreign workers who do not threaten Western jobs and as being "just like" their customers in the West. In order to become these imagined ideal workers, they must be believable and authentic in their emulation of this ideal. In conversation with Western clients, Indian customer service agents proclaim their legitimacy, an effort Mirchandani calls "authenticity work," which involves establishing familiarity in light of expectations of difference. In their daily interactions with customers, managers and trainers, Indian call center workers reflect and reenact a complex interplay of colonial histories, gender practices, class relations, and national interests.

Call center agents --- Service industries workers --- Customer services --- International business enterprises --- Intercultural communication --- Identity (Psychology) --- Personality --- Self --- Ego (Psychology) --- Individuality --- Personal identity --- Communication --- Culture --- Cross-cultural orientation --- Cultural competence --- Multilingual communication --- Technical assistance --- Cross-cultural communication --- Business enterprises --- Corporations --- Joint ventures --- Business enterprises, International --- Corporations, International --- Global corporations --- International corporations --- MNEs (International business enterprises) --- Multinational corporations --- Multinational enterprises --- Transnational corporations --- Customer relations --- Customer service --- Service, Customer --- Service (in industry) --- Services, Customer --- Technical service --- Employees --- Service industries --- Call center customer service agents --- Call center operators --- Call center representatives --- Customer service agents, Call center --- Operators, Call center --- Representatives, Call center --- Social conditions --- Social aspects --- Anthropological aspects --- Social conditions.