The outsourcing of call-centre work to developing countries by Western companies has become a huge business. For many, it represents a positive force of globalisation, bringing not only cost benefits to the West but also employment and career opportunities to the developing world. There is, however, a darker side to this. Call-centre work is generally exploitative and puts employees through long and unsocial hours under constant surveillance, not to mention the abuse and racism that employees often experience on the phone. Employees also suffer from losing – at least in part – their identity in an attempt to pass for Westerners.

A study that colleagues and I recently carried out (Boussebaa et al., 2014) revealed an even darker side to offshore call centres. We conducted research into two such organisations in the city of Noida in India, where we investigated how employees were affected by their work environments and, in particular, the English-speaking expected of them. Published in the Journal of International Business Studies, our study found that call-centre work creates quasi-colonial relations between the West and the rest.

The English language plays a key role in this because it helps to turn a segment of the local workforce into ‘comprador’ supervisors, like the compradors of old who acted as intermediaries between the colonisers and the colonised. And this creates the kind of language-based hierarchies of power and privilege that existed in colonial times.

Comprador Managers

The way in which employees are trained in English and then evaluated, rewarded and promoted based on their language performance helps to produce a new class of indigenous corporate supervisors who very much resemble those they serve – in their language, attitudes and practices. The sad irony is that these local managers maintain the exploitative, oppressive and talent-wasting conditions of call centres without direct input from Western clients. In this sense, they resemble the local administrative élites who climbed up the ranks in colonial times by working for the colonists.