Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
telecommunications may accelerate the offshoring of many low wage, low value-
added jobs from the U.S., with dire consequences for unskilled workers.
A related form of low wage, low value added services involves centers of
telework, often labeled call centers. Bodin and Dawson (
2002
, p. 39) define call
centers as ''places where calls are placed, or received, in high volume for the
purpose of sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support or
other specialized business activity'' (cf. Richardson and Belt
2002
). Call centers
functions include telemarketing, customer assistance, and phone-orders with
designated 1-800 numbers. They range greatly in size, from as few as five to as
many as several thousand employees. Despite their prevalence, call centers have
remained in the shadow of other well-known information-dependent industries
such as financial services. Like back offices, call centers are primarily screen-based
and do not require proximity to clients. The major cost consideration is labor,
although the workforce consists primarily of low skilled women, and high turnover
rates are common. They are thus the epitome of a footloose industry, disembedded
from their local milieu and highly mobile. There are an estimated 80,000-100,000
call centers within the U.S., which employ between 3 and 5 % of the national labor
force (Uchitelle
2002
), the majority of which are located in urban or suburban
locations. Cities that have recently established competitive niches in this domain
include
Omaha,
Nebraska;
San
Antonio,
Texas;
Wilmington,
Delaware;
Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Columbus, Ohio.
Also like back offices, call centers have become increasingly globalized. India,
for example, has attracted a significant number of customer service centers near its
software capital of Bangalore, where workers are trained to speak with the U.S.
dialect of English and are able to gossip with customers about pop culture
(Waldman
2003
). Wages there, which average $2,000 per year, are higher than
average Indian salaries but are only 10 % of what equivalent jobs pay in the U.S.
Call centers form nodes in networks that include First World firms, Third World
workers, the internet, clients, and massive, if invisible, information flows, without
which the systems would not exist and could not function. The Indian example
illustrates how blurry the boundaries between the local and global is: a Bangalore
operator speaking to a British customer calling for help with American software
program all comprise parts of one integrated topology that erases the convenient
closures afforded by conventional geography. Such observations give us a hint at
the complexities of the geographies being ushered in by the internet and digital
capitalism in general.
4.5 VOIPocalypse Now
One increasingly important repercussion of the internet is Voice Over Internet
Protocol (VOIP), i.e., telephone traffic conducted entirely through cyberspace,
allowing users to bypass the toll charges ubiquitous among public switched
networks. VOIP is generally held to have begun in 1995 with a small Israeli firm,
