Reconciling dichotomous demands: telemarketing agents in Bangalore and Mumbai, India

Abstract

Though outsourcing has created enormous employment potential in India’s information technology enabled services/business process outsourcing (ITES/BPO) sector, the implications for employees remain to be understood. The present paper describes employee experiences in telemarketing outbound call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, India. Following van Manen’s (1998) hermeneutic phenomenological approach, data were collected through unstructured conversational interviews with 18 telemarketing agents identified vi a snowball sampling and were subject to holistic and sententious thematic analyses. Reconciling dichotomous experiences at work was the label used to capture participants’ core experiences and indicated that while participants’ simultaneous positive and negative experiences contributed to a sense of concomitant stress and well-being, they employed various strategies to maintain a balance between positive experiences/well-being and negative experiences/stress