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Complicating utopian and dystopian views of automation: An investigation of the work and knowledge involved in call centre offshoring.

Offshoring is motivated by the relocation of organizational services to distant environments to achieve substantial cost efficiencies. Standardized business practices aided by information technologies are assumed to simplify the process of re-embedding existing practices in new contexts. However, such relocation involves substantial effort in managing the confluence of diverse social worlds in new organizational contexts. Each social entity that participates in recreating the outsourced services is driven by different expectations and logics. However, together they create abstract boundaries within with such offshoring services are viable. In this paper, we examine some boundary objects that bring together diverse communities in the offshoring industry in India. Data from several interviews with managers and consultants in the call centre industry reveal interesting insights that complicate the utopian and dystopian visions of a call centre. Introduction: The effect of the embedded IT artefact, on the transformation and creation of industrial practices, is an important subject. An important topic related to this is the various attempts to use IT in order to redistribute industrial work to other regions through offshoring. Examples include the offshoring of advice and software development, to near-shore or offshore countries. In these particular situations, various IT artefacts and managerial practices are developed and deployed in an attempt to redistribute, replicate and control service work in a new region. Often, the motivation for this redistribution of work is an expectation of cost reduction with similar or improved service delivery (e.g. Ang and Straub, 1998).