Abstract
As part of the government's Vision 2030 initiative, Kenya's business process outsourcing (BPO) sector has been identified as a key source of development and employment creation. With those in the sector hoping to challenge more established outsourcing destinations in the global industry, Kenya's potential has been based on a particular geographic, cultural and human resource profiling, emphasizing its suitability for voice-based call centre services. In light of BPOs’ association with ‘development’, this article draws upon the people-centred concept of ‘wellbeing’ to explore the implications of the expansion of the sector and the onus on internationally oriented call centre labour. Underlining the need to foreground existing workers’ experiences, the article argues that the picture for those employed in the sector has been mixed with respect to the material, relational and subjective gains from the work. While agents recruited describe beneficial and recognized work experience, the work has yet to represent a stable, long-term professional prospect, with the sector beset by an inconsistent financial record.
Résumé
Dans le cadre de la campagne gouvernementale Vision 2030, le secteur kenyan de l'externalisation de processus d'affaires (BPO ou business process outsourcing) a été reconnu comme une source centrale de développement et de création d'emplois. Dans un contexte où les acteurs du secteur espèrent braver des destinations pour l'externalisation plus établies dans l'économie globale, le potentiel du Kenya repose sur un profilage particulier, ayant trait à la géographie, la culture et les ressources humaines, qui éclaire son adéquation pour les services vocaux de centres d'appels. Au vu de l'association du BPO avec le « développement », cette article s'appuie sur le concept, centré sur les personnes, de « bien-être » afin d'examiner les implications de l'expansion du secteur et la responsabilité incombant au travail dans les centre d'appels orientés vers l'international. Le présent article, soulignant la nécessité de mettre l'accent sur les expériences de travailleurs, affirme qu'en ce qui concerne les gains matériels, relationnels et subjectifs tirés du travail, le tableau reste mitigé pour ceux employés dans le secteur. Tandis que les agents recrutés décrivent une expérience professionnelle reconnue et bénéfique, le travail ne représente pas encore une perspective professionnelle stable et à long terme alors que le secteur est, quant à lui, en proie à un bilan financier inconsistant.
Over the past 10 years, Kenya has sought to establish and promote its new business process outsourcing (BPO) sector.1 At the heart of the government's Vision 2030 initiative (designed to transform Kenya into a ‘middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by the year 2030’ (GRK 2007a, 1)), the BPO2 sector has been identified as one of six key economic pillars, with the aim being to diversify away from a reliance on tea and coffee production and tourism. Following in the footsteps of leading international BPO destinations such as India, Malaysia and the Philippines, Vision 2030 outlines plans to gain a portion of the global outsourcing market to position the country to ‘quickly become the top BPO destination in Africa’ (GRK 2007a, 14), ahead of other African countries such as South Africa, Morocco, Ghana and Egypt. More broadly, an initiative anchored in the creation of voice services for the international market can be regarded as an endeavour to reposition the country within an ‘imagined global village’ (Graham and Mann 2013, 15). Arguably, it also relates to a broader contestation of marginalization within ‘global shadows’ (Ferguson 2006) on the strength of providing sophisticated, information-based services and challenging images of Africa as peripheral to global networks and markets. This includes a challenge to the dominance of externally defined pathways to growth under neoliberal regimes, following examples from elsewhere within the multipolar global political economy (Harrison 2010, 145) and the ascendancy of economic powerhouses such as China and India.
In light of its associations with the Vision 2030 initiative, the expansion of the BPO sector is embedded within a larger set of aims around ‘development’ (Ndemo 2007, 8). With a high level of unemployment, the intention is that the sector will provide a new, important source of work for the country's young people (Warutere 2008, 2; Waema et al. 2009, 2), helping to enhance their prospects. Based largely on a particular geographic, cultural and human resource profiling, call centre work – especially in-bound, customer service work – was identified as the form of BPO most suited to Kenya's current capabilities.
The emphasis on ‘development’ invites important empirical questions about the ways in which the expansion of outsourced call centre work in Kenya may be said to enhance its people's prospects. Given pressing concerns across Africa around established patterns of informalization and casualization resulting from an emphasis on flexible labour markets and workers (Von Holdt and Webster 2005; Mitullah 2010), the focus on BPO – particularly in following a high-volume, low-cost model – would seem to risk exposing service sector workers to the same practices taking hold within the manufacturing sphere (Were 2011). Is the association of ‘development’ with outsourcing merely incongruous, and what does engaging with BPO call centre workers’ experiences reveal about changes within the labour market?
Engaging with the perspectives of a sample of current and former BPO call centre workers, this article offers an empirical focus on workers’ experiences and aims to amplify workers’ articulations of what results from the circumstances under which they work. Prior to a discussion of how to approach workers’ ‘wellbeing’, the article reviews the ideas and history behind BPO, and considers these ideas in light of critical scholarly perspectives on the call centre labour process and outsourcing. It continues by arguing for the relevance of McGregor's concept of three-dimensional development (McGregor and Sumner 2010) for the purposes of addressing the call centre working context, before moving on to an analysis of semi-structured interviews. The interviews were undertaken in Nairobi during two two-month periods (September – October 2012 and January – March 2013) with a variety of BPO call centre workers.3
Arguing that the experience of call centre work has been a story of mixed success for the sector's workforce, I order my discussion around three key themes emerging from the interviews (‘experience’, ‘profile’ and ‘compensation’), and draw upon a three-dimensional conceptual orientation towards development as an analytical lens. Despite notions of BPO call centre job roles as representing straightforward low-skilled work, the article suggests that the work has suited a particular profile of individuals, challenging an idea of openness to all. In the absence of effective employee protection and a reliance on casual labour, it also highlights the difficulties that workers have faced with procuring full compensation for their work in times of financial difficulty for their employers. Such problems notwithstanding, the article underlines that workers with a degree of experience in the sector stress certain benefits to be derived from the work, benefits which ought to complicate notions of internationally facing, outsourced call centre work as being merely detrimental.
BPO in Kenya
Roles and hierarchies
While there are diversity of concerns and positions, there is a degree of consensus around the negative effects and aspects of call centre work within the critically oriented literature, suggesting concerns about its primacy as the key form of employment in Kenya's emergent BPO sector. In their use of numerous targets, systems of monitoring and a high degree of supervision, Kenya's call centres demonstrate a similarity with other call centre working environments that have been the subject of critical academic attention (Frenkel et al. 1999; Taylor and Bain 1999; Korczynski et al. 2000; Noronha and D'Cruz 2009; Brophy 2010). In much of the Western world, call centre work has been considered undesirable, even ‘dead end’. In Nairobi, it is generally considered low-skilled work that essentially anybody can do. While a notion of large-scale operations employing thousands of people at a time perhaps predominates in the popular imagination around internationalized service work, Nairobi's BPO call centres have been almost exclusively small-scale, with anywhere from 10 to a few hundred agents working on any given shift.4
Each of the companies utilizes a similar hierarchy, primarily employing in-bound and out-bound ‘agents’. Though there is a degree of flexibility with modes of assessment that might otherwise seem an all-pervasive assortment of criteria, targets set a template for an essentially repetitive labour process based on the monitoring and evaluation of discrete elements of one's work and the company's resources (Callaghan and Thompson 2001, 20–21). Agents are subject to a combination of quantitative targets (average handling time (AHT), hours logged, number of conversions) and qualitative observations (following a script and customer rapport), overseen by other workers. Quality analysts assess recorded calls at random, reporting percentage-based scores back to agents and ‘coaching’ them to improve. In charge of teams of varying size (commonly from 10 to 60 agents), team leaders (TLs) and supervisors are responsible for day-to-day operations, ensuring that agents perform well by drawing on a combination of personal observations and a networked system of computerized monitoring.
This combination of qualitative and quantitative monitoring creates both a demand for consistent, on-call emotional regulation and a dynamic of continuous, individualized attention to elements of performance. As distinct from requirements placed on agricultural and manufacturing workers, the call centre labour process therefore obliges agents to practice a form of self-regulation with respect to self-presentation and demeanour – that is, to undertake ‘emotional labour’ geared towards satisfying customers’ needs in the service sector (Kenny 2004).5 It also creates a need for managerial control of workers’ subjectivities or immaterial qualities – their personalities, moods and choices – in light of the centrality of agent–customer interactions (Omar 2005, 272).
Ideas and beginnings
If practically speaking the creation of a BPO sector has been about dramatic infrastructural improvements and strategies for growth and jobs, the sector is arguably implicated in a broader, historically significant conceptual aim. Given the dominance of externally defined and imposed neoliberal regimes across Africa (Harrison 2010) and their basis in an ostensibly neutral and technical language (a ‘scientific capitalism’ – Ferguson 2006, 80), the establishing of an international voice and data service sector offers scope to develop endogenous growth strategies and contest the broader bypassing of Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) through an active reworking of the global ‘geography of representation’ (Graham and Mann 2013, 5). This encompasses projecting a straightforward idea of greater connectivity to the wider world through an enhanced information and communications technologies (ICT) infrastructure, as well as changing perceptions by demonstrating the capacity to provide information age services. Following the successes of other, increasingly buoyant players across the South (Harrison 2010, 145), creating a BPO sector represents an opportunity to move out of the shadows and away from being a mere site of primary material extraction and basic manufacturing, and instead become recognized as a source of a range of voice and data services that measure up to international competition. Consequently, notions of ‘development’ perhaps become less about satisfying externally produced, universalist orthodoxy, and more about creating spaces in which to follow one's own path and enhance local livelihoods, albeit on the basis of providing services to Northern companies by creating new economic ties.
Indeed, much of the anticipation around the potential for BPO in Kenya has centred on a particular understanding of the country's appropriateness for Northern markets with respect to geography, culture and human resources, along with designs on dramatically altering the country's economic geography and links to the rest of the world through investing in an enhanced internet infrastructure (Graham and Mann 2013). Such anticipation is illustrated by the focus of the existing BPO literature on promotional and regulatory concerns (Ndemo 2007; Waema et al. 2009; Bryce et al. 2011; Dihel et al. 2012). Nairobi is identified as an emerging business capital, working within a time zone regarded as appropriate for conducting business with Northern clients when compared with companies operating in Eastern countries. The BPO sector's flagship company was KenCall, a company focused primarily on voice services (sales calls and customer service). KenCall was set up in 2005 on the strength of a strong belief in the potential to capitalize on the lucrative international outsourcing market (Bryce et al. 2011).6
KenCall's ideas and activities were a considerable influence on the evolution of the sector. It proved to be the feature example of the economic and developmental possibilities behind supporting companies and expanding the sector as a new source of growth and jobs, albeit without prompting questions around about the implications of competing for potential ‘crumbs’ (Gurumurthy and Jeet Singh 2008) with other countries in the international BPO market on the strength of offering basic, high-volume, low-cost services.
The expansion of the BPO sector was integrated into the government's Vision 2030 initiative and earmarked as one of six key pillars to ensure the diversification of the economy away from more traditional sectors and to offer new opportunities to the country's many unemployed people (Warutere 2008, 2), to become the ‘sector of choice for employment among youth and young professionals’ (GRK 2007b, x–xi). These ideas overshadowed considerations of conventional problems for workers’ interests associated with outsourcing sectors, namely, the overriding emphasis on low costs within a hyper-competitive global economy, leading to contractual flexibility, reduced employment benefits and security, depressed wages and light regulation – risking outright precariousness for workers (von Holdt and Webster 2005; Barchiesi 2010; Jordhus-Lier 2010). And contrary to a sense of seeking endogenous growth strategies and eschewing externally imposed neoliberal ideas stemming from the international sphere, the use of labour practices underpinning BPO also risked intersecting with established domestic processes of informalization initiated by the neoliberal stress on rolling back the formal sector through retrenchments (Mitullah 2010) and existing trends towards the use of casual labour (Were 2011).
Aware both of the rising costs of voice services in established countries and a sense of general dissatisfaction with the type of voices offered, those promoting BPO in Kenya emphasized a specific set of traits in the country's workforce and wider culture – namely, a welcoming disposition (being accustomed to tourism) and speaking English with a ‘neutral accent’ likely to be far more intelligible to Northern customers than, for example, Indian English accents. Suggesting more appropriate subjectivities and a latent readiness for ‘emotional labour’, this overall profile presented the Kenyan worker as an ideal candidate to undertake voice-based service work and the sector's expansion as an important means of tackling difficulties associated with graduate and school leaver unemployment.
Sector's challenges
BPO call centre companies came to undertake a variety of both in-bound (receiving calls) and outbound (making calls) activities, such as customer service for telecommunications companies, telesales for insurance coverage, and transcription of mobile users’ voicemail messages.7 In order to centralize activities, the Kenya ICT Board was set up in 2008 as the government's marketing and promotional arm.8 As part of efforts to enhance the country's international reputation, this coincided with investments in a series of undersea fibre-optic broadband cables geared towards tackling high bandwidth costs and creating a robust internet infrastructure (Ndemo 2007, 10).9
Despite sustained anticipation around BPO,10 many companies have ultimately gone out of business after finding regular, profitable work difficult to acquire. As Graham and Mann highlight (2013, 8), disconnection to the global economy was more about ‘geographical and technological isolation’, with poverty understood to be intensified by a lack of access to international markets, rather than being a matter of targeting the provision of services higher up within value chains.
Nevertheless, a number of companies remain operational, albeit with a substantially different portfolio of work from that originally envisioned. Where once the focus was on international clients, companies such as KenCall, Horizon, TechnoBrain, Direct Channel, Spanco Raps and Gorilla BPO now commonly undertake work procured from the domestic and East African regional market, with international work in sales and customer service representing a more modest part of their day-to-day activities.11
Such a change has essentially been the result of a growing realization of the difficulty of procuring sustainable, profitable international work, in conjunction with greater appetite for outsourcing between companies within Kenya's domestic market. In the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, BPO call centres have found opportunities to undertake work for international clients diminishing considerably.
Development and wellbeing
With the sector unable to firmly establish itself and access lucrative contracts, what have been the implications for the sector's workforce and the idea of harnessing international voice BPO as a core component of the Vision 2030 programme? Just as patterns of casualization and informalization alert us to the overtly negative consequences of creating a sector based on intense downward pressure on salaries, they also call into question the notion of ‘development’ as enhanced global connectivity and creating ‘low-skilled’ jobs based on providing services to competitive international markets – namely, the government and stakeholder rationale behind the creation of the sector.
While it is essential not to neglect discussion of the context behind unwholesome work, such concerns should not however inhibit engagement with the potential scope for transformation for workers initiated by new spaces within the labour market and prompted by the creation of an internationally influenced sector – both in terms of markets and company practices and cultures. Though BPO might be understood as being in part about expanding away from basic commodity production and challenging international marginalization, are its jobs straightforwardly precarious and subject to the ravages of informalization (under a business model reliant on casual labour)? Are workers simply taken advantage of – and even exploited? Or are there encouraging elements of the way which BPO companies operate in trying to establish themselves and compete? Does working as a call centre agent merely entail a quasi-robotic adherence to routine, or might interactive service work demonstrate scope for agreeable company cultures, remuneration opportunities or personal development?
In responding to the need to engage with workers’ perspectives, I draw upon McGregor's ‘wellbeing’ approach. Wellbeing conceptualizes development as three-dimensional, encouraging an expansive consideration of how people's activities, relationships and possessions affect their quality of life and feelings towards their circumstances (McGregor and Sumner 2010, 105). The tradition aims to challenge and disrupt externally defined, universalistic and predominant understandings of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ as requiring a narrow onus on poverty reduction through growth. At the same time, it responds to challenging concerns around power as an exercise achieved through discursive formations of objects as inferior or deficient (Ferguson 1994, 25–26; Escobar 1995; Pieterse 2000, 177) and critiques of development as inherently depoliticizing and Eurocentric (Ziai 2007, 2013), and argues for moving into the domain of integrating subjective views and perspectives of what people value (McGregor and Sumner 2010, 106). Rather than simply stating what a person is, or ought to have or be, the approach takes conventional materially based understandings as but one element within a three-dimensional approach to people's quality of life, their wellbeing (McGregor and Sumner 2010, 106). It stresses an approach in which two additional dimensions of people-centred ‘development’ also feature, which are known as ‘relational’ and ‘subjective’. The approach arises from a combination of understandings of: (1) what a person has (material); (2) what the person can do with what they have (relational); and (3) how the person thinks about what they have and can do (subjective) (McGregor 2010, 317).12
In its application to the Kenyan BPO sector, drawing on wellbeing avoids assumptions about outsourcing models as purely detrimental to workers’ interests, and, conversely, avoids regarding the expansion of ICT-mediated working environments as simply modernizing. Crucially, it creates scope to question the Kenyan governmental and stakeholder policy of specifically connecting the expansion of BPO jobs for unemployed youth with ‘development’. In light of efforts to open up the Kenyan labour market to international demand, a conceptual approach that foregrounds different aspects of employees’ experiences also offers scope to investigate the extent to which the initiative has fulfilled salutary aims around creating service sector work.
Adapting wellbeing: framework and methods
Themes and framework
How might we understand the concept of wellbeing in relation to a highly monitored new form of ICT-mediated service sector work in Kenya? Having conducted a series of interviews in September to October 2012 and January to March 2013, I identified three core themes stemming from my data as a means of drawing upon the three-dimensional approach, namely, ‘experience’, ‘profile’ and ‘compensation’.
The identification of these themes is geared towards an exploration of the interplay of the three dimensions set out by the wellbeing tradition, enabling the foregrounding of the perspectives and experiences of those who have undertaken the work in order to consider the sector's association with ‘development’ as job creation. ‘Experience’ relates to workers’ sense of what they have acquired from undertaking the work and whether they regard it as broadly supportive of their future prospects. The theme builds on McGregor's concept of analysing what problems or opportunities arise from a person's circumstances and the subjective interpretations they offer in assessing the resulting harm or gains pertaining to their prospects (McGregor 2008, 4), while at the same time integrating important existing concerns for workers’ interests around outsourcing and the call centre labour process. ‘Profile’ refers to the type of person generally employed in the sector and the extent to which call centre work can be said to be a simple form of work to undertake. It encourages a focus on the broader context behind the relational gains available to workers and the extent to which workers’ socio-economic background may condition their ability to access the work. Finally, ‘compensation’ refers to the monetary earnings workers receive, the provision of bonuses and further benefits, and the precariousness of their labour. Drawing more expressly on wellbeing's concern for individuals’ material resources (combining ‘objective’ assessment with participants’ ‘subjective’ perception of their circumstances – McGregor 2010, 317), the theme focuses on the degree to which BPO call centre work has become a monetarily appealing new form of work for young people.
Semi-structured interviews and speaking with workers
I primarily met with research participants in public places within Nairobi's central business district in order to encourage participants to feel at ease. Given that in most cases I was meeting with participants for the first time, it seemed most appropriate to utilize semi-structured interviews and to interact in a relatively casual manner in order to ensure participants remained at ease and less inclined to feel a gaze of examination (an approach which did indeed work well).
In certain instances it was necessary to meet with workers at their place of work. While this might have given rise to a reticence among workers towards relaying their experiences, it was common for management – aware that their employees would be speaking with me – to voluntarily point out that participants ought to be free to speak openly and say ‘different things to what I tell you’ (company owner, January 21, 2013). I interviewed a total of 27 participants, comprising 20 ‘workers’ (12 agents, 5 TLs and 3 HR officials – some individuals had experience at more than one company), across 6 different companies, along with 4 senior managers, as well as an ICT Board representative, an investor and a service delivery manager. Interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, and though my preference was to record interviews and subsequently transcribe their contents, in a majority of instances it was necessary to take notes. Questions focused on topics such as workers’ personal background; professional activities; educational level; recruitment and competition for positions; type of contract; perception of skills and personality requirements; experience of customer interactions; attitude to monitoring & evaluation; and sources of job satisfaction. Those involved in senior managerial positions were asked about the rationale behind the BPO sector; strategies to acquire client contracts; reflections on the challenges of acquiring work; perceptions of the labour pool; and the emphasis on voice services. The criteria for selection was based on a purposive sampling with which I endeavoured to ensure that agents from numerous BPO companies were represented and to interview those both currently employed and who had left their positions. This included interviewing fellow ‘workers’ who occupied more advanced positions within company hierarchies and yet remained involved in frontline operations (i.e. TLs and HR officials). I interviewed both female and male agents, and as far as possible tried to achieve variation in the level of call centre experience my participants had.
Analysis of BPO call centre work
Experience
Personally I think that it all depends on your talents, because they hardly look at your educational background. As long as you're confident and can call, and as long as you can speak, they actually pick you and train you. They find your strong areas and then they work on your strong things. (Agent, 28 January 2013)
Despite the government's emphasis on BPO call centre work, the sector's high turnover demonstrates that it is yet to establish itself as a feature form of new employment and would suggest that outcomes integral to workers’ ‘wellbeing’ – material or otherwise – have been unrealized. Yet while this illustrates that many workers have been disinclined to remain in an ultimately undesirable working role, the picture is complicated by workers’ generally positive reflections on what one gains from the work. For many university graduates and school leavers alike, work experience in constructive formal working environments is tough to acquire, and international interactive service work has enhanced their ‘relational’ capabilities in facilitating the acquisition of recognized skills, experience and self-confidence.
Though in some cases certainly the result of an aversion to the work, the level of staff attrition is also explained by workers’ desire to use call centre work as an entry point in the labour market (ICT Board official, 12 September 2012). Those who have left call centres and who look back on their period of employment commonly highlight that a number of their colleagues in their current workplaces got their start in BPO (agent, 18 January 2013). Significantly, the challenging reputation of many of the call centres – with respect to recruitment and the varied work experience gained – favours workers who have undertaken as little as a few months’ work with a BPO company. Though liable to give rise to monotony, repetition and minimal decision-making, the emphasis within call centre work on routine and forms of personalized attention and feedback on one's performance and skills also serves to engender processes of self-reflection within a larger context of nurturing staff. If it would be inaccurate to describe such ‘nurturing’ as anything other than a company strategy to ensure that agents’ ‘emotional labour’ sustains customer focus (and thus satisfies the expectations of companies’ clients), the focus does prove of benefit to workers. When subsequently moving on to another work opportunity, workers commonly exhibit an affirmative subjective disposition towards the confidence and personal development they attain, underlining the high degree of recognition exhibited by their new employers towards candidates who have been selected and who have undertaken BPO call centre work.
Other workers point out that the invariably tough, fast-paced nature of the work provides for excellent general work experience (agent (two), 10 October 2012). Meeting targets, multitasking and facing frequently cantankerous – sometimes even abusive – customers all contribute towards onerous work. As one agent commented (15 January 2013):
Being patient I learnt when I was on the job. You know, working under pressure – you know to work under pressure you really have to work. Those are skills that I learnt when I was there, and I appreciate them.
Workers also speak warmly of their companies’ sincerity in wishing to identify agents’ personal strengths in order to enhance them (TL, 1 October 2012). If such points of view seem likely to be expressed more strongly by those who have achieved internal or cross-company promotions, their sentiments about this sort of benefit from the work – despite its monotony and challenges – are echoed by others who ultimately leave the sector. In keeping with the degree of recognition shown towards the value of the work experience, others stress that BPO work exposes one to a variety of challenges that are different from those found in other sectors, which serve as excellent preparation and are likely to instil a broader mind-set in a worker than a person who, for example, simply went directly into the banking sector (industry body representative, 25 September 2012).
Even taking into account the potential for exaggeration from those keen to promote the sector or who have achieved a measure of professional success within it, such a collection of broadly positive responses serves to problematize a notion that call centre workers are simply mere information age factory cogs, whose subjective interpretations of the work would be profoundly negative. If ‘harm to the social person’ (McGregor 2010, 338) derives from a failure to meet needs – whether relational (as personal resources activated) or subjective (as demonstrating a measure of positivity towards work) – then BPO call centre work has certainly offered space for opportunity for workers. However, this is not to downplay workers’ views on some of the less auspicious aspects of the call centre labour process. While some workers regard the targets, the high degree of monitoring and the repetition associated with interactions as necessary to maintain quality, many bemoan the continual pressure to sustain service levels and attend to approximately 300 calls in a nine-hour shift (with a one-hour unpaid lunch break and two further 15-minute breaks). As a TL reflected, perhaps in understated fashion, ‘talking for eight hours is not easy’ (1 October 2012).
The pressured work environment can feel like a ‘high school’ in its regulation (agent, 16 October 2012). Likewise, the obligation in many working roles to maintain an AHT of, for example, 1 minute, 40 seconds is a continual challenge, often compounded by circumstances outside of one's control, such as an irate customer who insists on speaking for an extended period of time. Negative interactions have to be instantly dismissed from one's mind, but the fact that all calls are monitored and assessed at random may mean that work deemed sub-standard may be seized upon. Even senior management disclose that ‘it's almost like being a robot’ (company owner, 21 January 2013), which when added to the general stress faced over an extended period of time in part illustrates why the sector faces a high level of attrition (TL, 18 February 2013). As part of the government's ‘development’ strategy, it also demonstrates that Vision 2030s plans for BPO to become a straightforwardly appealing example of new jobs for youth are yet to come to fruition.
One additional challenge peculiar to internationally oriented BPO call centre work is the practice of concealing workers’ locations and pretending to be operating in the client's country. While this implies an additional pressure for workers, some suggest that – particularly when new in the job – there are elements of enjoyment to adopting an alternative persona (manager, 2 March 2013). In general however, BPO companies pursue a pragmatic approach to agents’ on-call voice, and regard the need to sustain a clear, ‘neutral’ manner of speaking as trumping any requirement to mimic a client country's accent. Though not obligatory and dependent on a client company's preference, concealing agents’ location can on occasion prove the basis for customer hostility towards workers, leading to swearing and even racist abuse in some instances (agent, 18 September 2012). While certain companies employ counsellors to support agents’ experience of stress, the expectation is that training provides adequate priming to anticipate unaccommodating customers and to enable agents to put difficult interactions behind them. If an aversion to dealing with such customers is an understandable reason to leave one's job, the sense of resilience achieved for those who do stay proves another aspect of enhanced personal resources.
More generally, BPO call centre workers speak of training in overwhelmingly glowing terms, pointing out its sophistication and rigour. Indeed, where workers have experience with a single company, it is common to hear each speak in loyal terms about the training – consisting of a combination of soft skills improvement, basic technical and product knowledge and even speech therapy – available within their particular company, which in their view is superior to that offered elsewhere in the sector (agent (one), 10 October 2012). Similarly, this view prevails in relation to comparisons between BPO and captive operators, with those working within BPO emphasizing the better quality skill set one develops as a consequence of exposure to more diverse, dynamic professional activities. The validity of this view notwithstanding, this esteem for a company's (and by extension, one's own) level of skill and superiority also reflects a desire to draw upon inter-subjectively understood notions of the merits of working in the sector and the opportunities it affords (or, as McGregor argues, processes of social construction aimed at the generation of shared meaning outside of objective evaluation or subjective interpretation – 2010, 329).
On the part of companies themselves and in keeping with the logic of nurturing in relation to personalized performance feedback and training, BPO working environments are in many instances consciously designed to encourage openness in worker–manager interactions, as a contrast to more overtly hierarchical, status-based professional settings elsewhere in the city. Though this does not eliminate displays of petty authority between employees of different statuses within BPO call centres, it does highlight an internationally influenced corporate cultural practice of reduced manager–worker distance geared towards ensuring greater participation and investment in one's self. Given their position on the front line of service, such company openness can be argued to reflect a straightforward imperative to keep agents happy and ensure that a client's customers are provided for. Nonetheless, it also offers agents exposure to working environments in which both training and company culture are oriented towards maximizing the key elements of their selves implicated in service provision. If this scenario results from strategic managerial need, it nevertheless offers workers joining the labour market with minimal work experience an opportunity to enhance their relational resources, in service to their own prospects. And while the sector has been characterized by a high degree of attrition, both current and former agents display a positive subjective disposition towards certain benefits of the call centre labour process. But have such benefits been accruable to a broad range of workers in Nairobi? Or have they been restricted to a particular type of individual, problematizing a notion of low-skilled work accessible to all? I now turn to such questions in a discussion of the ‘profile’ of the sector's workers.
Profile
Most people don't really speak English. You have to have gone to a really good school to have a good command of the English language, and an understanding. (Agent, February 28, 2013)
Over time, however, companies’ management came to observe an often lower level of professional commitment and an inclination to quit on the part of some of the better educated. Conversely, those with merely secondary school education might generally exhibit more loyalty to a company and a greater capacity to focus and enhance their skills, owing to a greater willingness to undertake the work, along with being less ‘exposed’ to opportunities elsewhere in the labour market (TL, 11 October 2012). Such an impression on the part of companies’ management eroded an original emphasis on tertiary education.
While recruitment policies with respect to educational qualifications evolved over time, the level of education within the sector seemingly varies between companies (some underline that ‘80 per cent of the workforce is university educated’ (owners, 11 September 2012), while others insist that ‘the majority of the guys [workers of both sex] were fourth form leavers’ (agent, 16 October 2012)). Perhaps more salient is the general perception that education is unimportant in applicants and experienced workers alike, and that stress falls on what ‘contribution’ a person makes to the company (manager and company owner, 2 March 2013), with such a term connoting both an amenable personality and a receptivity to management's control. This perception might be termed one of ‘banal egalitarianism’, in that anybody can do the work, which is low-skilled and open to all. Some even go to the extent of saying that call centre work requires ‘no skills’ (TL, 18 February 2013). More progressively, a manager spoke passionately about the erstwhile historical restriction of opportunities and resources within ethnically based patronage networks and the comparatively more favourable situation today, and he claimed that work was being offered on merit within the BPO sector (2 March 2013). The change in recruitment also reflects a willingness of those in greater immediate financial need – who often will not be degree holders – to endure tough routines and intense monitoring, and to project the emotional resilience and control required in a manner that their more socio-economically stable counterparts will not. Aligned with this sense of greater openness in recruitment, this trend has meant that the sector's own difficulties in retaining staff have created opportunities for those with less formal education to find work within the BPO labour market. Certain opportunities to use BPO to improve livelihoods have emerged, though perhaps not in the way originally envisaged.
In illustrating the role of merit within BPO (rather than education or any other indicator), what is important could be characterized as one's attitude. Highly educated workers whose pride leads them to feel the work to be beneath them are less likely to perform well in the job. Those who do not display and cultivate patience, listening skills and an ability to be ‘on point’ will struggle (agent, 16 October 2012), as will those who are not adaptable to a dynamic working environment (TL, 6 February 2013).
In a strategic sense for their companies, this attitude must lead to receptivity towards workplace control mechanisms designed to sustain quality, address large call volumes and maintain pleasant customer interactions. By necessity, these mechanisms aim to produce regularity by ordering workers’ activities around routinized actions, making their relational gains and subjective reflections more about personal resilience to a tough working environment than opportunities for creativity or self-fulfilment in the workplace. And though agents themselves commonly insist that the work is open to all, it should be stressed that those who meet these requirements fit a particular profile. Perhaps most obviously, agents need to be comfortable in using the English language professionally, with customers whose accents may be dramatically different from their own. Generally speaking, if the emphasis on being university educated has changed, the language requirement implies at least completing one's education in a well-performing secondary school in which English use predominates (rather than Swahili or ‘vernacular’ language). Though companies have become more domestically and regionally oriented over time (taking on Swahili-language accounts on occasion), agents continue to need proficiency in English.
This requirement is but one aspect of a generally competitive recruitment procedure: agents commonly face intensive interviews, role plays and examinations designed to identify those most comfortable and deemed the best. Once they undertake call centre work itself, agents need to project consistent confidence, and not be quiet or slow (TL, 11 October 2012). Consistent with the original country profile for Kenya itself, the so-called neutral accent in English is an essential requirement for potential workers. In practice, agents consistently describe this as being disadvantageous for those with a ‘tribal’ accent (as a person cannot easily be trained out of their ‘mother tongue’ accent (agent, 18 September 2012)), which reflects growing up outside of an urban setting without much exposure to English. While this does not exclude people from non-voice BPO work (agent, 18 September 2012), those from a rural environment commonly do not have the same level of digital literacy as their urban counterparts. Indeed, in instances where an agent has referred people ‘from their village’, those referred have seen a lack of such skills seriously impede their ability to work, making them unsuitable (agent, 13 October 2012).
These requirements illustrate that if international voices services BPO – and its basis as a job creation policy – can be said to have created new opportunities, those opportunities are essentially restricted to urban workers who are digitally literate, confident in using English professionally, and willing to tolerate a repetitive, monitored labour process. With voice work, the English language operates as a broad cultural requirement. If workers enhance their relational wellbeing and ‘experience’ through BPO, they do so on the basis of existing personal resources stemming from their background, making them better positioned to benefit materially from the opportunity to work. Those who can understand an array of Australian, North American, British and Irish accents may be from the richer western part of Nairobi, or will at least have had exposure to other forms of English (agent (one), 10 October 2012), and will thereby be far better positioned to fulfil the company's emphasis on developing rapport when on-call.
One's socio-economic background therefore can strongly condition the ability to interact with such customers, as it is not really possible to acquire this type of skill (agent (one), 10 October 2012), meaning those from less advantaged backgrounds – be they urban or rural – are unlikely to be regarded as suitable for international voice work or to be taken on. This extends to the type of confidence one has to put to use when interacting with international customers. If certain workers have successfully entered the sector and used their jobs as their main source of income, many more have been young students and graduates who live with their parents and whose income would be ‘for buying clothes and getting drunk’ (agent, 13 October 2012). Though recruitment practices have evolved to acknowledge the potential of those without a degree, culturally the nature of international work – the original focus of the sector – is more closely aligned with those from a ‘middle-income family’ (industry body representative, 25 September 2012). The type of confidence one has to put to use when interacting with customers would also derive from a more internationally exposed cultural background. While being willing to work in a BPO call centre is contingent on tolerance for routine and responsiveness towards personalized performance assessment mechanisms (and a subjective sense of the value one derives from such experience – whether during or after working in the sector), the capacity to access the work depends on fitting a particular socio-economic profile, albeit one broadly defined.
Such a dynamic illustrates a basic, if sweeping, problem with a job creation strategy based on international outsourced call centre work: those best positioned to undertake the work can become rapidly uninterested (given the levels of attrition seen and aversion towards the work as a longer-term job prospect), while those without an internationally exposed background are considered less appropriate by companies. This intersects with problems associated with promoting an outsourcing model based on high volumes and low cost and the reliance on competing on the basis of ‘cheap’, flexible and temporary labour. The characterization of the typical BPO call centre worker would therefore be a young university student or graduate, possibly from a middle-income background, seeking a temporary position to acquire extra cash, rather than a person – from whatever background – seeking a long-term position and motivated to acquire an appealing post. Challenging perceptions of the sector as simply low-skilled and therefore open to all, particular workers have been positioned to access the work on the basis of a requisite combination of confidence, cultural suitability and personality.
The predominance of a particular type of worker suggests that there ought to be greater focus on integrating and developing the talents of a broader base of applicant, especially in light of companies’ own experience of the benefits of employing those without tertiary education and workers’ positive reflections on particular relational elements of the work. Though company selection procedures naturally remain anchored in logics of efficiency and selecting optimum resources, BPO's intended associations with ‘development’ as employment creation suggest a need for greater focus on distributing opportunities, to ensure that the relational gains deriving from general work experience and self-esteem through acquired toughness continue to be extended to those beyond a middle-income background.
Arguably, with the portfolio of international work having diminished, the international cultural demands on workers have receded, putting greater emphasis on a familiarity with Kenya and East Africa at large, and potentially enhancing the ability of those less educated to gain employment on accounts less based on international voice interactions. Nonetheless, many hope such work will pick up again in time, with a greater emphasis on premium contracts for local companies, while official enthusiasm has increasingly turned to the Konza Technology City infrastructure project (thereby implicitly favouring multinational companies). Even were international accounts for local BPO companies not to pick up, the BPO sector is set to continue domestically, and I argue that the quality of its innovations and output will be enhanced by employing a broader base of candidate, potentially amplifying the developmental implications – in the form of offering workers opportunities to evolve new skills and access higher value international work – of the increasing role of ICT-related jobs in the Kenyan professional landscape. This includes greater attention to ensuring adequate compensation for the sector's workers, a theme that I now address.
Compensation
I think they don't really solve it [attrition] – they don't really look at the problem. They just recruit. Because we have quite a number of youths looking for jobs – so when you leave, someone else will be prepared to take the job, so they really don't take much consideration into checking why did you leave, or try to work that out. And also retention – I would say in my company it's quite poor, it's quite poor. If you declare that you want to leave, you just have your notice and nobody will bother with why are you leaving. You just have your notice and that's it. (Agent, January 30, 2013)
In a call centre you are normally … you don't have a temporary or a permanent … It's hard to get a permanent. So they employ you as a consultant and most of the consultant contracts are normally renewable after one year. (Agent, January 18, 2013)
The issue of pay stems directly from companies’ need to compete – both with one another and internationally – on low costs, putting intense downward pressure on labour costs and increasing workers’ tendency to regard the sector as a stopgap. Despite the anticipated take-off of international voice services, the sector's difficulties in acquiring lucrative and sustainable contracts have undermined its growth. Though some workers speak enthusiastically about earning bonuses (particularly early on in the sector's history), these difficulties have strongly impacted on the workforce: the most striking material aspect to agents’ experience has frequently been being dramatically underpaid or even not paid at all. In the wake of declining contracts and profits, certain companies have not paid their agents regularly (with some going out of business entirely), providing salaries at only 30% of agreed rates or only paying every few months (agent, 18 September 2012). In contrast to intentions to harness BPO as a development strategy, engagement with workers’ material circumstances indicates that the sector has not made good on policy aims, with participants’ wellbeing proving precarious and even overtly damaged by non-payment of salaries, being scarcely supportive of their quality of life (McGregor 2008, 3). Without recourse to a government arbiter or the union representation characteristic of parts of the manufacturing and public sectors, agents have been left uncompensated (yet describing charismatic management and honesty about a company's financial situation as the impetus for many to remain in their jobs regardless – agent, 28 February 2013). In one incident covered in the media, Spanco Raps, an Indian-owned company, even saw its agents go on strike over underpayment.15
It is not the case that every BPO call centre has failed to pay staff, but the sector's reputation has been damaged. If the original economic rationale behind the sector's potential within the international market would not necessarily have gone hand-in-hand with casualized labour practices, the initial emphasis on high-volume, low-cost services made the cost of labour a key variable in its value proposition and led to intense pressure on workers’ remuneration, in a way far different from the original intentions to create jobs. Many agents feel that job security is poor and they can be readily dismissed as easily replaced cheap labour, especially considering that client companies may themselves terminate an agent's position (agent, 16 October 2012), meaning those working in BPO are subject not only to their own company's authority, but also that of clients. Furthermore, in the context of financial problems, agents privy to accounts-related details berate middle-ranking, more senior members of staff – earning salaries that dwarf those of agents and apparently without the awareness of owners and the most senior staff – for continually ensuring that they themselves are paid, while agents themselves may fail to pay personal bills, have to borrow funds from colleagues, and even face evictions (TL, 12 October 2012).
Significantly, BPO companies’ difficulties in the international market have led to successful efforts to instead acquire outsourced contracts from the domestic market, overcoming previous reticence on the part of Nairobi-based companies towards such arrangements. With the emphasis remaining on low costs, this scenario has led to workers who were once employed in-house by telecommunications providers – as in the Spanco Raps case, for example – now being employed by BPO companies fulfilling local accounts and slashing salaries to a fraction of their previous level. Despite notions that the creation of a BPO sector would improve people's opportunities on the basis of putting Kenyan skills to use to export services, one damaging result has therefore been the deterioration of local working conditions, with Nairobi-based clients becoming convinced of the cost-saving benefits of outsourcing, thereby creating reconfigured hiring and remuneration practices stacked against the interests of stable, adequately paid work, and intersecting with patterns of worsening conditions within more established parts of the Kenyan labour market (Von Holdt and Webster 2005; Mitullah 2010; Were 2011).
This outcome illustrates that the material dimension of agents’ work – job security and level of compensation – has been ambivalent. When companies are able to sustain profitable operations, salaries are available at a modest, perhaps good, level of income. In times of difficulty, workers bear the brunt of diminishing internal funds and may find those senior to them purely inclined to provide for themselves. If those experienced in international voice work display a positive subjective disposition towards elements of personal development and confidence stemming from the work, this should not distract from the problems of a sector once earmarked to improve livelihoods now undermining working conditions in a manner similar to that seen elsewhere. Combined with the need to acquire better quality work from clients, if the sector's reputation is to improve and if ‘low-skilled’ BPO work is to remain an emerging employer of young people, there needs to be an emphasis on honouring agreed rates of compensation, which, for example, the ICT Board, CCK or Ministry of Labour could ensure. While it is understandable that a new sector would face difficulty in establishing itself in a competitive international market, there must be an onus on ensuring that benefits accrue to each of its workers – in short, so the sector's participants recognize personal advantages in their involvement. If the BPO sector is to evolve as a key pillar of the Kenyan economy and a contributor to development, the existing experiences of those employed point to the need to establish improved worker compensation for those ‘on the front line’ (company owner, 21 January 2013) of ICT-mediated service sector work.
Conclusion: BPO as ‘development’?
Kenya's BPO sector is an emerging employer of the country's young people. Though the original intention was to establish the sector as a formidable competitor to those traditionally strong in the global voice-services industry, companies engaged in the sector have found consistent international work hard to acquire, often taking on less attractive contracts in a bid to achieve incipient profits. Though hopes remain that the sector will cement its position more strongly within the international market, BPO call centres’ portfolio of the work has now become increasingly based on domestic and regional contracts, with Nairobi-based clients becoming more favourable towards using BPO relationships to cut costs. Rather than enabling Kenya to assert itself as an exporter of competitive voice services (and reposition its economic geography through demonstrating the capacity to fulfil service contracts and set up renowned organizations), BPO has in a sense led to the importation of established practices of using flexible, cheap labour as a cost-cutting measure, in opposition to the aim of creating appealing jobs.
While the sector's expansion has been spoken of in terms of enhancing Kenyan people's prospects through new jobs (becoming integrated within the government's Vision 2030 initiative as a component of a strategy around ‘development’), there has been an absence of attention directed towards its outcomes and the experiences of those employed within the sector. Drawing upon the conceptual lens of ‘wellbeing’, engaging with workers experienced with BPO call centre work reveals an ambivalent record. With the sector beset with financial difficulties, workers’ material wellbeing has been undermined in the face of under- and non-payment of salaries. As companies have competed amongst themselves on low cost (with labour a central component), workers have been inclined to treat the sector as a stopgap and move between companies in search of better remuneration, with companies content to replace workers by drawing on a large pool within the labour market.
While the high level of sector turnover reflects the search for pay, workers display a positive subjective disposition towards aspects of the work. With work experience difficult to acquire, the advent of interactive service work in the Kenyan labour market (and its mechanisms of personalized feedback on performance) has enabled workers able to withstand a demanding labour process to develop greater personal resources – resources recognized by subsequent employers and thereby conducive to relational gains. Equally, workers commonly value companies’ training and appreciate the openness of company cultures relative to a greater emphasis on hierarchy and status – and even whom one knows – elsewhere in the city's professional landscape.
There is also a key socio-economic dimension to being able to access these gains, despite notions of call centre work as ‘low-skilled’ and thereby open to all. International voice work requires confidence and an ability to interact with customers in Western countries, most manifestly in one's level of professional experience with the English language. Though this should not be exaggerated as a form of crude socio-economic profiling, in general this leads those more ‘middle-income’ applicants to be more predisposed to being selected and to perform well in the work. Inasmuch as this might imply a corresponding emphasis on a high level of formal education, recruiting practices have nonetheless evolved to acknowledge the at-times superior commitment and aptitude of non-degree and non-diploma holders for the work. Whatever an agent's level of education, one's resilience and attitude – as toughness and receptivity to managerial control – are central to the ability to fulfil the requirements of the work.
As a new sector, BPO has faced the challenge of gaining an international reputation. At times this has involved companies undertaking poor-quality work from which it is difficult to make a return, belying the notion that Kenyan people's suitability for call centre work would be a straightforward means of establishing the country as an upcoming source of renowned service labour, and the idea that routinized, pressurized call centre work would be appealing for educated youth. Aside from the consequences for job roles, there have been serious material implications for companies’ workforces. If development is narrowly understood as redressing access to markets, utilizing ICT to provide new jobs, and altering a country's representation in the global political economy, then this conceptualization has overshadowed more pertinent, wellbeing-oriented questions pertaining to adequate institutional processes for remuneration and creating decent work. In contrast to ideas of rejecting externally defined neoliberal growth regimes and establishing Kenya as a self-determining actor within the international services market, this study's findings illustrate that the BPO sector's labour force has been subject to a trend consistent with neoliberal designs. If BPO is to provide an opportunity to establish Kenya's growth within international ICT and data services, then this should not be by undermining workers’ livelihoods via deepening practices of casualized, precarious labour and by permitting insecure, unpaid work to jeopardize the aims of the Vision 2030 initiative.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Dr Alexander Beresford and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
2. I understand BPO to be where one company contracts a second to undertake business activities that would otherwise be fulfilled internally.
3. In order to respect the confidentiality of participants, throughout the article I have omitted their names.
4. There is no government data on the number of people employed within BPO and the sector has seen dramatic fluctuations in the number of people it employs.
5. Kenny draws upon Hochschild's pioneering study of ‘emotional labour’ in the US service sector (see Hochschild 1979).
6. For many people in Nairobi, BPO in Kenya has simply meant call centres, with KenCall their emblem.
7. Numerous companies have sprung up to take advantage of potential opportunities. While a number have taken out licences with the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), many have operated ‘informally’, unbeknownst to the CCK or ICT Board (ICT Board official, 12 September 2012).
8. Following funding from the World Bank, the Board commissioned McKinsey to provide a set of recommendations for BPO (leading to a report entitled ‘Seizing the Prize: Driving BPO Sector Growth in Kenya’). Frost & Sullivan also released a report entitled ‘Analysis of the Kenyan Call Centre Market’. There were suggestions that the sector would provide some 7500 jobs by the end of 2012 (GRK 2008, viii), a figure that McKinsey regarded as insufficiently ambitious.
9. Through the provision of private sector projects and public–private partnerships, the Kenyan government oversaw the installation of the SEACOM, EASSy and TEAMS undersea fibre-optic broadband cables. Furthermore, in anticipation of the sector's subsequent take-off, the World Bank had provided a subsidy to cover the cost of the companies’ reliance on satellite communications.
10. See for example The Economist (2010), Fildes (2010), and Wambugu (2010).
11. Discussing South African call centres, Benner, Lewis, and Omar point out that India is in fact an ‘outlier’ in its large-scale operations oriented towards the global market. For the majority of call centres, serving domestic markets is the norm (2007, 7).
12. The wellbeing approach aims to open up a space in which the policy and research academic interventions leveraged in ostensible support of improving livelihoods can demonstrate greater sensitivity to people's own voices, perspectives, ideas and articulations – in short, the meanings attached to their lives and actions. It is interested not only in objectively verifiable concepts of livelihoods (measuring what people do and do not have) and personal subjective understandings (individuals’ personal experiences and ideas), but also in the way in which understandings of wellbeing are socially constructed and how meanings, values and ideas can be shared inter-subjectively. It has an appreciation that harm – anathema to wellbeing – can result when any of these different types of needs are disrupted.
13. In-house call centre agents commonly earn starting salaries equivalent to three or four times that of their BPO counterparts. Across other sectors, this monthly salary is similar to that of other positions considered ‘semi-skilled’, such as approximately KSh 13,000 per month for a general clerk. ‘Unskilled’ workers such as urban general labourers can earn approximately KSh 10,000 per month.
14. Employees and companies share equally a monthly $3.20 contribution to the National Hospital Insurance Fund, as well as a $4.00 social security contribution to the National Social Security Fund. Wausi, Mgendi, and Ngwenyi (2013) detail contractual relations between BPO employees and employers, including a maximum pension fund contribution of 5% of one's basic salary, while noting that there is variation in pension provision between companies.
15. See for example Daily Nation (2012).
