Deaf bodies and corporate bodies: new regimes of value in Bangalore's business process outsourcing sector

Abstract

This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how engaging in the same work articulates with deaf young adults' 'sameness work' to produce ambivalent deaf groups. It also analyses the everyday practices of deaf employees, their relationships with their normal co-workers who 'love' them, and the ways that value is reconfigured in the workplace through the existence of disabled workers. This article argues that in contrast to dominant representations of disabled people as unemployable, the (re)inscription of deafness as a source of multiple forms of value begs for a broader analysis of the role of disability in late capitalism. Producing the deaf groupIn September 2008, I visited Excel, a mid-sized business process outsourcing (BPO) corporation in Bangalore, India. 1 Excel was unique in that at least 95 per cent of its approximately one hundred and fifty employees at that time were disabled and many of them were deaf. Excel has since expanded and now employs over two hundred people, of whom at least two-thirds have disabilities. While conducting ethnographic research with sign language-using deaf young adults in Bangalore and other Indian cities, I had learned much about Excel from deaf young adults who were currently working there or who had previously worked there, from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and job placement organization administrators, and from popular newspaper articles extolling its innovative model of providing BPO services; its innovation in hiring disabled employees was stressed.

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