Professor Jeffrey Sallaz Wins Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award

Aug. 31, 2021
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University of Arizona's School of Sociology's Professor Jeffrey Sallaz was announced as the co-winner of the @ASAnews Zelizer Award for best book in Economic Sociology for his book "Lives on the Line: How the Philippines became the World's Call Center Capital".

You can the announcement from ASA here.

An abstract of the book can be found below: 

The call center industry is booming in the Philippines. Around the year 2005, the country overtook India as the world’s “voice capital,” while industry revenues are now the second largest contributor to national GDP. This ethnographic study traces the assemblage of a global market for voice over the past two decades. New information technologies developed during the 1990s and 2000s fed Western firms’ appetite for cheap, English-speaking workers in offshore locales. An initial attempt to build a stable labor market for voice in India failed, owing in large part to gendered norms regarding work and mobility. In the Philippines, in contrast, there is a remarkable affinity between workers and firms. Decades of failed development policies have produced for educated Filipinos a dismaying choice: migrate abroad in search of prosperity or stay at home as an impoverished professional. Offshored call centers, in this context, represent a middle path. Drawing upon case studies of sixty Filipino call center workers and two years of fieldwork in Manila, this book shows how call center jobs allow Filipinos to earn a decent living and stay at home. Filipina women and transgender Filipinos in particular use their voices as strategic resources. Call centers are for them lifelines and lifestyles. Taken as a whole, this study advances debates concerning global capitalism, the future of work, and the lives of those who labor in offshored jobs.

 

Congratulations to Jeff!