Dial just about any toll-free number and chances are you'll be talking to a Filipino. In fact, around the year 2005, the country overtook India as the world's "voice capital." Lives on the Line argues that this has nothing to do with wages or accents. Rather, as Jeffrey J. Sallaz shows, there is a perfect match between offshored call centers and educated young Filipinos. For Filipina women and gay Filipinos in particular, call centers are veritablelifelines, and their lives tell us much about contemporary capitalism and the future of work.

Jeffrey J. Sallaz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. He is an ethnographer of work who has performed fieldwork in automobile factories, casinos, and call centers. For the present project, he spent two years doing fieldwork in the Philippines and the United States.

• Part 1 Introduction


• 1: One Job, Many Lives


• 2: Assembling a Labor Market


• Part 2 Mediators Unpacked


• 3: Firms: Seeing Like a Call Center


• 4: The State: Making a Middle Path


• 5: Labor: Seeking the Philippine Dream


• Part 3 Three Archetypes


• 6: Responsible Women


• 7: Restless Gays


• 8: Rooted Men


• Part 4 Conclusion


• 9: Gone Baby Gone


• 10: The Relativity of Work


• Appendix


• An Ethnographic Narrative


• Acknowledgements


• Notes


• Index