Whenever I read the papers, especially the business section, I always scan for the words "call center." It's rare these days that I'm rewarded, and when I am it's usually bad news: "Call Center Fails to Save Airline During Crisis," or "Call Center Outsourcing Provokes Angry Mob."

But this week I found a mention of call centers in a very strange place -- in Jay McInerney's review of a couple of books about sushi in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

One of the books, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, author Sasha Issenberg makes the claim that sushi consumption is, to quote McInerney's review, "a key indicator of modernization, a signifier of participation in the globalized economy."

What is apparently not a true indicator of a full-fledged part in the world economy is running outsourced call centers; once sushi hits big in places like India, says Issenberg, that country "will make a successful claim to a Western ideal of modernity that no number of outsourced call centers can."

The point, I think, is that running call centers for North America and Europe is a way of serving those cultures. For regular Indians to have convenient access to sushi (and everything that comes with bringing fresh fish and exotic foreign preparations and traditions to a country) would make India an equal.

It's exhilarating to imagine the changes that will inevitably come with an India that has equal economic footing with the G-8 nations. Will outsourced customer service and tech support increase or decrease? Will the quality of service get better as Indian agents become more like their Western counterparts, or will it actually get worse?

This is happening, and it's happening now -- and not just in India. China, for instance, is evolving from the country that makes all of our cheap stuff, to a country that competes with us for consumption of all that cheap stuff. Not to mention the expensive stuff like computers, cars and oil.

China is certainly on our radar here at ICMI. According to some numbers quoted by ICMI China's operations director Wang Houdong, China had 216,000 agents in 2005 with more than 10% market growth annually. [Read his article An Inside Look at China's Burgeoning Call Center Industry for more about China]

So what can we learn about call centers from a book about sushi? That's easy: it's that the call center market is global. That all of our concerns in North America are shared by agents in China, Australia, the U.K. and Singapore. And everywhere else.

We at ICMI and Call Center Magazine will be changing the way we cover this huge industry in the next couple months. We'll be unveiling a new look for our website and our magazine. And we'll be giving you much more global coverage.

Catriona Wallace, director of the Australian website Callcentres.net visited a Singapore women's prison last year, a prison that does some call center outsourcing with the help of a company called Connect Centre.

As frequent readers of this blog know, prison call centers are a subject of particular fascination for us, so we read Wallace's account on her website's blog eagerly:

"We were security checked and escorted by armed wardens to a call centre with greater than 50 seats which was totally behind bars and running on a smart technology platform supplied by a local Singaporean IT company, Innovax. The centre is an outsourced centre, established as part of a program to assist in the rehabilitation of inmates. We interviewed several agents working there and were totally impressed with their professionalism and dedication to the call centre job they had and to the industry. The call centre work is treated by inmates as a privilege and there is a very rigorous interview process for inmates to become agents."

To be sure, cheap labor is a big benefit, but what if UNICOR and some of its clients actually touted their prison workers? The former inmates I've spoken to have said that the work they did during their sentences was time well-spent -- it gave them purpose, pride, and (a rather small amount of) money. It also gave them valuable work experience that helped them reconnect with the world once they were released.

"It was great to see the contact centre industry being able to make a social contribution and all credit to the managers from Connect Centre who were also exceptional in their vision and dedication to this centre and its people," wrote Wallace in her blog.

A smart, public service-driven marketing campaign could turn a company's secret shame into a PR dream while helping turn convicts into tax-paying citizens again.

"They're felons, and they've got your number," read a South African headline. "Convicted Murderers Offer Directory Assistance," said another. "Dial M for Mobsters: Italy sets up call centre in jail," shouted the Scotsman's headline. "The next time you call directory enquiries in Italy, you may speak to a convicted murderer," warned Australia's Perth Now. Indian news sources, gleeful for something that made their outsourcers look benign, were just as smug: "Hello, murderer speaking!" said the Hindustan Times.

Much, if not all of the international coverage of Rome's Rebibbia prison call center has been hysterical. Read below the headlines and you'll learn that only 24 (or 26, depending on the source) inmates actually work there, that prisoners cannot dial out, and that the handful of convicts, specifically chosen for the job, are grateful for the work experience.

Is there anything wrong with prison call centers? Read our news story Roman Prison Call Center Raises Ruckus and then tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from our readers about this sensitive issue.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Graeme Philpson recently went "behind enemy lines" -- to a call center in India -- and sat with agent Deepak, aka Derek:

"I asked him if he ever got discouraged. He didn't lie. He said 'Yes.' But he ploughed on, through his eight-hour shift, working on the basis that about three calls out of every hundred would end in a completed survey.

"It is likely that Derek, or one of his thousands of colleagues, has called you recently. Most of us find these calls rather tiresome. Ways to get rid of such callers have become the stuff of dinner party conversations.

"Should you just hang up? Or ask them to wait a minute and leave them on hold till they hang up? Or say something clever such as 'sorry, I'm busy at the moment but leave me your home number and I'll call you there at an inconvenient time.' After watching Derek and hundreds of others at work, I can assure you that the best thing to do is to politely and clearly say "I'm not interested thanks" and hang up immediately. It gets them out of your hair and allows them to move on."

Read the rest of Philpson's report here.

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Cairo was participating in a panel discussion about the different attitudes toward offshoring in the US and the UK. I represented the US point of view along with Keith Fiveson of ITESA. (Ironic, isn't it, that the American contingent consists of two guys named Keith from New York City?)

The New York Times reports that India may be shifting from technology outsourcing to manufacturing.

Reporter Anand Giridharadas writes: "India's emergence as a manufacturing hub comes as multinationals look for alternatives to China. A talent shortage is lifting wages there, and that could make Chinese goods costlier and help India compete against China's smooth and comprehensive infrastructure, an advantage that reduces its cost of production."

Victoria's Secret, Nokia, and BMW are among the companies investing in India-based manufacturing.

What does this mean for call center outsourcing? Is the quiet news of call center repatriation an omen? Is India slowly repositioning itself? Good questions, but with companies like Apple expanding into India and Dell increasing its India force by 5,000, call center outsourcing isn't going away soon.

We're always excited to see call centers covered in major newspapers. But when our editors are quoted, we're thrilled. Our chief technical editor Joe Fleischer was quoted today in an article in the New York Times' Technology section called The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order.

McDonald's has been testing the use of call centers to take drive-through orders at about 50 nationwide locations. One center, run by Bronco Communications in Santa Maria, California, serves customers in line at McDonald's locations as far away as Hawaii.

In a previous post, we linked to CBC Radio's series on Indian outsourcing. Journalist Jacques Poitras compared India's mammoth growing market to Canada's more stable market (stable being a euphemism for stagnant).

Datamonitor just released a report called Selling Canada as a Nearshore Option which says that while "Canada's domestic and offshore outsourced total agent positions will increase through 2010," growth in agent positions will go down.

A documentary from last year called John and Jane is making film festival news again, this time at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie follows six Indian call center workers over three years. The title refers to the Anglo-American names agents gave themselves.

The Bombay-based director Ashim Ahluwalia told an Australian news service that the movie wasn't really about business process outsourcing, saying, "John and Jane is more about the need for everyone to become a hybrid American. It's like that in India and I think the whole world is becoming like that."

Mr. Ahluwalia continued, "The film is about what it means to be Indian in the 21st century. I didn't mean to make a portrait of the middle class. But they represent the direction India is going in." He went on, "They shape our taste and our aesthetics and in some ways, without meaning to they end up shaping our identities. John and Jane is that fantasy of where we want to be as a country. We don't want to see cows on the street any more."

Writing for new age doctor Deepak Chopra's blog collective IntentBlog, Toronto-based filmmaker Mohit Rajhans called the movie one of the best documentaries he's seen in a while. He quoted the Toronto Film Festival's write up from last September:

"As part of their training, they learn the meanings that work, money and God hold for Americans. In classes that could be read as satire or tragedy, they study shopping flyers as though they were textbooks. Some begin to adopt American values as their own. One dreams of buying his own Spanish-style villa. Another notes, "Everyone who's ever gone to America gets rich." When their shifts end, Glen and Sydney go back to traditional Indian homes, with simple amenities and mothers who urge them to eat."

A review from Variety praised the movie's use of 35mm film (instead of video) and its high, security camera-like angles. Reviewer Robert Koehler notes, "Snippets of pronunciation classes are ironic, given the pic's use of English subtitling for the heavily accented English dialogue." Koehler laments the film's lack of ideology, saying "it fails to provide a greater understanding of the hot-button issue of outsourcing."

Datamonitor has some interesting numbers out today about the impact of globalization on American outsourcing:

• In 2004, 37% of the world's outsourced contact center agent positions were in the United States. By 2008, Datamonitor expects that number to shrink to 25%. In fact, the number of US agent positions is expected to drop from 315,000 in 2004 to 291,000 in 2008.

• Nine out of ten jobs lost in the United States contact center outsourcing industry will be outbound telemarketing jobs. This is attributed to the Do-Not-Call registry and the higher revenues offered by inbound work. In addition, the number of agent positions in offshore and nearshore countries will continue to grow, due to the growing demand from US and captive market businesses.

• Contact center outsourcers are introducing new services to grow revenue and compete more effectively in the US market. Firms that were founded as contact center outsourcers are offering services which overlap other business process outsourcing (BPO) areas, and BPO providers are acquiring contact center capability.

Are there really only 300k outsourced stations in the US? That tracks to something like 5-10% of the total agent population, if you use the accepted figure of 3-5 million FTEs in the US. Doesn't that suggest that the industry as a whole - separate from the outsourcers - is pretty healthy? Outsourcers do, after all, operate in a completely different economic model than traditional inhouse centers.

Is it a business model? Perhaps. But I'm not convinced.

A company out of Seattle is making the argument that call centers don't listen to enough of the calls that they've actually recorded. The head of the company - HyperQuality - and I were both quoted on the topic in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Howard Lee: "The dirty secret is that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all those calls are actually listened to," said Lee, who while at Disney oversaw three call centers and 800 customer-service employees. "You are lucky to get five calls per month evaluated per agent."

Me: "With speech recognition or word spotting, the tools are good enough to identify agent failure," Dawson said. "I don't think anyone is complaining right now about not having enough information. If you are looking for choke points in a call center right now, that is not it."

Read the whole thing, and please let me know if I'm way wrong.