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.