People, places, technology, and such

An interesting article about the effect (or non-effect) of globalization on poverty and inequality in China and India.

A couple of quotes that specially attracted my attention (emphasis is mine…):

In any case it is often statistically difficult to disentangle the effects of globalization from those of the ongoing forces of skill-biased technical progress, as with computers; structural and demographic changes; and macroeconomic policies.

(…)

Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s is perhaps mainly a result of the spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, egalitarian land reform and readjustment of farm procurement prices – mostly internal factors that had little to do with global integration.

(…)

Issues like globalization, inequality, poverty and social discontent are thus much more complicated than are allowed in the standard accounts about China and India.

The article is quite short, and, although it points some inconsistencies in the standard accounts about China and India, it does not provide any alternative explanation for phenomenons such as the rise in inequality indicators and its relation with globalization.

The point I found more intriguing, however, is the mention of the effects of skill-biased technical progres. In the traditional development accounts, technical progress is always associated to positive effects, but as the author hints, it is possible that technical progress (or some kind of technical progress…) also has a negative effect on equality, since the access to technology and its advantages may be limited by its cost and/or required skills to use it.

There are many efforts to use technology as tool to trigger economic and social progress in the more disadvantaged groups, but I wonder how many of them are really succesful and what are their effect on poverty and inequality indicators…

POST UPDATE: after writing this post, I found a paper about the increasing social fragmentation and inequality in Bangalore. I have not had time to read it in full detail, but the author seems to favor the thesis that globalization increases inequality:

Bangalore’s meteoric rise to a globally integrated location of modern service industries reflects the recent trends of economic globalisation. (…) Its integration into the highly competitive framework of inter-city linkages produces profound processes of urban restructuring creating new disparities and a highly fragmented and polarised urban society. Bangalore is becoming what is called a multiply divided city where both social and geographical barriers are reinforced.

Using color is a typical way to differentiate between slightly different usages of otherwise similar artifacts. Be it garbage recycling containers in Barcelona…

… or mailboxes in Bangalore…

As widespread as it is the use of color coding, it remains quite a local thing in many occasions. The meaning and associations attributed to different colors varies a lot in different cultures and societies, so color codes are constantly being invented to be used in specific situations and locations. Some of them may evolve to be fully global, maybe trough a formal standardization process, but in lot of cases they remain local, or are reinterpreted (translated) when moved to different situations and cultural environments….

A small test: what different type of garbage do you think you should throw in each container?, what type of letters would you put in each mailbox? (try to answer the question without reading the small print in the photographs…)

I’ve been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.

I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.

The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband’s funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today’s India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.

The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.

However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).

A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid…

We live in a globalized world….

How many times have you heard or read that sentence?. I’ve googled it, and there are more than 7000 references, counting both globalized and globalised spelling (by the way, which is the correct way of writing it?).

Usually, it acts as a starting point to two different types of arguments. On one side, the catastrophic view: due to globalization cultures and traditions will be lost, the natural environment will be destroyed and we will end up in a uniform, oppressive, orwellian world where difference will not even be remembered. On the other side globalization, serves as a excuse to push unpopular decisions (usually political or economical), like ‘because we live in a globalized world, we need to dismantle the welfare state…’.

These two arguments are based on a typical deterministic view of technology. It is obvious that what we call globalization has been speed up by the advent of new communication and information technologies, and, from a deterministic perspective, those new technologies determine how society is going to evolve; there is no way out, society has to resign to its fate…

There are several pitfalls to these arguments. It is simply not true that globalization is a new thing, there have always been global relations between the different regions of the world. Cultures and societies are not closed entities that have grown up and evolved in total isolation (yes, there is, maybe, the exception of some communities in some out of the way areas, island in the middle of the Pacific, Hymalayan valleys,…, but even in that case those peoples had to come from somewhere…). The idea of an intrinsically pure culture of a community (country, region, people, race…) that can be polluted and must be protected from external influences, is just a myth fed by nationalistic interests.

And, although it is true that new ICTs expedite and facilitate communication, relation, and sharing between different parts of the world, that does not mean that this integration must evolve in the directions we usually (and wrobly?) associate today to the word globalization.

Faster and better communication technologies bring with them more interaction between people and cultures, but that does not necessarily imply reducing the cultural, social and economical diversity of the world, as most of the arguments that start with ‘We live in a globalized world…’ try to suggest.

And what about the photo?

I think this one illustrates cultural diversity in a global world at its best: a Brazilian barber shop in the Chinatown area of NYC, probably frequented by Hispanic customers that also live in that area…

A couple of weeks ago, I caught TV program on deslocalization. I guess that the term sounds quite strange in English , but in French, and also in Spanish, it has become quite a common word to refer to the process of migration of (more or less skilled) jobs from developed to developing countries.

Obviously, since the term has been coined in countries that, supposedly, are loosing jobs in this process (and where labor unions are quite powerful), it has a very negative connotation. Even the word itself shows this connotation: deslocalization seems to suggest that work is being moved out of a location, a place, to somewhere in hyperspace, rather than what is really happening: being moved from one location to another. Relocalization sounds like a more exact term to describe the concept, but this term would probably not have the same impact…

Going back to the program, I got interested because they were showing some images of Bangalore, including some places, streets and shopping malls, that I had visited several times while we were living there, but the fact is that, in terms of contents, it was not very good. It abounded in the image of jobs being steeled from the developed countries, while, at the same time, the traditional values of the destination countries is also lost. It focused, mostly, on call centers, so there were also the typical topics of English accent training classes and the hard job of spending 8 hours a day answering customer calls.

In particular, there was this portion where they showed how some call center employees went to the mall to do some shopping of western items after receiving their monthly salary. The funny (or maybe sad) part is that they made that sound as something wrong: why should people from a third world country spend their hard earned money in western items such as cell phones or jeans?.

The fact is that there were lots of underlying cliches on which are the expectations, needs and values of social groups in developing countries, and, using a very superficial analysis, the conclusion was that deslocalization was bad both for the source and the destination countries. I guess that the intention was to justify the opposition to the whole phenomenon not only on the basis of job losses but also on the supposedly perverse effect on the culture and way of living in the destination countries.

The effects of deslocalization, offshoring, job migration, or however you want to call it… are much more complex, deep (and unsettling?) that what a TV program can show in little less than one hour, and you cannot expect that a deep social analysis on those effects will keep general public’s attention, but simplification should not mean just jumping into cliched conclusions…

When the program was shown I was also reading India’s New Middle Class by Leela Fernandes, and, although offshoring is not the main topic of the book, it describes and explains the causes for lots of the consuming habits changes in the new middle class in India, and their complex relation to the success of India as one of the destinations for high technology enabled jobs. (Unluckily, I forgot the book, when I had read more than three quarters of its content, in an airport loungue…)

The last few weeks have been very busy, but I have been able to spend dedicate some time Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization by A.Aneesh. The book is an interesting attempt to view the phenomenon of software development outsourcing and offshoring from a different perspective. Given my current job, I have done quite a lot of reading about these topics. All the stuff I had read so far seemed to address only two specific areas: the economic effects of the phenomenon or on the methods to implement and efficiency that can be extracted from remote development.

On the first aspect, what is the economic effect of the transfer of software development and related activities from developped countries to other geographies, the materials range from the populist and simplistic analysis (ala Lou Dobbs), to more serious and analytical, and obviously less alarmist, materials. Of course, the problem is that it is much easier to get exposed the former, specially on the generalist media. I must admit that I have had the Report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software (ACM, 2006) sitting in my desktop for the last few months and I have only been able to read the intro, while in this time I’ve read at least 50 different poorly researched articles about offshoring in general newspapers and TV shows (and that’s without counting the Indian newspapers, where there are news every day about the topic!).

On the second area, the materials also range from the simplistic, all the howto guides that, according to their editorial reviews, pretend to have solutions for everything and end up listing a few basic rules together with some anecdotes about cultural differences, to the well researched. In this later group, I must recommend Global IT Outsourcing: software development across borders(Sahay, Nicholson and Krishna, 2005), a book that using an ethnographic aproach analyzes several cases of successful and failed offshoring projects, extracting relevant insights, but without trying to give simple recipes or solutions that should work everywhere. (If I had read this book a few months before I did, I would have been able to skip some of the mistakes I did in the beginning of the project!).

In Virtual Migrations, Aneesh tries to address the whole offshoring/outsourcing/globalization issue from a different perspective: focusing more on what is the effect on the persons and organizations that participate in the whole phenomenon. This is how he comes up with the term that gives the title to the book: he claims that the whole topic can be analyzed as a change in the work migration paradigm. Instead of moving workers, only the work result is moved.

Hence programmers in India become virtual migrants, working for the big (mostly American) corporations from their Indian location. This enables capturing the advantages of migrant workers (basically lower salaries) without having to cope with the issues of integration of immigrants into a different society. This change is happening because of the availability of new digital communication and information technologies and facilitated by a change in the organizations towards what the author calls the algocratic model, where code and software plays a key role in the organizational and work structure.

This would be an example on how technology helps shaping the social structure, but the author escapes both from the fully technological deterministic or fully social construction perspective. For him code, distributed programming and related technologies are more an actor that shapes and is shaped by other economical, social, organizational and technological factors (more like an actor-network in ANT…)

In summary, Virtual Migration is a very interesting work, both from the theoretical perspective and the ethnographic data used in the argumentation, although, from my own experience, I find some of his accounts on how easy is to work IT related work around too optimistic. He does not talk too much about the issue of knowledge migration and its difficulties and barriers.

So, here I am, starting my second adventure in the blogosphere…

Some visitors may already know about Ven y Dime Cómo Vives, the blog (in Spanish) where my wife and I write about the experiences of an expat family in Bangalore. After a few months of posting, I guess I’m hooked on the idea of writing for some (mostly unknown) audience, and I have decided to try a different experiment. My purpose is to write about stuff more related to my work and my professional, and academic, interests.

I suppose that means that I need to explain which are those interests: I have been involved in technology development and innovation for more than 15 years, mostly in the software area, directly working for, or indirectly interacting with, some of the leading technology MNCs. If I had to summarize my learnings during these years in one phrase it would be: technology itself is only a 10% of the total equation. There are lots of other factors: economic, social and cultural that play a key role in the development, success and adoption of new technologies and innovations.

That’s how I got more and more interested on the interactions between innovation, technology and society and I started a PhD in STS (Society and Technology Studies). Sadly, the PhD work has been parked for the last year and a half, first due to some family changes that kept me quite busy, and then because I decided to take an assignment to work in Bangalore, India in setting up a new development group.

The experience has been great, both from a personal, experiencing a very different culture and way of life, and professional perspective, learning how to deal with knowledge transfer, remote research and development models, and building capabilities in a brand new team. Actually, lots of the concepts and ideas that I learned from my PhD courses have been quite useful for this assignment.

So I have decided to blog about some of these topics: innovation, technology, society, globalization, culture, and their interactions.

Whenever you venture into a new project there is some anxiety about what is going to happen and how it is going to evolve, but I think that I’m going to enjoy this one, at least as much as I enjoy my other life in the blogosphere… Lets see what happens!

A final note: Pardon our Appearance!. I have just started the blog and have not had much time to customize the template. I expect to have some time in the next few weeks to give it a more atractive, and personalized, look