People, places, technology, and such

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…)

It is very common that during the process of development of a new technology, an specific jargon is created. When the technological innovation starts to get deployed, the jargon acts as a symbol to differentiate those who know about it. But as the new technological features become mainstream, and with some good marketing help, the jargon words detach from the original technical field and get incorporated into the consumer language.

That evolution is specially visible in technologies related to consumer products (how many people who look at the L2Cache size spec for microprocessors has an idea, beyond bigger number is better, about the meaning of that spec?). But in certain circumstances this jargon evolution can also happen in other technologies not so consumer oriented.

In Bangalore, the major center of the software export industry in India, in an environment with a very high IT employment demand, IT and programming related skills becomes a very valuable asset. The consequence is that the programming jargon is becoming part of the regular language. Small signs advertising training in very specific programming technologies abound, and, in certain situations, it is quite easy to start a conversation with an stranger about specific programming languages, platforms, and techniques.

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.