Work and Life in the Global Economy

This edited book has emerged from a CRESC¹ (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) workshop held in Manchester in February 2008, which provided a forum to debate ‘Gender, Service Work and the Cultural Economy’. The aim of this collection, based largely on contributions from the workshop, is to explore the social and cultural issues within the economic changes that have given rise to service work, which represents the largest occupational sector (ILO 2008). This sector is often polarized between higher-paid ICT-enabled ‘knowledge work’ and lower-paid catering, cleaning and care work. In order to gain a broad appreciation of working lives, we adopt an inclusive approach with chapters covering a variety of types of service work. Written by specialists in their respective fields, this book draws together authors from interdisciplinary areas that are carrying out significant research into the totality of women’s working lives and studying varying combinations of gender and service work within an international context. Authors originate from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, critical management, industrial relations, economics, geography, gender studies, and science and technology studies. Accordingly, the analysis being presented is accompanied by diverse illustrations, such as IT workers in Mumbai, lone parents undergoing CISCO network engineer training in London, financial and retail service workers in Europe, Indian nurses working for the UK NHS, a historical study of female telegraphers, and call centre staff employed to service the emerging domestic market in India.

It is tempting to regard the ‘knowledge economy’ and the role of ‘knowledge worker’ as recent phenomena predicated on the introduction and widespread use of electronic information and communications technologies. However, in this chapter, I look to the long history of knowledge work in information and communications technologies such as the telephone, telegraph and computer, arguing that women’s work in these industries was vital in shaping modern bureaucratic forms of organization and in rehearsing and affirming conceptions of masculinity and femininity in relation to the use of technology. Studying the development of work in relation to such technologies shows there is continuity in what may be designated knowledge work, at least from the development of the telegraph until the present day, and continuity in the ways that women’s skills were valued, or denigrated, in working with these technologies. The history of women’s work in telephony, telegraphy and the computer industry demonstrates ways in which women’s labour was crucial to the organization of work, the transition to automation and the facilitation of information communication, thus sowing the seeds for modern conceptions of information processing and knowledge work. Although this often receives scant acknowledgement, women played a pivotal part in creating and defining modern technological roles.

In the past 25 years, the global economy has been powerfully marked by dramatic movements of labor and capital. The human face of these movements has been evocatively rendered in analyses of the “global assembly line,” the global “care chain,” and the “global city,” and in these accounts gender emerges as a critical dimension of these new labor-scapes (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Ong 1987; Parrenas 2001; Sassen 1991; Ward 1990). Where the “new international division of labor” signaled a major shift in which developing countries came to represent not only loci for the extraction of agricultural and raw materials, but also profitable sites of labor for the manufacturing of consumer goods for the “west,” the scale and manner in which this global restructuring has moved into an everwidening array of services adds even greater complexity to the lived realities and analytical challenges presented by contemporary globalization. One such facet that emerges boldly in recent portraits of global service workers — whether Indian call center workers portrayed in the popular media or migrant domestic workers analyzed in ethnographic texts — is the powerful symbolic and material importance played by global consumption as integral to these forms of global labor. Related to this melding of production and consumption is the need for a more nuanced analysis of class, and in particular the murky concept of middle-class, as the expanding reach of global restructuring includes everything from the most hidden and marginalized domestic and sexual labor to the upper tiers of professional managers, designers, and consultants.

Global Software Organizations (GSOs) constitute work settings for IT professionals engaged in software development for customers across the globe. In India, the information technology (IT) revolution in India has created new career possibilities for urban, educated, middleclass professionals, particularly women. GSOs often position themselves as knowledge-based, meritocratic, and gender-neutral in their structure and culture. This chapter aims to understand how gender is expressed or played out in a GSO work setting within India. It describes the ways in which gendered relations emerge or are reproduced in a GSO and how these influence work relations and outcomes within the GSO.

Feminist ethnographies on the nature of global capitalism have provided a wealth of knowledge on the gendered nature of transnational subcontracting. Women in many parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America have been constructed as the ‘ideal’ workers within transnational factories producing garments, food products, shoes, electronics and transcriptions at nominal cost in developing countries. This chapter explores a seemingly opposite trend at play in Indian call centres which provide voice-to-voice service to American clients. Call centre work is in many ways the epitome of what is commonly seen as ‘women’s work’. Providing good service on the telephone requires skills associated with hegemonic femininity, such as being nice, making customers feel comfortable, and dealing with irate customers (Hochschild 1983; Steinberg and Figart 1999; Leidner 1999). Yet, interestingly enough, call centre work in the newly emerging centres in New Delhi is not always segregated by gender. In fact, in the interviews I conducted, managers, trainers and workers unanimously and emphatically construct their jobs in call centres as free of gender bias and equally appropriate for male and female workers. This chapter explores manifestations of gendered processes in transnational call centres in light of these claims of occupational desegregation.

In the film Slumdog Millionaire, the central character Jamal Malik gains employment in a Mumbai call centre as a chai wallah. Scenes from this workplace, particularly the one in which Jamal stands in for a customer service representative and mishandles a call from a Scottish customer, resonate with the multiple images and perceptions popularly associated with the Indian call centre: cultural and linguistic difference and misunderstanding, crowded and fast-paced workplaces, the youth of its upwardly mobile workforce, technological domination, the concealment of the centres’ locations and the ambiguous identities of employees. Although myths persist, such as that presented in the film of management giving agents daily updates of UK soap operas so that they can better empathize with customers (Taylor and Bain 2005), these representations do reflect a material reality, the relocation of interactive service work from the English-speaking developed economies (principally the United States and the United Kingdom) to the developing countries (notably India) (Dossani and Kenney 2003; Taylor 2009).

Focusing on Europe’s reconciliation policies, aimed to balance family and labor market work, this chapter explores whether some of the legislative efforts introduced in Europe during the past decade could be applied to Latin American countries with important migrant populations, such as Bolivia and Ecuador. This chapter argues that there are differences between Northern and Southern countries that would influence the effectiveness of these kinds of policies in the South. Three differences in particular — the availability of domestic service, the extent of the informal economy, and international migration — are taken into consideration. Using the capabilities approach framework, this chapter outlines other lines of public policy action that can be useful in designing reconciliation policies for the South. Finally, the chapter argues that there is an urgent need for rethinking gender equity within the emerging gender order across countries.

Are there any connections between the processes driving contemporary inequalities and enduring gender inequality and, if so, how can they be identified, explained and challenged? In this chapter I review the current state of knowledge and indicate some potential lines of inquiry to illuminate two enduring questions in feminist research with respect to gender and pay inequalities: the persistence of the gender pay gap and gender segregation. I address these questions in the context of rising overall inequality, new forms of employment and new employment forms.

In many contemporary discussions of service employment, considerable emphasis is placed on services with a high knowledge content. Immaterial, ‘weightless’, knowledge-intensive services, particularly services which can be provided and consumed using information and communications, have for the past decade been seen as central to the health and continuing development of European economies. These high-end ‘knowledge-intensive services’ have been treated in social, economic and regional policies as the drivers of economic development, the means by which countries, regions and organizations can grow, create wealth and secure competitive advantage (Hauknes 1996). Human capital is one of the key resources in the creation and development of these services, the element which adds value to specialized activities in design, marketing, programming, engineering, management, consultancy, and that which drives innovation in all these and other service areas.

Workplaces are often fraught with conflict and disagreement. Contrary to the views of many mainstream authors writing for the core disciplines of business and management (such as organizational behaviour, human resource management, and information systems), conflict cannot easily be nullified, minimized or eradicated by the adoption of managerial ‘best practice’ (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999). Edwards’ phrase (1979) of the ‘Contested Terrain’ of work remains as apt today as ever. Conflict between management and labour is obviously a central workplace faultline emphasized by many theoretical traditions, notably by Marxist labour process theory (Braverman 1974/1998; Edwards 1979; Burawoy 1979; Thompson and Warhurst 1998; Thompson 2003).

Japan’s aging society and persistent low birth rate are key factors driving government legislation aimed at enabling women, in particular, to pursue paid work while raising children. Yet little is known as to how working mothers manage to combine work and family in a country where there is a legacy of women assuming full responsibility for children and family and a cultural ideology that imbeds them in this role. What is the balance between work and family for these women? Have legislative measures contributed to women finding a work-life balance? How does becoming a mother affect one’s career mobility? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by drawing on the results of a study of women with young children who work in a multinational corporation in Japan. Although the corporation had implemented a number of work-life balance policies as part of its diversity programme, women reported that combining a career with child-rearing presented serious challenges and in most cases undermined their career mobility. The sociocultural environment and the gendered understandings which underpinned norms in the workplace played an important role in how the women experienced their work-life balance. The chapter begins by describing relevant legislation and Japanese cultural ideology pertaining to working women. The research design is presented, followed by the findings, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the systemic biases and norms that serve to reinforce discriminatory patterns for working mothers.