Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization - Softcover

Aneesh, A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822336693 ISBN 13: 9780822336693

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Workers in India program software applications, transcribe medical dictation online, chase credit card debtors, and sell mobile phones, diet pills, and mortgages for companies based in other countries around the world. While their skills and labor migrate abroad, these workers remain Indian citizens, living and working in India. A. Aneesh calls this phenomenon “virtual migration,” and in this groundbreaking study he examines the emerging “transnational virtual space” where labor and vast quantities of code and data cross national boundaries, but the workers themselves do not. Through an analysis of the work of computer programmers in India working for the American software industry, Aneesh argues that the programming code connecting globally dispersed workers through data servers and computer screens is the key organizing structure behind the growing phenomenon of virtual migration. This “rule of code,” he contends, is a crucial and underexplored aspect of globalization.

Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. Aneesh is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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"This is a brilliant and innovative intervention in the study of globalization that demonstrates how much the specific forms taken by global institutional arrangements and processes depend on the structure and design of computer code. "Virtual Migration" will be invaluable not only to students in science and technology studies but to scholars in all fields interested in the troubled politics of the global movement of capital, technology, and people."--Akhil Gupta, author of "Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India"

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Virtual Migration

The Programming of GlobalizationBy A. ANEESH

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3669-3

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................ixCHAPTER 1 Of Code and Capital..................................................1CHAPTER 2 Programming Globalization: Visions and Revisions.....................14CHAPTER 3 Body Shopping........................................................37CHAPTER 4 Virtual Migration....................................................67CHAPTER 5 Action Scripts: Rule of the Code.....................................100CHAPTER 6 Code as Money........................................................133CHAPTER 7 Migrations: Nations, Capital, and the State..........................153APPENDIX A A Note on Method....................................................165Tables..........................................................................171Notes...........................................................................175Bibliography....................................................................179Index...........................................................................191

Chapter One

Of Code and Capital

A silent transformation in the global organization of work is upon us. With high-speed data-communication links, workers based in one part of the world are increasingly able to work at locations far beyond their immediate horizon. Other stories of globalization and migration have commonly centered around the body, narrating how laboring bodies move from the developing to developed nations (see for example MacPhee and Hassan 1990; Zlotnick 1998), and how the integration of transnational labor-both documented and undocumented-takes place and struggles along national borders. Indeed, over the years the border has only grown in significance. In the decade after 1993 the U.S. Border Patrol doubled in size and tripled its budget; for migrants as well, the border has become costlier, in terms of increased coyote fees and also in lives-between 1994 and 2001 the bodies of more than 2,700 failed migrants were regularly recovered on both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico (Cornelius 2001). The border has not lost its significance, of course. But there is a development in labor migration that negotiates national borders differently. This book contrasts the account of embodied migration with the fast-growing but little researched virtual migration that does not require workers to move in physical space.

This story unfurls an emerging paradigm of transnational labor that allows workers in India to connect to corporations and consumers in the United States with high-speed satellite and cable links, performing through globally accessible data servers a range of work activities. One type of work, the staffing of call centers, has come under the focus of the news media. As inquiries from Americans who watch infomercials are routed to India, a teleworker in New Delhi may be selling them badly needed tummy crunchers, diet pills, orthopedic insoles, or even a fitness machine. Other work activities do not depend on the telephone: software research and development, engineering and design, animation, geographic information systems, processing of insurance claims, accounting, data entry, transcription, translation, and customer services such as technical support. Features of this labor integration may include a continuous monitoring of work by the client in the United States, who can perform quality checks and communicate with Indian workers as if they were on site. Since the United States and India have an average time-zone difference of twelve hours, the client may enjoy, for a number of tasks, virtually round-the-clock office hours: when America closes its offices, India gets ready to start its day. Thus paradoxically, the new space of transnational labor has reversed its relationship with the worker's body. Rather than move the body across enormous distances, new mechanisms allow it to stay put while moving vast quantities of data at the speed of light.

In an increasingly integrated global economy, therefore, a different kind of labor migration is taking place. I call it virtual migration. Although emerging online labor is part of the common trend in contemporary capitalism to tap globally dispersed labor in a more flexible manner, it has three distinctive features. First, online labor has limited direct, physical, face-to-face contact with corporations in the United States. Second, one could argue that online work is hardly transnational in character, as it takes place within national boundaries, and in many instances in direct response to immigration restrictions. Thus workers in India, while indirectly working for American corporations through subcontracting firms, still retain a single, unambiguous national identity. Unlike immigrants who physically work in the United States, they do not go through the agony of visa requirements, alien status, cultural opposition, and "nativist reaction" (Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield 1994). Third, workers based in India may (or may not) be governed by local practices, including labor and tax laws. Yet just like traditional immigrant workers, they do cross national boundaries and directly occupy some employment space in sectors of the American economy. In short, they migrate without migration, which is why we call the phenomenon virtual migration.

The concept of virtual migration underscores that a programmer sitting in India and working for a local firm can directly provide services in the United States, that a call center employee in Delhi-who sits in front of a computer screen wearing a headset-may sell a miniature rotisserie to a Californian. Many software development strategies rely on transnational software platforms that integrate groups sitting across the globe. Such invisible and disembodied processes of labor supply add a different dimension to our conventional understanding of labor migration.

I seek to free the discussion of labor mobility from the confines of the body, and to place the flows of labor at the level of global capital flows. This approach enables us to see certain social aspects of the transnational integration of labor that remain invisible in the economistic language of outsourcing and subcontracting. There are also semantic differences between outsourcing, offshoring, and virtual migration. Outsourcing is a relatively undifferentiated umbrella term, covering aspects of offshoring and virtual migration as well as the subcontracting of services and manufacturing within the country. Offshoring, on the other hand, surely happens off the shore or overseas, and it may include manufactured goods and components along with services. Virtual migration differs from outsourcing and offshoring in two respects: first, it does not include the transfer of physical merchandise such as parts, components, or the whole product, as it literally implies virtual labor integration, not trade in merchandise. Second, it encompasses the noneconomic elements that always accompany any mode of migration (such as the sociocultural aspects of call centers).

To bring out the uniqueness of these online labor flows from India to the United States, I compare them to the corresponding physical practice of securing work visas for Indian programmers and bringing them to the United States to work on site-a practice called "body shopping." While online programming implies...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822336693
• ISBN 13: 9780822336693
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland