Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
impacted upon livelihoods, this chapter starts with a focus on the new
service economy and the processes of digitization that have created new
spaces of work in the global South.
Global Services and Off-shoring:
New Spaces of Work
From the late 1990s onwards, advances in ICT technologies enabled
MNCs to outsource substantial components of their businesses in order
to take advantage of cheaper labour and tax incentives. Originally cen-
tred on the provision of data-processing and back-office services such as
credit card billing, sales and reservations, payroll accounting, and
claims processing, offshore industries created routine, automated and
labour intensive jobs in politically stable, English-speaking regions like
the Caribbean. Typical examples of this work include health services
and insurance in the Caribbean, shipping and legal services in the
Philippines, telephone call centres in India, and pharmaceutical
research and development in China. In the latest wave of development,
firms like Amazon have invested in software development in South
Africa and France was reported to have outsourced US$35 million of
call-centre and transcription work to subcontractors in Morocco and
Tunisia. The global division of labour in IT industries is also changing,
with hardware being produced in Malaysia and Taiwan, software enter-
prises developing in India and China, and back-office services relocat-
ing to Brazil and South Africa. The rise of the Asian computer gaming
industry is creating new innovative work opportunities for local youth,
including the trading of 'in-game currencies' (potions or armour) to
wealthy global consumers in multiplayer games like 'World of Warcraft'
(Heeks, 2008).
Back-office and data-processing industries often have a preference
for young, female labour as a result of the gender stereotyping of rou-
tine tasks as 'women's work', discussed in Chapter 3.2. In the 1990s, 90
per cent of Jamaica's data-processing labour force was female. The
extent to which data-processing firms have provided new opportunities
for women in the global South has been a topic of intense discussion
within academic and scholarly circles (Perrons, 2004; Pearson, 2007).
While some commentators have identified offshore industries as sites of
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