Virtual migrations

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.