I've been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.
I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.
A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.
The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband's funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today's India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.
The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.
However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).
A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid...
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Monday, July 30, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
Deslocalization(?)
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...)
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...)
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