Urban generations: Post-colonial cities
01-03 October 2004
Conference Abstracts
22. Gupta, Suman; The Ferguson Centre for African
and Asian Studies, The OU: "Reconfiguring the Post-Colonial City: Discussions/Representations
of the Impact of Outsourcing in the Mainstream Mass Media"
In both the British/American and the Indian mainstream
broadcast and print mass media there has been a prodigious amount
of discussion of the implications of outsourcing information services
by British establishments to India. To a significant degree such
discussion has addressed political and economic repercussions –
in terms of job losses, legislative prerogatives, workers’
rights, quality of services, advantages to business, etc. However,
almost invariably, apart from the surface political and economic
concerns addressed, such discussion also: (a) draws upon certain
cultural assumptions regarding the spaces/people who provide outsourced
services and the spaces/people who use such services; and (b) offers
observations about the cultural changes that are becoming manifest
or can be expected in both as a result of this relationship. These
cultural assumptions and expectations are naturally informed by
the colonial and post-colonial histories involved, and revolve around
the understanding that the spaces/people in question are (especially
insofar as those providing outsourced services go) urban. A discussion
of these issues cannot proceed on the assumption that mass media
texts are transparent windows giving a view of the distinctive cultural
interactions that have emerged with the outsourcing phenomenon.
Arguably, the fact that mass media texts have chosen to pick up
the phenomenon as a public-interest matter – and have attempted
to accommodate it within media frames that construct, as much as
convey, the nature of that public interest – has an important
role to play in the development of this phenomenon. The cultural
assumptions and perceptions regarding people/spaces and post-colonial
urbanity involved is appropriately examined only by attention to
both the nuances of outsourcing itself and the manner in which it
has been taken up in the mainstream mass media.
In this paper these issues are examined with reference to a number
of indicative Indian and British mass media texts.
