Conference Abstracts
39. Omoniyi, 'tope; University of Surrey, Roehampton,
UK:
"Outsourcing and the Reconstruction of Habitus, Field and
Identity"
An incredible amount of discourse and counter-discourse
have been generated on the subject of immigrants and immigration
particularly to popular Western destinations. The host-guest social
and cultural interface is the context of varying relational transactions
which invoke Anderson’s conceptualisation of the nation as
an ‘imagined community’ (1991). Within these, descriptors
such as economic migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, aliens, foreigners,
and immigrants define segments of or the entire population at the
core of migration while terms like nationalists, fascists, Nazis,
racists, purists and victims have been used to describe those opposed
to immigrants and immigration. These construct differing perspectives
of agency. Arguably, with the reverse migration associated with
outsourcing, globalisation may be said to have effected a reconstitution
of habitus within a new field (Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992; cf. Habermas 1984) for identity construction. The
remodelled habitus may in principle be characterised as a challenge
to essentialist perspectives on identity considering that collaborations
between two distinct work cultures, ethics and other social practices
potentially rub-off on each other with a de-essentialising effect.
Furthermore, some of the activities are de-territorialised such
as transactions conducted by video-conferences, and on-line through
customer-support networks. These activities contrast with on-ground
transactions between outsourcers and contractors in specific country
locations. There are also transactions between contractors and the
call-centre staff they recruit to fulfil their obligations to clients.
There are cross-cultural transactions between trained call-centre
staff and the outsourcer’s customers. These transactions evidently
involve a complex web of political, economic, cultural and social
relationships. Previous sociolinguistic studies of call-centres,
for instance Debora Cameron’s (2001) have focused on describing
the communicative practices of the sector. In this paper, I shall
examine the ways in which habitus is reconstituted within interactions
in the new field created by outsourcing, and the effect that such
reconstitution has on the identities of Southern producers of knowledge
and their Northern clients. I shall present the report of an initial
investigation of one case of outsourcing by a global IT company
with a branch in Southeast England.
References
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Community. London: Verso
Bourdieu, Pierre (1985) "The Social Space and the Genesis of
Groups." Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723-744.
Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Cameron, Deborah (2003) Good to Talk?: Living and working in
a Communication Culture. London: Routledge.
Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action.
Polity Press, Cambridge
Back
|
