Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers by Kate Meagher Laura Mann Maxim Bolt

Author:Kate Meagher, Laura Mann, Maxim Bolt [Kate Meagher, Laura Mann, Maxim Bolt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Demography, Political Science
ISBN: 9781315436470
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

I. Introduction

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) can loosely be described as service work contracted out to a third party. The term encompasses a range of activities that include customer service work, data entry, transcription, digitisation, financial accounting, auditing and other higher value-knowledge processing such as content development, animation, legal services, engineering design and data analytics. The BPO sector first emerged in Northern economies in response to deregulation and competitive pressures inducing organisations to restructure, increase efficiencies and maximise shareholder value (Batt & Moynihan, 2002; Davis, 2009). Work tasks that once took place within firms came to be standardised and outsourced to outside organisations, often using information and communication technologies (ICTs). Work was first moved to lower wage areas within national economies (Taylor & Bain, 2008) but by the early 2000s, changing communication capacities had allowed such work to be offshored to countries such as India, the Philippines and China, effectively creating a ‘global’1 marketplace for services (Dicken, 2003; Bryson, 2007; Malecki & Moriset, 2008). The increasing geographical spread of BPO has resulted both from pressures to reduce costs and from desires by multinational companies (MNCs) to spread risk across markets (Kleibert, 2014).

BPO has been seen to represent very different facets of economic globalisations. On the one hand, it has been described as offering potential developmental benefits, allowing developing countries to leapfrog industrialisation, acquire new skills and capital, and participate in a flatter and more frictionless global economy (Dossani & Kenney, 2007; Friedman, 2006). Fernandez-Stark, Bamber, and Gereffi (2011, p. 1) thus write, ‘the industry provides a clear illustration of how globalisation has provided opportunities for both employment and business formation in developing countries’. However, others have voiced more cautious assessments, stressing that benefits are ‘uncertain and contingent’ (Levy, 2005, p. 691) and that the globalisation of services is likely to benefit more highly skilled groups while weakening the security, economic prospects and bargaining power of less skilled workers (Held, 1999). Anxieties about BPO are particularly pronounced in relation to developed economies where fears of job losses dominate discussions.

Since 2004, Kenyan policy-makers and businesspeople have wanted a share of the market. Many hoped the 2009 arrival of fibre optic internet cables into East Africa would allow these economies to break their dependence on primary commodity exports and use the affordances of better internet connectivity to transition into tertiary and quaternary service sector exports (Graham & Mann, 2013). The original vision for the BPO sector in Kenya was therefore export oriented, Kenyan owned and oriented towards the creation of jobs (Graham, Andersen, & Mann, 2015). Estimates released by the Government of Kenya (2007a, b) predicted the sector would create 20,000 direct BPO jobs and contribute 10 billion Kenyan shillings to GDP (approximately 114 million USD).

Few connected the deeper penetration of high speed internet nor the development of an export-oriented BPO sector with the potential for greater domestic outsourcing within Kenya itself (that is Kenyan BPO companies conducting work for other Kenyan companies). Despite a trend of increasing subcontracting already taking place (Mazumdar &

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