|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 12/5/2006
Digitizing Services: What Stays Where and Why
Martin Kenney, Rafiq Dossani
June 2006
Introduction
The spatial extension and deepening of capitalism has been a topic of interest to geographers, other social scientists, and activists since, at least, Lenin. This topic has reappeared on the public agenda recently under the rubric of “globalization.” Once again, the spatial redistribution of economic activities is sparking enormous controversy and opinions from nearly every philosophical position. This paper considers two dimensions of this enormous topic and argues that neither dimension has received sufficient attention from geographers. The first dimension is the role of technological advancement in transportation and communication technologies in a capitalist system. The second dimension is the development of a global division of labor in service provision.
In 1980, Frobel et al. hypothesized that a new international division of labor was being created within which low skilled manufacturing work, which had previously been located in the developed nations, was being transferred to developing nations to take advantage of low-waged, mostly female workers. At the time, they suggested that this was an inherently unequal exchange and that the workers in both locations were victims of this relocation. This essay will not engage the debate about the exploitation of low-wage workers in developing nations except to assert that the plight of these workers has received an enormous amount of attention from geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, professors of women’s studies, and social activists. Quite naturally, in their zeal to struggle against the very real and shocking work conditions under which these workers labor, they have focussed on a few industries particularly garments and shoes (industries known in the developed world for shocking labor conditions), and, to a much lesser extent, electronics. It is remarkable how social science researchers have reduced the integration of the developing nations into the global economy to garments and shoes. This fixation has had the unfortunate effect of resulting in a one-sided understanding of globalization
This essay directs attention away from these infernal mills to the two dimensions that I believe will have a far more significant effect. Consider the implications of how the rapidly evolving global transportation and communications infrastructure is tying the global economy more firmly together. The globalization of manufacturing is being followed by a global redistribution of white-collar work, which has only recently begun. As this advances, it will lead to a fundamental geographic redistribution of work that is also nearly certain to have profound effects on the global economy. These two themes are not new as Dicken (2004) touched upon these in his lament that geography was being left out of the globalization discussion. To presage my concluding discussion I will argue that geography has been so swept into the study of clusters and the interest in cultural studies that it is missing the macroforces that are transforming the world economy.
This paper speculates on the implications of the digitization of work and the global improvement in telecommunications and transportation networks means for the creation of a global work force and, by extension, a global labor market. This will threaten those in developed nations whose skill levels are not sufficiently superior to those in developing nations to justify receiving developed nation’s wages. For all economies it suggests, ceteris paribus, that workers wherever they are will be rewarded more equally.
