New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman was visiting a software maker in Bangalore India in February 2004. The CEO of the Indian firm said to Friedman to look around the office in Bangalore: "All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke..." wrote Friedman in one of his February 2004 NYT op-ed pieces after observing this office in India.
So, is outsourcing to foreign shores, or "offshoring" as it is often called, just an American corporate ploy to create new markets for American goods in developing nations such as India, China, and Vietnam? Is it in fact the backdoor Trojan horse for propagating American culture?
Such an assertion would be either cynical or it would grant an overly prescient quality to America's foreign economic policy.
That said, it is clear that offshoring has a strong cultural component. In any offshoring process originating from the United States, some aspects of American culture are transplanted abroad. Why? Because offshoing entails slicing the business process and reenacting that slice of the process abroad. In such reenactment, some cultural elements that are concomitant of the business process also get reenacted aborad. Business processes, especially service processes, are saturated with culture -- pieces of service pound cakes soaked in the American cultural rum. After all, answering the telephone from Delhi in an American accent requires a good degree of Americanization of the worker abroad.
Such cultural flows have happened in the offshoring of manufacturing industries for decades and of extractive industries for centuries. But in the offshoring of services, the cultural flow is much stronger. After all, a service is almost entirely created and delivered by humans, with some assistance by technology. Especially if such a service has interpersonal qualities, then the service worker abroad is exposed to yet another cultural influence: the voice or the email writer at the other end, in America.
In the case of services, insulating the local culture from foreign influences is far more difficult than in the case of manufacturing, and similarly manufacturing has far more cultural impact than extractive or agricultural work.
The "banana boat" of contemporary globalization brings the "service bananas" to USA while silently shipping cultural slices of All-American Apple Pie abroad. And, unlike the slow moving ocean boats, the "banana boat" of service and software globalization moves at a lightening speed, on telecom and Internet backbones.
In fact, "offshoring of jobs" -- a hot political potato of the 2004 Election Year America -- is also the cultural "invasion of the body snatchers" of this century, where Asian bodies are being abducted surreptitiously and impregnated imperceptibly by American Culture. Of course, this creates cultural anomalies, even clashes, in those exoting foreign offshoing lands. But money washes over and colors everything. Heck, what's wrong with some Americanization if it helps fatten up the pay packet at month end?
It is thus not American jobs going abroad. Rather it is the cloning of Americans abroad.
Now, if only a U.S. constitutional amedment can be passed to give American voting rights to these newly cloned quasi-Americans, then the political defenders of American capitalism would have no worries. They would get voted in, year after year, by the new "Amerindians"!
Nik Dholakia
