An American-Based Study Examining the Relationship Between Participants’ Demographic Profiles and Attitudes Regarding Business Outsourcing Techniques and Strategies

The world is a global marketplace, however much inquiry has been created regarding American-based companies relocating departmental operations offshore to foreign territories. Keating (2012) indicated that popular areas for companies to reposition operations include customer service, information technology, and sales services. The main reason for moving offshore is to cut costs and to maximize on cheaper labor pools in the host country. There are cultural and language barriers that complicate matters, as well as, the media, as reported by Dobbs (2004) in the United States (U.S.) brings supposition by broadcasting the jobs lost by U.S. employees, as well as, home country power diminishing by stronger global players rising and thriving, such as, Brazil, The Philippines, and Mexico. This study quantifiably examined the relationship between participants’ demographic profiles and attitudes regarding business outsourcing techniques and strategies utilizing the Chi-Square and Fisher’s Exact tests, to gain a greater understanding of what these American-based beliefs truly are, in relation to, the sample confined within this study. Areas of concern examined attitudes towards managers, as well as, the U.S. government, regarding engaging in business outsourcing endeavors, enforcing policies to keep jobs in America, operating with a global mindset, helping people in both the home and host countries, competence factors associated with the capabilities to head outsourcing efforts based upon gender, and the training needed to successfully move operations offshore, for example. Significant differences were found in all of the demographic variables of ethnicity, gender, number of children (e.g. family size), age, education level, marital status, and annual household income.

Perception and Digital Media in India

This essay analyzes the body politics at the center of both business services outsourcing labor (also termed affective, immaterial, or communicative labor) and the value-adding digital image in contemporary Indian media. The author uses a “media assemblage” method in this analysis, which brings together a critique of emerging forms of communicative labor, digital image technologies, and the changing capacities of the body, or affect. This paper is concept, following the critical approach methodology, and interprets findings rather than predicts them. Numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work, have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Through an analysis of the Hindi-Bollywood film No Smoking (Kashyap, 2008), and the documentary Office Tigers (Mermin, 2006), the author explores the emergence of a digital vision in the South Asian context through pervasive processes that are “informatizing” various forms of life and work. They correlate the function of this digital vision in both business outsourcing and digital media through analyses of two key modalities: the evolving functionality of information in computer technology; and the modulation of subjectivity in the capacities of attention and sensation of value creation.