Reading and Writing in the Global Workplace: Gender, Literacy, and Outsourcing in Ghana
Author(s): Beatrice Quarshie Smith (Author)
Publisher: Lexington Books (UK)
Publication Date: 14 Jun. 2012
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 210 pages
ISBN-10: 0739137840
ISBN-13: 9780739137840
Book Description
Reading and Writing in the Global Workplace: Gender, Literacy, and Outsourcing in Ghana by Beatrice Quarshie Smithexplores the conditions that underlie the outsourcing of US data-processing work in Ghana. Here Beatrice Quarshie Smith describes the convergence and interplay of at least four different socio-economic forces: (1) the digital and satellite technology enabling virtual environments for global outsourced data-processing; (2) the historical development of Ghana as a politically-stable Anglophone society with a relatively strong tradition of public education; (3) the neoliberal economic restructuring policies advanced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and (4) the ready availability of women seeking to enter the formal wage economy either to seek independence from their roles within traditional families, or in order to support their families. The author’s comparative study of two distinctly different workplaces reveals significant insights about problems of organizational hierarchy and management-employee relations in the cross-cultural environments of out-sourced business and IT process work. Through extensive interviews, the book sheds light on the educational backgrounds, day-to-day struggles, fears, and aspirations of the workers. Quarshie Smith develops this multi-faceted analysis with keen insights into the representational limitations and ethical responsibilities of the researcher. This pioneering study about outsourced data-processing work in West Africa opens up a new area for research and offers a fresh perspective from which to consider outsourcing in other regions of the globe.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Based on a carefully reflexively constructed ethnographic research design, Quarshie Smith offers a comprehensive account of the workplace literacy practices of Ghanaian women working for two US-based outsourcing companies in Ghana. . . .[T]he author’s discussions of information communication technologies may be useful to the emerging field of new literacy.
Beatrice Quarshie Smith’s rich and rigorous ethnography provides a nuanced analysis of the complex gendered interactions between the local and global, while also raising important questions about the nature of knowledge, labor, and the workplace in a networked global economy. There is a dearth of strong empirical scholarship on gender and globalization in Africa, and this book is an important and timely contribution.
Using a multi-site design, Quarshie-Smith exposes the ways that outsourcing operates as a gendered globalizing activity in Ghana. The contributions to our understanding of processes of globalization and to the need for the development of new methodologies that enrich our understanding of literacy in networked environments in this book are vital and significant. Anyone who thinks they know about networked literacies and gender–and anyone who wants to know–needs to read this book.
About the Author
Beatrice Quarshie Smith is an associate professor of Literacy Studies in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University where she is also the Director of the Intensive English as a Second Language Program. Her research interests include explorations of the relationships among globalization, gender, English language literacies and work-related practices.
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