Respectability and Flexibility in the Neoliberal Service Economy

Abstract

In the past 25 years, the global economy has been powerfully marked by dramatic movements of labor and capital. The human face of these movements has been evocatively rendered in analyses of the “global assembly line,” the global “care chain,” and the “global city,” and in these accounts gender emerges as a critical dimension of these new labor-scapes (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Ong 1987; Parrenas 2001; Sassen 1991; Ward 1990). Where the “new international division of labor” signaled a major shift in which developing countries came to represent not only loci for the extraction of agricultural and raw materials, but also profitable sites of labor for the manufacturing of consumer goods for the “west,” the scale and manner in which this global restructuring has moved into an everwidening array of services adds even greater complexity to the lived realities and analytical challenges presented by contemporary globalization. One such facet that emerges boldly in recent portraits of global service workers — whether Indian call center workers portrayed in the popular media or migrant domestic workers analyzed in ethnographic texts — is the powerful symbolic and material importance played by global consumption as integral to these forms of global labor. Related to this melding of production and consumption is the need for a more nuanced analysis of class, and in particular the murky concept of middle-class, as the expanding reach of global restructuring includes everything from the most hidden and marginalized domestic and sexual labor to the upper tiers of professional managers, designers, and consultants.