Critique of Ritzer & Lair's (2009) the Globalization of Nothing

...

On its own, the outsourcing of (service) work has been found to lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and raise willingness to quit amongst outsourced employees compared to ‘in-house’ staff (Walsh & Deery, 2006). And that is not even about the content, or maybe lacking of (distinctive) content of the service jobs: it is the simple fact alone of the jobs simply being outsourced for economic reasons. Then, it is not hard to imagine that these negative effects will only be stronger when jobs, and thereby the people performing them, are stripped of/prevented from attributing their potential ‘something’, to use Ritzer & Lair’s (2009) terminology. The outcomes of a research of Lindsay & McQuaid (2004) are consistent with these negative views on the standardization of service work, finding that there is a group of job seekers that avoid the so-called ‘McJobs’ – the common term that “has come to describe low-skill, low-pay, dead-end, routine service industry employment in general” (Gould, 2010, p. 780) – because of the image these jobs have regarding their working conditions and opportunities for personal development. It is not something that contributes to the abilities to attract workers. To fall back to core-periphery model (Martínez-Valdez, 2001), an important reason for the offshore outsourcing of service work in general could be that organizations have difficulties attracting service employees at a certain cost in their own country and thus go looking for labour abroad in more dependent, peripheral countries.

Furthermore, while Ritzer & Lair (2009) do not include this in their work, another important thing to consider which supports their predominantly negative view on the outsourcing of service work is the impact the outsourcing of service work could have on the customer. Sharma (2012) found that the offshore outsourcing of customer service work on average leads to a lower perceived service quality and a lower customer satisfaction. Moreover, a study by Raassens et al. (2014) shows that outsourcing customer-support to emerging countries may actually lead to a decrease in performance, especially when the service work is characterized by a high degree of personal contact and high knowledge embeddedness.

To summarize the above, Ritzer & Lair (2009) make some valid statements. First, due to its basis on rational principles and the relative ease with which standardized, centrally conceived and controlled products can be distributed globally, grocalization will prevail over glocalization. However, the predominantly negative view the authors have on this is not entirely just, as many good developments and spread of good ideas and principles come from globalization, e.g. the combination of global and local elements that lead to new hybrid forms. Furthermore, it is the same standardization and predictability that attracts large groups of people to globalized/’grobalized’ fast food chains such as McDonalds (Rosenau, 1997), but this does not mean consumers do not have the possibility to choose for a local option with a higher degree of ‘something’. Finally, the authors argued that the globalization of service work, its offshore outsourcing, is more of the globalization of nothing and can lead to social pathologies. This view was discussed in the light of the world systems view of core and peripheral countries and some additional arguments for potential negative effects of these developments were presented, e.g. regarding customer satisfaction.

References

Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture & Society, [online] 7 (2), pp.295-310.

Gould, A.M. (2010). Working at McDonalds: some redeeming features of McJobs, Work Employment & Society, [online] 24, pp.780-802.

Lindsay, C. and McQuaid, R.W. (2004). Avoiding the ‘McJobs’: unemployed job seekers and attitudes to service work. Work Employment & Society, [online] 18 (2), pp.297-319.

Martínez-Vela, C.A. (2001). World Systems Theory. Engineering System Division, [online] 83, pp. 1-5.

Raassens, N., Wuyts, S. and Geyskens, I. (2014). The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies, International Journal of Research in Marketing, [online] 31, pp.280-292.

Ritzer, G. and Lair, C.D. (2009). “The Globalization of Nothing and the Outsourcing of Service Work” in Korczynski, M. and Macdonald, C.L. (eds.), Service Work - Critical Perspectives. Oxford: Routledge, Chapter 3, pp. 31-38 and 48-50.

Rosenau, J.N. (1997). The Complexities and Contradictions of Globalization. Current History, [online] 96, pp.360-364.

Rosenau, J.N. (2004). Many Globalizations, One International Relations. Globalizations, [online], 1(1), pp.7-14.

Sharma, P. (2012). Offshore outsourcing of customer services – boon or bane? Journal of Services Marketing, [online] 26 (5), pp.352-364

Walsh, J. and Deery, S. (2006). Refashioning Organizational Boundaries: Outsourcing Customer Service Work. Journal of Management Studies [online], 43, pp.557-582