Cultural colonisation of Indian youth through outsourcing

Although outsourcing brings forth opportunities for enhancing global development, it also creates wide ranging political, economic, social and cultural issues for both outsourcing receiver and outsourcing provider countries. So far the issue has been dealt with an economic point of view keeping in mind the employment losses and wealth creation in the job exporting countries. The experiences of countries that receive outsourced jobs are yet to be addressed, especially in social and cultural context. In this context the study of BPO culture in a country like India, which is crowned as the ‘outsourcing capital of the world’, is extremely relevant. The tremendous growth of Indian call centers in the last few years has generated considerable social and cultural developments in Indian society. Both positive and negative impacts of outsourcing are discernable across different aspects of Indian social and cultural life, including language, identity, gender, and lifestyle. This transformation of society needs to be seriously understood. The present paper offers a critical evaluation of this ‘cultural colonization of the mind’. This paper takes into account a range of theories which have been put forward to explain the role of communication technology toward the construction of youth culture, for example Postmodernism (e.g. Wallace et al. 1998; McRobbie, 1994) or the Cultural Studies approach (e.g. DuGay, Hall et al., 1997; Cohen, 1997).