Abstract
Reading and Writing in the Global Workplace is an exploratory study of gendered literacy practices associated with outsourcing in Ghana. Based on a carefully reflexively constructed ethnographic research design, Quarshie Smith (2012) offers a comprehensive account of the workplace literacy practices of Ghanaian women working for two US-based outsourcing companies in Ghana. The book argues that literacy practices in these settings are not neutral but motivated by ideological, economic, and political proclivities. She draws on Appadurai’s (1997) concepts of ‘scapes’ and ‘flows’ to examine the effects of globalized workplaces in relation to traditionally gendered institutions in Ghana. The work is largely situated within ongoing discourses of literacy as social practice, outsourcing, globalization and the feminization of labor, and their implications for work by Ghanaian women. Bearing in mind that context illuminates ethnographic research, the author sketches Ghana’s educational, cultural, and political history in order to situate her work ‘within the immediate work environment, but also within the larger cultural, social, and historical milieu’ (p. 24). The book makes a significant contribution for grasping the dynamics of the politics of labor, globalization, and negotiations offered by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The study shows that Ghanaian women working in Client Technological Industries (CTI) and Client Data Network (CDN) outsourcing companies have developed functional literacy skills such as medical, accounting, and information retrieval literacies. According to Quarshie Smith, these skills enable the women to think of themselves as ‘imagined citizens’ of the United States, the home of their clients. The author also remarks that as part of the women’s resolve to maximize productivity at their workplaces, they engage in all sorts of communicative practices including approximating the American accent of English, translating their clients’ accents into their local Ghanaian languages such as Twi, Ga, Ewe, or Hausa to aid comprehension, and brainstorming amongst themselves some key terms and vocabulary they do not understand. Quarshie Smith also notes that the women at these workplaces are strong in enacting their identity, agency, and resistance. She observes that despite the power structures at play in these companies, the poor working climate of Ghana, and the difficulty in landing a job in the country, her participants are resolute in demanding fair wages and good conditions of service. Underlying the book’s thesis is this silent, tacit emphasis on the unfair treatment meted out to Ghanaian women in outsourcing.
To a large extent, the author maintains a clean bill of self-reflexivity throughout her research. Prior to undertaking the project proper, Quarshie Smith embarks on a complete academic soul-searching exercise in order to identify how her ‘herstory’ has affected her world-view, and how she could position herself vis-a-vis her biases. In the preface, she throws beams of light on the axiological thrust of what it means to write about other people’s experiences. This presents the educational developments of the researcher and her shift from positivist research to what appears to be a response towards the interpretive turn. The author goes at length to clinically situate her multiple identities – a Ghanaian and yet an African American, a woman, and a scholar – and how these enactments weigh heavily on her ways of seeing and interpreting the world given that the business of self-reflexivity is to identify a space of particularity. Worthy of mention is how she confronts the polemic of doing ethnographic research vis-a-vis ‘the critical triple crises of representation, legitimization, and praxis’ (p. xviii).
Also worth commending are her tenacious access-to-field site negotiation strategies. These discussions are captured in Chapter 5 (‘Multi-Sited Ethnography and Hybrid Spaces’), which paints in loving detail how she troubles the canons of ethnography. Since she works in hybrid spaces, that is, offline and online workspaces, she realizes the inadequacy of the concept of ‘fieldsites’, and so she refashions the ethnographic research process in order to capture the nuances of complexities her field affords. As she inquires, ‘When one studies a work community with ethnographic practices, what adaptations should be made to traditional research practices?’ (p. 72). Her sharp sensitivity to self-reflexivity runs throughout the entire data gathering process. For example, in gaining approval from the Institutional Review Board of her university, she deemed it appropriate to design her project description flexibly with the latitude it deserved. Moreover, such tough questions as ‘Are traditional ethnographic strategies adequate in studying these work-spaces even if one does not gain access to the whole web of virtual networks? Under these conditions in which one access is gained, what constitutes a participant observer stance? How does a researcher protect company confidentiality in situations where identifying the country where the research takes place may be enough to lead to company identification?’ demand the attention of the research community.
Another strength is the rich rigor and resonance with which Quarshie Smith describes the field site, field scene, and research participants. As expected, the author gives detailed biographical accounts of her focal participants – educational background, ethnicity, religion, marital status, professional development, and career goals – as well as the cliques of camaraderie they had developed. Also, data gathering materials like interviews (formal and semi-structured), artifacts, field notes, analytic memos, observation commentaries, and photographs are thoroughly discussed and interspersed with the I-voice of the researcher plus excerpts of interview transcripts obtained from the participants. She also uses texts available from public online spaces of CTI and CDN, documents, records, and memos. Interviews at both field sites amount to 1440 minutes and 357 pages over a period of six months. She also redevelops data categories, based on her reflections on the interview transcripts and observational field notes, while ensuring multivocality. Again, her negotiation with the gatekeepers of CTI and CDN demands not only commendation, but also emulation. Here, too, Quarshie Smith is overtly tactful in recognizing the key role of situational ethics in such matters. For example, she admits that it was far more difficult gaining approval from ‘power brokers’ at CTI than it was at CDN in view of the fact that approval involves a chain of dynamics and power in the organogram of a company.
The author sincerely admits her methodological challenges. The first relates to her attempts at understanding the community’s practices from its own perspective. This was important to her so that she would not unnecessarily distort the experiences of her informants. Second, the extent to which her researcher identity could obfuscate the research process also needs careful consideration. Although she admits that her insider knowledge of the Ghanaian culture was an added advantage, she also notes that she had to be ‘cognizant of the danger of drawing on previous knowledge to make decisions about the meaning and significance of behaviors and patterns in the data collected’ (p. 87). Such a stance raises some ethical issues: the agony of identifying the host country where the research was underway (i.e. Ghana) and also the country of origin of the foreign companies (in this case, the US), and maintain confidentiality. Such agony emanates from Quarshie Smith’s resolve to be ethical.
One concern is how the book adds to or challenges current literacy practices. While it is certainly the case that the author adds her voice to the ongoing discourse in literacy as cultural or social practice (Street, 1995), it appears that her work offers little to research in new literacy practices. Corio et al. (2008) state that new literacy concerns literacy practices afforded in digital and online spaces. This is exactly what the author’s fieldsites represent: they are paperless. Arguably, such studies need to be thoroughly enmeshed in theories of new literacy, and Quarshie Smith does meaningfully draw on information communication technologies literature. But how does her work, for instance, speak to or problematize Kevin Leander’s (2008) ‘Toward a Connective Ethnography of Online/Offline Literacy Networks’? In this case, the author’s discussions of information communication technologies may be useful to the emerging field of new literacy, but may do so in less direct ways.