"I love my American job" Professional prestige and the western halo in the developing country context

“I love my American Job”

Professional Prestige and the Western “Halo” Effect in the Developing Country Context

The impact of Western influences in shaping global attitudes and preferences has been studied in a range of contexts. Pertinently, in the labor market context, researchers (Nadeem: 2009) have shown that cultural processes and identities of people and institutions alike are continuously shaped and resisted by globalized influences – especially when Western jobs are “shipped” out for organizational and economic efficiency.

For the most part, however, research on the global offshoring of jobs has been portrayed as a transformation of low-wage, low-prestige jobs to what are considered high wage, high-prestige jobs in the outsourced country (Friedman: 2005). This simplistic transformation story is problematic for a variety of reasons, prime of which is the fact that it fails to incorporate efficiently the effect of globalization in reshaping traditional markers of prestige.

This paper uses field data from the Indian legal outsourcing industry to show the ways in which association to the West has emerged as a marker of prestige and how, while important, traditional understandings of prestige markers (e.g. Abbott: 1981) are not enough to explain this transformative function. Universality of professional prestige has traditionally not taken into consideration the effect of globalization as a prestige factor in and off itself. I offer here that in addition to the markers used (for e.g., level of skill, monetary rewards, etc), and especially while trying to understand the emerging-industrialized world, an approach more reflective of the “halo” effect of the West is crucial.