Introduction

Minivans with open doors are parked tightly in front of the Harbour Industrial Park's newest addition—the Barbados Data Processing Centre. By half past seven vendors are well in place with trays of "rock buns," meat pies, tuna sandwiches, and sweet drinks. Dozens of Bajan women in animated conversation rush to their morning shift, turning the heads of passersby with their colorful and fashionable dress. Within moments the high-heeled workers of Data Air are ensconced in the air conditioned hum of their "open office." These women, dressed proudly in suits and fashions that identify them as "office" workers and performing jobs recently unheard of on this small island in the eastern Caribbean, represent vast changes in labor patterns and technology in the global arena. As offshore data processors, they are linked with service workers in such disparate places as Ireland, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mauritius, and the United States as the information age signals an intensification of transnational production and consumption—of labor, capital, goods, services, and styles.

On the data entry floor of this offshore information processing facility, a hundred women sit in clustered computer stations, entering data from over three hundred thousand ticket stubs for one airline's two thousand daily flights. One floor below, an equal number of women work as "approvers" entering data from medical claims sent for processing by one of the largest insurance companies in the United States. This expanding company alone hires close to one thousand workers, almost all of whom are women. As fingers fly, the frenetic clicking of keys filling the vast and chilly room where Walkman-clad women work eight- hour shifts at video display terminals, constantly monitored for productivity and accuracy, and typing to the latest dub, calypso, or "easy listening" music. The muffled clatter of keys creates a sort of white noise. Against the green glow of a sea of computer screens, it lends an Orwellian aura to this unusual workplace set in a nation better known as an upscale tourist destination.

This scene encapsulates new conditions of the international economy that have implications for multinational capital, national governments, and large numbers of women workers across a wide array of local cultural contexts. Categorized under the general heading of offshore manufacturing, and marking the latest version of high-tech rationalization of the labor process, this rapidly expanding new industry, known as informatics, represents a massive and transnational commodification of information. Its forms include airline tickets and consumer warranty cards, as well as academic texts, literary classics, pornographic novels, and specialized scientific articles. Indeed, apart from the shape of the "product" and the uniquely officelike setting of production, the shift of information-based work offshore looks like a newer version of the export processing model of industrialization embraced through much of Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Yet, despite the industry's highly regimented and disciplined labor process, closely resembling factory assembly work, informatics workers adopt a language and set of behaviors for describing and enacting themselves as "professional" nonfactory workers in ways that effectively demarcate them from traditional industrial laborers.

This study explores the convergences and distinctions between "traditional" industrial settings across the global assembly line and these new informatics operations. I examine the ways in which Barbadian women confront highly regimented labor processes in which every minute of their day is monitored by supervisors and managers, as well as by the hidden gaze of the computers on which they work. In the course of their workday, as these women experience multiple levels of discipline, they also draw pleasure from the "professionalism" informatics demands of them.

I take as my point of departure three broadly interconnected questions. First, how is "transnationalization" experienced, and, in turn, shaped by social actors in the specific context of Barbados? Second, what does "informatics" mean along the continuum of the global assembly line? Are these new transnational workplaces best characterized as "electronic sweatshops," as their critics claim, or, instead, as an expansion of white-collar services and a source of "development" for third world nations? Finally, how are women's identities shaped by their incorporation into this newest form of transnationalized labor, and how are these identities informed by the gender ideologies and practices of their Afro- Caribbean cultural context, as well as by their multinational employers? What resemblance do they bear to their sisters at other ends of the global assembly line?

To begin answering these questions, I have positioned this anthropological study at the intersection of political economy and cultural studies. For contemporary anthropology and cultural studies, this is a reminder, very simply, that labor is integral to the transnational flows we are increasingly attempting to analyze and describe. This ethnography is grounded in the premise that work, in a multitude of settings (e.g., informal, formal, waged, unwaged), plays a central part in shaping people's place in the world and informing their identities. By situating work in the broad context of people's everyday lives—including their families and their daily routines, as well as their desires and aspirations—I am asserting a view of culture and transnationalism that puts workers center stage amid global political economic forces and cultural flows. As such, they are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form.

For labor studies and political economy, I argue that culture and workers' gendered subjectivities must be taken into account in conceptualizing labor markets, labor processes, and the macro-picture of globalization. The movement and impact of multinational corporations around the world does not take a uniform and monolithic form. The case of offshore informatics in Barbados demonstrates the need to look more closely, not only at how global workers and local cultures accommodate the demands of multinational capital, but also how, in small as well as large ways, they force foreign companies to attend to their own cultural practices and desires. This book suggests that the transnationalization of work closely ties production and technology to cons umption and image making in the lives of third world women workers. In doing so, it challenges longstanding paradigms based on antinomies: "first world" consumers versus "third world" producers, and "first world" white-collar/mental workers versus "third world" blue-collar / manual workers.

The concept "pink collar" is central to my insistence that the dialectics of globalization/localization, production/consumption, and gender/class be analyzed in a way that keeps them linked. "Pink collar" denotes two major processes within informatics and its workers. The first is the feminization of work such that informatics is itself gendered, not only because it recruits women workers almost exclusively, but also because the work process itself is imbued with notions of appropriate femininity, which includes a quiet, responsible demeanor along with meticulous attention to detail and a quick and accurate keyboard technique. The second process is the linking of work and clothing-production and consumption. The particular appearance of informatics workers—the boldly adorned skirt suits and polished high heels—and the physical space they inhabit as workers—the air-conditioned and officelike setting—are integral to women's experience of these jobs and ultimately to their emergent identities.

"High heels" are important to the industry and to these women workers in several ways. They are a sign with which data processors, their bosses, and the wider public distinguish informatics workers from factory workers in the economic sectors in which Barbadian women of the lower classes have traditionally been employed—agriculture, manufacturing, and domestic services. Dress and appearance not only set informatics workers apart symbolically from other women in the working classes but also blur the boundaries between informatics workers and other sorts of clerical workers who are assumed to be middle class.

The focus on dress and feminine image-making is central in representing dimensions of women's experience in informatics that are simultaneously burdensome and pleasurable, and that tie their engagement in the "formal" informatics sector directly to a range of practices in the "informal" sector of the economy as well. To meet the complex desires and demands of "professional fashion" that are prescribed by company dress codes and, more subtly by peer pressure, women enter into other production/consumption "shifts" beyond their formal workdays. Before and after their work as data processors and on weekends and holidays, they spend their time designing, producing, and purchasing the clothes and accessories that create the "professional feminine" look they and their employers ascribe to informatics. As such, their pink-collar identities are tied not only to their informatics jobs but also to their shopping trips overseas, their clothing design courses, and the variety of other means by which they supplement their formal wages in the informal market. Thus, these multiple dimensions of the "pink collar" call for an analysis that explicitly links practices and identities associated with production/consumption and gender/class across local and transnational terrains.

Pink-Collar Workers in the Caribbean

Globally, the new pink-collar informatics worker represents both a reconfiguration and a cheapening of white-collar service work. What was once considered skilled, "mental" information-based computer work can now be performed "offshore" without compromising the "product" or the speed with which it is produced. Simultaneously, the informatics worker offshore also represents a growing third world market for a wider and wider range of commodity goods, including fashions, housewares, electronics, music, and videos, and the expansion of transnational networks of trade. Locally, in Barbados, the pink-collar informatics operator represents a new category of feminine worker, symbolically empowered by her professional appearance and the computer technology with which she works. Her air-conditioned office appears to be a far cry from the cane fields and kitchens in which her mother and grandmothers toiled, while the work she does represents a significant new emphasis of economic diversification by this sugar- and tourism-based island economy.

These processes have profound implications for our understanding of the gendering of class identity and consciousness. They help to explain, for example, why these particular global workers remain nonunionized in a nation known for its strong tradition of trade unionism. As such, they invite us to rethink the relationships between discipline, agency, and pleasure. By taking seriously the dimensions of these jobs that give women pleasure even in the face of numerous stresses, speed-ups, and monotony, we see that women are agents in ways that simultaneously inscribe patriarchal notions of femininity and create a space of invention and autonomy. Afro-Caribbean culture and history are integral to our understanding of how these processes work.

Two themes within Caribbean culture make the position of these pink-collar workers unique. The first relates to the transnational underpinnings of Caribbean political economy since the 1500s, challenging the premise that "modernity" is a new form of globalization that is only now taking hold in the developing world. The second involves the particular place of women in Afro-Caribbean societies and the complex set of gender roles and ideologies that have not only allowed but often insisted that women be both mothers and workers. This prescription stands in stark contrast to the profile of the third world woman worker as typically articulated by transnational industries in search of "ideal" labor.

The Caribbean is an ideal setting for today's fascination with exploring the juxtapositions of "traditional" and "modern" culture encoded in dichotomies of "local" versus "global" processes, practices, and artifacts. Formed out of colonial conquests and global migrations of the enslaved, the coerced, and the free, the Caribbean emerged by the seventeenth century as a prime locus for resource extraction, forced labor, and accumulation of wealth by competing European empires. Its "natives" were quickly decimated by warfare and disease, and its inhabitants (including African slaves, European colonists, and indentured labor, first from the ranks of the poor, imprisoned, or politically dissident from the British Isles, and later from India, sent to replace the emancipated slaves) came to constitute a new, creolized culture that reflected these diverse origins and the brutal manifestations of tropical plantation life. A place that anthropologists not long ago dismissed for its lack of purity and authenticity now presents a particularly intriguing site of study for precisely these reasons. Indeed, the Caribbean has been described as quintessentially "modern" by many of its preeminent scholars. For example, Eric Williams, Trinidad's father of independence, and one of the region's foremost historians, and Sidney Mintz, whose anthropology of the region spans nearly half a century and criss-crosses the region's colonial/linguistic boundaries, both describe Caribbean sugar plantations as "factories in the fields" representing the origins of industrialization itself. Furthermore, according to Mintz:

The Caribbean region had begun to figure in European thinking nearly two centuries before North America was even a vague image in the minds of most knowledgeable Europeans. Perhaps we can only begin to assess the changing significance of the Caribbean region in world affairs by remembering that, before the Caribbean had begun to do Europe's bidding, there had not been any "world" affairs. Otherwise said—and with no apologies for this formulation—"the world" (in quotation marks) first became a modern concept in the Caribbean. (1993:4)

If transnational movements of people, goods, capital, and culture define the very essence of the Caribbean's creation and the sugar plantation and factory stood as incipient forms of industrialization before Europe experienced the modern industrial age, clearly the dichotomies of tradition/modernity and local/ global cannot be employed here as simple oppositions. This study of informatics in Barbados challenges the premise that late twentieth-century transnationaliza- tion has suddenly, and for the first time, brought modernity to the underdeveloped world and explores the dialectics of local and global culture and economy to reveal the specific implications for the Caribbean of today's conditions of late modernity. West Indians across class and racial divides have been moving between and across the region and the metropole for centuries, and they continue to do so according to old and new patterns. The people of the Caribbean have, likewise, produced for the metropole for centuries—from sugar and bananas to computer chips and animated cartoons. What is less well explored are the continuities and contemporary novelties in the realm of consumption—the extent to which Caribbean peoples have not just produced for foreign markets but also have enjoyed foreign goods and culture themselves.

The importance of the Caribbean island of Barbados in the channels of transnational trade belies its small size (14 miles wide and 21 miles long) and contemporary reputation as little more than an upscale tourist destination. The most easterly of the Caribbean islands, lying only 200 miles northeast of Trinidad and Tobago and 270 miles northeast of Venezuela, Barbados is a small but densely populated country of 260,000 inhabitants. In 1966 the island gained its independence from the British, who had colonized it and operated it as a mono-crop sugar economy for over three hundred years. One of the most politically stable countries in the region, characterized by a quiet conservatism and governed by a parliamentary democracy this small island has long been known as "little England." Some visitors even claim that its landscape more resembles that of the English countryside than that of its West Indian neighbors.

Barbados, one of the cricket-playing former colonies, takes pride in things English, as reflected in numerous place names, its tea-drinking tradition, and the dominance of the Anglican church, though the influence of the United States has begun to usurp the British cultural stronghold. Gordon Lewis's description of Barbados (1968:226-56) as "cautious and complacent," "conservative," "slow moving," "puritan" in spirit, "culturally backward," and unshakably stratified by class and color takes the notion of Bajan conservatism to an unflattering extreme but is a typical rendering of this small island and one not missed by transnational corporations looking for an amiable production site.