EMERGENCE NEWS

eWork is of considerable interest to Australian government departments with both international and internal perspectives. Internationally, there is a strong push to develop Australia as a regional location for call centres, due to its favourable exchange rates, well-educated workforce, stable political environment and good IT infrastructure. Australia’s reputation for advanced knowledge in industries as diverse as mining, education, health, business services and media is also producing innovative experiments in offshore eWork. On the other hand, in certain service industries, offshore labour and offices are cheaper, and there is some loss of jobs to Asian countries. A national shortage of IT workers also encourages offshore job relocation.

The internal relocation of eWork interests governments as a means of providing jobs and economic growth outside traditional centres. One of the most urbanised countries in the world, Australia has 84 per cent of its population concentrated in one per cent of its area. The state of Tasmania, for example, is attempting to follow the model of Canada’s New Brunswick by vigorously attracting call centre and other eWork jobs, marketing itself as the ‘Intelligent Island’.

The grants (totalling 113,000 Australian dollars) will fund an Australia-wide EMERGENCE employer survey, case studies of eWork relocation, and collaboration between Australian and European researchers, including visits and video conferencing.

The survey will sample 1,000 managers of large and small organisations using the instrument recently employed in the European survey, with the aim of mapping the relocation of e-work within Australia, and to or from Australia.

The international case studies will examine call centres in service and professional occupations, and the use of international back offices or outsourced suppliers in areas such as software development and business procurement. Potential international cases include an Indian call centre servicing Australian domestic telephone inquiries, an Australian call centre servicing finance companies in Japan and other East Asian nations, and an Australian example of a ‘follow the sun’ 24-hour global service network. Other case studies will focus on internal relocation, particularly from urban to rural centres.

 

The EMERGENCE Australia studies will be carried out by:

Dr Peter Standen, Acting Head of the School of Management at Edith Cowan University.     Dr Jan Sinclair-Jones, Senior Lecturer and Director of PICTURES (Production and Information Communications Technologies: a Unit for Research into Employment Shifts) in the Division of Humanities at Curtin University.

Both universities are located in Perth.

For further information on the Australian project, email Peter Standen at p.standen@ecu.edu.au, or follow the forthcoming links from the main EMERGENCE website www.emergence.nu.

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