The political economy of industrial policy in Peru and Ecuador: 1980-2010

This dissertation focuses on industrial policy in two developing countries: Peru and Ecuador. Informed by comparative historical analysis, it explains how the Import-Substitution Industrialization policies promoted during the 1970s by military administration unravelled in the following 30 years under the guidance of Washington Consensus policies. Positioning political economy in time, the research objectives were two-fold: understanding long-term policy reform patterns, including the variables that conditioned cyclical versus path-dependent dynamics of change and; secondly, investigating the direction and leverage of state institutions supporting the manufacturing sector at the dawn, peak and consolidation of neoliberal discourse in both countries. Three interconnected causal mechanisms explain the divergence of trajectories: institutional legacies, coordination among actors and economic distribution of power. Peru’s long tradition of a minimal state contrasts with the embedded character of Ecuador long tradition of legal protectionism dating back to the Liberal Revolution. Peru’s close policy coordination among stakeholders –state technocrats and business elites- differs from Ecuador’s “winners-take-all” approach for policy-making. Peru’s economic dynamism concentrated in Lima sharply departs from Ecuador’s competitive regional economic leaderships. This dissertation paid particular attention to methodology to understand the intersection between structure and agency in policy change. Tracing primary and secondary sources, as well as key pieces of legislation, became critical to understand key turning points and long-term patterns of change. Open-ended interviews (N=58) with two stakeholder groups (business elites and bureaucrats) compounded the effort to knit motives, discourses, and interests behind this long transition. In order to understand this amount of data, this research build an index of policy intervention as a methodological contribution to assess long patterns of policy change. These findings contribute to the current literature on State-market relations and varieties of capitalism, institutional change, and policy reform.

Calling for resistance: The political economy of Indian and Canadian call centre industries

Call centres have in the last three decades come to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. From telemarketing to tele-health services, to credit card assistance, and even emergency response systems, call centres function as a nexus mediating technologically enabled labour practices with the commodification of services. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the call centre in post-industrial capitalism, the banality of these interactions often overshadows the nature of work and labour in this now-global sector. Advances in telecommunication technologies and the globalization of management practices designed to oversee and maintain standardized labour processes have made call centre work an international phenomenon. Simultaneously, these developments have dislocated assumptions about the geographic and spatial seat of work in what is defined here as the new international division of knowledge labour. The offshoring and outsourcing of call centre employment, part of the larger information technology and information technology enabled services sectors, has become a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs. Leading offshore destinations for call centre work, such as Canada and India, emerged as prominent locations for call centre work for these reasons. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and “offshore” labour forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labour unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call centre workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call centre industries located in Canada and India, this dissertation contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, critical communications, and labour studies.

Breaking New Ground: The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920)

In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. Among them, both a cause and an effect of these sweeping social changes, was the first generation of Canadian women to work as professional authors. Although these women were not unified by ideology, genre, or date of birth, they are studied here as a generation defined by their time and place in history, by their material circumstances, and by their collective accomplishment. Chapters which focus on E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the Eaton sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), Joanna E. Wood, and Sara Jeannette Duncan explore some of the many commonalities and interrelationships among the members of this generation as a whole. This project combines archival research with analytical bibliography in order to clarify and extend our knowledge of Johnson’s and Duncan’s professional lives and publishing histories, and to recover some of Wood’s “lost” stories. This research offers a preliminary sketch of the long tradition of the platform performance (both Native and non-Native) with which Johnson and others engaged. It explores the uniquely innovative ethnographic writings of Johnson, Duncan, and the Eaton sisters, among others, and it explores thematic concerns which relate directly to the experiences of working women. Whether or not I convince other scholars to treat these authors as a generation, with more in common than has previously been supposed, the strong parallels revealed in these pages will help to clarify and contextualize some of their most interesting work.