At the Margins of Global Capital: The Globalized Non-Mobile Population and the Reshaping of the Urban Landscape

Abstract

This paper expands conventional understandings of globalization by examining how outsourcing reshapes both global processes and local realities in the Philippines. Focusing on Dumaguete City, I ask: How is outsourcing reshaping our understanding of globalization? Moreover, how is it reconfiguring the city’s spatial landscape and urban economy, and what does this reveal about globalization as an embedded, locally mediated process? Drawing on qualitative interviews with 17 executives, managers, and industry experts, complemented by ethnographic observations, I found that globalization is not merely an external force imposed upon localities, but a process that is embedded, negotiated, and reproduced within them. Central to this analysis is the concept I term the “globalized non-mobile population,” which captures how individuals participate in global labor markets without physical migration. Beyond labor, I show how the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry transforms Dumaguete’s urban landscape through multiplier effects, including the emergence of a nighttime economy, the expansion of secondary industries, and the reorganization of everyday life around global time zones. At the same time, these changes reconfigure social relations, expanding youth autonomy and negotiating power while continuing to reproduce, albeit in reworked forms, existing gender norms. Finally, I demonstrate how the localization of the transnational workplace is produced, reproduced, and sustained through organizational practices and the promise of upward mobility.