Yale-NUS academics contribute to a better understanding of the ASEAN business climate

“In Asia, for the World.”

In keeping with the spirit of the Yale-NUS vision, faculty in Yale-NUS College have a keen interest in the developments within the ASEAN region. Their research has contributed to a better understanding of the region’s business climate and the resulting socio-economic implications for ASEAN.

Since joining Yale-NUS College in 2020, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Urban Studies) Justin D. Stern has expanded the geographic and thematic scope of his scholarship in Southeast Asia, often with the involvement of Yale-NUS students through the Summer Research Programme (SRP). Asst Prof Stern’s research focuses on the interplay of economic development, technological disruption, and urban form in the rapidly urbanising regions of South and Southeast Asia. As Asst Prof Stern explained, “One of my key motivations for joining Yale-NUS College was to build on my existing scholarship in the Philippines and conduct comparative research in India, Malaysia, and elsewhere in the region.”

Asst Prof Stern’s current research project, “Global Outsourcing, Local Transformations: Business Process Outsourcing, Urban Restructuring, and the Scrambling of Time in the Philippines” explores the socio-spatial implications of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the Philippines. BPO refers to the subcontracting of business operations to a third party, such as the ‘offshoring’ of customer service call centre work.

Using the Philippines as a case study – where over a million people in Metro Manila alone work throughout the night to service clients located in North America – Asst Prof Stern’s research found that the rapid expansion of the BPO industry is generating a “new type of urban enclave.” Within these highly clustered business districts, issues of time are a key determinant in the organisation of physical space and urban social life. Asst Prof Stern seeks to unpack how these urban enclaves intersect with and often exacerbate regional inequality and environmental issues.

Picture of Asst Prof Stern from his most recent research trip to the Philippines (pre-COVID). He is pictured with Charito Plaza, Director General of the Philippines Economic Zone Authority (PEZA). Photo provided by Asst Prof Stern.

The rapid expansion of the BPO industry in the Philippines has important spatial implications, including “the repurposing of existing buildings, such as shopping malls, hotel ballrooms, big box stores, and even a parking garage, into BPO office space,” Asst Prof Stern said.

He also highlighted that, “the nocturnalisation of work due to the BPO industry has meant that well over a million people in Metro Manila alone work nocturnally – they live on ‘borrowed’ time, on North American time.”

This has led to dramatic changes, with regard to both urban form and social life. “The BPO industry’s night-time activity has turned Manila into a 24/7 city unlike any other. Shops and restaurants are often open at all hours or sometimes exclusively in the evening and early morning. A number of local governments have also begun to invest in street redesign, such as improved lighting and pedestrian passageways, and other interventions to make the night-time urban environment safer and more welcoming,” he shared.

“Although the BPO industry is highly concentrated in Manila, it is beginning to expand to other cities in the Philippines as well. In addition to spending time documenting urban change in Metro Manila, I am increasingly focusing my attention on mid-sized cities, such as Bacolod, Baguio, Cagayan de Oro and Iloilo,” elaborated Asst Prof Stern.

Yale-NUS students have played an important role in Asst Prof Stern’s research. As part of their Summer Research Project, Chelsea Ho (Class of 2022), Kalla Sy (Class of 2021), Joshua Vargas (Class of 2023) and Qiutong Zhai (Class of 2023) helped to make important contributions, such as transcribing interviews, mapping BPO office locations, and scouring social media sites to gain insights into the social implications of the BPO industry in the Philippines. Although the team was not able to do on-the-ground fieldwork due to COVID-19, Asst Prof Stern said, “I am thoroughly impressed with the team’s resilience and ability to leap into innovative new research methods that allowed us to continue the research programme despite the travel restrictions. I have been extremely fortunate to work with a remarkably talented research cohort here at Yale-NUS!”

With a long history of interdisciplinary scholarship in the social sciences, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Environmental Studies) Marvin Montefrio’s research centres around sustainable food, agriculture and the socio-political and ecological implications of these issues. One recent focus of his research is in the ASEAN region’s rural tourism space.

Rural tourism is shifting away from typical forms of tourism in the region, like beaches and resorts, toward more immersive and experiential types such as farm tourism. Asst Prof Montefrio explained that farm tourism is now being framed as a sustainable solution to the ills of mass-consumption tourism, and that the mass migration of people from rural to urban areas has prompted governmental and private organisations to see such a form of tourism as a way to revitalise rural areas.

With the push from the state to acquire higher standards for the farm tourism sector, he noted that tourism farms in Southeast Asia that become successful are capital endowed farms equipped with amenities to cater to tourists, such as restaurants, accommodations and souvenir shops. Farms that are successful in the transition are the ones with sufficient capital to do so. “These are owned by wealthier farmers whom the state did not intend to be the main beneficiaries of rural revitalisation. The poor small farmers are supposed to be the beneficiaries of farm tourism initiatives,” Asst Prof Montefrio said.

In part, the objective of rural revitalisation is also to ensure food security, with the assumption that farm tourism activities will boost food production within that locality. However, farmers have realised that there is more money to be made in tourism. Asst Prof Montefrio explained that this was why more farms are transitioning to becoming more of a resort. Farms engaged in tourism activities are then increasingly operating more for spectacle and show than food production.

One of the popular farm tourism sites in the Philippines that Asst Prof Montefrio observed. He occasionally brought his family with him in his fieldwork. Photo provided by Asst Prof Montefrio.

Asst Prof Montefrio’s research also benefitted from insights provided by his students. Yale-NUS alumna Alaine Johnson (Class of 2018)’s research on the organic agriculture scene in ASEAN helped shed light on some of the claims that these farms were making about their sustainable practices, with her ethnographic insights contributing to thinking on rural tourism. Formerly Asst Prof Montefrio’s former research assistant and capstone student, Alaine is now a master’s student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Another benefit is the research collaborations with fellow academics from other institutions. Written in collaboration with critical tourism geographer Sin Harng Luh at the Singapore Management University, one of the papers that emerged from Asst Prof Montefrio’s research is titled, “Between food and spectacle: The complex reconfigurations of rural production in agritourism.”