In an Outpost of the Global Economy

Work and Workers in India's Information Technology Industry

Carol Upadhya, A.R. Vasavi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415456807
• eBook ISBN: 9781136518492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

While much has been written on the growth of information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services in India, little is known about the people who work in these industries, about the nature of the work itself, and about its wider social and cultural ramifications. The papers in this collection combine empirical research with theoretical insight to fill this gap and explore questions about the trajectory of globalization in India. The themes covered include: (a) sourcing and social structuring of the new global workforce; (b) the work process, work culture, regimes of control and resistance in IT-enabled industries; (c) work, culture and identity; (d) nations, borders and cross-border flows.

1

Outposts of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Outsourcing Industry

Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi

Over the past two decades, India has become a major outpost of the global economy, as the recipient of outsourced technology-based and mediated work mainly from the post-industrial economies of the West. The emergent information technology (IT) and IT enabled services (ITES) industries have become emblematic of India’s entry and integration into the global economy and have put India at the centre of discourses about globalisation.

The emergence of these ‘high tech’ offshore industries in India is one manifestation of the latest phase in the development of global capitalism. Aided by the spread of sophisticated computer and telecommunications technologies, systems of production are becoming ever more geographically dispersed and an increasing array of economic activities are being outsourced and offshored to new destinations, leading to the establishment of new ‘knowledge’ industries in countries that were formerly labelled ‘Third World’. Today, China and India are continually under the gaze of international media, and the apparent unstoppable outflow of jobs from the US to these and other ‘developing’ countries has sparked public outcries in the West. Although the IT and ITES industries still constitute a very small part of India’s economy as a whole and employ an insignificant proportion of the working population, they have substantially enhanced India’s visibility and reputation in the global cultural economy. The country’s prowess in the IT field has been widely celebrated even as Indian software engineers and call centre agents are blamed for stealing American and European jobs (as seen in the use of term ‘Bangalored’ to refer to the loss of American jobs to India).

While the state, the media and IT industry leaders hail this new sector as a model for development that will enable India to ‘leapfrog’ into a post-industrial economy (and hence provide an opportunity to become a world superpower), and although the industry has received substantial media and academic attention, there has been till recently relatively little research on these developments from sociological or anthropological perspectives. There is substantial literature on the history, growth and structure of India’s IT-ITES industries,¹ but few critical analyses of the nature of work in this sector, the new workforces that have been created, or their significance for India’s overall social and economic development. For instance, we know little about the organisational structures and work processes that have developed in these industries—are they culturally distinctive or do they simply replicate the features of their Western parent or client companies? Have IT-ITES companies introduced new forms and cultures of work into India, and if so, what are the implications of these changes? What are the characteristics of the new workforces that have been produced to cater to these industries, and how does working ‘virtually’ in the global economy affect the lives and identities of workers? Has the IT-ITES sector provided employment to a broad cross-section of the population, expanding India’s ‘new middle classes’ (Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2000) or only reinforced existing caste-class-gender divisions by drawing primarily on the existing educated middle class for its workforce?

An additional set of questions concerns the wider cultural and social repercussions of the rapid growth of these offshore industries in India and the emergence of a distinctive category of global ‘knowledge workers’. In cities where IT activity is concentrated, such as Bangalore, Chennai, NOIDA and Hyderabad, the transformations that have been wrought by this industry are starkly visible. Most IT and ITES companies are housed in hypermodern glass-and-steel structures that are often jarring against the background of their more traditional urban or semi-rural surroundings. IT professionals too have become a highly visible segment of the new middle class that has emerged in liberalising India: with their high salaries and opportunities for travel abroad, they can afford fairly luxurious lifestyles at relatively young ages, thus forming a new elite professional class. IT and ITES jobs have become the most sought after career options for Indian youth, significantly altering their educational choices and social trajectories.

Moreover, due to their sudden rise and social significance, the IT and ITES industries have been subjected to excessive media attention, and this has produced a range of popular images about these new workplaces and their workers. Narratives circulating in the media and other public spheres have helped to create the high level of visibility that these industries and their workers enjoy, and are central to the construction of a specific discourse about IT and its significance for India’s development. For all these reasons, there is a need to match the dynamics of these fast evolving industries with solid academic research, deploying a sociological gaze to scrutinise them and their employees, and especially to understand the ways in which outsourced IT work leaves its imprint on workers and the larger society.

The chapters in this volume explore some of the questions outlined above. The IT-ITES industries are quite new in India and research on them and their workforces is at a preliminary stage. All the chapters presented here are based on field research and are situated within current theoretical debates, but the volume as a whole is exploratory. More field-level and empirical research needs to be done to develop a comprehensive understanding of the transformations that have been set in motion by this phase of globalisation in India. Nonetheless, we believe that these essays make a significant contribution to what promises to be a growing and important field of study in India as well as more broadly to the anthropological and sociological literature on globalisation.

In this introductory chapter, we situate the essays within the broad contours of current debates on cultural and social processes of globalisation, the nature of work in the ‘new economy’ and the emergence of new categories of global workers. But first, in the following section we provide the context to these studies by briefly reviewing the history and political economy of the Indian information technology industry.

Political Economy of the Indian IT Industry

As already noted, the emergence of the Indian IT-ITES industries is directly linked to the process of global economic restructuring that has been underway since the 1980s. In the first phase, the shift from ‘Fordist’ mass production to ‘post-Fordist’ networked flexible production forged new links among countries and economies across the globe (Larry and Urry 1987; Castells 1996). Under the regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ that emerged (Harvey 1989), economic activity was increasingly organised through complex transnational production networks rather than through vertically integrated multinational companies.² Since the 1980s, the regime of flexible accumulation has been taken a step further. Work is increasingly performed through the manipulation of symbols in computer systems rather than of material objects—what Zuboff (1988) has called textualisation of work. As a result, production and services have become ‘dematerialised’, disembodied, and divided among workers located in geographically distant sites. Modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) have facilitated the vertical disintegration of the production process within large companies, which are then reaggregated into specialised industries and relocated in various global production centres (Huws 2003; Lash and Urry 1987).

The globalisation of services is a key feature of this phase in the development of global capitalism (Castells 1996). The ‘servitisation’ of the advanced economies and increasingly sharp competition have led companies to prioritise customer service and satisfaction even while they attempt to reduce their costs by centralising and outsourcing routine services such as customer support. These shifts, together with the integration and spread of new digital and communication technologies, have given rise to global commodity chains of service provision. While in the earlier stage of globalisation manufacturing jobs moved from the industrialised economies to low-cost locations in the ‘Third World’, now it is primarily service jobs that are migrating—both ‘high tech’ professional jobs such as computer programming and software development as well as ‘low-end’ back office services such as insurance claims processing and telemarketing (IT-enabled services and business process outsourcing or BPO). Thus, a range of white and ‘pink collar’ work has been outsourced or offshored to sites where cheaper labour enables large amounts of clerical work to be carried out round the clock. Work carried out in these dispersed sites is managed and coordinated through the use of the new ICTs. These economic shifts have created a global ‘informational economy’ (Castells 1996) based on complex production and services networks that create and support information technology systems and provide remote backend services, linking together workers, managers, and customers located across multiple sites and borders. In this ‘new economy’, information or ‘knowledge’ has become the key resource and factor of production as well as the primary product.

The emergence and growth of India’s IT industry coincided with an acceleration in the internationalisation of the production, distribution, and management of goods and services in the 1990s (Castells 1996:116). Companies located in the advanced industrial economies are outsourcing and offshoring an increasing proportion and range of their business activities to places where skilled human resources are more easily available and at lower cost. India has seen the setting up of offshore software development centres by MNCs (multinational corporations) and the burgeoning of international call centres and other back office operations. In tandem with these developments has been the emergence and spectacular growth of Indian-owned IT services companies (now being transformed into transnational corporations) to cater to the global demand for these services. India now accounts for 65 per cent of the global market for offshore IT services and 46 per cent of global business process outsourcing (NASSCOM 2005, 2006). The Indian software and services industry (often simply referred to as the ‘IT industry’)³ grew at a rate of about 50 per cent per year in the 1990s and in 2005–06 generated total earnings of $17.8 billion. Riding on the back of the software industry’s success, ITES (which includes BPO or business process outsourcing and call centres) has become the new boom industry, generating revenues of $7.2 billion in 2005–06 (NASSCOM 2007). Although accurate employment figures are difficult to obtain, current official estimates place total direct employment generated by the industry at 1.3 million in 2005–06—representing a rapid expansion from the figure of 284,000 in 1999–2000.⁴

While global economic restructuring provided the space for the emergence of the IT-ITES industries in India, their rapid growth can also be attributed to specific political and economic processes that have unfolded in the country since the 1980s. These include the deepening policy of liberalisation that has exposed India to global economic forces; the push towards technological modernisation, especially in the computer and telecom sectors, that began under Rajiv Gandhi’s regime; and the emergence of a class of indigenous ‘middle class’ entrepreneurs in the IT sector who represent a new model for Indian business (Upadhya 2004). The IT industry right from its inception has enjoyed significant state support, both directly and indirectly, and at both national and state levels.⁵ In addition, it has drawn on the large pool of skilled manpower (especially engineering graduates) that was produced during the long period of Nehruvian state-led development policies. The industry’s requirement for a steady supply of ‘knowledge workers’ has shaped both public policy and the production of the IT workforce in particular ways (Upadhya 2006a).

The export-oriented nature of the IT-ITES industries in India also has significant implications for the nature of work and the modes of organisational control employed. Despite frequent claims that it is ‘moving up the value chain’ towards the provision of end-to-end software development, consultancy and ‘knowledge process outsourcing’, the IT industry continues to rely on labour cost arbitrage (Balakrishnan 2006). Its profitability is based largely on its ability to marshal sufficient and well-qualified human resources, to deploy them onto projects as and when needed, and to maximise labour productivity. Similarly, the ITES industry needs to hire and manage large numbers of English-speaking educated youth. The labour market and modes of control over the labour process are largely structured by the need to recruit, deploy, and manage this army of ‘knowledge workers’.

Work and Workers: Flexibility, Virtuality and Mobility

Software engineers, BPO workers and others employed in IT-related occupations constitute new categories of global technical workers or ‘knowledge professionals’ in India. In several ways, the characteristics of these workforces and the nature of work are distinctly different from those in ‘old economy’ companies as well as traditional service and professional occupations. These differences flow primarily from the specificities of the outsourcing business.

First, while Indian software engineers are physically mobile within the global economy, the growth of offshoring is immobilising labour in new ways as work is increasingly performed ‘virtually’ and online, reducing the need for the physical migration or circulation of labour. Although this labour is disembodied and deterritorialised, the fact that workers across the globe are connected in dispersed networks of production or services ‘… retemporalises labour by introducing a register of instantaneousness … [altering] the cultural frame of labour, restructuring it in shapes that are not readily discernible’ (Poster 2002: 340). This in turn alters the very experience of work and hence the subjectivity of the worker in significant ways. Although parallels may be drawn with the earlier phase of globalisation which was marked by the geographical dispersal of manufacturing, the way in which IT-based offshore workforces are linked into the global economy is substantially different from export-oriented manufacturing industries. Workers in offshore factories in Malaysia or Brazil produce goods destined for the global market but have no connection with the ultimate consumers of these goods, or usually even with the multinational companies which market them under their brand names. In contrast, many offshore software engineers and telematics workers are in direct and frequent contact with customers, colleagues, or managers located in their employers’ head offices or client sites. Outsourced service work thus requires a significant level of interaction and collaboration across borders, bringing to the fore issues of cross-cultural communication that are addressed by companies through myriad training and orientation programmes.

Second, many of the features of service or ‘knowledge’ work that have been discussed in the literature on the ‘new economy’ in the West are also found in the Indian IT industry. For instance, culture, in various ways, has become central to the management of work and workers, as in the ‘new economy’ generally (du Gay and Pryke 2002; Ray and Sayer 1999), and this in turn shapes the subjectivities of employees, who are expected to mould themselves to meet the demands of the ‘new workplace’. But some characteristics of management and labour are perhaps unique to the Indian industry because of the requirements of the outsourcing relationship. For instance, customer service is a key value in many companies, and this together with the constant need to shore up the bottom line, leads to the long working hours that are typical of this industry. Similarly, IT companies privilege labour flexibility and promote a new ‘global corporate culture’ based on worker individualisation and self-management, but they also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Outposts of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Outsourcing Industry
• 2. Producing the Knowledge Professional: Gendered Geographies of Alienation in India’s New High-tech Workplace
• 3. Betwixt and Between? Exploring Mobilities in a Global Workplace in India
• 4. Management of Culture and Management through Culture in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry
• 5. The Scientific Imperative to be Positive: Self-reliance and Success in the Modern Workplace
• 6. Software Work in India: A Labour Process View
• 7. Empowerment and Constraint: Women, Work and the Family in Chennai’s Software Industry
• 8. ‘Serviced from India’: The Making of India’s Global Youth Workforce
• 9. Work Organisation, Control and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call Centre Work
• Editors
• Contributors
• Index