Dead ringers: How outsourcing is changing the way Indians understand themselves

Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages

  Nadeem, Shehzad ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84883909502     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (625)

1. Paul Krugman, The Accidental Theorist (New York: Norton, 1999).
2. Brendan Burchell, David Ladipo, and Frank Wilkinson, eds., Job Insecurity and Work Intensification (London: Routledge, 2002)
3. Edmund Heery and John Salmon, eds., The Insecure Workforce (London: Routledge, 2002)
4. Arne L. Kalleberg, "Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition," American Sociological Review 74(1):1-22 (2009)
5. Vicki Smith, Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).
6. Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000).
7. David Brady, Jason Beckfield, and Wei Zhao, "The Consequences of Economic Globalization for Affluent Democracies," Annual Review of Sociology 33:313-34 (2007).
8. The term globalization covers both "offshoring," the movement of work abroad through subsidiaries, and "international outsourcing," which denotes the subcontracting of foreign firms.
9. Manjeet Kripalani, "Satyam Revelation Rocks Indian Markets," BusinessWeek, January 8, 2009:14.
10. Florian-Arun Taube, "Transnational Networks and the Evolution of the Indian Software Industry: The Role of Culture and Ethnicity," in Dirk Fornahl, Christen Zellner, and David B. Audretsch, eds., The Role of Labour Mobility and Informal Networks for Knowledge Transfer (New York: Springer, 2005), 115.
11. There are also cases of credit card fraud and data and identity pilfering at outsourcing companies. Satyam itself had been barred from World Bank contracts in late 2008 on the suspicion that it had installed spyware on some of the agency's computers. It was also accused of providing "improper benefits" to bank staff, among other things. None of these were scandals in their own right, but cumulatively they cast a pall on the earlier enthusiasm for the new postindustrial India
12. On rationalization, see Yong Suk Jang, "Transparent Accounting as World Societal Rule," in Gili S. Drori, John W. Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang, eds., Globalization and Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167-95
13. John Meyer, John Boli, George Thomas, and Francisco Ramirez, "World Society and the Nation State," American Journal of Sociology 103(1):144-81 (1997).
14. In 1999, a credulous Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secre tary and now director of Obama's National Economic Council, said of transparency in corporate accounting: "If you ask why the American financial system succeeds, at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities" (quoted in Paul Krugman, "The Big Zero," New York Times, December 28, 2009:A27
15. See also Haridimous Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
16. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002 [1905]).
17. Nietzsche was a particularly astute observer of this: "The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken separately are all over illogical and unjust" (The Gay Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 120)
18. According to Hume, "Reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions" (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (1751)], 5).
19. George Akerlof and Robert Schiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
20. So politically sensitive is the matter in the United States and Europe that subcontractors often have to sign confidentiality agreements that bar them from revealing their clients' names publicly.
21. Francis Fukuyama loudly proclaims the first view: "There has emerged in the last few centuries something like a true global culture, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it" (The End of History and the Last Man [New York: Harper Perennial, 1993], 126).
22. In its fascination with "hybrid," "negotiated," "fluid" identities, this school too often sidelines issues of power
23. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 5.
24. Hence George Ritzer's use of the portmanteau term grobalization as counterpoint to glocalization (The Globalization of Nothing [Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage], 2004).
25. Fredric Jameson, "Progress versus Utopia: or Can We Imagine the Future?" in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 287.
26. As Oswaldo de Rivero writes, "In the face of the great emerging power of the new transnational aristocracy and the policies of the . . . IMF and World Bank, the power of the so-called developing countries is marginal. Even the most powerful of the group, such as Brazil and India, are unable to influence the rules of the international economic game" (The Myth of Development [London: Zed Books, 2001], 61).
27. "The Call of the Call Centres," The Hindu, December 27, 2004
28. "The Call Centre Drawl," Indian Express, June 4, 2003
29. "Nasscom Flays Reports on Labour Issues in BPOs," Financial Express, October 25, 2005
30. Sramana Mitra, "The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing," Forbes, February 29, 2008.
31. Timothy Mitchell, "Dreamland," in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (London: Verso, 2007), 1-33.
32. While I do use these categories, mostly out of convenience, we should, of course, recognize that all societies are in states of becoming.
33. Edmund Andrews, "Democrats Criticize Bush over Job Exports," New York Times, February 11, 2004:A26
34. Jacob Weisman, "Bush, Adviser Assailed for Stance on 'Offshoring' Jobs," Washington Post, February 11, 2004: A6.
35. Hence the need, in consultant Michael Corbett's clumsy terms, to "manage outsourcing's people impacts" (The Outsourcing Revolution: Why It Makes Sense and How to Do It Right [Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2004], 64).
36. More recently, presidential contender Senator John McCain claimed that outsourcing strengthens the U.S. economy, while his opponent, then-senator Barack Obama, vowed to "stop providing tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas."
37. Not only may the list have "indirectly boosted offshoring by providing free publicity for the BPO industry" but it reads like a who's who of corporate America (Andrew Ross, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade [New York: Pantheon, 2006]).
38. Pew Research Center, "Public Says American Work Life Is Worsening, But Most Workers Remain Satisfied with Their Jobs" (Washington, D.C.: Pew, 2006), 3.
39. Whatever the term's ideological connotations, it did describe a certain yet fuzzy reality. While service workers numbered around 64.9 million in 1979, they almost doubled to 113.9 million by 2006
40. Uric Dufrene and James Altmann, "The Professional and Business Service Sector," Indiana Business Review 82[2]:1-6 [2007].
41. Carrie Kirby and John Shinal, "Offshoring's Giant Target," San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 2004:A1.
42. Ashok Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll, "The New Wave of Outsourcing," Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, University of California, Berkeley (2003)
43. Jon Haveman and Howard Shatz, Services Offshoring: Background and Implications for California (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2004).
44. According to UNCTAD, 70-80 percent of companies in various studies mention lower costs as the reason for offshoring, with cost-savings ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent (World Investment Report: The Shift towards Services [New York: United Nations, 2004], xxv)
45. Another survey of executives finds that "it was a given that savings on a given activity would have to be at least 40 percent to make the relocation worthwhile" (Rafiq Dossani and Martin Kenney, "Went for Cost, Stayed for Quality? Moving the Back Office to India," Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University [2003], 7).
46. Sandra Polaski, "Job Anxiety Is Real-and It's Global," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Brief 30 (May 2004), 1.
47. Carolyn Locheed, "Tech Bosses Defend Overseas Hiring," San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2004:A1.
48. The company's website declares that "Autodesk Solutions Fulfill Criteria for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" and that "Autodesk's solutions allow government agencies and their contractors to implement the funded projects in a cost effective, more transparent, and more efficient manner."
49. "Looking Offshore: Straight from the Mouth: Executives Speak Out," San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 2004:I1.
50. "The average pay of the leading outsourcing CEOs is 3,300 times the pay of an average Indian call center employee and 1,300 times more than the pay of an average Indian computer programmer" (Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Stacey Chan, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, Executive Excess: Campaign Contributions, Outsourcing, Unexpensed Stock Options, and Rising CEO Pay (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies), 1.
51. Ron Hira and Anil Hira, Outsourcing America (New York: American Management Association, 2005).
52. Douglas Brown and Scott Wilson, The Black Book of Outsourcing: How to Manage the Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities (New York: Wiley, 2005).
53. Daniel Drezner, "The Outsourcing Bogeyman," Foreign Affairs, May 2004:22-34.
54. Jagdish Bhagwati, "Why Your Job Isn't Moving to Bangalore," New York Times, February 15, 2004:A11.
55. Thomas Friedman, "A Race to the Top," New York Times, June 3, 2005:A23.
56. Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 236, 229.
57. "Where the Good Jobs are Going," Time, August 4, 2003:36-39
58. Lael Brainard and Robert Litan, "Offshoring Service Jobs: Bane or Boon-and What to Do?" Brookings Institution Policy Brief, No. 132 (April 2004).
59. Catherine Mann, "Globalization of IT Services and White-Collar Jobs: The Next Wave of Productivity Growth," Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics (2004)
60. Joshua Bivens, "Truth and Consequences of Offshoring," Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper 155 (2005).
61. Global Services Conference, New York City, January 31, 2007.
62. Corbett, The Outsourcing Revolution, 54.
63. Dufrene and Altmann, "Professional and Business."
64. Atul Vashishta and Avinash Vashishta, The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring (New York: McGraw- Hill, 2006), 16.
65. "Offshoring Issue Guide," Economic Policy Institute; retrieved from http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguide_offshoring.
66. Steve Lohr, "Nobel Laureate, Critic of Outsourcing Theory, Dissects 'Polemical Untruth,'" International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2004:F14.
67. Ralph Gomory and William Baumol, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 8.
68. John Cassidy, "Winners and Losers: The Truth about Free Trade," New Yorker, August 2, 2004:26-33.
69. Polaski, "Job Anxiety Is Real," 1.
70. Lohr, "Nobel Laureate," 14.
71. Anderson, Cavanagh, et al., 1
72. Carrick Mollenkamp, "Bank of America to Cut 4,500 More Jobs," Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2004:C5
73. David Lazarus, "Train Your Replacement, or No Severance Pay for You," San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 2006:D1.
74. Saritha Rai, "India Concern to Design I.B.M. Chips," New York Times, November 18, 2005:C4
75. "IBM and the Rebirth of Outsourcing," Time, March 26, 2009; retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1887779,00.html.
76. Aneesh Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)
77. Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi, "Work, Culture, and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry," National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore (2006).
78. UNCTAD, World Investment Report, xxv.
79. Global Services Conference, New York City, January 31, 2007.
80. Churchill Club, "Outsourcing: Sorting Out the Hype, Reality, Risks and Benefits," Palo Alto, California, June 28, 2005.
81. Global Services Conference, 2007.
82. Robert Reich, "The New Rich-Rich Gap," Common Dreams, December 12, 2005.
83. Alan Blinder, "Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?" Foreign Affairs 85(2):113-28 (2006).
84. Quoted in Amit Prasad, "Capitalizing Disease: Biopolitics of Drug Trials in India," Theory, Culture and Society 26(5):1-29 (2009).
85. Surrogacy is a largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar business in India. See Amanda Gentleman, "India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood," New York Times, March 10, 2008:A9.
86. UNCTAD, World Investment Report, xxiv.
87. Or as an executive puts it: "Venture capitalists today require that product design be distributed across continents." See also Paul Blustein, "Implored to 'Offshore' More: U.S. Firms Are Too Reluctant to Outsource Jobs, Report Says," Washington Post, July 2, 2005:E1.
88. Geetanjali Pathole, "Catering to the Americans," Times of India, September 28, 2000.
89. "Stressed Youth Turn to Acupressure," Times of India, October 26, 2004
90. Siddhartha Kashyap, "Stressed Techies Losing Sex Drive," Times of India, November 27, 2004.
91. "BPO Jobs: No More Than a Stopgap Option for Youth," Hindu, December 17, 2004.
92. Rohit Chopra writes more generally: "In the contemporary conversation on Indian economy, politics and society, it is usually the pro-globalization and pro-liberalization narrative that is affirmed as more credible than the opposing viewpoint" ("Neoliberalism as Doxa: Bourdieu's Theory of the State and Contemporary Indian Discourse on Globalization and Liberalization," Cultural Studies 17[3-4]:419-44 [2003], 420).
93. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1976 [1867]).
94. United Nations Development Programme, Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
95. International Labour Organization, World Employment Report 2001: Life at Work in the Information Economy (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2001).
96. "Economist Outsourcing Survey: A World of Work," The Economist, November 11, 2004:3-4.
97. Bardhan and Kroll, "New Wave of Outsourcing"; NASSCOM and McKinsey and Company, The NASSCOM-McKinsey Report: 2002 (New Delhi: NASSCOM and McKinsey and Company, 2003).
98. Consultants McKinsey and Company note ruefully, however, that in India as with other low-wage countries, "only a fraction (10 to 25) of these people are suited for work in multinational companies." Nonetheless, India "produces a higher proportion of suitable graduates than China" (Diana Farrell, Noshir Kaka, and Sasha Sturz, "Ensuring India's Offshoring Future," The McKinsey Quarterly, September 2005:76.
99. UNCTAD, World Investment Report, xxiv-xxv, xxvii.
100. See also A.P.S. Malhotra, "A Spirited Evening," The Hindu, December 22, 2005.
101. See Friedman, The World Is Flat
102. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
103. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 116
104. Ohmae reportedly exercised considerable influence on the Clinton administration's trade policies via Labor secretary Robert Reich.
105. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Verso, 1998 [1848]), 38.
106. This is not to downplay the massive flows of labor migration, which are well documented. See David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008)
107. Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003) among many others. The focus here is on corporate mobility and its effects.
108. Henry Yeung, "Capital, State, and Space: Contesting the Borderless World," Transnational Institute of British Geography 23:291-309, 299 (1998)
109. Or as Peter Dicken puts it, "Every component in the production chain, every economic activity is, quite literally, 'grounded' in specific locations. Such grounding is both physical, in the form of sunk costs, and less tangible in the form of localized social relationships" (Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy [New York: Guilford Press, 1998], 11).
110. As Manuel Castells writes, "We are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed" (The Rise of the Network Society [Oxford: Blackwell, 1996], 341).
111. Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 6.
112. Tuan, Space and Place, 36-37.
113. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
114. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, "Place and Space in Contemporary Europe: Some Lessons and Reflections," Antipode 25(3):177-90, 192 (1993).
115. Jamie Peck, Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 238.
116. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989), 254.
117. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 334
118. Harvey writes, if place is the "site of Being," then "becoming entails a spatial politics that renders place subservient to transformations of space" (Condition of Postmodernity, 257).
119. Karl Polanyi characterized the oscillation between market self-regulation and social intervention as the "double movement" of capitalism (The Great Transformation [New York: Rinehart, 1944]).
120. David Harvey, "The Geopolitics of Capitalism," in D. Gregory and J. Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan, 1985), 145.
121. Global Services Conference, 2007.
122. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 141.
123. Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism (New York: Verso, 1987), 71.
124. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, "Globalisation as Hybridisation," International Sociology 9(2):161-84 (1994).
125. On this free traders and socialists agree: capital and the market are amoral and without conscience, all nerves and instinct; genuine corporate social responsibility would suggest that this hardwiring has frayed.
126. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
127. Xiang Biao, Global "Body Shopping": An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
128. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, "Cities and the Geographies of 'Actually Existing Neoliberalism,'" Antipode 34(3):349-79, 366 (2002).
129. See Rupal Oza, "Special Economic Zones: Space, Law and Dispossession," in Waquar Ahmed, Amitabh Kundu, and Richard Peet, eds., India's New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2010).
130. David Harvey, "The Right to the City," New Left Review 53:23-40, 34 (2008)
131. On China, see Jun Jing, "Villages Dammed, Villages Repossessed: A Memorial Movement in Northwest China," American Ethnologist 26(2):324-43 (1999).
132. As a former IMF chief economist puts it, "Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit . . . oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders" (Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic, May 2009:1-11).
133. See Oza, "Special Economic Zones."
134. Aiwha Ong, "The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity," in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 64.
135. International Labour Organization, Employment and Social Policy in Respect to Export Processing Zones (Geneva: ILO, 2003), 2.
136. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 395.
137. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei Wei Yeo, Post-colonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (London: Routledge, 2003).
138. Bradford DeLong, "India since Independence: An Analytic Growth Narrative," in Dani Rodrik, ed., Modern Economic Growth: Analytical Country Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
139. Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian, "From 'Hindu Growth' to Productivity Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition," KSG Working Paper No. RWP04-13 (2004).
140. Prabhat Patnaik, "On the Political Economy of Liberalisation," Social Scientist 13(7-8):3-17 (1985).
141. Atul Kohli, "Politics of Economic Liberalization in India," World Development 17(3):305-28 (1989).
142. Jorgen Dige Pedersen, "Explaining Economic Liberalization in India: State and Society Perspectives," World Development 28(2):265-82 (2000)
143. K. J. Joseph, Industry under Economic Liberalization: The Case of Indian Electronics (New Delhi: Sage, 1997).
144. Montek Ahluwalia, "Economic Reforms in India since 1991: Has Gradualism Worked?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 16(3):67-88 (2002).
145. See Waquar Ahmed, "From Mixed Economy to Neo-liberalism: Class and Caste in India's Economic Transition," Human Geography 2(3):37-51 (2009).
146. Ahluwalia, "Economic Reforms in India," 74.
147. Barry Lynn, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
148. See Biao, Global "Body Shopping." Over half the companies started in the last decade or so in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants (Vivek Wadhwa, "Don't Blame H-1B Workers for Woes," BusinessWeek, February 10, 2009:28).
149. Paul Krugman, "Feeling No Pain," New York Times, March 6, 2006:A21.
150. News reports and Vashishta and Vashishta, The Offshore Nation.
151. Bardhan and Kroll, "New Wave of Outsourcing"; National Association of Software and Services Companies, "Indian IT Industry Fact Sheet" (2008)
152. UNCTAD, World Investment Report.
153. C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, "Engineering Colleges, 'Exposure' and Information Technology Professionals in Tamil Nadu," Economic and Political Weekly 41:258-62 (2006)
154. Anirudh Krishna and Vijay Brihmadesam, "What Does It Take to Become a Software Professional?" Economic and Political Weekly 41:3307-14 (2006)
155. U. Oommen and A. Meenakshisundararajan, "Social Structuring of Human Capital of the New Global Workforce," paper presented to International Conference on New Global Workforces and Virtual Workplaces, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, August 12-13, 2005
156. Upadhya and Vasavi, "Work, Culture, and Sociality."
157. NASSCOM, Strengthening the Human Resource Foundation of the Indian IT Enabled Services/IT Industry (New Delhi: NASSCOM and Government of India, 2004).
158. For a critical assessment, see Kiran Mirchandani, "Gender Eclipsed? Racial Hierarchies in Transnational Call Centres," Social Justice 32(4):105-19 (2006).
159. Babu Ramesh, "'Cyber Coolies' in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Nonstandard Work," Economic and Political Weekly 39:492-97 (2004). BPO/ITES also recruits heavily from the liberal arts background, while IT relies on the sciences. Software exports generate more revenue but employ less people than BPO/ITES.
160. "The Insidious Charms of Foreign Investment," Economist, March 3, 2005.
161. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 160-61.
162. "Millennium Business Processing Outsourcing Policy," Department of IT and Biotechnology, Government of Karnataka (2002); retrieved from http://www.karnatakaindustry.gov.in/documents/The%20%20Millenium%20BPO%20Policy.pdf.
163. "West Bengal IT Policy," Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal (2003). As a result of these actions, Calcutta holds the distinction of being the "least riskiest [sic]" outsourcing destination in India, according to an industry survey ("Black Book of Outsourcing, 2009: The Year of Outsourcing Dangerously," Clearwater, Fla.: Brown-Wilson Group [2009]).
164. "Press Release: Haryana Government Makes Changes in Labor Policy to Benefit IT-ITES Sectors," BPO Newsline 52 (2006).
165. Focus on the Global South, "When the Wind Blows: An Overview of Business Process Outsourcing in India" (2006)
166. Upadhya and Vasavi, "Work, Culture and Sociality."
167. Walter Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," New German Critique 17:65-69, 65 (1979 [1933]).
168. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 314.
169. Susan Willis, A Primer for Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 1991), 52.
170. Jameson, Postmodernism, 314.
171. Fred Alford, "Nature and Narcissism: The Frankfurt School," New German Critique 36:174-92, 186 (1985).
172. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 382, 453.
173. Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," 65.
174. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Verso, 1986), 187.
175. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993, 52).
176. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6.
177. Susan Sontag, Styles of the Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 261.
178. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11.
179. Ernst Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," New German Critique 11:22-38, 22 (1977 [1935]).
180. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 139.
181. Edward W. Said, On Late Style (New York: Vintage, 2006), 127.
182. Bloch, "Nonsynchronism," 29.
183. As Pankaj Mishra writes, "Our modern fantasies of a simple and whole past are fragile. Perhaps that's why we hold on to them so tenanciously" (Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux], 306).
184. Arif Dirlik, "Spectres of the Third World: Global Modernity and the End of the Three Worlds," Third World Quarterly 25(1):131-48, 142 (2004).
185. Nigel Thrift, "Afterword," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18:213-55, 222 (2000).
186. Bloch, "Nonsynchronism," 27.
187. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 25.
188. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 214.
189. As Henri Lefebvre puts it, "The birth of 'modernity' . . . coincided with the beginnings of doubt and questioning; the world we call modern was born with the shattering of the modern world, carrying within its heart the principle of its destruction and self-destruction" (Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes [New York: Verso, 1995], 105).
190. At some point, today's celebrated flexible professional will share a similar fate.
191. See Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
192. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
193. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
194. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
195. Dirlik, "Spectres," 139.
196. Pieterse, "Globalisation as Hybridisation," 161.
197. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
198. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiv.
199. While all Hindu gods and goddesses embody contradictory qualities, Parvati is generally considered a benevolent mother goddess that domesticated the unruly Shiva, and Lakshmi is thought of as the goddess of wealth or good fortune. See Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
200. Gita Mehta, Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 85.
201. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 181.
202. Alford, "Nature and Narcissism," 186.
203. Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," 65.
204. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 267.
205. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 48.
206. Ash Amin, "Spatialities of Globalisation," Environment and Planning A 34:385-99, 388 (2002).
207. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Althone Press, 2000 [1971]), 64-65.
208. Ian Burkitt, "The Time and Space of Everyday Life," Cultural Studies 18(2-3): 211-17, 1>224 (2004).
209. The appeal of tea is double, both as a work stimulant and, historically, as a luxury, as in "the tea," a middle-class social occasion in England and elsewhere. See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 141, 186.
210. In Polanyi's words, social conditions during the Industrial Revolution were "a veritable abyss of human degradation" (Great Transformation, 39).
211. Doreen Massey, "Traveling Thoughts," in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and A. McRobbie, eds., Without Guarantees: In Honor of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), 225.
212. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
213. See Sharon Zukin, "Mimesis in the Origins of Bourgeois Culture," Theory and Society 4(3):333-58 (1977).
214. Emma Rothschild, "Globalization and the Return of History," Foreign Policy (Summer):106-16, 106 (1999).
215. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 1
216. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
217. Mauro Guillén, "Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social-Science Literature," Annual Review of Sociology 27:235-60 (2001).
218. George Ritzer provides a nuanced and sophisticated example of this perspective in McDonaldization of Society, 6th ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2010)
219. According to Forbes correspondent Robyn Merdith, outsourcing "is costing Americans jobs but allowing the United States to export its way of life" (The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China [New York: Norton, 2007], 123).
220. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
221. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999), li.
222. Arjun Appadurai, "Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics," Public Culture 14(1):21-47, 29 (1996).
223. Arturo Escobar, "Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization," Political Geography 20(2):139-74 (2001)
224. Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994)
225. Saskia Sassen, "Spatialities and Tempor alities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization," Public Culture 12(1):215-32 (2000).
226. Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity: Or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
227. The terms are Thorstein Veblen's (The Theory of the Leisure Class [New York: Dover, 1994 (1899)]).
228. Leela Fernandez, India's New Middle Class (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
229. Mark Liechty, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7.
230. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12(2):291-343, 299 (2002).
231. McKinsey Global Institute, "The Bird of Gold: The Rise of India's Consumer Market," McKinsey & Co. (September 2007), 6.
232. Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
233. Andre Beteille, "Caste in Contemporary India," in C. J. Fuller, ed., Caste Today (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 150-79.
234. Fernando Coronil, "Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature," Public Culture 12(2):351-74 (2000).
235. Kiran Mirchandani, "Practices of Global Capital: Gaps, Cracks and Ironies in Transnational Call Centers," Global Networks 4(4):355-73, 361 (2004).
236. Fredric Jameson, "On Cultural Studies," Social Text 34:17-52, 34 (1993).
237. Claire Cowie, "The Accents of Outsourcing: The Meaning of Neutral in the Indian Call Centre Industry," World Englishes 26(3):316-30 (2006).
238. See Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
239. Robin Leidner, "Emotional Labor in Service Work," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561(1):81-95 (1999).
240. According to The Hindu newspaper, one company makes unique allowance for such frustrations: "Her friendly BPO has a yelling room even. A soundproof room that lets you yell and bawl!" (Harish Bijoor, "Stress, Suicide, and Sales," Hindu Business Line, December 22, 2005).
241. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 93-94.
242. See, for example, Laurie Cohen and Amal El-Sawad, "Lived Experiences of Offshoring: An Examination of UK and Indian Financial Service Employees' Accounts of Themselves and One Another," Human Relations 60(8):1235-62 (2007)
243. Mirchandani, "Practices of Global Capital"
244. Winifred Poster, "Who's On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced Firms," Industrial Relations 46(2):271-304 (2007)
245. Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, "'India Calling to the Far Away Towns': The Call Centre Labour Process and Globalization," Work, Employment and Society 19(2):261-82 (2005).
246. "Call Centers 'Bad for India,'" BBC News, December 11, 2003; retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3292619.stm.
247. Mark Landler, "Hi, I'm in Bangalore (but I Can't Say So)," New York Times, March 21, 2001:A1.
248. According to one survey, Bangalore ranks as the riskiest outsourcing destination in terms of "uncontrolled environmental waste and pollution" ("Black Book of Outsourcing").
249. Pavan Varma, The Great Indian Middle Class (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999), xii.
250. Leela Fernandes, "Nationalizing the Global: Media Images, Cultural Politics, and the Middle Class of India," Media, Culture and Society 22:611-28 (2000).
251. Nicos Poulantzas, The Crisis of the Dictatorships (London: New Left Books, 1976).
252. As Eric Wolf writes of the Indian textile industry under colonialism: "Within each mill the administrative and technical staff were at first British, but soon Indians were recruited. The key figure in the organization of the mill was the 'jobber,' a kind of foreman charged with recruiting and supervising unskilled laborers. He wielded a great deal of power" (Europe and the People without History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 289)
253. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York: Norton, 1996)
254. William Mazzarella, "Indian Middle Class," in Rachel Dwyer, ed., South Asia Keywords; retrieved from http://www.soas.ac.uk/csasfiles/keywords/Mazza rella-middleclass.pdf.
255. Saswati Chakravarty, "Sex in the City: BPOs Rock," Economic Times, September 7, 1994.
256. As one executive says, "Even the Economic Times, a business paper," is obsessed with "these culture issues."
257. Such thinking inspired the creation of the website bposhaadi.com (shaadi is Hindi for marriage), the "first matrimonial service for BPO employees."
258. Dean Nelson, "India's Call-Centre Staff Tune in to Decadence," Sunday Times, March 19, 2006.
259. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998), 139.
260. Nelson, "India's Call Centre Staff ."
261. S. Mitra Kalita, "Hope and Toil at India's Call Centers: Up-All-Night Culture Develops Around Outsourced U.S. Jobs," Washington Post, December 27, 2005:A1.
262. Focus on the Global South, "When the Wind Blows."
263. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Space of Points of View," in Pierre Bourdieu, ed., The Weight of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3-5, 4.
264. She also received a certificate from management that bore the inscription: "Amazing Job and good achievement . . . my best wishes to the whole team !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Cheers & Beers Joe."
265. Winifred Poster, "Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and e- Unions: Multi-Surveillances in the Global Interactive Service Industry," American Behavioral Scientist (forthcoming).
266. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
267. Franz Fanon, White Skin, Black Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952)
268. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York: Picador, 1967).
269. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Macmillan, 1892), xlii.
270. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
271. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York: Harper Row, 1975).
272. See William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
273. Eric Simonson, "Part I: What's Driving the Growth of BPO? The Impact of Labor Arbitrage," BPO Outsourcing Journal (2002); retrieved from http://www.bpo-outsourcing-journal.com/nov2002-everest.html.
274. "A World of Work," The Economist, November 11, 2004:3-4
275. Stephanie Overby, "2006 Global Outsourcing Guide," CIO Magazine 19(19): 64-69.
276. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 240.
277. Barbara Adam, "Reflexive Modernization Temporalized," Theory, Culture & Society 20(2):59-78 (2003)
278. Castells, Rise of Network Society
279. Robert Hassan, "Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch," Time and Society 12(2/3):225-41 (2003).
280. Castells, Rise of Network Society, 101.
281. Richard Heeks, S. Krishna, Brian Nicholson, and Sundeep Sahay, "Synching or Sinking," IEEE Software 18(2):54-60 (2001).
282. Sassen, "Spatialities and Temporalities."
283. Friedman, The World Is Flat.
284. Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: Why Large Corporations Will Continue to Dominate the Global Economy (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), 47
285. Lynn, End of the Line.
286. Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso, 2003)
287. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
288. Peter Bain, Aileen Watson, Gareth Mulvey, Phil Taylor and Gregor Gall, "Taylorism, Targets and the Pursuit of Quantity and Quality by Call Centre Management," New Technology, Work and Employment 17(3):170-85 (2002)
289. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)
290. Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, "'An Assembly Line in the Head': Work and Employee Relations in the Call Centre," Industrial Relations Journal 30(2):101-17 (1999).
291. Adam, "Reflexive Modernization Temporalized."
292. Aaditya Mattoo and Sacha Wunsch, "Pre-empting Protectionism in Services: The WTO and Outsourcing," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3237 (2004).
293. Martin Baily and Diana Farrell, "Exploding the Myths of Offshoring," The McKinsey Quarterly (2004).
294. Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours.
295. At a call center I visited, 32 percent of compensation was performance- based. A broader survey found that 17.5 percent of compensation is performance-based in international call centers and 15.5 percent in domestic centers (Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast, Hyunji Kwon, Mudit Nopany, Priti Nopany, and Anil da Costa, "The Indian Call Centre Industry: National Benchmarking Report Strategy," Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, Working Paper 5-7, Cornell University ILR School [2005]).
296. Dinesh Sharma, "Shining India's Swanky New Sweatshops," Hindustan Times, October 24, 2005.
297. Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
298. Erran Carmel, "Building Your Information Systems from the Other Side of the World: How Infosys Manages Time Zone Differences," MIS Quarterly Executive 5(1):43-53, 46 (2006).
299. Dataquest, "BPO Employee Survey 2004: Industry Stress Factors"; retrieved from http://www.dqindia.com/content/dqtop202k4/empSurvey2004/2004/104110816.asp.
300. Leslie Perlow, "Time to Coordinate: Towards an Understanding of Work Time Standards and Norms in a Multicountry Study of Software Engineers," Work and Occupations 28(1):91-111 (2001).
301. International Labour Organisation, Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety; retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/encyclopedia.
302. Muhammad Jamal, "Burnout, Stress and Health of Employees on Non-standard Work Schedules: A Study of Canadian Workers," Stress and Health 20(3):113-19 (2004).
303. Scott Davis, Dana Mirick, and Richard Stevens, "Night Shift Work, Light at Night, and Risk of Breast Cancer," Journal of the National Cancer Institute 93(20):1557-62 (2001).
304. "Night Shifts Spark Cancer Payout," BBC News, March 15, 2009.
305. L. Alfredsson, T. Åkerstedt, M. Mattson, and B. Wilborg, "Self-Reported Health and Well-Being amongst Night Security Guards: A Comparison with the Working Population," Ergonomics 34:525-30 (2001)
306. P. Knauth and M. Härmä, "The Relation of Shift Work Tolerance to the Circadian Adjustment," Chronobiology International 9(1):46-54 (1992)
307. Anders Knutsson, "Health Disorders of Shift Workers," Occupational Medicine 53:103-8 (2003).
308. Another survey of female BPO workers finds that "32 percent of the employees suffered from sleep disorders, 25 percent had developed digestive problems, and about 20 percent suffered from eyesight problems" ("Sleep and Travel Hamper Women BPO Staff," BPO Watch India, September 17, 2008).
309. J. Barton, L. Smith, P. Totterdell, E. Spelten, and S. Folkard, "Does Individual Choice Determine Shift System Acceptability?" Ergonomics 36(1-3):93-99 (1993).
310. International Labour Organisation, Encyclopedia.
311. S. Al-Naimi, S. M. Hampton, P. Richard, C. Tzung, and L. M. Morgan, "Postprandial Metabolic Profiles Following Meals and Snacks Eaten during Simulated Night and Day Shift Work," Chronobiology International 21(6):937-47 (2004).
312. N. R. Kleinfeld, "Modern Ways Open India's Doors to Diabetes," New York Times, September 13, 2006:A1.
313. A study in the Indian Journal of Sleep Medicine found that 40 percent of call center workers surveyed smoked, against 7 percent of a control group. What is more, 36 percent had more than two alcoholic drinks a week, com pared to 2 percent of the control group. Close to a third of respondents said they used sleeping pills or other drugs to help them fall asleep (Laurie Goering, "Outsourced to India: Stress," Chicago Tribune, April 20, 2008:D1).
314. Hans Van Dongen, Greg Maislin, Janet M. Mullington, and David F. Dinges, "The Cumulative Cost of Additional Wakefulness," Sleep 26(2):117-27, 117 (2003).
315. P. Meerlo, M. Koehl, K. van der Borght, and F. W. Turek, "Sleep Restriction Alters the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Response to Stress," Journal of Neuroendocrinology 14:397-402 (2002).
316. Van Dongen et al., "Cumulative Cost," 117.
317. Amartya has a room in the company's cold-water flat. His belongings are stuffed into two duffle bags and the room traversed by a clothesline. He sleeps on a small metal cot placed in the center. During the day, when he is often sleeping, the sunlight is dimmed and diffused by a diaphanous curtain. Pictures of his family and magazine cutouts are taped to the walls.
318. L. F. Portela, L. Rotenberg, and W. Waissman, "Self-Reported Health and Sleep Complaints among Nursing Personnel Working Under 12h Night and Day Shifts," Chronobiology International 21(6):859-70 (2004); International Labour Organisation, Encyclopedia.
319. Mirchandani, "Practices of Global Capital," 365.
320. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114.
321. BBC News, "Boss Faces Call-Centre Death Case," BBC News, February 22, 2008; retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7258837.stm.
322. Ravi Sharma, "Murder Most Foul," Frontline, January 13, 2006.
323. T. A. Johnson, "BPO Rape, Murder Clouds Bangalore," Indian Express, December 17, 2005.
324. Phil Taylor, Dora Scholarios, Ernesto Noronha, and Dr. Premilla d'Cruz, "Union Formation in Indian Call Centres/BPO," Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (2008), 6.
325. Teresa Rodriguez, The Daughters of Juárez (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 2.
326. "Cover Up, Cabbies Tell BPO Women," CNN-IBN, February 23, 2006.
327. "We Don't Dread the Night," Daily News and Analysis, August 15, 2008.
328. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2006).
329. Shantha Rajaratnam and Josephine Arendt, "Health in a 24-Hour So ciety," Lancet 358:999-1005, 999 (2001)
330. Torbjorn Akerstedt, Bjorn Peters, Anna Anund, and Goran Kecklund, "Impaired Alertness and Performance Driving Home from the Night Shift: A Driving Simulator Study," Journal of Sleep Research 14(1):17-20 (2005).
331. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38:56-97 (1967).
332. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004).
333. More generally, see Arlie Hochschild's The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Holt, 2001).
334. Frida Fischer, Lúcia Rotenberg, and Claudia Roberta de Castro Moreno, "Equity and Working Time: A Challenge to Achieve," Chronobiology International 21(6):813-29 (2004).
335. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
336. Erik Olin Wright, "Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests and Class Compromise," American Journal of Sociology 105(4):957-1002, 962 (2000).
337. Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.
338. The figures companies give are somewhat inflated. While experienced personnel are indeed receiving large salary increases and bonuses, entrylevel and junior workers are somewhat expendable and have not seen major increases.
339. Castells, Rise of Network Society, 6.
340. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Norton, 1968), 13.
341. Silicon India, "One Lakh Layoffs in IT Service Sector by September," Silicon India, April 28, 2009
342. Mini Tejaswi, "Techies Say 'No' to Pink Slips," Times of India, May 1, 2009:B15.
343. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), 131-32.
344. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline," 73.
345. Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours, 163.
346. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline," 93.
347. "Smartsourcing: The New Way to Drive Innovation," Industry Week, June 14, 2005; retrieved from http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=12129
348. Vivek Paul, "It Was the Right Time to Go," Rediff. com, July 8, 2005; retrieved from http://www.rediff.com/money/2005/jul/08inter.htm.
349. The result of Welch's downsizing and outsourcing was that more than 100,000 workers were pushed off the GE payroll (James Lardner, "The Specter Haunting Your Office," New York Review of Books, June, 14, 2007).
350. Paul, "Right Time to Go"
351. Shelley Singh and Snigdha Sengupta, "The Inside Story: Why Vivek Paul Quit Wipro," Rediff.com, July 8, 2005; retrieved from http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/jul/08bspec.htm
352. Jyoti Thottom, "Vivek Paul," Time, December 17, 2004:109.
353. Ravi Aron, "Confessions of an Aspiring Venture Capitalist," Wharton School of Business (November 21, 2005); retrieved from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1276.
354. Paul Attewell, "Big Brother and the Sweatshop: Computer Surveillance in the Automated Office," Sociological Theory 4:77-89 (1987)
355. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975)
356. Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984)
357. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977)
358. Harley Shaiken, Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985).
359. By Indian standards, these workers are privileged (only 10 percent of Indians get any kind of postsecondary education). But educational standards at even reputable institutions are lagging. Of India's 300-plus universities, only two are ranked in the top 300 in the world, and as a result, in the global labor market, workers enter with what corporations consider to be a relatively low level of skills (James Surowiecki, "India's Skills Famine," New Yorker, April 16, 2007:28).
360. Monica Prasad, "International Capital on 'Silicon Plateau': Work and Control in India's Computer Industry," Social Forces 77(2):429-52 (1998), 429.
361. Aneesh, Virtual Migration.
362. Taylor and Bain, "India Calling," 277.
363. "BPO Employee Survey 2005: Call Centre Maladies," Dataquest, November 8, 2005; retrieved from http://www.dqindia.com/content/dqtop202k4/empSurvey2004/2004/104110814.asp.
364. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital
365. Leidner, "Emotional Labor."
366. Aneesh, Virtual Migration.
367. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 233.
368. Jeremy Leonard, "Offshoring of Information Technology Jobs: Myths and Realities," American Sentinel University (2006), 3.
369. Shyamanuja Das, "BPO Pricing: Are Companies Risk Averse?" Global Services, September 25, 2006.
370. A BPO trainer says they sometimes hire high school graduates between 19 and 20 years of age, without any college education. Before the BPO market, "It was hard to find jobs. The starting age for earning was 23 to 24, now its 18 to 19. People are less mature; you need to give guidance. Education is taking a backdrop. I have a feeling that BPO might undermine the importance of education." He believes the industry "will grow at the base."
371. Or as the CEO of Motorola puts it, "You have to draw a line. . . . Core intellectual property is above it, and commodity technology is below" (Peter Engardio and Bruce Einhorn, "Outsourcing Innovation," BusinessWeek, March 21, 2005:84-94).
372. Heather Timmons, "India Feels Less Vulnerable as Outsourcing Presses On," New York Times, June 2, 2009:B1.
373. Mirchandani, "Gender Eclipsed?"
374. Marianne McGee, "Recession Takes a Bite Out of Pay-for-Performance Outsourcing," Information Week, March 21, 2009.
375. While there is some intraoffice mobility within call centers, the jobs do not provide much leverage in landing higher positions. One study finds that only 1 percent of workers are able to do so. "Call center jobs," the authors conclude, "typically do not serve as entry-level positions for careers outside of the centers in the larger corporation" (Batt et al., "Indian Call Center Industry").
376. In more abstract terms, it began as a subsidiary of a subsidiary, which serves as an outsourcing provider for other companies. In this, Amandeep Sandhu is correct in describing international outsourcing as "Russian doll capitalism" ("Russian Doll Capitalism: An Essay on Work in the IT-City of Bangalore," Biblio, May-June 2006, 41-42).
377. Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (New York: Vintage, 2006), 143.
378. Or else face the consequences: sluggish research and development, negligible productivity gains, and stagnant or declining long-term shareholder value.
379. And these future nonhires, of course, will find no way into the job loss estimates.
380. Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 90.
381. According to one consultant, the emphasis shifts in such situations from managing process delivery to managing deliverables, as it is difficult to micromanage a process 9,000 miles away.
382. As an American IT worker observes: "The real decision making posi tions are still held by the American IT worker, where jobs like coding are done by the Indians" (Stephanie Overby, "Inside Outsourcing in India," CIO Magazine, June 1, 2003:60).
383. Al Gini, My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (New York: Routledge, 2001), 18
384. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language: A Modern Selection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 22
385. Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 9.
386. Bill Worthen, "Extreme Outsourcing," CIO, May 1, 2007:32-40.
387. Nicos Poulantzas, "On Social Classes," New Left Review 1(78), March-April (1973).
388. Claus Offe, Industry and Inequality: The Achievement Principle in Work and Social Status (New York: St. Martin's, 1977)
389. Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 236.
390. Chopra, "Neoliberalism as Doxa," 437.
391. Mills, White Collar, 233.
392. Uchitelle, Disposable American, 3.
393. Carl Dalhman and Anuja Utz, India and the Knowledge Economy (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005).
394. Incidentally, a web search for Chindia turns up a few scattered business reports as well as an Indian medical tourism site, India Health Guru, that advertises the cost and quality of outsourced chin surgeries. See also Peter Engardio, Chindia: How China and India Are Revolutionizing Global Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006).
395. Aaditya Matoo and Sacha Wunsch, "Pre-empting Protectionism in Services: The WTO and Outsourcing," Policy Research Working Paper 3237, World Bank, Washington, D.C. (2004), 6-7.
396. Sangeetha Chengappa, "Can Academia Bail Out Industry from Manpower Shortage?" Deccan Herald, January 16, 2006.
397. Surowiecki, "India's Skills Famine."
398. This is not to say that English is not important. It is an "essential prerequisite for obtaining a quality higher education in India" (Chopra, "Neoliberalism as Doxa," 439)
399. It is also a major differentiator in the Indian labor market: "Salary differences between equally qualified (non-professional/ technical) candidates can be as high as 400 to 500%. In fact, the more fancied jobs in airlines, hotels, media, banks and financial services [go] only to those who know English. . . .The best jobs with the upmarket shopping malls, multinational fast-food chains and tony restaurants go to those who can speak English along with the mandatory fluency in local languages" (Sucheta Dalal, "BPOs and the Economics of English," Indian Express, November 6, 2005).
400. Neo IT, "Offshore and Nearshore ITO and BPO Salary Report," Offshore Insights Market Report Series 4(4):1-23 (2006).
401. A recent case found one company guilty of poaching. According to an associate at the law firm Baker and McKenzie, in Wipro Ltd. v. Beckman Coulter International, the Delhi High Court "held that the defendant had breached the non-solicitation provision by publishing a recruitment advertisement specifically targeted at the plaintiff's employees."
402. Asked his thoughts on unionization, the executive of a KPO remarked surprisingly, "Truthfully, I'd love a union contract. . . . Unions have order. It might actually place restrictions on employees like a notice period."
403. Dataquest, "BPO Employee Survey 2004: Industry Stress Factors." Another reason for high turnover is the graveyard shift. An executive explains: "You may be able to train, indoctrinate 10 people when they come over, but what happens when they leave because they don't want to work the night shift? Attrition is a fact of life in our industry. It's a nascent industry."
404. For engineering, the quality of education is often lower in India than the West. As a result, one study found that "if you define 'engineer' by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable" (Surowiecki, "India's Skills Famine"). Moreover, the large figures of Indian and Chinese engineering graduates include not only four-year degrees, but also three-year training programs and diploma holders (Vivek Wadwa, Gary Gereffi, Ben Rissing, and Ryan Ong, "Where the Engineers Are," Issues in Science and Technology, April 9, 2007:73-84).
405. Farrell, Kaka, and Sturz, "Ensuring India's Offshoring Future," 78-79.
406. To the mass of inexperienced entry-level workers, those who do not see their salaries double each year, this commitment is also lacking in terms of investment in personal and skill training.
407. Neo IT, "Offshore and Nearshore." Nonetheless, employers still carp about increasing labor costs. An executive of a KPO company at an industry conference says that a few years ago "people making $250,000 to $300,000 in the U.S. were replaced by workers in Bangalore making $25,000. "Now," he says ruefully, "the latter is going up." Others at the conference voiced concerns about having to pay more for work once it is labeled KPO.
408. Mohit Chhabra, "The DQ-IDC India Salary Survey," Dataquest, October 6, 2004. There is also an increasing use of variable pay in the industry ("TCS Withholds Variable Pay of BPO Employees," BPO Watch India, April 21, 2009). As one venture capitalist with work experience at Infosys says, "There is an increasing variable percent of people's salaries. Sixty percent will be fixed and 40 percent is variable and depends on things like the company's overall performance. On paper wages go up 17 percent but not in reality. They give you much less. The pay was so low at Infosys . . . that's why people were upset about wages."
409. Shyamanuja Das, "Five Outsourcing Myths that 2006 Busted," Global Services, January 1, 2007.
410. Ramesh, "Cyber Coolies."
411. As Marx wrote of the "equilibrium" condition of labor supply and demand: "Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock" (Capital, 799).
412. In an effort to exert greater control over workers, NASSCOM, the industry association, has started a National Skills Registry-the first-ever centralized database of employees of IT services and BPO companies (https:// nationalskillsregistry.com/).
413. Quoted in Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 113.
414. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), 59.
415. Daryl D'Art and Thomas Turner, "Independent Collective Representation: Providing Effectiveness, Fairness, and Democracy in the Employment Relationship," Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 15(4):169-80, 172 (2003).
416. Susan Schneider, "Human and Inhuman Resource Management: Sense and Nonsense," Organization 6(2):277-84, 281 (1999).
417. Jane Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16
418. See also, Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi, eds., In an Outpost of the Global Economy Work and Workers in India's Information Technology Industry (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).
419. Ross, Fast Boat to China, 157.
420. Dataquest, "BPO Employee Survey 2004."
421. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 40-41.
422. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).
423. Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)
424. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
425. P. K. Edwards, Conflict at Work: A Materialist Analysis of Workplace Relations (London: Blackwell, 1986).
426. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage, 1973), 32.
427. Mills, White Collar, 233.
428. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 16.
429. See Attewell, "Big Brother"
430. Irena Grugulis, Tony Dundon, and Adrian Wilkinson, "Cultural Control and the 'Cultural Manager': Employment Practices in a Consultancy," Work Employment and Society 14:97-116 (2001)
431. Steven McKay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High- Tech Production in the Philippines (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006)
432. Patrice Rosenthal, "Management Control as an Employee Resource: The Case of Front-Line Service Workers," Journal of Management Studies 41(4):601-22 (2004)
433. Patrice Rosenthal, Stephen Hill, and Riccardo Peccei, "Checking Out Service: Evaluating Excellence, HRM and TQM in Retailing," Work, Employment and Society 11(3):481-503 (1997)
434. James Rui and Peter Brantley, "Computerized Surveillance in the Workplace: Forms and Distributions," Sociological Forum 7(3):405-23 (2002).
435. Ali Mir and Raza Mir, "Producing the Governable Employee: The Strategic Deployment of Workplace Empowerment," Cultural Dynamics 17(1):51-72 (2005).
436. Zuboff, Smart Machine, 322-23
437. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 199.
438. Freeman, High Tech, 199.
439. Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D'Cruz, "Being Professional: Organizational Control in Indian Call Centers," Social Science Computer Review 24(3):342-61 (2006).
440. As Michel Foucault argues, the individual is not merely affected by disciplinary power but is, in part, its creation, "one of its prime effects" (Power/Knowledge [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980], 98).
441. Hence Steven McKay's call for a "place-sensitive notion of production politics" ("Zones of Regulation: Restructuring Labor Control in Privatized Export Zones," Politics & Society 32(2):171-202, 173 [2004])
442. Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
443. Meaghan Morris, "Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower," New Formations 11:5-18, 10 (1990)
444. Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
445. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History," Cultural Studies 6(3):337-57, 339-40 (1992).
446. The reference is to Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).
447. Both, of course, are ideal types, stylized representations of how people think and act.
448. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism; Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e), 2008)
449. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception
450. Richard Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism.
451. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 86.
452. On a four-week project, for example, all is said to be well during the first few weeks, but "when the project is due tomorrow, they say it's not going to be done for another two weeks. Or they won't respond to email until it's done or will just say everything's fine."
453. The phrase is Freud's (Civilization and Its Discontents [New York: Norton, 1989 (1930)], 72).
454. Sundeep Sahay and Geoff Walsham write that in Indian bureaucracy the "rigid adherence to procedure combines with a ready susceptibility to personal pressure and intervention" ("Social Structure and Managerial Agency in India," Organization Studies 18[3]:415-44, 420 [1997]).
455. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 181-82.
456. This illustrates how "culture and its representations remain in important ways rooted in the assumptions of the colonial modern in spite of the complex processes . . . of political independence and decolonization" (Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 166).
457. For example, an IT worker says that the employees at his old job were "oldies"; that is, they were in their thirties and forties. The "atmosphere here is lively. We have office parties, an annual day were teams are nominated for best hub. We celebrate birthdays and we have a social group in the hub itself."
458. Russell Muirhead, Just Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 72-73.
459. Roland, In Search of Self, 32.
460. Bruce Nicholson and Sundeep Sahay, "Some Political and Cultural Issues in the Globalization of Software Development," Information and Organization 11(1):25-44.
461. What bothers Das is that feudal relations are bad for business. He does not question the treatment of the domestic qua domestic, but only says that professionals deserve something better.
462. Guruchan Das, India Unbound (New York: Anchor, 2002), 274
463. Das accuses Indian companies of "a lack of attention to human capital." They do not invest enough in workers' training, "and just throw" the employee into her job, in contrast with "the detailed training plans" at multinationals. Josh, an American who worked at an IT company for two years in Bangalore, said that despite his repeated requests, he was never assigned a mentor, which he said bodes ill for the development of human capital and leadership skills in the industry.
464. Sahay and Walsham, "Social Structure," 421.
465. As the Bhagavad Gita counsels: "And do thy duty, even if it be humble, rather than another's, even if it be great. To die in one's duty is life; to live in another's is death" (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003, 20).
466. Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D'Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of Professionalism (New Delhi: Sage, 2009).
467. Batt et al., "Indian Call Center Industry," 16.
468. As Freeman writes, "The open office is, at one and the same time, factorylike in its labor process and officelike in its muffled quiet ambience" (High Tech, 200).
469. Kalita, "Hope and Toil," A1.
470. Noronha and Cruz, "Being Professional."
471. Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind, 31.
472. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 112.
473. As Sahay and Walsham write, "The Hindu virtues of contentment, absence of desire and stability oppose the dynamic striving for success and unlimited consumption that capitalist systems emphasize" ("Social Structure," 420).
474. See Peter Van der Veer, "Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation- State," in Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 276-90.
475. To be sure, the jobs also relate to self-approval. As one worker puts it, "The job has affected my social and family life positively. It has helped me enhance my job and personal skills, which enhances my confidence and abilities overall."
476. T.V. Mahalingam, "Where Dreams End," Outlook India, June 27, 2009:12.
477. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception.
478. Brenner and Theodore, "Cities and Geographies," 364.
479. Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 [1950], 118).
480. This even applies to the cab drivers who ferry workers to and from work: "I don't have to be servile, saying, 'Yes, sir' and 'Yes, madam' all day and carry my boss's briefcase everywhere," one driver says. "In this job, I just focus on the time and the road" (Rama Lakshmi, "Ferrying the Night Owls Who Fix the World's Glitches," Washington Post, August 30, 2007:A12).
481. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193.
482. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63.
483. See Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Macmillan, 2009).
484. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth- Century India (New York: Penguin, 2004)
485. Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
486. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 149.
487. One worker notes, however, that this is not always a "cultural issue": "It takes employees a long time to get places because of traffic, distance, and infrastructure. Many things intervene to delay, like power outages."
488. Other managers I have spoken to say similarly that they only allow select workers to speak or communicate with clients directly, and not just for reasons of poor grammar.
489. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Pessimist's Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964 [1851]), 226.
490. Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978)
491. Dinesh Sharma, "Psychoanalysis and Sociocultural Change in India: A Conversation with Sudhir Kakar," International Journal of Group Tensions 29(3-4):253-83 (2000).
492. Kakar, The Inner World, 107.
493. Sen, Development as Freedom.
494. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2.
495. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper, 2006), 526.
496. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11.
497. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
498. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2006 [1951]).
499. As Rousseau wrote more generally about the limits of sympathy and concern: "It appears that the feeling of humanity evaporates and grows feeble in embracing all mankind. . . . It is necessary in some degree to confine and limit our interest and compassion in order to make it active" (Discourse on Political Economy [London: Dent, 1946 (1755)], 246).
500. See Nezar Alsayyad and Ananya Roy, "Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era," Space and Polity 10(1):1-20 (2006)
501. Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003).
502. Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Vintage, 2006).
503. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957 [1887]).
504. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997 [1893]).
505. Varuna Verma, "Fear in the City: 'I Don't Feel Safe in Bangalore Anymore,'" The Telegraph (2005); retrieved from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051225/asp/opinion/story_5636735.asp.
506. Quoted in Varma, Great Indian Middle Class, 184.
507. "Software in India: Bangalore Bytes," The Economist, March 23, 1996:67.
508. Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 9.
509. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 89.
510. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 10.
511. In a similar vein, Forbes correspondent Meredith writes that "capitalists from corporate America and elsewhere surely did not set out to help Asia's downtrodden, but they did. Call them accidental activists" (The Elephant and the Dragon [New York: Norton, 2007], 12).
512. Of the penchant for not saying no and taking on too much work: "Commerce is changing this. Vendors now make a point of only committing to what they can do."
513. See Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael Mann, Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004).
514. Joanne Waghorne, "Chariots of the God(s): Riding the Line between Hindu and Christian," History of Religions 39(2): 95-116 (1999).
515. American Heritage dictionary.
516. Anthony Giddens writes of the juggernaut of modernity as "a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of control and which could rend itself asunder" (The Consequences of Modernity [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990], 139).
517. Andrew Leyshon writes that "most of the globalization discourses ... tend to be far more simplistic in their general tenor, if not evangelical in tone, and display a burning faith in the 'natural' benevolence and 'obvious' utility of markets" ("True Stories? Global Dreams, Global Nightmares, and Writing Globalization," in Roger Lee and Jane Willis, eds., Geographies of Economies [London: Arnold, 1997], 143).
518. Despite the sobering reality of over 10 percent unemployment and over 17 percent underemployment in late Novermber of 2009, Goldman Sachs has resumed awarding large bonuses, eliciting public anger
519. See John Arlidge, "I'm Doing 'God's Work.' Meet Mr. Goldman Sachs," Times of London, November 8. 2009; retrieved from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ us_and_americas/article6907681.ece
520. On Datini see Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 (New York: Knopf, 1957).
521. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
522. Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 157.
523. Although they provide a home drop from 10:30 at night to 4:30 in the morning, many parents are concerned about their daughters riding the train at night.
524. She had been promised an annual salary of 1.8 lakhs ($4,090), but was given only 1.7 lakhs ($3,862).
525. Hume, Principles of Morals, 44
526. Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 80
527. See also, Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
528. Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism, 83.
529. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 150.
530. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1.
531. Lefebvre, Production of Space; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)
532. David Harvey, "Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction," Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 610 (1):21-44 (2006).
533. Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991)
534. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983)
535. Phillip Kelly, "The Geographies and Politics of Globalization," Progress in Human Geography 23(3):379-400 (1999).
536. Phillip Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14.
537. In other words, to resolve what Robert Wuthnow calls the "problem of articulation" between ideas and social context, one needs to look at how symbols and ideologies are interpreted in the face of concrete events (Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 5).
538. I use the notion of an economy of morality in an earlier piece: Shehzad Nadeem, "The Living Wage Movement and the Economics of Morality," Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 28:137-67.
539. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1776]), 800.
540. Friedman, The World Is Flat, 10-11, 297.
541. Vashishta and Vashishta, The Offshore Nation, 13.
542. Habib Beary, "Infosys Boss Makes Anthem Apology," BBC News, April 10, 2007.
543. Pieterse, "Globalisation as Hybridisation," 177.
544. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 149.
545. Chopra, "Neoliberalism as Doxa," 439.
546. Satish Deshpande, "After Culture: Renewed Agendas for the Political Economy of India," Cultural Dynamics 10(2):147-69, 148 (1998).
547. Khilnani, The Idea of India, 148.
548. Desphande, "After Culture," 160.
549. Leela Fernandes, "The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space in India," Urban Studies 41(12):2415-30 (2004).
550. Edward Luce, "India to Dip into Forex Reserves to Build Roads," Financial Times, October 6, 2004:14.
551. Churchill Club, "Outsourcing."
552. Chopra, "Neoliberalism as Doxa," 435.
553. Ramesh, the cleaner, makes 2,000 rupees per month (part-time); Mahendra makes 3,500 rupees per month; Vinod works at night, making photocopies and performing various chores and earns 2,800 rupees; the "coffee guy" makes five rupees on each cup of coffee and six rupees per cup of tea. Their driver's base wage is 5,000-6,000 rupees a month, but can reach 12,000, even as high as 20,000 depending on how late they keep him at the office.
554. Paul Beckett, "Caste Away: India's High-Tech Revolution Helps 'Untouchables' Rise," Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2007:A1.
555. Working conditions, incidentally, are better in large companies, which suggests that caste and class inequalities are also reproduced within the industry.
556. As a trade union official writes, "If we keep in mind the hierarchical caste-based division of Indian society, the workers in this sector predominantly belong to the upper castes with a marginal presence of people from the backward or scheduled castes or scheduled tribes" (Pradeep Kumar, "The Outsourcing of Services: The Case of India," All India Federation of Trade Unions, New Delhi [2004]).
557. Upadhya and Vasavi, "Work, Culture and Sociality."
558. Emily Wax, "India's Lower Castes Seek Social Progress in Global Job Market," Washington Post, August 20, 2007:A1.
559. Krishna and Brihmadesam, "What Does It Take," 3310.
560. Gartner, "India ICT is at a Crossroads" (2005); retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_134972_11.html.
561. Anthony D'Costa, "Software Outsourcing and Development Policy Implications: An Indian Perspective," International Journal of Technology Management 24(7-8):705-23, 705 (2002).
562. Taylor and Bain, "India Calling," 270.
563. Yeung, "Capital, State, and Space," 300.
564. "How Global Are You?" BusinessWeek, December 8, 2008:12.
565. Worthen, "Extreme Outsourcing." Such strategies are particularly problematic for smaller vendors, as the CEO of one company notes: "The cost has come down. Part of it is the fact that you have vendors. In fact, we get killed because you can always get freelancers and the freelance cost is minimum. So let's say you want to get something done. You want to get your whole thesis written, for example. You could outsource it, right? And you could get it done for minimum cost, which would make it worthwhile for you." Needless to say, I did not avail myself of this option.
566. Multinationals are increasingly insisting on geographic diversity so that in the event of a natural disaster or power outage work will not grind to a halt. As one executive put it, "They want disaster recovery and want providers to have two different functioning facilities, where data is redundant and things can be worked on."
567. The same could be said of liberalization-it has unlocked many forces, but India cannot liberalize over and over again.
568. As economist Robert Solow famously illustrated, 87.5 percent of labor productivity in the United States over the past 150 years has been the result of technological changes, while the rest can be attributed to growth in the number of workers and capital equipment (Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1957]).
569. William J. Baumol, "Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crises," American Economic Review 57(3):415-26 (1967).
570. Ross, Fast Boat to China.
571. "The Next Big Opportunity: Moving up the Value Chain from BPO to KPO," Evalueserve, Gurgaon, India (2004), 11.
572. Amy Waldman, "India Takes Economic Spotlight, and Critics Are Unkind," New York Times, March 7, 2004:A3.
573. Pamela Shurmer-Smith, India: Globalization and Change (London: Arnold, 2000).
574. Quoted in Chopra, "Neoliberalism as Doxa," 420.
575. AFL-CIO, "Outsourcing America," AFL-CIO Executive Council (2004); retrieved from http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/ecouncil/ec03112004i.cfm.
576. While the working conditions compare favorably with other "traditional" Indian industries, a major obstruction to organizing efforts is the high level of monitoring. "From day one," says an official, "they say come in, work here, but don't talk about trade unions." In workspaces, there are closed-circuit cameras and nearly "everything is recorded and monitored in call centers."
577. Kumar, "The Outsourcing of Services."
578. Jameson, Postmodernism, 207.
579. Neoclassical economists like Gary Becker used the term human capital to describe the stock of education, knowledge, and training that a worker acquires over time and invests in work. By contrast, businesses and this union, at least, prefer intellectual capital, perhaps to hint at the cerebral and thus distinguished nature of white-collar work.
580. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 397.
581. The story's narrator refers to Bartleby's refusal as a form of "passive resistance." Herman Melville, Great Short Works of Herman Melville (New York: Perennial, 1969), 47, 50.
582. As anthropologist Eric Wolf writes, "Meanings are not imprinted into things by nature; they are developed and imposed by human beings. . . . The ability to bestow meanings-to 'name' things, acts, and ideas-is a source of power" (Europe, 388).
583. Roberto M. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 2004), 594.
584. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 22.
585. Sukumar Muralidharan, "Some Heresies of Development: An Interview with Roberto Unger," Frontline 18(8):1-14 (2001).
586. Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
587. P. Sainath, "Nearly Two Lakh Farm Suicides since 1997," The Hindu, January 22, 2010
588. Kounteya Sinha, "UN Report Slams India for Farmer Suicides," Times of India, September 24, 2006
589. Frontline, "Seeds of Suicide: India's Desperate Farmers," PBS, July 26, 2005.
590. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector (New Delhi: Government of India, 2007).
591. Bagehot is quoted in Lewis Lapham, The Agony of Mammon (New York: Verso, 1998), 1.
592. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, Conditions of Work, 8.
593. Alice Amsden, Escape from Empire: The Developing World's Journey from Heaven to Hell (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 9.
594. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (New York: Picador, 2007), 197.
595. P. Sainath, "The Decade of Our Discontent." The Hindu, September 8, 2007
596. Land reforms, writes Achin Vanaik, "greatly facilitate mass literacy, creating a more skilled labour force that contributes to rising industrial productivity, as well as preparing a wider domestic market for more sophisticated consumer goods" ("Myths of the Permit Raj," New Left Review 29:153-60 [2004], 159).
597. Ahmed, "Mixed Economy," 42.
598. As Alice Amsden writes of India, "Output rose over time, soaring in the early 1990s even before market reforms began. Software services boomed in the remote region of Bangalore, which benefited from former government investments in electronics, telecommunications, aerospace, and a prestigious Indian Institute of Science" (Escape from Empire, 8). For an historical view, see Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 18
599. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 310.
600. UN-Habitat, The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements (London: Earthscan, 2003), 2.
601. And as John Pilger notes, "Spending on private health, which only the well-off can afford, is one of the highest in the world" ("Not Shining, but Drowning," New Statesman, September 2004).
602. Sinha, "UN Report."
603. Roger Cohen, "Toilets and Cellphones," International Herald Tribune, May 24, 2010:6.
604. See Dani Rodrik, "Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?" Journal of Economic Literature 44(4):973-87 (2006).
605. Ho-fung Hung, "America's Head Servant," New Left Review 60:5-25 (2009).
606. Unger, False Necessity; Mauro F. Guillén, The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
607. World Bank, "Beyond Economic Growth: Meeting the Challenges of Global Development," The World Bank (2000), 8.
608. Michael Burawoy, Joseph Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven Lopez, Sean O Riain, and Mil lie Thayer, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
609. Thomas Eriksen, Globalization: Studies in Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2003)
610. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)
611. Zsuzsa Gille and Sean O Riain, "Global Ethnography," Annual Review of Sociology 28:271-95 (2002)
612. Biao, Global "Body Shopping."
613. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
614. Cooper, Colonialism in Question
615. Alan Hudson, "Placing Trust, Trusting Place: On the Social Construction of Offshore Financial Centres," Political Geography 17(8):915-37 (1998).
616. Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 2.
617. Margaret Somers, "The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach," Theory and Society 23:605-49 (1994)
618. Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 610.
619. Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 119.
620. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Longman, 1995).
621. Charles Briggs, Learning How to Ask (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
622. Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 82.
623. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuralism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984)
624. Charles Ragin and Howard Becker, eds., What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
625. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 47.