In an Outpost of the Global Economy

Carol Upadhya is Fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. Her research interests focus on contemporary Indian society and culture, globalisation, economic anthropology, the history of anthropology and sociology in India, and anthropological theory. Her most recent work has been on work, workers and entrepreneurs in the Indian information technology industry. Earlier, she has written on the social impact of the Green Revolution and the emergence of a new business class in coastal Andhra Pradesh. A.R. Vasavi is Professor at the Social of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. Her earlier research work focused on the sociology of India and she is the author of a book, Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South India (1999). In addition to coordinating a project on elementary education in Karnataka, she is working on an edited volume of translations of Kannada writings on society and culture and a volume of her collected writings on agrarian change, sociology of education and the new cultural economies of globalising India.

1. Introduction: Outposts of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Outsourcing Industry Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi 2. Producing the Knowledge Professional: Gendered Geographies of Alienation in India’s New High-Tech Workplace Sanjukta Mukherjee 3. Betwixt and Between?: Exploring Mobilities within a Global Workplace in India Marisa D’Mello and Sandeep Sahay 4. Management of Culture and Management through Culture in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry Carol Upadhya 5. The Scientific Imperative of Being Positive: Self-Reliance and Success in the Modern Workplace Sonali Sathaye 6. Software Work in India: A Labour Process View P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan 7. Empowerment and Constraint: Women, Work, and the Family in the Software Industry in Chennai Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan 8. ‘Serviced From India’: The Making of a Youth ITES Workforce A.R. Vasavi 9. Work Organisation, Controls, and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call Centre Work Babu Remesh