Invisible Labour: Support Service Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry
This book investigates the life, working conditions, and urban experiences of support service workers, such as janitors, security guards, culinary workers and carpool drivers, in the information technology (IT) sector of India.
Largely omitted from academic discourse, support service workers are crucial to the Indian IT industry. Drawing on interviews with such workers in seven Indian cities with a large concentration of software service companies, this volume:
Uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to map and assess workers' responses to migration from rural occupations to a modern urban employment setting;
Explores the everyday grind of migrant workers in the context of the homogenizing effects of globalization in an alienating urban environment and discusses how their dislodgment from the structures of rural life – gender and caste roles – has placed them in a space of contestation between traditions and the opportunities and challenges offered by digital society in the form of freedom, individualism, flexibility and innovation;
Traces the evolution of new areas of class, and identity formations, as well as the hegemonic relations within that ethos imposed by contractors and corporations.
Largely omitted from academic discourse, support service workers are crucial to the Indian IT industry. Drawing on interviews with such workers in seven Indian cities with a large concentration of software service companies, this volume:
Uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to map and assess workers' responses to migration from rural occupations to a modern urban employment setting;
Explores the everyday grind of migrant workers in the context of the homogenizing effects of globalization in an alienating urban environment and discusses how their dislodgment from the structures of rural life – gender and caste roles – has placed them in a space of contestation between traditions and the opportunities and challenges offered by digital society in the form of freedom, individualism, flexibility and innovation;
Traces the evolution of new areas of class, and identity formations, as well as the hegemonic relations within that ethos imposed by contractors and corporations.

Publisher
Routledge
ISBN
9780367336493
Published
2020
Specialisation
Social Sciences
Theme
Urban / Rural
Society
Media
Globalisation
Economy
Region
India