Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India

This book showcases issues of work and employment in contemporary India through a critical lens, serving as a systematic, scholarly and rigorous resource which provides an alternate view to the glowing metanarrative of the subcontinent's ongoing economic growth in today's globalized world.  Critical approaches ensure that divergent and marginalized voices are highlighted, promoting a more measured perspective of entrenched standpoints.  In casting social reality differently, a quest for solutions that reshape current dynamics is triggered. The volume spans five thematic areas, subsuming a range of economic sectors. India is a pre-eminent destination for offshoring, underscoring the relevance of global production networks (Theme 1). Yet, the creation of jobs has not transformed employment patterns in the country but rather accentuated informalization and casualization (Theme 2). Indeed, even India's ICT-related sectors, perceived as mascots of modernity and vehicles for upward mobility, raise questions about the extent of social upgrading (Theme 3). Nonetheless, these various developments have not been accompanied by collective action - instead, there is growing evidence of diminished pluralistic employment relations strategies (Theme 4). Emergent concerns about work and employment such as gestational surrogacy and expatriate experiences attest to the evolving complexities associated with offshoring (Theme 5).

Ernesto Noronha holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. He is currently Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India, where he teaches Macro-organizational Behaviour, Research Methodology, and Sociology of Work and Employment to post-graduate and doctoral students. His  research interests include workplace ethnicity, technology and work, and labour and globalization. Prof. Noronha has been awarded many multi-lateral and bi-lateral grants to study various aspects of employee experiences of work in India's offshoring and outsourcing sector, focusing on new and unexplored areas such as organizational control, diversity, telework and collectivization. He has been a visiting professor at the Industrial and Labour Relations (ILR) School, Cornell University and at the Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna. Prof. Noronha has presented invited talks as a visiting scholar at numerous European universities such as Strathclyde, Portsmouth, Bergen and Hamburg, in addition to the keynote address at the 2010 Work, Employment and Society (WES) conference.