Xiang Biao 2006: Global 'Body Shopping': An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry Princeton: Princeton University Press

摘要

Indian 'body shopping' has become a well-known aspect of the IT industry, even as the Indian IT industry has grown and upgraded. Body shopping - where intermediaries hire workers to be placed out as project-based labour with clients - goes beyond 'matching' workers with employers to the management of the employment relation itself on a global scale. Recent debates on the outsourcing and offshoring of white-collar jobs have placed practices such as body shopping at the centre of policy debates and Xiang Biao's book is a timely addition to research in the area. Based on interviews with Indian software developers and entrepreneurs, and ethnographic observation in India and Australia, the book explores the social and institutional conditions of body shopping on a transnational scale.