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Global Body Shopping Biao Xiang

Global Body Shopping By Biao Xiang

Global Body Shopping by Biao Xiang


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Summary

Explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, this book offers an analysis of the India-based global labor management practice.

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Global Body Shopping Summary

Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry by Biao Xiang

How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global Body Shopping explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as body shopping. In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or bench them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility.

Global Body Shopping Reviews

Winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology Xiang Biao's book opens a fascinating window... Although addressing a profoundly complex subject, it is intended to be read by people with little background in India or familiarity with the IT industry. Global 'Body Shopping' is an enjoyable and easy read, while offering a detailed and sophisticated critique of the unchallenged embrace of global capitalism. It deserves a wide readership among those with an interest in globalization studies and will be particularly useful for people desiring to find out more about ethnographic work that is global in scope.--Nanlai Cao, Pacific Journal of Anthropology Xiang Biao's avowed goal at an analysis incorporating ethnography and political economic analysis has long been a requirement for scholars interested in the production and maintenance of transnational work and flexible labor. Global Body Shopping more than lives up to this ideal... I strongly recommend this ethnography as essential reading for scholars interested in questions of globalization, transnationality, and flexible labor.--Mathangi Krishnamurthy, American Ethnologist Xiang Biao tells the fascinating story of how body shopping brought globalization into the lives of hitherto minimally influenced rural youth and facilitated their movement into the highly volatile global arena of information technology ... he has created a remarkably clear picture of a complex globally dispersed labor chain... Not only does this innovative book provide a strong foundation for scholars interested in this under-researched global labor system, it is a great resource for teaching political and economic geography as well as courses exploring the various facets of globalization.--Monalisa Gangopadhyay, Political Geography Xiang has produced what may well be the first contribution of a contemporary anthropologist from China to the ethnographic study of global issues... The book is compact, lucid, and jargon-free, making it one of the most accessible ethnographies of how the global migration regime's shift towards temporary skilled labour is changing societies.--Nyiri Pal, Critique of Anthropology The book provides an important corrective to analyses that ignore the lower end of the IT labour market. The discussion of how Indian community associations contribute to workers' quiescence is a valuable addition to Saxenian's insights regarding how such community associations in places such as Silicon Valley promote entrepreneurship and innovation. Biao also goes beyond Castells' emphasis on exclusion through the digital divide to show how the more glamorous parts of the IT industry are sustained in part by the flexibility provided by body-shopped labour and the social reproduction taken on by local communities, extended families and governments.--Sean O Riain, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Xiang Biao's Global Bodyshopping is an outstanding example of multi-sited ethnography and a timely story of globally mobile workers... [Xiang] Biao must be congratulated for his nuanced approach to the subject.--A. Aneesh, International Review of Modern Sociology The novelty of this work lies in its attempt to study social groups within the context of the ongoing processes of abstraction and virtualism, as these groups develop strategies to participate in global processes... Xiang's book presents the daily lives, the intricate familial and professional negotiations, calculations and strategies, dreams and speculations through which individual Indians in the finger-labour market survive.--Madhava Prasad, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies [A]n extremely well written-book with mega-doses of anthropology mixed with humour.--Raghunath, Nilanjan, Asian Journal of Social Science [The book is] remarkable for meticulous research, mastery of details and understanding of the structures and processes of the industry... This book must be read--not only by all social scientists, but by all those enthusiastic votaries and skeptical denouncers of IT as India's present and future.--Samita Sen, Global South I find the book most instructive in teaching us how political economic analyses sensitive to fine-grained details about the local and everyday life can enrich a global ethnography. What holds the book together is its creative use of socioanthropological methodologies to understand the phenomenon of 'body shopping' peculiar to the information technology (IT) industry... I find his honesty and the unpredictability of his narratives refreshing.--Mark Lawrence Santiago, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography [A] sterling exemplar of what anthropology is and can be today... In a world of anthropologists never-ending anxiety over the loss of cultures, the loss of their own ability to explain cultures, and the problem of finding new things to study, Xiang's book offers a way out: it shows how one can study a structure within a larger system and explain both how that structure works and how it illuminates the function of the larger system. The combination of a simple explanation (hard-won through fieldwork) of a complex technical and economic system, with the exploration of its effects on social and personal lives of an extended network of families, villages, and corporations scattered around the globe is what makes this the perfect 'Intro to Cultural Anthropology' book in my estimation.--Christopher Kelty, Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

About Biao Xiang

Xiang Biao is Academic Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Transcending Boundaries.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations, Tables, Boxes vii Acronyms ix Prologue: A Stranger's Adventure xiii Acknowledgments xxi Introduction 1 Body Shopping: Brief Overview 4 Ethnicization, Individualization, and Transnationalization 7 Structure of the Book 11 Chapter 1 The Global Niche for Body Shopping 13 Financial Democracy and the Virtual Shortage of IT Labor 14 War for IT Talent and Wall of Regulation 19 Chapter 2: Producing IT People in Andhra 24 D-Shops and T-Shops 26 Have Lands in Andhra, Have a House in Hyderabad, and Have a Job in America 30 Producing IT People as a Family Business 34 Chapter 3: Selling Bodies and Selling Jobs 39 Fee-Paying Workers and Body Shops in Hyderabad 43 India as the Nexus of Global Body Shopping 48 Chapter 4: Business of Branded Labor in Sydney 53 Marketing and Development Are Totally Different Stories 57 Only Indians Can Handle Indians 59 Overlapping Businesses 62 Same Roof, Different Hats 65 Chapter 5: Agent Chains and Benching 70 Differentiated Circles 75 Indians Are the Most Dangerous Ones! 77 Overbooking Seats on the Bench 80 Chapter 6: Compliant Bodies? 82 Interlocks between Body Shops and Community Associations 86 Workers as Intermediaries 90 Relations among Workers: Support Yes, Solidarity No 92 The Way Out 97 Chapter 7: The World System of Body Shopping 100 The United States of America: Mecca for IT People 102 Global Gateways: Singapore, Malaysia, and the Middle East 104 U.S. Satellites: The Caribbean and Latin America 107 New Frontiers: Sind Sie Inder? and Is There a German Dream? 108 Ending Remarks The Indian Triangle in the Global IT Industry 110 Appendix: Essay The Remembered Fieldwork Sites: Impressions and Images 117 Biographical Index of Informants 129 Notes 149 References 167 Index 173

Additional information

CIN0691118523G
9780691118529
0691118523
Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry by Biao Xiang
Used - Good
Paperback
Princeton University Press
20061126
208
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Global Body Shopping