Being Indian, yet a global employee

Big Indian outsourcing companies like WIPRO, Infosys, TCS have developed their own models and they have perfected outsourcing as a type of business. Partly as a matter of management and partly as a matter of marketing, the problems that these companies face is the ‘Indian’ label.

It is only recently that India has gained a reputation in the global economy as good in software or good at IT. One has to first build a reputation to be able to market services in the global market. To be able to interface with the western clients, Upadhya noticed that on the one hand there is a kind of moulding to fit into the global market and also to fit to the specifics of the client side whether it is Europe, France, Germany or the US. On the other hand there is the notion of being Indian. When looking at the training programs and the way managers talk about this, somehow they have not made up their minds about what people are supposed to be. Workers have to be an Indian in certain contexts, and have to be like a European in some others and so on. Upadhya finds that it appears to be very confusing to be a software engineer in this context, yet at the same time Upadhya and colleagues observed in the many interviews they did, that in some sense it is not a problem because people have a clear sense of self in their private lives, which is not eroded by all the stuff that they are meant to do at work

CN