Bangalore, 1rst of December 2008: Carol Upadhya is considered to be one of the authorities on the culture of the software industry in India. From an anthropological perspective she has observed and
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Carol Upadhya
Associate Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
person
Carol Upadhya is interested in theoretical and historical anthropology; economic development and social change in India; globalisation; entrepreneurship; middle class. She has widely published and
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Caroline
Carol
Dr. Carol Upadhya and colleagues have conducted a considerable number of interviews in India’s IT industry in order to understand the culture and social economic structures of this industry. The
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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
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Only after a considerable amount of work in which trust is built through a rigorous monitoring and witnessing of every little step, companies and Indian centres of larger multinationals get more
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Upadhya describes the dynamic as follows:
“Because of cultural stereotypes it is implied that there is a certain level of incompetence that needs to be managed. So there is this whole bunch of
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In the IT industry people talk about ‘becoming global’, referring to a meaning of the word ‘global’ that somehow includes moulding behaviour into a model, which everybody can understand
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When inquiring about the nature of the work, very few people are self-conscious and can articulate such things. By reading in between the lines, Upadhya got the notion that people think about their
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In Upadhya’s research many people commented about the fact that there is a lot of reaching out in terms of information sharing. Most of this knowledge sharing is self-organized within the limits of
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As a sociologist going into all these companies, it is interesting for Upadhya to think about presence and absence. Of course there are various ways one has an immediate boss, who is there physically
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Upadhya’s observation is that every project faces a crisis at some point. And often it is a problem of time, a time crunch, so what really happens when they go ‘firefighting’ is that they just
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In her research Upadhya found that in the IT industry a very specific kind of personal performance is staged all the time because people have to mould to the Global Service Delivery model.
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Full transcript including film fragments you find at: http://www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
Hereunder the transcript in text.
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